Hello

Hi! I'm not entirely certain what to write, this being my first entry. It's been so long since I've been new anywhere that I feel like I should just start in the middle and go from there. What should a first entry contain?

I suppose I should discuss the title of my blog. I chose it due to popular vote (my husband and sister both agreed that it was a good name), but if I intend to post things unrelated to my escape I should choose a different name. Especially if I intend to keep this blog updated after I move. The best I can come up with is Miba's Ramblings. If anyone has any ideas, do let me know!

Right now I live in the city, which to most city folk would be funny as it's not a horribly big city, more of a town really. But it has a Wal-Mart, Target, Borders, and a mall! And 3 McDonalds for some reason, though I must say that has come in handy more than once. I work as a slave Dairy Manager at a grocery store. And I have decided to move up to the middle of nowhere. My mom has offered us room to build a house on her land I have taken her up on it. Why? Well, the day I decided on it was a Wednesday. Wednesdays are one of the hardest days at my job. I had come in at 6AM, though I was running a little late, I was exhausted and sleepy even though I had just woken up. As I walked through the store not knowing what my department would look like as I have Tuesdays off, I was met with one of our truck drivers who said he had a load of grocery to deliver. However, I have a juice order due out at 7AM on Wednesdays so I had to go do that first, then get the backroom ready, then track down the grocery manager (who can never be bothered with offloading his own trucks) to get keys for the back door. He told me to make a bale (which he tells freight crew not to make bales for the sole pleasure of making me do it). When was I going to have time to make a bale? As we were offloading the dairy/deli/meat/frozen truck showed up. This ended any help I was getting from the grocery driver as he went to talk with the other driver and left me to offload on my own. After I had offloaded grocery I loaded returns (empty pallets and such), which on Wednesdays can take an hour. After this I had to get the coolers ready since meat department is never ready for their load. Fortunately our Wednesday deli/frozen guy is a big help (a shock for Doug Andrus, our deli/frozen trucking company, as they tend to hire all the idiots and lazy people) and so we got him offloaded and gone and I was done with all the trucks. It had only taken three and a half hours. While doing the trucks people had discovered the baler was full and so left their cardboard in carts by the baler or thrown it down the compactor. I am one of about five people in the whole store who will make a bale. No one else "has the time" or they claim they don't know how. So I had to clear the carts out and then make a bale. Then I was finally able to get into doing my stuff. I still had to face, fill milk, fill eggs, do shelf reviews (which is scanning all the things I'm out of, on Wednesdays I do this for dairy, frozen, and vendors), check for markdowns, do markdowns, do scanouts (throwing away damaged product), do my order, fill my holes, get grocery calls (cause our grocery manager feels he doesn't have to work during the day and leaves before 9 most days), and go up front to check when they need a spare checker (because csms usually can't be bothered with checking). Usually all of that means a half hour of overtime if I'm lucky, sometimes an hour. Because I have been told repeatedly (with the threat of being fired once or twice) that I am not to leave the store until all my holes were filled and dairy looks good. Once I worked 10 1/2 hours before I gave up, told the CSM I didn't care anymore and was going home. And all of that is just what I'm supposed to do regardless of customers.

The customers themselves are a whole 'nother story. As an example, let's say I'm running late, it's 45 minutes before I have to go home, I'm doing my order, and I have holes to fill still. I'm rushing along, my legs hurt, my back hurts, the wrist area of my thumb hurts, my left arm is bothering me, and I'm trying to decide how much of something to order. Let's say it's on sale, and I'm looking at my sales and order histories, doing math, and the fans in my cooler are buzzing in my ears. On one side of me I am deaf as my doors are sound proof (so if you are standing on one side trying to talk to me don't get mad that I can't hear you! Those doors are literally sound proof), and whatever noise I hear of people around me I tune out. Usually they're talking amongst each other, and I have no business listening in. There are phrases and words that make me tune back in, things like "Excuse me" or "Do you" or "Are you" or "Where is", these are things that give you my attention. When I suddenly see a hand in front of my eyes followed by an arm wrapping itself around my body to grab a product that's in front of me of course I'm going to jump. You've just scared me half to death. And then the glare you give me as if I did something wrong by "being in your way" coupled with my sudden fright causes me to lose all concentration in what I was doing. Sometimes I can get past this and keep on going, until the next time when someone physically crowds me out of a door (it's either I move or they push up against me) and then completely ignore my existence without even a glance at me... it causes a feeling in the pit of my stomach as though cottage cheese had spoiled and then began boiling, not to mention the nauseating headache it produces. At other times I can't handle it at all and have to escape into my  backroom to cry. Sometimes I can't cry because they call me to check and I wipe my tears as best I can (being in the cold helps as I can press my cold fingers to my eyes) and run up to check. Sometimes, lo and behold, the customer who caused me pain is the one I have to check out. A part of me dies when I have to smile at this person and give them good customer service. And then I go back to my department to find the yogurt section I had just filled a while before is now almost empty with cups of yogurt shoved in where they don't belong or knocked over or people have taken incorrectly. (more on taking incorrectly later) I have seen customers standing besides me watching me face (to pull product forwards and make it all pretty and stacked and organized) and then take incorrectly. And then I reach out and fix it. And they do it again with a smirk. I've seen people knock yogurt over, glance at me, then walk away. People put cold products on the regular shelf and frozen products in the coolers. I can't tell you how disgusting it was once when I found a bag of frozen meat someone had stuffed in my cooler that had defrosted over night and started leaking. Or ice cream that's sticky and gross from being left in my cooler too long. I've had people cut me off when I'm walking and then given me a glare, but when I'm not in my work uniform no one cuts me off on purpose and if they do it by accident they actually apologize. I saw an old woman, just yesterday, walking down an aisle and made me move to the side around behind a display so she could go through because she was walking in the dead center without room for a single person to pass her on either side with a smile on her face that clearly said, "Ha! I made you wait, I made you stand aside, I foiled your plans for getting your work done". She could have moved to the side but didn't. In front of my department there are displays with room to walk on either side. Sometimes I am doing something in one of the doors and am blocking one side of the walkway around the display. I have had people, always older women, get mad at me for being in the way and demand I move in a rude voice as though I was the one being rude. Upon turning around I find that she and I are the only ones within sight. She couldn't go around the display? I sometimes have to check, and customers fight you every step of the way up there, on Sunday I checked out a family of five, all old enough to bag, and they stared at me while their 200 dollar order piled up at the end of the checkstand. Not a one lifted a finger to help. I bagged it and set it at the end of the checkstand and proceeded to the next order. They continued to stare at me as though I was supposed to put their order in their cart for them. Finally they took the hint and sullenly placed their bags in their cart. People pick up product, decide they don't want it, and set it back down facing backwards!! Or even worse, in the wrong spot! How is it even remotely possible to put a half gallon in with the gallons without knowing you did it! How can you put a red product in with the blue products!!! These things are impossible unless you failed preschool, are retarded, or are out to destroy the lives of employees. I could go on and on and spend hours telling horror stories of the evils of customers and the stress they cause me. I take a vitamin B every day, sometimes twice a day, but even they don't prevent the nauseating headaches I get. Sometimes people make me feel like I'm breathing a tad too fast, my head is swirling, my stomach is racing my head on which will explode first, I shake, and feel all the other usual signs of anxiety. And they're pushing everyone to smile with threats for those who don't smile and greet and ask people if they want help. I don't know about you, but if an employee greets me and asks if I want help I get annoyed and usually if they hang around or keep bothering me I either leave the store or I don't buy the product I was there to buy or I go to another part of the store till they're gone. I hate "helpful" employees and refuse to become one. I also can't keep on handing out smiles to people anymore and treating them nice. I know I have ultimate freedom in my mind but I can't keep the outward charade up for much longer, it's starting to kill me to treat people nicely who deserve much worse. I start feeling like two people, inside my head wishing them ill will yet on the outside speaking with a cheerful voice and giving good service.

I was once prescribed anti-anxiety medication but stopped taking it because I was worried what the doctor would think of me for having to take it every day. Also, I meet all but maybe two of the requirements for being Neurotic according to Wikipedia. Which doesn't help as I believe my main boss is a tad OCD himself, but usually about other things than what I'm on about, so we usually end up bouncing off each other negatively. He had me working all by myself with no one to work night shifts and dairy looked awful even though I had on my own been staying about 10 hours a day, I was exhausted, working as hard and fast as I could, and it still wasn't enough. The only thing he did was tell me to keep up. (things have since changed and I have a night person again) I sometimes feel like the lyrics in that song, Behind These Hazel Eyes, "Now all that's left of me is what I pretend to be, so together yet so broken up inside, cause I can't sleep, no I can't breath, I'm barely hanging on". And then I like to say "here I am, once again, I want to go home". hehe

So, yes, while I know that I'll be cutting firewood, working on a house, gardening, hauling water, and all the other hardships of living in the woods, I'll have the comfort of knowing I'm stress-free. I shall be my own lord and master. If my back hurts I stop working. If I get sick I curl up by the woodstove. And maybe my left neck/shoulder area will finally heal and stop hurting. I'll never have someone yelling at me because I didn't get up to check because I didn't hear them calling me due to offloading the truck. I won't have the stress of figuring out new ways to cheat on my scanouts 'cause they keep making it more and more impossible to meet goal. And I won't ever have to deal with another customer treating me as though I am not worthy of being the scum on the bottom of their shoe.

All this is not to say I do a bad job, oh no. Somehow I do exceedingly well and in fact last year I won 75 dollars for being the best dairy manager in the company.

Also, I see people at work, in their 50s and 60s who tell stories of how they came down and got a job right after highschool and have been working in the same building for 30 or 40 years. I couldn't imagine that kind of monotony. How does one not go insane? They spend their lives with the same complaints day in and day out. They talk of how they hate it, they want out, they hate this they hate that, they want more sleep, and they never fix it. Did they spend their entire lives hating everything around them and yet never fixing it?

I find myself falling into that same trap, I feel I am playing a game and have a high score and I hate playing it, I want to do something else, I want to stop, I want to get up and go on with my life, but I don't really want to throw the game. You've had that feeling. Someone sends you a little game to play and you play it for nearly an hour, and you're doing good, but you have to get up and make dinner, you need to use the bathroom, your butt hurts, your mind hurts, but you somehow can't make yourself end the game, you can't lose accidentally-on-purpose, you have to lose for real, but somehow you just can't... But at the same time I can't just wake up one day when I'm 50 and realize I have lived an unhappy existence and have hated life since I was in my 20s and that I never really lived. I never got out there and did the things I wanted to do. I don't want to find that I destroyed my body in retail and never did the adventuring I wanted to do and now am too old for some of the things I would have enjoyed as a "kid". Already the work is telling on me with back pain more times than not and a neck that has spent almost three years trying to heal and never quite making it, sometimes my knees or legs ache, and of course there's that wrist part of my thumb on my right hand that cramps up and feels like it needs to be popped or something yet no amount of twisting or pulling will pop it. I don't want to be physically 40 before I'm even 25 and I don't know how much more stress from customers and bosses I can handle. I want to live. I want to be free to do what I want. Years ago I used to say that if you don't like your job get a new one, if you don't like your house move, etc. I now feel like a mockery of all I used to say, of all I was taught. Living in my rut, with one day like the one before with with nothing to set the days apart. I peeked at journal entries from a year ago and they are almost word for word like ones I write now. These last few years are a blur of nothingness with nothing to set them apart, a gray fog with little to give remembrance to. Is that what I want to tell my grandchildren? Do I wish to rock my chair back and forth on this same porch I have now and tell my grandchildren how I went to work day, came home, had a shower, ate dinner, played at the computer, went to bed, same thing, day after day after day after day. I wish to break away. Go places, see things, do things. The phrase "hell is full of good intentions" means something a little different to me, it means that you had intentions to do things but were too lazy to actually do them. I look at the mountains. How long as it  been since I was beyond them? I used to marvel at those who said they have never left their state. How does one deal with that?

To me moving is a chance to start over, to be who you want to be. When you're around the same people all the time it's hard to change yourself. With new people they only know the you you present to them. I can't be with the same people all the time. Even my best friend at work, our ICM, sometimes makes me feel suffocated, though she doesn't mind as she doesn't have a high regard for others as well. I have one friend online I sometimes try to offend but she seems to be almost as negative about people as I am so I don't think I bother her any. I recently left a forums I had been posting at for 8 years because I couldn't stand anyone there anymore. I need a change of one sort or another. I wonder that more people don't up and change. I was once told to take what makes me happy and drive it like it's stolen. Maybe people wouldn't treat others so awful if they took that advice to heart. Of course happiness is subjective to opinion as well. Someone might think it great entertainment to knock over yogurt. I know it is sometimes hard, I have said to one of our milk vendors whom I'm friendly with (who also doesn't really like people either... a running trend in those I call friends...) that I would quit my job except I'm addicted to eating and having a warm place to sleep.

And so, I will move up to the middle of nowhere I once strove to escape from, and it shall be my own path to freedom, a particular kind of freedom for freedom is something of an opinion. To some, I suppose to those who find nothing wrong with living their lives from complaint to complaint, what I am going to do would be like imprisonment. They wouldn't be able to handle not having stores nearby, or other people. Me, I will rejoice when I can spend a whole week without seeing another human face besides that of my husband and my mom and step-dad. The freedom I'll have to sleep when I want, eat when I want, do what I want, when I want. To have the whole of nature as my companion. It will be peaceful and happy. I shall have a nice, clean, organized home because I will have the time and energy to clean. After work a lot of times I hurt too much to really do a whole lot. But up there I can clean and read and sew to my heart's content. And perhaps I can get back into writing. I used to write as a kid, and now I write so seldom.

I guess on with other stuff:

This morning I did my usual online activities; I checked my email, skimmed the news, and read the daily comics. All the while I had the Wheel of Monotony running in the background. This is a chance and luck game on Neopets. This wheel takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours to stop spinning, but most of the prizes are well worth it. This was my first time to let the wheel spin till it stopped. I got a rock. In other words, one of my pets lost half their hit points. Which isn't too bad, the Healing Springs hands out hit points like they're candy. But it was the only bad prize of the lot and I ended up with it. I'm uncertain whether I should take this as an ominous sign that I shouldn't spin that wheel anymore, or if I should give it another go sometime. Most likely I'll give it another go as it only costs 150 neopoints to play.

I had Cinnamon Toast Crunch for breakfast. It used to be my favorite cereal when I was a kid, but these days I'm more of a Lucky Charms kinda gal. I do enjoy the occasional Cinnamon Toast Crunch, however.

After I had decided I'd been sitting in my jamies too long (by jamies I mean a pair of my husband's boxers and one of his long sleeved shirts I've stolen for the purpose of sleeping in) I dressed myself in a pair of jeans and my Stormtrooper helmet and crossbones t-shirt. Later I will put my hair up in what I guess I've come to call "Double Braided Buns". The YouTube tutorial I learned them from had dubbed them Bweeta's Buns after the girl who asked to have a tutorial made for them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq0QSgCdeKU This is one of my favorite hair styles now. It stays put throughout the day and it's pretty. It also makes me look younger I think. I end up using 10 pins while at work instead of the recommended 8. However, I feel I am getting more experienced with this hairstyle and occasionally consider going with only 8. I might try it on a softer day, such as Thursday or Sunday where I don't have trucks to offload.

My ears are currently half popped and half not. I do hate when that happens, especially when I happen to be out of sinus pills. (Kroger Sinus and Allergy PE, 4 dollars a box and great for stress relief as well as sinus issues and tooth aches) Today's problem could be due to the cold I am recovering from as I seem to be in the "I think I'm going to sneeze... no, wait there it goes... no, it's coming back.... I'm so stuffy... no, not going to sneeze after all..." stage. The good part about that is that food isn't interesting because I can't taste it. If only being sick didn't hurt so bad! It's the best diet ever.

I finished reading  Dracula the other day. It was a very good read. 700 pages but it barely felt like it. It had it's moments of slowness and being dull, but otherwise it was very good. I had neither read it before nor seen any movies. My motivation for reading it was my husband's Castlevania obsession. I don't want to spoil those who haven't read the book or played the games, but those who have read and played will understand that I  had some questions regarding a certain character and their offspring. I also don't quite understand Dracula's ability to reincarnate. But on it's own the book is excellent and fairly creepy. I even had nightmares about it, in the good way, like the way you watch a horror movie for the thrill of it.

I have now moved on to reading the first LOTR book. It is exceedingly boring. I have to wonder if this is a fandom encyclopedia or a story! I swear Gandalf and Frodo spent 20 pages just talking, most of it being irrelevant. And now they're walking. Up a hill, down a hill, past a spot of grass that was yellow and green and these flowers and birds of this sort and that sort and up a slope and around a tree and across a stream that was this temperature and flowed in that direction through this town where the inhabitants were of this social understanding and through a little wood of this size and had those trees and that trees and omg just get on with it. I want to read about Gollum, who is my favorite character. Gollum is awesome. After the movies came out I had attempted to read this book before but lost interest about 100 pages in. So far I've managed 75 of them. Hurray! I also want to read about whatshername the king's daughter (daughter of rohan I believe is one of her nicknames??) she seems angsty. And wishes for escape. Or at least that's the impression I got from the movies. I have never read the books. I have read The Hobbit but it was boring.

Now that I have written a novel-length entry I shall go, for it is time to wake up my husband and maybe eat something. I think I'm somewhat hungry. (there, had oriental flavored ramen while editing)