A Long Weekend

Weekends aren't as exciting for me as they are for everyone else.

This is because I'm a cashier at our local Turkey Hill, and I'm basically guaranteed to work on Saturday and Sunday because of school.  I don't get to do anything fun because I work from 3 PM until about 9 or 10 depending on how busy we are.

Weekends are also the time I may or may not get to talk to Kyle, depending on Lora's whims.  She tends to not tell him she's visiting until the day she's heading up, which throws him into a bad mood, which leads to us fighting.  He gets miserable, takes it out on me, I call him on being a jerk, and we argue about why Lora is a terrible person.  Generally, he doesn't rebut my arguments because he can't.  He just apologizes and eventually I burn out on talking about it and change the subject.  It's not healthy and I know that, I just can't abandon him.  I know they won't make it...the distance is always going to be a problem, as Lora refuses to leave PA and Kyle can't leave NY.  Lora's attitude is also a big problem.  She gets mad for stupid reasons, and I used to have to defuse those situations all the time.  Without me to defuse them anymore, I see them piling up into a huge explosion.  It's just taking a lot more time than I'd expected it to, unfortunately.

But I'm on a tangent now.

This weekend was long for so many reasons.  First of all, there are issues at work.  When I first started, the manager was newly separated from his wife and struggling quite a bit with it.  He hit on me a lot more than I would've liked.  When it got creepy (he once said he was going to tie me up and kidnap me), I stopped him by saying it was completely inappropriate, since he was my boss, and that I wasn't interested.  To his credit, he stopped the behavior and we have a normal working relationship.  That didn't stop our assistant manager from deciding that he was going to go after our manager's job and use me as the reason to have him fired.  He is scouring the cameras for any inappropriate behavior on our manager's part and plans to forward it to our district manager.  Luckily for our manager, he won't find anything.  But I'm tired of being in the middle of things like this, and it makes me want to call off every single day that I work.  I hate going in there, and I used to love it.

On Saturday, while I was at work, Bryan texted me with the news that his father had suffered a heart attack.  Bryan isn't terribly close to his dad, but he was rather upset by this.  The information was slow in coming from his family, though, because his dad is currently in prison for probation violations relating to a crystal meth possession charge.  Pro tip: if you're on probation for possessing crystal meth, it's probably NOT a good idea to go obtain more crystal meth, carry it around, hang out with a crowd you were instructed to stay away from, and then draw the attention of police.  It leads to you being arrested again, and this time, none of your sisters wants to bail you out...and that's exactly what happened.  He was arrested, and none of Bryan's aunts or his mom would bail him out.

Now, some of you may remember an interesting fact about Bryan's family.  His mom Tina is his dad's sister.  (Funny story: at the time I told Kyle that, all he knew about Bryan's life before me was that he'd lived in Georgia.  His response to me saying that exact thing was "When you say it like that, it sounds like he was born in Arkansas instead of Georgia."  I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe, because my husband was indeed born in Jonesboro, Arkansas.)  Anyway, it's not as bad as it sounds, I just like saying that for shock value.  His biological mom was an alcoholic crack addict, and Tina (their aunt) adopted the boys when they were very young.  We don't know where their biological mother is, and Bryan has no desire to find her.  Anyway, my mother-in-law is a wonderful woman with a masters degree who works for the federal government, and my father-in-law is a convict.  Tina never had bad taste in men, Reuben is just a bad egg in an otherwise wonderful family.

Anyway, back on the subject, I came home after work and comforted my husband, who had been okay until he heard a song by Volbeat (my absolute favorite band) that is about the death of the lead singer's father.  He was rather shaken up, so I sat and held him and told him it would be okay.  Fifteen minutes later, his aunt got back to him with information from the hospital.  It was simply heatstroke, not a heart attack like they'd originally feared.  I was relieved.  I don't love Reuben the way I love Bryan's mom or aunts/uncles, but I do care about him for the sake of my husband.  We lost Bryan's beloved grandmother last year and I don't know how much more loss he could handle right now.

When the worry and stress from that had subsided, we actually managed to have a rather pleasant weekend.  I had today off, and I'm off tomorrow too.  It's nice to have some time to recharge after being mentally drained by the soap opera currently playing out at my workplace.  I'm so over all of that.

How are you guys all doing?  Did anything interesting happen this weekend?

Kocham cie!  (I love you in Polish)
J