Wednesday December 11, 2024
Dear Diary,
Good morning God,
- Thank you for this day.
- Thank you for my mom.
- Thank you for tea.
- Thank you for books.
- Thank you for hugs.
- Thank you for mandarin oranges.
- Thank you for temptations.
- Thank you for contrast.
I love you!
I woke up at 4AM. I played wordle and connections and wrote my blog. I finished writing at 6:30AM. Just in time to get up and get ready to drive back to up the mountain to Council. On the way home, I was stopping in Cambridge to do a cleaning opportunity. I packed up our suitcase and stripped the bed. I put clean sheets on the bed and put the used ones in the washing machine. Bits wanted out to use the bathroom, so I had wake up my mom because she had the alarm system set and if I opened the door the alarm would go off. She been sleeping hard and I apologized for waking her up. She said that she was glad I did because she wanted to tell me goodbye before I left. She disabled the alarm and let Bits out to use the bathroom while I made tea. I woke Angel up and put her sheets in the wash with the others and started them washing. Angel ate oatmeal for breakfast and I made her a jelly sandwich for lunch since neither my mom nor I could find the peanut butter to go with it. I cleaned the kitchen and put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. Then, I packed all our stuff in the truck, we hugged my mom goodbye and I thanked her for having us over.
On the drive we listened to a Nancy Drew audiobook. A friend called and I talked to him on the phone a while until I lost connection. He said he would call back later in the day but he never did. At Midvale the gps had me turn off the highway, which was a different route than I had gone before but I figured it was because there was construction going on at a bridge near my clients house. I drove way out in the middle of nowhere on icy and snowy dirt roads. When I arrived at the house the gps took me to, it was not my clients house and there was no service to use my phone to re-route to the correct address.
I kept driving, I figured the dirt road would eventually connect to a main road. I couldn’t follow my route back because there had been a lot of turns onto different roads and without the gps, I had no idea which roads to take. So forward I went and I knew from the look of the mountains all around me that I was still in the correct valley. I drove and drove, turning on roads that either led to the north or west. Finally I got two bars of internet connection at the top of a hill. Looking at the google maps, I saw that I was way way way out in the middle of no where. I would have been wandering around a long time if I hadn’t have gotten an internet connection. I had gone too far north and needed to be going south. The map app showed two different options for my clients address. This time I chose the correct option. I had to backtrack some and turned onto a road that had a sign that said minimum maintenance, travel at own risk. “Ok well, let’s see how this goes”, I thought to myself. I started down the road and going around a corner, I entered a thick fog….lol. The road was a little slippery in places and thankfully the snow wasn’t very deep.
Eventually I came out on a well maintained road and made it to my clients house. I arrived an hour later than I had planned. Thankfully she was out of town and I didn’t have to be there on time because she likes me to be there exactly on time. In Texas I had a client that wanted me to be exactly on time too. One day when I arrived 5 minutes late, she asked me, “are you going to be here at 8 or 8:05 from now on?”. I told her I would be there at “8ish” and smiled at her. She let it go after that. I am normally on time, I like to be on time out of respect. She was a great lady though and I enjoyed cleaning for her.
I got started cleaning and Angel got started on her schoolwork. My client had asked me to clean her oven while she was out of town and I don’t think it had been cleaned for years, it was in bad shape. In the middle of scrubbing out the oven, some oven cleaner flew up into my eye. I ran to the sink to rinse it out. I had the hot water already running to fill up a bowl for my cleaning cloth. Without thinking about the water temperature, I grabbed the nozzle and sprayed my eye with hot water. Now, not only did my eye burn from oven cleaner but it was scalded from hot water. Ahhh! I turned the water to cold and rinsed my eye out for a long time until the burning stopped. Then I went back to scrubbing out the oven without anymore incidents. It took me a long time but I got that oven sparkling clean. I didn’t take a before picture but I took an after picture.
With the oven finished, I did my regular cleaning. Angel did a great job on her schoolwork. Lately, she has stopped fighting me on it and actually seems to enjoy it now that she is reading better. Doing a half hour of reading a day has really stepped up her reading skills.
On the way home, I stopped and picked up an engraving of my son and daughter-in-loves dog that they’d had to have put down a couple of months ago. I’d hired a lady to do the engraving on a cutting board and am going to give it to my son and daughter-in-love for Christmas. Once again the gps took me to the wrong place but this time I still had internet connection and was able to call the lady and she was just down the road.
I picked up the engraving and talked to the lady for a while. I told her about getting lost in the middle of nowhere earlier that day. She said that area is a bad place to get lost in because those roads go all over the place for miles and miles and if your vehicle gets stuck out there, there is no internet connection and it is a long walk to any houses to get help. Thankfully I didn’t get stuck because when I was out there, I realized that it was not a frequently traveled area and very few people lived out there.
By the time we got to Council, I was hungry. I’d only snacked on a couple of mandarin oranges and a handful of nuts all day and it was after 3 PM. I’d been wanting to go to a local restaurant called “Sprockets”, so we spotted there. They had an impressive list of salads but I didn’t think a salad would satisfy my hunger. So instead, Angel ordered fries and I ordered onion rings, thinking that it would eat just of little. Of course, I ate a lot of both fries and onion rings and had a stomach ache. It’s interesting to me why eating healthy is such a difficult thing for me to do, when I feel so awful after eating badly. I used to get angry at myself for making bad food choices but I don’t get angry about it anymore. I know it’s a form of going unconscious. I try to deceive myself by lying to myself but myself knows I’m lying because it’s only me in there talking to me 😂. I prayed and asked for guidance on healing the part of me that fears staying conscious. I know it’s from my childhood, I fear being hungry. I’d rather feel awful from eating badly than feel hungry. Now that is a revelation right there! I hadn’t realized that before. Thank you God for that insight.
When we finally got home, I unloaded the truck while Angel played on her phone in front of the pellet stove. When I got everything put away, I laid in bed. My stomach hurt and my body was screaming with inflammation. I had Zumba class in an hour and I didn’t want to go. I wanted to lay in bed until I felt better. I called my mom and talked to her for a while. Then I forced myself to get up and get ready for Zumba. My sister got home right as I was leaving and Angel stayed with her.
Once I was out walking, I was glad I had forced myself to move my body. It felt good to be out in the cold crisp air and I really enjoyed the walk. Zumba class was a lot of fun and just as I was feeling like I couldn’t do anymore, the class ended.
After Zumba class, the church I attend was having a meeting that I wanted to go to, so I walked straight there. When I arrived, the meeting was just ending. They had changed the time and I hadn’t known. I sat and talked with people for a while, then I walked home.
When I arrived home it was almost 8PM. Angel was watching TV and my sister was locked in her room wrapping presents for Christmas. Angel said she wanted noodles for dinner. I was really tired and wanted to go to bed but I started her noodles cooking. My sister came out of her room and we talked while I waited for the noodles to cook. Once they were ready, Angel turned off the tv and sat at the table to eat them. She tasted them and said she didn’t like them and wanted something else. I sternly told her that she could eat that or nothing. I was to tired too play this game with her. I had been up since 4AM and it had been an eventful day. Angel cried and ate her noodles. I went upstairs and got into bed. Angel came up shortly after. I apologize for yelling at her and gave her a hug. She crawled in bed next to me and read a story out loud. Then she got into her bed and I turned on a sleep meditation. I wrote my blog notes and went to sleep at 9:30PM.
Thank you for reading my blog and being a part of my life. I appreciate you.
Love, Victoria
P.S. this blog post is inspired by the Holy Spirit.