Who are you at work?

Everyone I know works with someone who absolutely refuses to carry their own weight.  Their co-workers pick up the slack time and time again.  What I cannot understand,  is the persons lack of work ethic.  You get paid an hourly wage, you owe an hour's work.

Perhaps you are one of those people who use their job as their social outlet.  You talk all day long when you could be focusing on the day's tasks and at the end of the day you feel the crunch to finish.  Your co-workers could use some help closing your department or cleaning up after the shift, but you're too busy finishing what you could've done while you were blabbing all day long.  Your co-workers close the department and you're sitting back, catching up your own unfinished tasks.

Perhaps you're one of those people who do what few things are necessary to your position, without the ability to see that the workload as a whole is not complete.  Let's say you are hired to press pizza dough into pans.  Your dough is caught up.  The sauce makers are struggling to keep pace.  Instead of pitching in, you secretly disappear.  Is this you?  Look in the mirror.

The more people you have working on a task, the easier it becomes.  It's amazing to me, when I'm behind what little help is needed to get me in a good spot on my job.  I have, for the past year and a half, been doing the work of two.  It's a well known fact in my department.  I'm not saying I'm a super worker, have the perfect attitude, can handle it with grace under fire or any of those things.  I am frazzled, angered, frustrated and feel slighted on a near daily basis.  Without the help of a few of my co-workers who realize that there is a lot to my position, I would have walked out a long time ago.  I hang in because the job is close to home, the pay is good and I leave work knowing that I've made a difference in the lives of the people I have met on any particular day.

The moral of this story I guess is that one day your back will become very, very itchy.  Those whose backs you've scratched will remember your helpfulness and will come to your aid time and time again.  If you have never done anything to help a co-worker when they were struggling, you may find yourself in a situation you need their help getting out of.  If you have repeatedly let them drown during their work day, they will get great pleasure out of watching you squirm when your day falls apart.   The truth though, is that good employees will never let someone drown, regardless.  Even when repeatedly, they are left to dig out of a their workday hole by the same individuals over and over again.

My Lesson from Deanna

My youngest sister died at age 38.  We received no answers from the scientific world, no autopsy report to explain it.  She was just here one minute and gone the next.

A few days ago, I was thinking of her while sitting at my computer and I Google'd her name.  Nothing came up.  No Facebook page, no MySpace although I wished something could have.  I scrolled through several pages of Google search results and then something caught my eye.  Someone had posted a blog entry entitled "Deanna Dream."  I clicked on it out of curiosity and started to read.  It could have been any Deanna until I saw the Crabtree Valley Mall reference in the blog post.  That narrowed it down to a specific geographical location.   Then the blogger mentioned our last name.  I knew it had to be about my sister.

In the blogger's dream, she mentions that Deanna is dead and she is aware of that.  Deanna is the only one unaware that she had died.  It made me very sad.  It made me feel that perhaps in this dream Deanna was a lost soul, searching for friends who knew her.  Perhaps she was trying to get the attention of those around her to let them know she was there.

There are many things I wish I had done differently in my relationship with her.  Many things, for circumstances that are private, would have been the same regardless.   I would have been more encouraging.  I have learned a hard lesson about myself in this loss.  I am not very forgiving, nor patient, nor tolerant, nor supportive.  Once I feel wronged I no longer have the capacity for compassion.

I have always been of the belief that people can reach out even when they have left our worldly experience.  This has been proven to me time and again through circumstances that have occurred that were unexplainable.  My grandmother has been in contact with me spiritually, an old boyfriend has sent me a message, my dad reprimanded me through a fortune cookie, and now my sister has sent me a message through a stranger's blog.

I will pray for Deanna, that her soul finds rest, peace and the intense white light that comes with immeasurable love.  I will pray for more tolerance and compassion for those around me who cannot seem to get their lives together.  And I hope that the mistakes I made with my relationship with my sister will end there.  And I will pray to be set free from my inability to accept people for who they are and where they are in their live's journey.  Not everyone carries the same map.

Mud Slinger

This afternoon I called my mom.  One thing I know I can count on is that she'll more than likely have the most recent weather report.  "Rain", she says.   My driveway has been rendered impassable by our white Christmas.  We've been struggling with it ever since.  But the one good thing that has come of it  - I can flat out drive in mud.  It's nothing I aspired to, nothing I had on my bucket list, but now that I've gotten good at it, for some reason it's a pretty good adrenaline rush.

We have a flat section about 100 feet long and then it's about 200 feet at a 35-40 degree angle uphill.  I start at the very beginning of the drive.  I turn of the Vehicle Stability Assist.  I rev my motor because it makes me feel good.  Then I take off.  I speed up the driveway and shoot up the hill.  My car sways this way and that way. The wheels have a mind of their own.  The ten inch deep ruts try to grab the tires and throw me to the center where the ruts are deepest but alas, I'm the captain of this ship and I make it up the hill and park beside my deck.

I look back down the drive and the headlights of my husband's car shine brightly against the fog.  I see him slow down and I know he's turning his VSA off too.  Then he accelerates on the flat part, speeds up the hill being tossed and turned like a newspaper in a whirlwind and in a few shakey seconds, he's parked beside me.  He turns his interior lights on and gives me a great big toothy grin and two thumbs ups.  I'm hoping for a freeze tonight.  The mud is much easier to navigate when it's frozen, but not nearly as fun.  Nope, no where near.

Sans skirt

I'm reading "Eat, Pray, Love."  I have heard about this book for several years with the first attention being thrown at it by the bushels by Oprah.  I have to admit that if Oprah recommends a book, I usually shun it just to remain an outcast of the flocking masses.  I saw this book lying around at my mom's and decided to read it because after all, I wouldn't mind being able to touch something a little bigger than me.  Perhaps I too could connect to a blue-light spiritual side and have some soulful electricity travel up my spine and burst through my cranium.  Supposedly that's what happened to the author when she finally was able to reach that height in her meditation.  But then suddenly, I realized that the India part of this book, the "Pray" section was boring. How can spiritualism be boring?  Well, I'm not done with the section yet and I'm still reading with an open mind.  So far, I must admit, I prefer the "Eat" section.  So much so that last night we went out to eat pizza in honor of her exploits through Italy.  Oh, let me add that I am not shunning the "Praying" just that the meditation, chants and "Om ma Shamalama" sanskrit mantras aren't my speed.

Have you read this book?  All the way through?  If so, share your thoughts with me.  I know I have 4 followers to my blog now and one of them is me, but Cheryl, Mary Ann, Ann - any thoughts or am I alone in my literary choices thus far.

General Oglethorpe Aside

This weekend we took to the roads and ended up in Savannah, Georgia.    I firmly believe in a previous life I lived in Savannah because every time I go, I have this incredible yearning to stay.   Now keep in mind that if reincarnation is an evolution of your soul and each life is an improvement from the past life, I could not have been a proper woman in a hoop skirt and a hundred pounds of petticoats.  I believe I was one of those girls who hung out on River Street and flirted with the crew of those big boats & secretly smoked homemade cigarettes behind their father's backs.  The reason I say that is if I had been a proper lady, my penchant for having a drink with my friends and bellowing out a bad word every now and then wouldn't be as prevalent in my life as it is now.  I will admit that I am working on my "ugly words."

As an FYI, my husband tried out yet another variation of shrimp & grits and the jury is back with the verdict of  NO GOOD!    Do not have the shrimp and grits at The Oyster House on River Street in Savannah if you have had GOOD shrimp and grits anywhere else.

We tried the General Oglethorpe's recipe, by the way, and in comparison to Crook's Corner's version, we admit to liking General Oglethorpe's recipe better.  I would recommended cutting the Cajun spices just a little bit unless you are someone who really enjoys spicy foods.  Give it a try sometime.  It takes a little talent in the kitchen.  I had 3 pots/pans going at one time.  But well worth it just the same.  Click on the "Recipes" tab for both the Crook's Corner & General Oglethorpe recipe.

Adventures in ditches

All the way home I  dreaded the thought of going up my drive.  It's clay.  It's nice, red, slick, western North Carolina clay.  The type of clay people made cooking pots out of & set beans to boil over an open flame in the pioneer days.  If my driveway is any indication of the circumstances in which pioneer women were made to travel in their covered wagons and skinny little wooden wheels, it's a thousand wonders a few more lynchings didn't occur.  I, for one, would probably have joined the Indians and brought home my husband's scalp to proudly display in the new teepee I would build on LEVEL ground.  Shudder the thought.  Sorry.

I was determined that with God's help I'd get up the drive and park happily beside the deck.  Well, I did make it on the second try.  My daughter and her boyfriend came to my aid, dressed in plastic garbage bags and we pushed it downhill, through the ditch, narrowly escaping a small plunge into the creek.  We lost shoes to a burnt umber colored downward sucking sludge and no brand of fake tanning lotion can compare to the orange glow of our legs, arms and faces.

The car is in the driveway.  Shoes & jeans are in the washer.  The dog is bathed and all is semi-well with the world.

A mud, muck & gravel expert is coming tomorrow.  Tonight the forecast is for rain.

Three substations later

Today we started out lazy.  Our only goal was to cook dinner and for that we'd planned on General Oglethorpe's Shrimp & Grits.  I'm a big Crook's Corner Shrimp & Grits fan myself, but a co-worker gave the recipe, spices & grits out as a favor at her wedding in Charleston. Tonight I thought we'd stray from our tried and true standard and venture into the world of shrimp & grits with country ham rather than the bacon we were accustomed to.  After all, anything is good with bacon crumbled on top, right?  But we're willing to give Gen. Oglethorpe a try.

We head out to the store just as our power went out.  We assumed innocently that it wouldn't be out long and things would be back to normal very soon.  Food Lion just happened to have shrimp on a bogo sale and things were looking great.  Until we called home.  Our daughter told us that the power continued to be out and we'd been gone more than an hour already.  Greg called the electricity co-op and they informed him that they had lost 3 substations and it may be a while before electrity was restored.  Bojangle's, here we come.  Thank you for the hot chicken and mashed potatoes.  As we sat down to start our dinner by candlelight guess what happened.

Tomorrow, I look forward to Oglethorpe's Shrimp & Grits.  I have both recipes posted on the recipe tab.  If you try them, I would highly recommend the Crook's Corner version.  It's fool proof and delicious.  I'll let you know about General Oglethorpe's tomorrow night.