The Year That Wasn't...

Ahhhh, hellooooooo, 2014! I can’t tell you how glad I am to finally see the backside of 2013. I thought it would never end, and I don’t think I’ve ever wished so much for a year to be over. Last year was… well, it was The Year That Wasn’t.  It wasn’t happy, wasn’t healthy, wasn’t fulfilling, wasn’t really a year I want to remember. I know things could have been worse and I’m trying to get perspective on it, but it doesn’t change the fact that I want to rub last year out of my personal history book.

 At the end of 2012 I was having some issues at work and in my personal life and had to step down from my three Design Teams. I thought a short break would be all I needed and I would be crafting and blogging regularly again in January. Then one of my coworkers left her position and I began covering a portion of her work as well as training someone to cover her other duties, someone who’d never been an admin. It was supposed to last a month or two while they were recruiting. So, January was busy, but I looked forward to getting back into the craft room. In February, two of my coworkers left on medical leaves, so for several weeks our team of 5 was down to 2.5.  The snowball of work began picking up speed… and many, many, many layers began packing on. Fast forward to June. My two coworkers had come back to work but the 5th position was still open after 6 months and an avalanche of work was piling up faster than anyone could manage. I was up to about 60 hours of work a week, plus spending time at home each night after work organizing my to-do list for the next day. I hadn’t taken a day off work except for Memorial Day in May. The social life was at nearly zero; I wasn’t eating properly and was gaining weight; I hadn’t been to the gym since December; I wasn’t sleeping well whilst having nightmares about work I hadn’t completed yet; and I was pretty much burnt out, both physically and emotionally.  The craft room was a barren, lonely place I hadn’t stepped into for 6 months.

We hired a new admin mid-June and I thought I saw some light at the end of the tunnel. Little did I know it was the light of an oncoming train. =(  I scheduled a few days off in mid-July, my first vacation days since December.  It was an interesting vacation… I traveled by Stryker bed and visited the exotic locales of Emergency Room, CT Scanning, Ultrasound and 5th Floor Nursing Unit. For four days I got to kick back and get served breakfast, lunch and dinner in bed. I enjoyed the purest oxygen. And I met so many lovely new people… all so smart in their uniforms and so well-credentialed. Yes, my vacation was spent in hospital. And I learned three new words I never want to hear together again: Bilateral. Pulmonary. Embolism. I scared my family, upset my boss, and truth be told, freaked myself out as well.

The worst bit of the hospitalization was that I was most stressed out by the thought of all the work I needed to get done. (Yes, looking at it now, I’m an idiot. But do you ever realize that when you’re going through it?) I persuaded my doctor to let me go back to work almost immediately after discharge. I had to live with my parents for a while and my mother drove me back and forth to work. I had plenty of mothering by everyone at work and it was so hot out that I actually was physically more comfortable and was able to move around more often at work than at home. I did discover that oxygen tanks are darn heavy. (How do frail elderly people carry those things?)  I was less stressed overall being able to get some work done instead of worrying about it at home. And it distracted me from other ‘joys’ of 2013, such as my oldest brother’s diagnosis of colon cancer and the resultant surgeries and chemo. (He’s recovering nicely and everything was successful!)

Living at my parents during the first part of my recovery posed several problems. First, they don’t have a spare room, so my bed was the couch. Couch surfing at 20, cool. Couch surfing at 40, not so cool. Also, my two dogs are too big for my parents’ small home. So we made the decision to leave them at my house and my mother checked on them twice a day. Had I been back at my own house in a couple of weeks, this probably would have worked out, but I ended up being with them for 9 weeks. While I was away, my neighbors drilled a new well which pulled water away from my well. By the time we were able to address that by lowering the pump, the dogs… oh, the dogs! They had done a real number on my dining and living room rugs and due to the inconsistency of water, my mom wasn’t able to clean properly until then. I moved back in and life was ok for a couple of weeks until we had a dry spell in late September. For nearly three weeks I had to use 5-gallon containers of water to sponge bathe, wash my hair, water the dogs, and clean the house while we waited for the plumbers to come drill a new well. Not an inexpensive venture by any means, the new well was completed in October, just in time for the rain to finally come… and to reveal that my roof is leaking. We’ve patched that up, but I will have to have something more permanent done later this year. Then in November, the admin we’d hired in June left our department. Fortunately the girl who’d helped out in the Spring was able to take the position and although she still needs guidance, at least it wasn’t starting from scratch.

Finally in November, I turned and really looked at my poor lonely, dusty craft room.  The thick dust and disorder was not really conducive to happy crafting, so I decided that I would spend the rest of 2013 getting my craft room, my house and my life in order. I scheduled vacation time at the end of the year to get the mental break I so desperately needed. I excitedly ordered new craft supplies and reorganized my craft room. I got back into Blogger – which I’ve discovered no longer works with my outdated PC Boo! – and started slowly making the rounds again. I had no idea Google Reader had been phased out, so I got onto BlogLovin and have finally joined the Pinterest craze. I’m sure getting myself all ramped up and back into the swing of things will take a few months, but I’m so glad to be back. I missed my online friends and the crafty community. And I’m happy I’m back on the road to good health and spirit.

If you managed to make it through all of that, thank you for caring enough to read it all, and I assume you are probably as exhausted as I am just thinking about it. LOL Today will be my first day crafting in my newly neat and clean craft room, so I’m off to revel in getting inky, and I hope to be back soon to blog my first card of 2014.

Til then, happy new year and best crafty wishes for 2014 to you all! See you soon!

Christy