My wife just graduated nursing school. She spent every week night and most weekends studying for years. She didn’t get out much. Her social life was smothered, going out with more of a whimper than a bang. But now she’s done.

She will be training and working some evening and overnight shifts coming up, however she is currently working day shifts. This means I can actually spend time with her after the work day. We can cruise the streets, wander around Wal*Mart for hours never walking the same hour twice, or chase squirrels with bottle rockets. The time is ours to enjoy!

So, I will see you again, and soon. The long after-work hours of braiding each other’s hair and whispering passive aggressive secrets about the imagined lives of unknown neighbors will end soon. Shortly I will return to your harsher embrace. Your free weights will bow me over like a 90 year old osteoporotic. Your leg extensions will cause me to strain and strain until I wet myself just enough to be embarrassing but not enough to inconvenience the next person on the machine. Your treadmills and I will spend long half hours in sweaty, tortuous bliss.

Until then.

School is wrapping up (actually, today she takes her last tests), but there are few, if any, nursing jobs around. Hey, remember that nursing shortage we had and were told would last for many years? Well…not so much. Nursing shortage, meet healthcare crisis and overhaul. Meet hospital downstaffing, nurses staying put in their current positions, and therefore a lack of new positions to be had. Meet the State of Maine, where the state doesn’t pay its hospitals for taking care of its state-insured patients.

The job search is on. Until very recently, the only places she has been able to apply to were out of state. Will we be moving to Virginia? That would be nice, actually. Or, could she be hired at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota? Cold, but acceptable.

School is wrapping up, but the future is extremely uncertain. It’s like rushing full tilt toward the edge of a cliff.

What’s over the edge?

We looked over the menu thinking there had to be something that would be the slightest bit appetizing. Well, there was: some kind of spinach and soy cheese wanton. However, that was an appetizer, and my wife seemed loathe to let me order only an appetizer and not a main dish. I might add a couple things at this point: 1) I am very good at choosing only a simple appetizer and enjoying it at a place where the menu seems a bit suspect to my tastes. One time I ordered only a bowl of clam chowder, and enjoyed it, while the rest of my dining party was nauseated with their dinner selections. I spent less money and had a better dinner. I trust me. This did not happen last night. 2) There was another person at the dinner last night, much smarter than I was allowed to be, who was allowed to not order anything at all. Nothing. He didn’t order only an appetizer. He ordered nothing. And he got away with it. I don’t know exactly how the birthday girl thought of him, but I didn’t hear anyone coming down on him for not ordering. Taking those two facts together, I should have just gotten an appetizer.

My steamed vegetables came to me covered in peanut sauce. I thought it would be pretty good and all I would have to do is pick out a few of my least favorite vegetables. Unfortunately, the peanut sauce was chunky not smooth. Also unfortunately, as of late my body has had a bit of a problem with chunky peanut sauce.

A couple weeks ago I was, what one would call, violently ill. The last thing I had eaten earlier in the day we some roasted peanuts. The taste of roasted peanuts stayed with me through the entire day as my stomach ached and caused the most nauseated feelings I have had in a decade or two. These feelings culminated in a grand, if not violent, outpouring of nothing other than chunky peanut sauce a few times that night. Flash forward that picture to the chunky peanut sauce I was staring at on my plate last night. I should have just gotten an appetizer.

We headed back toward home from the interestingly busy vegetarian restaurant and decided to stop at a Dairy Queen at the halfway point. The DQ in Augusta is a small little hole in the wall with no inside seating, though it does have inside serving. The pictures of the 25th anniversary Blizzards were deliciously tempting. I ordered a medium Tagalong Blizzard to make up for my dinner. The Blizzard looked great; the kid had even sprinkled some of the Tagalongs on top when he was done mixing it up.

The first few bites were not too bad. I was just enjoying the ice cream, a delicacy I don’t indulge in quite so much these days. After the first bites, I noticed the Blizzard was awfully soft. It was as if the ice cream was melting rapidly or maybe it wasn’t too hard to begin with. It also started tasting funny, and not a good kind of funny like a clown. It was definitely the bad kind of funny, like nauseating chunky peanuts.

I finished almost the entire Blizzard (hey, I paid for it), and drove home quite disappointed all in all.

Today I had a Mint Oreo Blizzard for lunch. It was awesome. The end.

Ted Dekker’s Green
Ted Dekker and Erin Healy’s Burn
Mark Schultz’s Come Alive
Jeremy Camp’s Speaking Louder Than Before
Warren Barfield’s Worth Fighting For
Big Daddy Weave’s Christ is Come
Sport Coat
T-shirt
Bacon Salt
Tiger calendar
Munchkin card game
Socks
Starburst

What if I was more observably affectionate toward everyone, instead of just my wife and my God? Obviously not everyone in the same way, but what if I just planned on being more kind as a whole? I was looking through my paltry amounts of posts from last year and I saw that I was becoming a softy, at least toward my family. Maybe I could work on that in all of my relationships. We’ll see.

Maybe I could set a goal on the number of books I want to read a month, and then allow myself to read my comics once I’ve reached that goal? Four books a month is achievable. It would let me achieve my plan of reading more books than the last two years, and it would often give me some time at the end of the month to immerse myself in the comics I’m craving to re-read.

There. We’ll see how these work.

Later.

No, instead of resolutions, I will share my plans for the new year. These are goals, sure, but they are less stringently enforced or sought after than resolutions. I will not make 90 day action plans to meet these goals, nor will I obsess about them. These are things I plan to do in the new year:

I plan to display more observable and outward affection to my wife. The original thought was to love my wife more this year, but that hardly seems an observable goal. I want to move beyond any inward build up of love and onto an outward manifestation.

I plan to display more observable and outward affection to my God. Again, to say I will love God more this year is great, and should be a goal of everyone for every year, however I want this to be noticeable to an observer. Not for my sake, naturally, but to display that there are people in this world who still care about him, to be a light, using terminology Christendom is familiar with.

I plan to read more books. This is somewhat of an arbitrary plan, as one could actually read fewer books containing more pages and end up having read more than previous years. However, all things averaging out in the end, I would like to get back into the book reading habit. I have spent much time over the past few months re-reading some of my comic books. It was (and is) a yearning inside me to re-read them until I’m caught up again with the monthly storyline. However, I plan to put this aside to get back into a regular book reading routine.

I plan to lose weight. Seriously, I got on the scales a few days ago and it went up higher than ever before in my life. I didn’t stop at my arbitrary, self-imposed maximum. No, it kept going almost 10 lbs higher. It was horrible. I have been pigging out for over a week now. Luckily most of the junk food is gone, and my wife has the same plan. We’ll lose weight, and we’ll do it with diet and exercise. That means getting back to a regular gym schedule as well.

I plan to post to my website more often. If I don’t, then I’ll start to wonder why I keep it, which would be completely understandable. I spend so much time as a taker, reading other people’s blogs and following people on Facebook and Twitter. I want to be a giver. At one point I fancied myself as somewhat of a writer. I’d like to get back to that. We’ll see what happens.

Those are my largest plans for the year. I have other minor goals, like being more fiscally responsible, catching up on painting some miniatures (for a board game I haven’t played in months, unfortunately), catching up on digitalizing my pictures, and some other catching up I can’t think of now. I don’t want to play catch-up any more. So, let’s see how this all goes.

Later.

I have a cousin getting married in Dallas. I’ve been to Austin, TX for a week…in years gone by…and I loved it. When my mother asked if I wanted to join in the party heading down, I sure did! The bad part is that it is relatively expensive (I thought I had money to blow at the time she asked) and I have to leave my wife behind. She’s in the middle of a school semester and has to work clinical hours while we’re gone.

Other than that, I expect to love it. I think I’d make a good Texan. Let me head south and mess with Texas and we’ll all find out.

The bacon is left over from another time and place, but there is enough hiding in the back of the fridge for me to heat up and devour, noisily lapping splattered grease from my face and fingers.

Lastly we have toast rounding out the hearty triumvirate. One masculine piece delicately covered in a seducing layer of the Queen’s own strawberry jam, while the other piece proudly bears Skippy peanut butter aloft to it gastric doom.

Before I get into that, did you know that PoliGrip has “the unique patented Ooze-Control Tip®?” Why does that not sound inviting? I know I should be sold on that fact alone, but I find myself oddly repulsed instead.

Ooze.

Anyway, the dog getting into the PoliGrip got my thinking: What if the dog’s jaw had hardened together? Would you have to take the dog to the vet to chisel the teeth apart? Or, would the vet have to yank the teeth? Would the dog then get doggie dentures?

I can see a dog trying to bark at the mailman when suddenly its teeth pop out. “Woof, woof!” *whump* “Whimper, whimper…”

At least it might control the dog’s ooze…

These days…not so much.

I can pack some clothes with the intention of stopping by the gym on the way home tonight, but I can already tell that I’ll probably talk myself out of it.

We’ll see.