Merry Happy Jesus Christ...is it 2015 already?

Hello, friends (shoutout to Saudi Arabia and Russia where the majority of my readers hail from.....you know who you are! I don’t. But thanks!

It’s been about 5 months since my last confession. When last you saw me, I had just turned 38 and was creeping out the people at the Heart Attack Grill in Vegas by staring longingly at their butterfat shakes through a window.  I wish I could tell you that milkshakes no longer have any power over me, but that would be one hell of a whopper.

Anyway, the autumn months are when I go underground to take a breath, reflect, and nurse my heart. We are now over two years out from the loss of Ligaya. Two years.  Where the hell did the time go?  I ask myself this every single day. In the thickest part of my grief, it felt like I was underwater, trying to run away as fast as I could from the darkness against a current that would just not let up. When I realized that I would drown from all the fighting – that I needed to GO through it to GET through it – the shift happened. I felt ok……that I would make it if I just stopped fighting and kept trying to ride it out instead.  I didn't always want to, but I did.  This is not to say that I do not have my very bad moments, because I do. And there is not one single day that I don’t think of her and wish she was here as a precocious, two-year old handful with sticky fingers and smile like her dad’s. I miss her so very much. 

Surprisingly, even the holidays were more manageable. The big difference this past year was that we decided to buy a 10 ft tall Christmas tree – our first “real” tree since moving in together in 2001. It pretty much died a few weeks into the season (it stopped drinking its water, I don't know why), but it was still beautiful and made the house smell and feel like Christmas. Ligaya was there. I felt her presence as naturally as the air that I breathe. She’s always with me, and it’s that thought that keeps me going every day.

Anyway, I had a chance to read over some of my old blog posts, and wow…I sound like the mayor of Crazypantstown with all of the anger shooting forth from my fingertips. I'm like freaking Zeus with bolts of lightning coming out of my hands!!! Or is that another Guardian of the Galaxy I'm getting mixed up with? Hmmm. Well, while I still have – ahem, just a few - issues, I've  cut back on all of the violent promises to punch people in the face and kick them in the throat. These days, I very rarely make obvious threats to burning down office buildings or sending out a rabid pack of simians to fling doo-doo at all of my arch-enemies (I've actually developed another one of my own languages to make such threats within the privacy of my own brain – a combination of Mandarin and Esperanto, if you will).

So this explains why I haven’t been gracing the board with countless tales of bad food choices, my torrid love/hate affair with exercise, and any unfortunate mishaps involving my unpredictable bowels.  I took my annual fall break to prepare myself for 2015.

Here are just a few recent updates:

• I started a job that still allows for some baking on the side, but not as much as I’d like. It does help me to purchase better ingredients (Mexican vanilla and butter prices, FTW) and other important things essential to daily life, though - mainly soap and things of that nature. 

• I’ve already had a few singing engagements and we’re still only in January. The Angels have me on the schedule again this baseball season, as well as the Orange County Sheriff’s Department with their beautiful medal of valor ceremony in April. Let’s hope I don’t sing into the microphone wrong-side up again or spill eggs on the Assistant Sheriff’s pants like I did last year (or attempt to clean off said pants with my napkin).

• I’m actually singing tomorrow for a military event and am fighting what I think is the beginning stages of the flu. With the outbreak of measles and all of the other weird bugs going around, getting a $15 massage from my favorite, yet questionable, massage joint probably wasn’t a good idea. Trying to express via broken English to my favorite “masseuse” that he could live in our house in exchange for all the massages I want whenever I want them probably wasn’t a good idea either. But when the CD in my head switches tracks from from “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” to the "Theme From Ice Castles", anything goes. Human trafficking be damned.

And wedding stuff.  Ah...the wedding.

• I finally settled on a dress and hired a coordinator because the stress of a new job and planning a wedding were making me want to punch people in the face and kick them in the throat. Repeatedly.  Wedding colors? What's that? Who? 

• I’ve folded well over 1000 paper cranes at this point in time, and I can’t seem to stop. It’s therapeutic – mind numbing – and allows me to watch an incredible amount of Netflix and Amazon Prime. I really should be exercising, I know this. But...... THE WIRE!!!!

In fact, any normal person would start exercising before their wedding, or at least stop with the bad shit, but nope. It hasn’t hit me yet. I can’t find the missing piece to that part of the dumb puzzle – and every time I think I’ve found a way to bridge the missing gaps, it still doesn’t look or feel quite right. I can come up with a thousand things that should motivate me, but it’s all just words right now. Lots and lots of words.

Until next time, all.

Love, Light, and Ligaya - CS