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Since October, I have been ignoring my hurt feelings and anger over my Ex. So I have decided to get it all off my chest once and for all, and let you all read the juicy drama.

I met Adam during our first year of college. I guess you could define our relationship as the typical college sweethearts. We were together for almost 5 years. We lived together, we had pets together, and at one point I thought I would marry him. He had many positive qualities and was a sweet guy, and for the most part we made a decent partnership. My relationship with Adam was one of friendship first and foremost. When I pick someone to be with, I look for not only romance and chemistry, but someone I can talk to and hang out with.

Towards the end of our five years together, it was clear to me at least that we were at different places in our lives. First off, I was really at a point where I was ready to take big commitment steps and start settling down. While I was looking down the path to getting a stable job, marriage, buying a house, and children; he was thinking about travel, and all the places he wanted to move and live. I have always been “ahead” of my age maturity wise and in the way of life experiences. Prior to 21, I had had my fill of partying, dating and experimenting (most of which I had done fairly hard core in high school). By 21 I was pretty much just going to school, working, and my social relationships were dinners and evenings with other couples.

Adam on the other hand, constantly felt that he was missing out on the typical college experience. He resented the fact that I had a good deal more relationships then him. This was a feeling that had long since been a source of contention in our relationship, leading to multiple “break-ups” with the purpose of dating others to make sure I was the person he wanted to be with (though he never ended up dating anyone else, and we would just get back together within a day or so, and the cycle would start again). Additionally he had never partied at all and felt he was missing out on being able to experiment in that sort of lifestyle. Having been there and done that, I was not interested in going back, but I wasn’t against him going to parties. But the fact that I didn’t have any interest in what he wanted to do became a problem.

I realized that things were not working probably a year before we actually split up. But being that I like to be certain before I make life changing decisions, such as splitting up with a person you have spent 5 years with, it took me a good deal of time before I made a final decision. It started slowly; while we were living together I told him I needed some time and space. I moved to the spare bedroom shortly after. When the lease was up on our apartment, we were both moving back home to Seattle from our college town. We couldn’t afford to move into a new apartment so we respectively moved into our parents homes. At this point, it was clear our relationship was over. I think both he and I thought that maybe in the future it would be a possibility to get back together.

I started dating other people. I was very open with him (as that was how our relationship was, or so I thought). I told him who I was talking to and when I went out with other people. We remained close friends. Within a few months I had met and become serious, with Dan (who is now my fiancé). Dan lived in Columbus, OH and I had planned an open ended trip to meet and spend time with him. I placed my belongings in storage, and packed four 70 lb bags (it was going to be a short stay… definitely :P). Adam even drove me to the airport and loaded my luggage.

So went my move to Columbus. When I first arrived, I would spend a lot of time on the phone with Adam. Part of that was due to the fact that less then a month after I had moved he had been diagnosed with cancer. I felt guilty that I had left, and that he was alone. I wanted to support him as much as I could, which is hard over such a long distance.

Maybe I was selfish, but I knew if I picked up and flew back to take care of him it would end my current relationship, but most likely mean I would get back together with Adam. And that would be for the wrong reasons, not because we should be together.

The other part was that I valued the friendship I had with him. We were still close and after having spent 5 years with someone, it’s hard to just let that friendship go.  

After a Year or so had passed, I had planned a trip back to Seattle to see my family for Christmas and announce our engagement. Dan and I both took 2 weeks off of work and boarded our dogs. My stepmom, who knew beforehand, had planned a small engagement party for my family and friends. Adam had been invited along with his new girlfriend.

This is the point at where my anger starts. I had been so excited to get together and spend some time with Adam when I came to visit. But he never was able to commit to even an hour of meeting up for coffee or the like. He did attend my engagement party, and brought his new girlfriend. I was more then happy to have both of them there, but that quickly changed as she sat sourly through the whole party. Not five days later, they announced they were engaged. Coincidental?

I flew back to Ohio and decided to just put it behind me. Though I did speak to him on a less regular basis, I chalked that up to him having a weird work schedule and the time difference. Another year or so passed.

The breaking point however came when Dan and I moved back to Seattle. I was thrilled to be moving back home. Once we settled in I called Adam to hang out. I had hoped to get together with him and his fiancé, another couple we both had ties with and Dan and me. I left him a few voicemails, and a MySpace message. When I never heard anything back after a few phone calls, I wrote a long email to the extent of: “What the heck is going on? Did I do something or do you just not want to be friends anymore? At least let me know, so I can quit looking retarded leaving you messages.” He finally called back, didn’t mention the email, and pretended like everything was fine. Since then I left another message but resolved that I was on a one call policy and that if he didn’t care to call be back, oh well.

So for the past 6 months, I have had one phone call from him. It seems that either he just isn’t interested in talking to me anymore, or his fiancé doesn’t like him talking to me, or both. Overall it hurts my feelings, as I thought we would always at least remain friends. Maybe it was me being naive.

What makes me even more sad, is the new relationship he is in. I worry that he is in it for the wrong reasons. First off, he chose a woman that is so similar to me in looks, it’s a little scary. You can let that go on maybe he has a type. But then he chooses to get engaged directly after I did, within a matter of days.

It’s not about me not liking her, or being jealous. She has managed to ostracize any of his friends that were mutually attached to me.  Adam took his fiancé over to our mutual friend’s house to have a couple’s dinner and catch up. Adam and his new fiancé spent the night making digs on our friends for their financial and job success, and rolling their eyes when they would speak about what was going on in their lives.

I have restrained myself from saying anything about any of it to him because I don’t feel it’s my place (even as his friend) and don’t want it to come across for the wrong reasons. But I think the behavior is rude. It angers me that he can treat people that before he acted as if he genuinely cared about, in this manner. I am hurt that I have lost what at one time I thought was one of my best friends.

Sunlight trickles through the dense green leaves and vines that drape across the Ravine. Moistened clay walls rise high above the river beds. Smooth rocks line the banks of the river warming in the summer sun. The beauty here is so serene.

The water flows swiftly through the gorge, glimmering where the sun hits it. It twists and curls like a giant jade snake throught the Northwest terrain. And typical to the pacific northwest the smell of pine fills the air, mixed with the mossy damp undertones of the river banks.

This is one of my favourite places to float. While the river is techincal for rafting, it is relaxing and tranquil on spring and summers days.

When Zeus was only about 6 months old we had the scare of our lives. Dan and I were in the living room one evening after work. We had eaten dinner and had settled into a movie. Zeus wandered out of the room, most likely to eat or get a drink in the kitchen. Moments later we heard a huge crashed and the most awful scream I have heard (and if you have ever heard a dog scream you will know exactly what I am speaking). Both Dan and I jumped out of our seats, only to see Zeus flying from the dining room, past the living room, down the hall and into the computer room.

For the life of me I could not figure out what on earth was going on. We quickly ran to the office, to witness him cowering under the table, shaking and howling and crying. Dan immediately went to calm him, and ordered me out of teh room, as I was already scared out of my mind. I went to the dining room to find that the dog had defecated under the dining table. I looked for knives or anything else the dog could have gotten into that would have injured him. There was nothing.

I spent a good 5 minutes before I found the culprit. I spotted an outlet, where I had just a few days earlier removed the covers to paint. At the time I had capped the wires and pushed them into the wall. But now they were sticking out. And the little plastic caps were missing.

So come to realize my puppy had wanted to play with the caps, and in the process of pulling them off the wires, managed to electrocute himself. Needless to say, he walked a WIDE perimeter when passing the outlet from there on out.

I love my dogs. They are like Ying and Yang. Zeus is my gigantic black puppy. He is a great dane mix that we got from the pound just prior to X-mas 2005. He is now close to 140 lbs. While he is incredibly smart he LOVES to play dumb.

On the other hand, Sebastian is a 10 lb beige Terrier. He is a holy terror, while being the most adorable thing in the world. He loves to cuddle, and could be considered a living stuffed animal. He also thinks he is MUCH bigger then he actually is, and refuses to associate with anything besides large dogs, namely, Danes, Rotweilers, Dobermans, etc…

So I have decided to devout an catagory of my blog to my dog stories.

Early on a cold February Saturday I set out for the river. This wasn’t my first time on the river, but I was used to the hot summer days of Eastern Washington. Days where just the thought of being able to swim was made more enticing by the dusty heat and the sweat you were breaking from just being outside.

But this was different. There was a light dusting of snow along the banks. The ground was frozen hard with winter frost. I could see my breath curl in wisps in front of my face as I shuffled through the blue Rubbermaid bin in the trunk of my Jeep. Pulling on layers of micro-fleece shirts and socks, I watched as other cars pulled into the parking lot. Finally a large yellow school bus arrived, pulling behind it a trailer of deflated rafts.

Being 18, I was easily the youngest member there. Most looked at least 25 and some ranged into their 60’s. I was also one of only three women. Slowly, I headed over to the group that had begun to form near the doors of the school bus. Some of the men were hauling piles of neoprene suits off the bus in various colours of faded red, faded blue and a very faded black. As they stacked the suits according to size, we all began to head to our appropriate pile and grab one.

Donning a wet suit is a peculiar feeling. First, it is one of the few pieces of clothing I have every worn that is completely one piece. Secondly, the skin-tight garment immediately makes you notice every curve of your body, which even for the least self-conscious person is a humbling feeling. Barefoot on the cold parking lot asphalt, I made my way to pick up a pair of booties and quickly put them on. I glanced around, knowing everyone was feeling the same, standing in a group of perfect strangers in a suit that is flattering on no one.

A fairly tall, barrel-chested man who had previously been blowing up rafts and unloading the truck began to speak. He introduced himself as Don and welcomed us to River Guide Training. As he spoke I studied him. He seemed young, probably in his late 20’s maybe early 30’s. He began to hand out photo-copied booklets to each member of the group. He began separating our larger group into pods of 6. We perched on the sides of our group’s raft, as each raft was then assigned an instructor.

We were given the generic safety speech, illuminated of course by each instructor’s own twists and anecdotes. My instructor introduced himself as “Slasher”. He was in his mid-thirties, had bleached hair that was shaved at the sides, yet long enough to pull back into a stubby pony-tail. After going over some basic do’s and don’ts we hoisted our fully inflated raft back onto the trailer, piling it along with 5 others, and strapped the load down. We boarded the school bus and began the trip up to the put-in.

As we got closer to the put-in the bus buzzed with exhilaration. Eventually we pulled off onto the shoulder of a 2-lane highway. We hoisted the rafts to our shoulders and carefully navigated down a narrow dirt path leading to the water’s edge. The rafts were lowered into the eddy one by one, and all of us climbed in except the instructor. I sat startling the side of the raft, my right foot in the icy water. One by one each instructor pushed the rafts off the shore and jumped in calling out rowing orders, “All FORWARD! …. Right BACK!….”

And so started my guide training. We glided down the river, sometimes paddling full speed ahead, other times paddling back in a vain attempt to slow the raft from its natural course.

The Skykomish is a dynamic river. When the water is low it is a technical river and navigating the river bed is tedious. When the water is high, it is fast moving with long rock drops, and slides. Both ways presents dangers as well as excitement. On this particular day the water levels were fairly high. The scenery was beautiful, crisp and clear as you gazed across the landscape. There was a sparse layer of snow dusted over the land and trees. The smell of pine wafted through the clean air.

We stroked onwards, skating around the edges of small rock drops, traversing the river as debris blocked portions of the waterway. We headed down the river towards “Boulder Drop”. We were to navigate between two ominous rocks, appropriately named “House Rocks” as they each seemed as large as a house. White water roared through the narrow gap between the two rocks, and poured over a submerged boulder into a bubbling whirlpool.

The raft plunged down the grade. The nose dipped slightly beneath the cold water. The stern rose up into the air, lifting the guide and those in the back up away from the river, while waves crashed onto those in the front. As soon as we hurtled into the swirling water below the drop we began to paddle harder, pulling the raft out of the tumbler at the base of the boulder that would surely flip the vessel.

As we floated into slower, deeper water we decided to brave the icy water and jumped in. We floated alongside the rafts with only our synthetic suits to protect us from the bite of the cold water. We swam to a large eddy at the pull out. Just over the bank I caught a glimpse of the parking lot which held my Jeep. We hauled the rafts out of the water, our hands and faces red from the cold.

We packed the oars into standing barrels, deflated and rolled the rafts, loading them back onto the trailer. Then we striped from our wet suits, changing into warm, dry sweaters and pants. Bidding the river farewell, I climbed into my Jeep and headed back to the city, knowing that I would be back shortly to continue a process that had only just started.

So this is my birthday post. I am now 26. Which in the grand scheme of things is not that old. But I have really started to notice how “old” I feel.

 As a teenager and young adult, I was always spontaneous and never worried about consequences. Scientists say that the frontal lobe of the brain doesn’t fully develop until the early to mid 20’s. Meaning that before that time your ability to judge long term consequences and fully restrict behavior based on these consequences is limited. More likely you’re basing most decisions on your primordial brain, which usually enatils making rash decisions that support your immediate gratification.

I miss those days. In the last year I having really noticed all of that changing. I now worry about money. Even when I have money to blow, I still worry about it. For Instance, we got our tax return and had already planned to spend a good portion of it on a new TV. When it came time to buy that TV, I couldn’t even look at the total on the screen as my husband swiped his card.

 I don’t go out as much with friends either. Part of this is because I am married to my best friend so I don’t find the need to go outside of that, and partly because it has become so hard to coordinate schedules. One of my best friends Mike used to practically live with me. When I was in college my boyfriend and I lived only a few blocks from campus and had a rather large 2 bedroom apartment in a house. Mike would just head down after class and come on in and hang out, eat with us, and many times stay the night on one of our massive couchs… at the time we had 3. The same was true going the other way, many days I would just find myself heading over to his apartment to play video games or just watch TV. Really we did nothing in particular, it was just hanging out. I loved it.

But that has changed. First, he moved back home to Seattle, which is 84 miles from our college town. Then he got a girlfriend, now fiance, which was inevitable I guess. Then I moved away to Columbus for 2 years, so we kept in touch with online gaming. Now that I have moved back, with a husband in tow (not that, thats really any different as I had been in a 5 year relationship the entire time we were in college), its very different.  We had done things as couples before, but now that we are each respectively married it is much more “adult”. We actually PLAN dinners as opposed to just showing up. And the aspect of just hanging out, doing nothing in particular has been replaced by more structured discussions about work and weddings and family.

Not all of this is bad. I do enjoy some aspects of my adult life. My relationship with my parents has changed drastically. I like knowing that I make all the decisions in my life and control where I spend my money, when I go to work and when I go on vacation. ETC ETC. Its just very different, and kind of a weird realization when it all hits.

Welcome to 26!

Well since I am starting a blog, and yall are reading it, you might want to know who I am.

I was born Feb. 25, 1982 in Washington State. My birth mother was fairly young and therefore prior to my birth decided that it would be better to put me up for adoption. I was taken home by my adoptive parents a few days after my birth. I was told from a very early age that I was adopted, so there was never a time that I can remember that I didn’t know I was adopted.

One of the most common questions I get is “do you resent being given up for adoption or feel like your birth parents abandoned you?” The truth is, giving a child up for adoption is probably the hardest decision a mother can make. They have already chosen to continue with their pregnancy, and go thru 9 months of being pregnant and the pain of giving birth, only to have to turn around give you up. Knowing that she was young, already had one child and was struggling; giving me to someone who could truely provide for me was the best gift she could have ever given me. I do not resent her in the slightest, in fact I admire the strength and courage to go through what she went through to give me a better life. I know I could not have done the same. Additionally,I could not have asked for more loving, and caring parents, with whom I was placed.

 My parents divorced when I was about a year and a half. They had been married for nearly 13 years, and in addition to the problems of normal marriages, the strain of years of trying to have a child, and a 5 year adoption process/waiting period took a huge toll on their marriage. One that was not satiated by bring a child into the family finally.

Both of my parents remarried, my mother when I was 2, and my father when I was 12. My mother and stepfather, by accident, had my sister in 1986. In 2001, my father and stepmother had my brother. I truely live in a unique blended family, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Essentially I had a relatively normal childhood, other then the chaos involved in boucing between homes, and the hectic lifestyle that ensues around a person with a HUGE family. But this seems more the norm for our generation.

For most of my Schooling I attended private Catholic school, (with is a topic for a completely seperate post, I could fill pages with those experiences). After High School I moved to Bellingham, WA where I lived on Campus at Western Washington Univ. while attending Whatcom Community College for 2 years, and transferring to WWU for my final 3 years of college.

I duel majored in Psychology with focuses on abnormal psych. and developmental psych. & Sociology with focuses on criminology and family. Technically I still have 2 classes to finish up, but I have over 250 college quarter credits (you only need 180 to graduate with a 4 year degree), so I can it even.

Currently I work in customer service. Though I enjoy my job, I don’t know if I will stay in customer service forever. For now I am well paid, and have benefits and time to figure the rest out. I have often thought about continuing my education to get my masters in counseling pyschology, an MS in Social Work, or my teachin credentials. But quite honestly, I can’t think about going back to school at this point. 5 years of taking 20+ credits fall, winter, spring, and summer kind of burnt me out.

That pretty much brings me to my current status as of today (minus a few life changing events here and there, but that I can go into later, as I have plenty more thoughts).