Friday thoughts

Overheard in the Springer household recently:

Mom: “Penny, you’ve set a world record.”

Dad: “Well, records are meant to be broken.”

Note: We’re not talking about a good record, here. And Penny is my Pug dog. My very bad, but also very cute Pug dog.

-----

“Are you going to church? Or are you going to confession?’

“Neither. I’m just going to start sinning.”

-----

Mom to daughter conversation: “For once in your freaking life, just listen to me.”

Yes, that sounds about right.

Pinteresty Items

My bff and I sometimes communicate solely through Pinterest. It makes my day a little brighter, and I sometimes giggle so hard people ask me what's wrong.

Ahem. Nothing, people. I just have the most amazing friends in the world.

Here are some of the gems we've come up with over the past few months. Giggling is allowed.

Stupid Tax

Sometimes road trips aren’t meant to be.

The last time I went to Nebraska, in October, I made a few stupid mistakes that I ended up paying for. The first mistake I made was leaving my flat iron in the hotel room after I left.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that Nebraska has my pants, but that’s a story for another blog post.

Anyway, back to the flat iron. I pouted about its death for a couple of weeks while I tried to make do with my mini travel sized flat iron. (Yes, please, go ahead and make fun of me for not taking the travel sized one out of town and losing it. It is kind of funny.)

I was getting fed up with having ugly hair every day. One night I went to the store to pick out a new one. I looked at the options, threw the cheapest one in the cart then started to walk away.

Wait a minute, I thought. I’m an adult now. I went to college. I have a job. I need to look like I know what I’m doing, even if I sometimes don’t.

I went back to that aisle and picked a more expensive one. It wasn’t the uber expensive, but it was the moderately expensive one.

When I got home and used it, I was amazed. Guys, this little sucker might be a life changer. You can control the temperature, and all it takes is less than five minutes until your hair looks like you spent all morning working on it.

Sometimes stupid mistakes turn into stupid taxes, which turn into good decisions. Sometimes.

Penny Pug

She was the worst birthday present I’ve ever received.

My dog, Penny, was given to me as a gift three days before my 26^th birthday.

Goober.

Penny came to me via a family member, who picked her out for me. When I went and picked her up from the animal shelter, I remember thinking she was cuter than I thought she would be.

That feeling didn’t last very long.

Penny, the 11-pound, 6-month-old Pug, ended up being a batshit crazy terrorist whose personal goal was to ruin all of our lives.

By the time my birthday rolled around that year, I hadn’t slept in three days because Penny screamed at me all night. I actually remember being mad and thanking my family for such a terrible birthday gift.

Penny had separation anxiety. There was medication involved. She ate her way through a metal crate. She spit in my face. She whined and cried when she wasn’t touching a human being. And, it was her personal goal to poop in the house as much as possible.

She was terrible. She ate electricity and melted her chin off by sticking it in a 400-degree oven (in two separate incidents). She survived both, luckily.

I used to judge people whose children and pets got injured in stupid, freak accidents. It wasn’t until I got a dog that I realized that stupid stuff happens and sometimes you can’t prevent it.

Fast forward almost three years later, that worst birthday present ever turned out to be pretty cute.

It’s comforting to me to fall asleep to the sounds of her snorting and snoring. She has the biggest attitude ever when it rains or snows. She sometimes gets mad at me if it’s cloudy and cold outside. She's mostly fearless of things that can actually harm her, but she's scared to death of things that pose no risk to her.

She spent a week being afraid of a fan sitting on the floor in my living room, for example.

It takes me a few minutes every morning to convince Penny to wake up. Mostly, she just gives me dirty looks, snorts loudly, then goes back to sleep. Often, on cold mornings, she comes in from outside, goes back to bed and then refuses to move.

Pugs.

The cool thing about little dogs is that they don’t know they’re little. Her personality far outweighs her little 18-pound body.

Plus, when she flashes me her underbite, I turn to mush.

She actually turned out to be one of the best birthday gifts I’ve ever gotten. Sometimes you really have to look for the diamond in the rough before you find it.

Makes no sense.

I'm tired and I don't have a lot to say tonight.

I have one observation from the day, though. When buying a coffee drink from a certain place in western Kansas, why in the world would they put a ton of whipped cream on top when I ordered it with soy milk?

That makes no sense whatsoever.

I sometimes forget that most of the world is normal and can drink milk products. That's happened to me twice this week.

Sigh.

Also, here's a photo from Pinterest/Reddit of a Pug cookie monster. If you know Pugs, you know that all Pugs are cookie monsters.

Maybe I'll introduce you to my cookie monster, Penny, in the next blog post.

Life's weird.

It's weird as an adult to go back and visit the place where you were a student.

Five years later, I still get an uneasy feeling, even when I visit the large city I originally went to school in.

It's weird to me that everything in that big city can change so much yet remain exactly the same.

The retail store I worked at? It sits empty. The new store in a few miles east, next to a Cabela’s.

Weird.

That school I went to? There are new buildings being built all over campus. One of the apartment complexes I lived in is being torn down soon.

That parking lot that my car broke down in? That store that I sat in for a couple hours, waiting for a tow truck? Those still exist, but now it’s totally different.

My almost-paid-off-car runs and is dependable. And, if it didn’t run, I have a full-time job and the means to cover an unfortunate event.

I don’t understand how everything can change but still look exactly the same.

I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like, hey, place I used to live, thanks for teaching me those lessons you taught me. But all I really remember is being homesick and not wanting to be here. But, hey, thanks for existing and making me who I am.

By the way, you kind of majorly suck and I still don’t really like you (cough, big city, cough).

Sigh.

You know that feeling of being at peace, of being happy and knowing that you belong where you landed?

I’ve never felt that in anywhere but my hometown. I guess it makes sense that I live here now. No place else has even remotely given me the sense of happiness and belonging that my hometown has given me.

I guess I'm thankful for what that experience taught me - it taught me what I didn't want in life. I don't want to be surrounded by thousands of people I don't know. I don't want to be hundreds of miles away from my family. I don't want to be surrounded by concrete.

I like what's familiar. I need wide open spaces. I need to be able to breathe. I don't mind that there are more cows in my hometown than people. And I don't mind spending a few hours in a car to get to a place where people outnumber livestock.

I never thought I'd say that.

Life’s weird.

I'm introverting.

I love Pinterest.

Sometimes, I run across a pin that's too delicious to not share with the world.

This is one of those things.

To boot

There are some pretty important questions in life.

Did that school district have extra money leftover from the bond issue a few years ago? What did they do with it, and was it money well spent? Why is healthcare so expensive?

More importantly: Could I pull off that cute pair of boots?

I faced a few dilemmas while shopping out of town recently. One was about a pink scarf I decided I couldn’t pull off. The other was about a pair of tan boots that fit me perfectly.

The black pair would be the safer choice, but the store didn’t have them in my size. They were less snazzy and wouldn’t stand out as much as the tan pair. The less snazz the better, I thought.

There was one pair of the tan boots in my size. I tried them on. A little girl, probably around 7 or 8 years old, tried on a pair of glittery flats beside me. She didn’t seem to notice or care about the pickle I was in.

Boots. Cute boots. Am I really that person?

                                                                                   

A lot has changed in the past year for me. Some of the changes include not eating like a hung-over college student, working out almost every day and doing yoga.

The result? Every single piece of clothing that was in my closet last year has been donated. The second round of clothes that don’t fit me anymore are sitting in plastic bags, waiting to be donated.

I wore a pair of jeans a few days ago that will have to be donated with that pile. I bought those jeans three months ago.

Changing the way you look is a big deal.

With that in mind, I bought the boots. I tried them on when I got home and thought pretty hard about whether I was that person. I considered returning them.

Then, I made a decision. The answer to my life’s most burning question is yes. Yes, I can pull off those boots.

I’m pulling them off right now, and they’re fabulous.

"You look happy."

Every few months, I get in this mood. I'm not sure how to describe this mood. It's not a bad mood, it's not a funk, and it's not negative at all.

It's just a mood where I need to get out of town, to go on a long drive alone to listen to music as loud as I want.

So I took a vacation day from work this week with the excuse that I had to go pick up a bridesmaid dress out of town.

Sure, for a lot less money the dress could have been shipped to me. But really, who wants to work on a Wednesday when you could get out of town for a day? I made my plans, got an oil change, gassed up my car and left before 6 a.m. yesterday.

It was fabulous.

I got to hang out with a handful of people who instantly recharged me and reminded me how lucky I am in life.

One of these amazing women looked at me immediately and said, "You look happy."

I couldn't stop smiling. 

Happy is something I haven't always been. I haven't really been unhappy, per se. As the same amazing woman told me, I've always been somebody who's just been okay. I was okay with where I was in life, but I've never been over-the-moon excited about life and what it has to offer me.

Until now.

Now? Everything has changed. Now I'm happy and content, and I'm excited about the future. 

And I love that other people can see that in me, too. 

Today was my 2-year anniversary at my job. In six months, I will have been at this job longer than any other job I've had. The past 2.5 years have been the most wonderful and awful roller coaster ride I've ever been on. I gave up on my career and left it behind, I moved back to my hometown and spent months job searching. And there's been a whole lot of other things in-between.

I didn't go where I intended to in life. Instead, I veered off course (way, way off course) and took a couple of side journeys I wasn't expecting.

One of my favorite sayings in life is this: "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I needed to be."

I think I need to be here right now. I need to hang out with my best friend multiple times a week. I need to help her plan her wedding. I need to be here for my brother, and I need to be surrounded by people that I've known my whole life.

I think I ended up where I needed to be. 

And, I'm happy.