Sorting through new communities and blogs

The past two days I have spent many hours sorting through communities and blog posts to find where I feel comfortable. There are several that I have joined. I have noticed that there are not many dealing with being a single Christian working on their relationship with Christ and God's will for their life.

I truly believe that I am being called to do some missionary travel, and to share the story of my complicated life.

Is there any interest out there in including real life accounts or perhaps I can start a community.

I will be posting my testimony in my next blog post.

Sorting through the unnecessary.

Let's see where to start. In the past two weeks I have been trying to rid myself of the unnecessary feelings, possessions & bills, and advice that I no longer need.

First of all the unnecessary feelings involved when you go through a breakup. I feel guilty like I abandoned him, like I should have tried harder and like I should be able to be his friend. Nonsense, these feelings are not useful to anyone but him and I refuse to give them any weight. I have made a decision that when these unnecessary feelings creep into my thinking I will acknowledge them & then simply move past them by labeling them nonsense.

As for unnecessary possessions, lets start with the travel trailer I am currently living in. His back-pay from his Social security disability payed for this trailer. I verbally agreed to pay him back $1000 a month for 10 months. Since then he has called me drunk & threatening to file criminal charges against me for being a con-artist and taking advantage of a person in an incapacitated state. Nonsense, I helped him to file for social security disability, I have never said that I was taking the trailer that he paid for. I have always helped him and continue to take him to appointments, the store and the bank so long as he is sober and understands that we are only friends and doesn't get the wrong idea that we are getting back together. I have thought about giving him the trailer back but he insisted on putting it in my name. So the problem is this: If I sign the title and give it back he could potentially say that I sold it for $1 and say that I still owe him $8999. I have already paid him the first $1000 monthly installment. I offered to get a loan from the bank and pay him the $9000 I still owe him but he said no don't do that that will cost you interest. I have thought about selling the trailer or getting a loan so that I can pay him back. A loan for 48 months would be $207 a month paying approximately $2000 in interest. This would be much more affordable than $1000 a month and I could make double payments and pay it off in 2 years instead of four. Since my focus is on helping myself, this seems reasonable.

As for both necessary and unnecessary advice, where do I start. My mother says: "don't pay him a cent you are too nice and you let people take advantage of you." My daughter agrees and adds "Mom don't give the trailer back to him you paid $6500 in rent to help him out when he couldn't pay his rent." My dear sister says "I understand that you don't want the conflict and that sometimes you may have a right to something but it is not worth the hassle." My Christian friend agrees, "Just give it back and move forward. I knew the first time that I met you that you are a good person and I am really sorry that things didn't work out between you two."

My decision, get a loan and pay him all of the $9000 I owe him by writing a check & depositing it into our joint bank account with a memo of what it is for to cover myself should he pursue criminal charges. Then I will take myself off his accounts as i am the secondary. I have also found a dear older lady I've known for the past 5 years who needs a roommate in her home to help make ends meet. So I will be paying $300 a month plus food to live with her and $207 a month to keep the trailer. She is my friend's mom and she has family all over so her and I plan to travel the country visiting her children.

Life in a 26' travel trailer

Well it took me a full day to level the trailer and about 12 bruises. Once that was accomplished, it was dark.

So I had to wait to start the furnace. Wow was that a chore. I learned that if the propane tank is too low then I had to switch to the full tank. Once I figured that out, it took a while to purge the gas lines of air before the electric igniter would work. Another full day, but by the time it got dark I had heat. Woo Hoo.

Okay so after a week of running the furnace, I notice around 11:30pm that the furnace is blowing cold air. Out of propane already? Yes, that is what it was. I thought oh well, I will just turn it off and snuggle with Maya under the warm mink blanket.

I woke up very early the next day to 37 degrees in the trailer. What the heck? That is the outside temperature right?

Well the door came unlatched sometime in the middle of the night and was wide open. So in essence, I slept outside.

The next day I purchased a $15 electric ceramic heater with thermostat and safety tip over cut-off switch in case the dog accidently knocks it over. I now lock the door in addition to latching it at night, so my days of sleeping outside are over. I hope anyways. I guess I can always stand down at Walmart with my cardboard sign:

"Will blog for heat, food. Anything helps."

Helping Myself

After three days of being avoided and several outburst of yelling, I decided that I had tried hard enough to remedy the situation.

I tried apologizing, I tried calming him down, I tried avoidance, I tried asking him how he wanted to resolve the conflict.

I admit, I got into a few screaming matches. Not good. I asked, "how can you expect me to want to live with you in a 26' trailer when you get mad and refuse to resolve the conflict for days? Where are you going to go if we are in another state? Where am I going to go?"

Anyways, I don't quite remember what set me off but he had hooked the truck up to the trailer & parked out front of the neighbors and said "take it all, take me for everything I've got."

Well I didn't want his stuff, so I started throwing his clothes, belongings, ashtray, etc. in the front lawn & screaming that he was a drunk & that I didn't want anything to do with him anymore. The landlords picked his stuff up & took it downstairs to him. They even poured out his large bottle of rum. Well he needed more, so he came out from the apartment and started walking to the liquor store.

I taunted him saying, "Do you need a ride? Do you need some money for alcohol?" I am not proud of this, but... it felt good to let out some bottled up frustration. It felt good to vent.

Long story short... I left him at the apartment and I am now living in the trailer with my dog Maya at my daughters. I feel happy most of the time. Sometimes I wish that I had someone to share my life with. However, that feeling is quickly replaced by the sense of relief that I am in charge of helping myself, and I am not willing to give that up.

At this point...my spring cleaning has just begun. My life is cleaned out, I have packed all my belongings into a 26' travel trailer, well only what fit and stored the rest away in my storage shed. The freshness of the air I breath and the new life I am starting are a welcome breeze.

What is the Help Desk?

The help desk is a discussion based blog for those requesting help and those who can provide help.

For my first topic I've chosen:

What is the best way for someone to vent over an injustice that was done to them?

For example in my own life I recently vented over the injustice of being screamed at for four days because I loudly commented that I was overwhelmed while trying to pack a full sized bathroom into a tow behind travel trailer's bathroom.

In short, it was late morning and all I wanted to do was go take a shower in our apartment when the person I was working with, brought out three large totes of bathroom stuff and put them in the trailer. Now what is the big deal you ask? Well the trailer is 26' long by 8' wide and has no slide out rooms. So the walking area was covered and I was trapped inside until I could get the totes emptied out, moved to the couch or dining benches. In addition, we hadn't hooked up the water or filled the holding tanks so there was no way to use anything requiring water in the trailer.

While all this was happening my daughter called me to ask me if she could borrow the truck to go camping. The very truck I needed to move the trailer. It was for one night so I said okay I would trade her vehicles for a day since we weren't planning on moving the trailer for at least another week. While I was talking to her she said, "what's wrong mom? You sound annoyed." I said very loudly, "I am annoyed, He keeps bringing up more totes and I haven't even had a chance to empty the first three yet, and all I want to do is go take a shower." Then I said bye to her and hung up the phone.

Well this was the start of the four day rant. You see I lived next to a very busy park with a 3/4 mile paved walking path around it. It was about 50 degrees out so there were a lot of people walking their dogs, playing at the playground with their kids, or jogging around the park.

The next thing I hear from my fiance was "why don't you tell everyone how stupid I am? why not call up your daughter? she doesn't like me anyways. I left our shower stuff in the apartment."

I said "I'm sorry honey I just got overwhelmed and she called me to ask for something and asked me why I sounded annoyed so I blurted it out."

Then comes the same venting from him that I heard for four days. "You think I am an idiot and that I don't know what I am doing. I thought we were moving all of our stuff out of the apartment and into the travel trailer. We only have a week to get everything moved out and I don't want to wait until the last minute to do everything. I am 53 years old and no one has ever helped me move, I know what I am doing."

I again said "I'm sorry, I blurted out my frustration so that everyone could hear. What is it that you want me to do?"

His answer: "I want you to call up your daughter and tell her that I am not an idiot and go tell everyone in the park that heard you."

I said, "she is going to call me back in a little bit and I will be sure to tell her when you can hear me that you left all the shower stuff down in the apartment but I am not going to tell everyone in the park. Besides, the people that heard it are probably gone by now anyways"

His response, "I don't care, I want you to go out in the park and tell everyone anyway."

My response, "No I am not going to do that, now I am going to go take a shower and then bring more stuff up to the trailer."

For the rest of the day I went through my clothes and transferred the ones that I was keeping into the trailer. I tried to talk to my fiance but I could tell he was still upset at me and was avoiding me.

He was in the trailer most of the day watching movies, chain smoking cigs and drinking rum & iced tea.

This continued for 3 more days with intermittent bouts of screaming.

I will post later what I did, but here is my question: What would you do if someone wouldn't let something go and screamed at you for four days?