Long time gone

My mom gets on to me all the time about not posting to my blog. She's right. It's been almost 8 months since I've posted. Much of the reason is because I've been posting in the trucker's forum about our trials and tribulations with Alan's truck driving job. He hates driving a truck and he especially despises working for Covenant. Unfortunately, it's a job which is more that a lot of people can say they have and until he's been working for them for a year, which comes up next month, he can't get with any other company.

Since my last post I've gone from Birmingham (where sales were dismal) to Huntsville (where sales were a lot better) and I've been in Raleigh, North Carolina now since May. I've done pretty well here so far and the past two weeks have been my highest earning weeks in the year and a half working with Air Photo. So that's a good thing. It means that Alan and I are starting to catch up financially after several set-backs.

Since the beginning of the year, I've taken two weeks off to take Mom to Florida to recover from extensive chemo and radiation therapy for the cancer on her neck. It was nice to get away from everything for a little while and Tammie flew down to join us. It was the first time just the three of us had been together since as long as I can remember.

Then I took another week off in June to stay with Mom while she recovered from surgery where they removed many of the lymph nodes in her neck. She's doing better and slowing getting her strength back. Soon she'll start another round of chemo to battle cancer on another area of her body. I don't know how she does it but my mom has always been a strong person. I've been trying to convince her to come stay with me in NC as Duke Medicine is one of the top rated cancer centers in the country but it is very difficult for her to leave the doctors she has come to trust which is understandable. I just wish circumstances were different so I could be with her.

Since January I have been taking classes to become a medical transcriptionist. It is normally two-years' worth of instruction but since it is self-paced, I have been getting through the coursework fairly quickly. I am on my next-to-last course (pharmacology) having already taken medical terminology, laboratory and diagnostics, human diseases, and anatomy and physiology. I have one more course, Medical Transcription Technology, to go before I start the three phases of actual transcription - beginning, intermediate and advanced. During that part I also take a couple more courses in grammar and punctuation and also the medicolegal aspects of the medical record. Also somewhere in there I do an internship which will give me experience needed to get a job with a transcription company.

Shane and Catherine are now in Petersburg, VA until December while Shane is going to command school. Cat is pregnant with their second baby. It's a girl and Sarah Elizabeth is due in September. So far so good with the pregnancy with the exception that Cat's sugar was to high during her last checkup so they will have to run a test to check her for prenatal diabetes.

And that's all my news for now.

Not a good day

I hate sales on so many levels. I hate that my income is dependent on other people. I hate knocking on peoples' doors and dealing with their barking, growling, jumping dogs. I hate putting megamiles on my truck (which just went over 36K miles and is now officially out of warranty). And I hate assholes. Today I met the meanest person yet in all my nine months of working for Air Photo.

Yesterday I went to a house. Nice enough house. Nothing spectacular. The usual McMansion. The wife answered the door. Real nice lady. Thought the picture cost too much but liked it. Wouldn't make a decision without her husband seeing it. So she told me that I could catch him home when I see the horse trailer in the driveway.

So today I drive past and there's the horse trailer in the driveway just like she said. So I go up to the door....ring the bell....no answer....knock.....no answer. So I give up. I go back to the car and just as I'm about to leave a man pulls into the driveway. I step out of my truck (which is parked in the street) and ask him if he is the homeowner. No, he says, but he's sure that someone is home. So he tells me to follow him to the door and he doesn't get anyone either. Nice enough guy. We chitchat. He admires the picture. He makes a quick phone call and a minute later the man's son comes around the side of the house. I show him the picture and both men agree that it's very nice.

So far so good.

The son takes the picture to the back door of the house to show it to his dad (the real homeowner) and I wait outside next to the garage.

After about a minute or two I hear a THWACK and I turn around to see a man striding toward me with a very menacing look on his face. As I start to walk toward him, he starts yelling at me telling me to get out, take my picture with me and never come back. He accuses me of trying to rip him off because he can get the same thing off Google Earth (--not even close--) and he wanted to know why I was there when his wife told me to leave (--a lie--). I started to tell him that his wife had told me to come back but he wouldn't let me finish. He kept telling me to get the hell away from his house so I told him as nicely as I could that I couldn't leave without the picture. He gestured to my truck and that's when I figured out that the thwack that I'd heard was him slamming the picture on the roof of my truck. As I walked back to my truck, he kept telling me to get the hell out and to never come back again (--like it was my mission in life--).

Amazingly enough, the curtain rods were still holding the picture together. As hard as he'd slammed it on the roof, I'm surprised they didn't come flying out letting the whole thing fall apart. The frame didn't appear to be damaged so that was good. It didn't seem to have hurt my truck either since he'd slammed it onto the glass of the moon roof.

Well, that was pretty frightening and it shook me up pretty badly. But I managed to maintain my composure and calmly sat in front of his house until I was done with my paperwork and done framing up the next picture. THEN I drove off.

This man beats the one in Texas (who cursed me out at his door) in the hostility department.

Alan said I should go online and put this man's address on every thing that will generate junk mail so his mailbox gets stuffed with it every day. David took it one step further and said I should go to a porn site and sign him up to receive gay sex video catalogs.

That cheered me up a little.