New Luck In A New Year?

So As the Chinese New Year nears for some of you and is already upon the others, I rejoin the ranks of the blogging. I'm hoping that this new year of my ancestral heritage brings about a complete reversal of fortunes brought in with the new year of my adopted heritage. Let's think of it as a do over, the release of version 2.0 to make us forget that V1 ever happened.

As some of you may have or may not have noticed, I've been absent from this and all of your pages for some time. In the past, I've just been plum lazy or have been on trips where I've met up with some of you, and this time, I dearly wish that it could have been for one of those reasons... There's been bad luck and then there's been the type of shit show that's been my life for the last month. If it weren't for a trip to NY to visit with Eve and S'Mat I think I may have punched a ticket to be Britney's suitemate in Beverly Hills' Loonie Lodge.

This is by no means a sympathy plea, more so a tainted blood letting... It started about a month ago with a very nasty rumor going around my work place that I was one of the people that had for lack of better terms been falsely submitting statistics to boost my performance numbers. Now I know I had done nothing wrong, but it sucked having people from different shifts talking behind my back and hearing all the crazy versions of the stories being circulated when people were respectful enough to talk to me face to face about it. It was always fun for me to go into work, but now I was beginning to dread it. That episode came to a head when one of the top bosses came in and addressed my unit and said jobs were on the line if the investigation into the matter turned anything up... Great. A big scare tactic to motivate the troops...

That had been nagging me for a while so a road trip to New York seemed to be the perfect solution. It was fantastic and I'll write about it later. Upon my return, it got worse, much worse. The very first day of the new work week saw an innocent man shot and killed by rival gun-toting ass clowns who fired at each other with no regard for the lives around them, including that of their victim, Mr. Mao. I was the first to arrive on scene and had the very sad experience of having him take his last breath in my hands. Let me just say that it isn't anything like what you see on T.V. or film. There were also a pile of things that went wrong afterwards that drew a lot of criticism for those of us that were involved... It was the second innocent murder victim in less than a week for the city and this one stung. Mr. Mao was stacking oranges at a fruit stand and was working that evening as a favor to his boss as he had quit his post a few days previous...

So after a 17 hour work day and a short sleep, I was not exactly in the mood or frame of mind to get back to the job. I guess fate was reading my mind and took care of that for me. Let this be a lesson to you all to never help your mothers... My mother had returned home with bags of salt for the water treatment system in the house. The filter is in the furnace room of the house and as I brought one of the bags down, I noticed that it had sprung a leak at the bottom. I decided that it would be best to hoist it up to the opening of the system and just let the salt out from the cut in the bag. I hoisted it up but I didn't notice the pane of broken stained glass leaning to the immediate side of the system. I noticed it as I let the bag down. I think my exact words were, "OOOH, wow, big cut, big cut. That's no good!!!". A little bit of a bloody mess here, a trip to the hospital and three stitches there and voila, a day off work. Just what I did and didn't need to deal with the previous day's events. Just when that day couldn't get worse, my mother dropped my camera and thankfully only managed to break a lens filter. Though not the actual lens, it's now $60 I don't have.

The next few days saw some of the fall out from the homicide still sifting through the air, choking a few collars tight and fraying collective nerves altogether. As that settled we were all devastated with the news that one of our workmates had taken his own life over the weekend. There is never a good time to receive news like that, but this really stung. He was always such a pleasant person and you could always count on him to have a smile on his face and to try and put one on yours. "Hi handsome" was the trademark greeting and it's not easy turning corners in the building and not hearing that anymore. The viewing and funeral came at the end of the week and that was not an easy time either. The support in numbers that showed up for the funeral speaks to the impression he made but also to the true sense of family that comes in my line of work.

I'd love to say that was the end of it, but alas... We've recently been made to wear name tags on our clothing to make us more accessible and approachable or something like that... One night before our meeting, my partner and I switched our tags, but that move went un-noticed and we failed to get the laugh we'd set out for. We forgot about it and went about the night. At the end of the shift, another supervisor at the station noticed and got right upset about it all and threw a tizzy. He gave us shit and said he was doing us a favor by addressing the matter. So much of a favor that he had us write letters to the top boss explaining our actions... Seriously of all the things to get mad at... Having that fresh on my plate, I then proceeded to go home just to get into an accident 8 houses away from my front door... My beautiful baby isn't so beautiful right now, but she must have movie star blood in her because a little cosmetic work and she'll be back at it in short order.

To wrap it all off, a close relative on my father's side succumbed to his batter with cancer this past week and we had the funeral for him yesterday. It's never easy even with the knowledge of his illness in our back pockets going into it. So that in a conch shell has been the state of affairs that constitute my life for the past few weeks.

Now I know a lot of people in my position would have taken a dive off a spring board into an empty pool by now, but somehow I'm still plodding ahead with my head up. I don't why or how I've managed to keep at it, but I'm thankful that I have. I smiled today and I actually stopped to enjoy the moment. I was walking along in a near blinding snow storm on my way to my grandparents when it happened. I was listening to "Welcome To The Black Parade" while the wall of white enveloped me. I stopped and just let it all hit me. The song changed to a Metallica cover of "Whiskey In The Jar" and it might as well have been "Ride The Lightning" as I was stunned by a wave of blue. I thought it was a powerful camera flash, but the accompanying clap of thunder sounded otherwise... A winter thunder snow storm. I loves me a good snow fall and thunder storms are funtastic in general so having both at once was cause for a small celebration.

Hey, baby steps still get you to where you're going.