DMV woes

      It is a true wonder that there have been no reports of any shootings taking place at any state-run Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) (at least that I know of) .  I mean, come on, admit it, anyone who bothers to take a peek at my blog and read this particular post can admit to experiencing extreme disappointment, disgust, anger, bewilderment (insert your own descriptive word, if you like) whenever they've gone down to the DMV.
       Recently, I had the privilege to be hired by the school bus company in my neighborhood.  Of course, I use the term "hired" loosely.   I'm not exactly on their payroll or anything until I pass the Commercial Driver License permit test.  Simple, right?
       If only.  Here in my state, we have several DMV's, but only one issues Commercial Driver Licenses (CDL) for the entire state.  Only one puts people through all the rigamarole involved before even starting to train for the CDL road test.  Rigamarole stuff such as having to present tons of documents before forking over $ just to take the CDL permit test.
       This doesn't sound too bad so far, I know.  However, the location of this one particular DMV office is an hour's drive away from where I live and involves having to drive through a major city with all the lovely rush hour traffic to boot.  My first trip to this DMV was to merely pick up a Commercial Driver Manuel to study from for the permit test.  Not a manual is offered at any other DMV in the state.  That first drive there was not so bad because my husband came along for company and support.
        So, after two weeks of studying hard from this manual and taking a couple free classes through the bus company (classes that offered guidance and tips on how to pass the permit test), I was ready to go take the test.
        I went to the DMV twice this week to attempt the permit test.  The first time, I have all my paperwork ready.  I prayed against test anxiety, endured the city traffic, got there after an hour, waited in line at the DMV for at least 20 minutes and finally my number is called.
      One by one, I'm pulling out the documents as the lady asks for them.  I pull out my birth certificate.  "That's not the right birth certificate," the lady behind the glass says.  (Is that bullet proof glass, I wonder?)
      "What?"
       "We need the State and vital Birth Certificate.  That," she points at my birth certificate in hand, "is a hospital birth certificate."
       I feel my face warming. I want to say, "Are You KIDDING ME???"  But because I'm a proclaiming Christian, and because I know the lady is just doing her job and has no control over having to follow certain rules and regulations, I bite my tongue and then take a few deep breaths.  So I just say, "This is not good enough?"  IT'S A BIRTH CERTIFICATE, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!! explodes in my head.
        In her own courteous voice, she says, "No, I'm sorry."
       "After all the trouble," I mutter.  "I know I have another birth certificate, but I didn't think there was a difference."
        She must have seen the frustration all over my face (what DMV employee wouldn't, dealing with frustrated patrons all day?)  "So sorry.  Hopefully it's the right one."  She marks my paper as a CDL return in red so I won't have to wait in line again.  The line wasn't so bad, truthfully.  It's the hour's drive to and from home that's a pain in the neck.
       I go home.  Find the correct birth certificate.  I'm too tired to go back the same day, so I go back the following morning (this morning).
       Wouldn't you know it, I get the same courteous lady I had yesterday.  I give my best, honest smile and present her with all the proper paperwork.  Admittedly, this lady treats me well and not meanly like past dmv people, so I'm okay.  It's not her I want to kill.  It's not her I hate.  It's the evil DMV and all its bureaucracy.
        This time, I have the correct birth certificate along with all the other paperwork.  After she entered all the proper documentation in the system, the clincher happened.  She asked me to look in the eye exam machine.  No problem, I think.  It's like the eye exam you have to take for a regular driver license.  Wrong!  Apparently, the standards for obtaining a commercial driver license/permit are higher.  My eyesight did not pass.  Groan!
      I didn't bother to take anything out on the lady behind the (bullet proof?) glass since she has no control over the eye exam standards or over my latent nystagmus problem that I happened to be born with and have had all my life (the same problem that prevented me from joining the military).  She softened the blow by offering me an olive branch in the form of an eye card note to be filled out by my eye doctor.  If he gives me the okay with this card and sends it directly to the DMV, then maybe I'll be fit to drive that big ol' school bus I envisioned myself doing during my partial retirement.
      It could have been worse, this whole experience.  The DMV could have charged me the $100.00 or more just to take the permit test and then test my eyes, have me fail, and then turn me away and not reimburse me.   Maybe I shouldn't say that so loud.  I wouldn't want to give the DMV any more ideas to make things worse for the general populace and cause a 'going postal' or a shooting scenario that hasn't happened yet.

We had to bury a 14 year old boy today.  What I mean is, the funeral home I work for did calling hours and then a grave side service for a fourteen year old drowning victim.  To think that last week, this young man was alive and well, surrounded by a loving family.  Then today, he was lying in a box for all to see, prepped and ready for burial at the local cemetery.
     I haven't been a funeral attendant for long.  I can count the number of funerals I assisted on both hands.  Of all the funerals I've assisted so far, this was the one that caused me to sit up and take notice.  All the previous funerals I assisted at were for older people; people who were expected to pass on because of their age.  But this...
    I know very little about the young man.   I went into work this morning, not knowing who had passed, to be honest.  I recall waking up early this morning, feeling the need to pray and do Bible reading (something I should do every morning, anyway, but have been neglecting), and praying during my entire drive to work. 
    One of the first things I do when I walk into the funeral home is check the guest register to acquaint myself with who the deceased is and who are the surviving family members.  I read the name and see the age all on the first page.  For privacy reasons, I'll say I read the name John D.  this morning.  When I saw the age of 14, I had to do a double take.  14?  I thought that maybe there was a typo.  Did they mean 74?  One of my co-workers confirmed that it was not a typo.  I felt like the rug got pulled out from under me.  I didn't even know the boy and I felt this way.  Imagine how the mother and father must have felt.  Words escape me.
    I could tell my coworkers were affected by this one.  Usually, there's a lot of jesting and bantering going on between them.  They're like family, in a way, goofing off or teasing one another.  There was none of that kind of behavior this morning.  If anything, everyone seemed to be on edge and snapped at each other.  Normally, I'm not one to get on my trac-phone and text my family (since I'm not very good at texting with those phones), but I felt the need to get on and ask for my family to pray. 
    I'm reminded of the verse in Ecclesiastes 11:9  "You who are young, be happy while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment."   I don't claim to know the fate of this young man's soul.  All I know is that he went swimming a few days ago on a hot summer day, happy and care free, and ended up drowning instead of returning home that same day.  Then, today, he lay in a box for all his grieving family to see.  May the family feel the prayers and experience God's comfort.  I don't know how else to end this blog except to say that my heart aches for all of them. 

Marriage to a Bi-polar patient

For those of you actually reading this blog, thank you for taking the time to pay me a visit.
I started this blog for various reasons, mostly just to write some of my memoirs, reflect on life as I see it or, at times, to blow off steam.  A journal, if you please.
     This particular entry is to blow off steam.  Not necessarily to express anger or frustration (well, maybe frustration), but to allow readers a glimpse of my life and the challenges I have to deal with on occasion.
     I am married to a bi-polar patient.  Bi-polar is a mood disorder often requiring some kind of therapy, whether pharmaceutical or homeopathic.    When I met my husband, Mike (name changed for privacy reasons), he was stable at the time, having to rely on a natural salt substitute called lithium.   I had never heard of bi-polar disorder until he and I got serious, and the concept of him being unstable was entirely meaningless to me.  I simply lived the here and now, enjoying our engagement, not fore-seeing the life I would share with him as being anything beyond the wedded bliss we experienced in the beginning.
     Before anyone starts jumping to conclusions about what I will share, I can say that I have been fortunate to have a husband who never raised a hand toward me in any violent way.  Mike's gentle spirit is what attracted me to him to begin with and I can say with confidence that if the urge ever took over during one of his episodes, he would more likely hurt himself first before ever striking out at anybody else.
    We had ten years of marital bliss, popping out first a girl and then a boy in the process, and then, in November, 2005, devastating news of Mike's brother's suicide changed everything.
    You've heard the expression, "Life will throw you a curve ball."  Or how about, "Life will kick you in the teeth" ?  I nod my head enthusiastically at these statements.
      Joseph (Mike's brother) also suffered from bi-polar disorder.  His illness cost him his job, his marriage, his sanity and, unfortunately, his life.
     News of Joseph's death sent Mike into a tailspin.  The Lithium no longer worked sufficiently.  Mike's job, already a stressful experience before the loss of his brother, became too much to bear.  Sick leave turned into sick leave without pay.  Time off for a few days stretched into weeks and eventually months.  After seven months of leave without pay,  several doctor and hospital visits, filling out paperwork/red tape, Mike was forced into disability retirement.   To add insult to injury, the stress of losing his job (he couldn't see it as retirement) sent him back to the hospital on suicide watch.
      I watched my strong, confident husband diminish down to a puddle of anxiety and misery.  Those first several months he lost 50 pounds because he was too depressed to eat.  And somehow I had to explain in simple terms to my then six year old and eight year old what was happening to their father.
     And the visits to the behavioral health clinic (former name:  psych ward).  Those are another story.
     Like I said, I had no knowledge or experience with mental illness before I met Mike.  I may have been one of those people that would say, "he just doesn't trust the Lord enough," or, "he isn't praying enough," or, how about, "he should stop taking the lithium and not have to rely on any pills and just trust the Lord to heal him."    May God forgive me if I ever said such a thing to any family members of mental illness patients in the past.  Nothing gets me more riled up when well meaning Christians say such things to my husband or me.  They have no clue.  No clue!
     I've seen Mike off the meds.  The doctors had to take Mike off his meds while in the hospital to reset the proper dosages.  Mike is an overconfident, rambling, irrational, arrogant jackass when he's off the meds.  When he's not at that end of the spectrum, he's at the other and is a miserable, sad sack who will sleep for several days after experiencing the mania and no sleep for several days.  If he ever followed the advice of going off meds those well-meaning Christians told him, I'd kill him if he didn't kill himself first.  That's really just a joke, but, my main point is, we would still not be married today if he wasn't as responsible as he is about taking his proper medication.
     In a perfect world, my husband would be healed and we can resume our lives as a married couple and live in marital bliss.  But this isn't a perfect world and I have to count my blessings.  Mike isn't healed, but he is responsible and knows he has to take his medication.  We don't have a lot of money to enjoy world traveling in our retirement like I wanted, but we have enough from the Social Security Disability Insurance to manage a half way decent lifestyle for us and our kids who are now old enough to understand this illness that has affected their father.  Despite all that has happened to threaten our marriage, Mike and I are still the best of friends.  And, by the grace of God, the challenges of mental illness and its ramifications has brought us (Mike, the kids and I) all closer as a family.  My kids aren't perfect, but they haven't done any of the rebellious, horrible stuff that I hear or read about on the internet.  Not so far, anyway.    Our merciful Heavenly Father knows I could not have handled another difficult burden.







   

Time

Here I am again.  I actually managed to find my way back to my own blog site.  Three cheers for me!
Laugh all you want.  This is quite an achievement for me considering my lack of tech savviness.
     So, about the verse (Ecclesiastes 9:4 "...even a live dog is better off than a dead lion.") and why I chose it.    If you have never read the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, I suggest you read it.  Don't say you read or heard Chapter 3, (you know, the chapter on A Time For Everything).  That doesn't count.  One has to read the WHOLE book to really appreciate what Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived (aside from Jesus Christ) had to say.   Now, I'm not going to go into a sermon about this book, because I know there are plenty of preachers/teachers out there that have posted their take on it already.  Suffice it to say, I love the book because it reminds me that this life is very short and that, without God in my life, it really has no meaning.
     Yesterday I went to a funeral for a dear friend of mine whose wife had passed.  She was 57 years old, very close to my age.  The funeral was a seven hour drive from where I live.  This dear friend of mine is like a brother to me and we were close back about 20 years ago.  But then, I got married, moved away, had kids.  He got married, had kids...  We grew apart both physically and friendship-wise, it seemed.    I worried and fretted about going to pay my respects after losing touch for so many years.  Will he be angry and ask, "What are you doing here?" or, will he say, "I haven't heard from you hardly at all and now you show up?"   
     Turns out, he was amazed that my husband and I drove all that way to come see him. Amazed and appreciative.    He said later after the grave side service that we just pick up where we left off, as if no time had passed by.  "Time melts away the years," he said.
    My point is, I let time slip by without paying attention.  Twenty years went by in a blink of an eye.  And the same was true for my friend.  He didn't pay attention to the time either, so it seems, the way he acted when he saw me.  It was if no time had gone by.
      As I grow older, time is something I think about more often.  You've heard the expression, Redeem the time?  That's a recurring theme that gets in my face more and more frequently.  I see the clock of my own life ticking away, and often get that needling in the back of my mind, "what are you doing with your time?"   Thinking about the brief conversation I had with my friend at his wife's funeral, about time melting away the years, I get a small glimpse of God's perspective about time, how He can see the beginning and the end all at once.  They say time doesn't exist in Heaven.  If that's the case, all of history since Adam and Eve must seem very brief to God.  No big deal.  My own life...just a fraction of a second to Him.  And all the lives of everyone that follow me, they will be just a vapor in God's eyes.  "Everything to come is meaningless," Solomon said in chapter 11:8   And yet, he exhorts in Chapter 12 "Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, 'I find no pleasure in them'."  It's something I took to heart a long time ago (maybe more than 20 years ago), and it has paid off.  Trouble and hardship came into my life that would weaken me to my knees, forcing me to remember my Creator to help me through them all.  Without my Creator, I'm nothing but a 'live dog' doing better than a 'dead lion'.  Maybe someone reading this post feels this way, and nothing more.  Ecclesiastes 5:18-20 exhorts, "Then I realized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him--for this is his lot.  Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work--this is a gift of God.  He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart."
     So Live Dog sort of describes me.  Yeah, I'm better off than a dead lion...And yet, I'm much more than that, thanks to God.
     

Live Dog

"It's better to be a live dog than a dead lion."  Ecclesiastes 9:4

So, I'm just testing this blog out.  This is Live Dog (pronounced as it would be pronounced in the verse above), new kid on the block, trying to make my way in the world of writing.  Yeah, Nobody will ever read this, so I can say any darn thing I want and not worry about it, right?
     As you can probably already guess, I'm of the older generation who isn't very computer savvy.  Case in point:  I have been meaning to do a blog for at least three years now.  Last summer, when I thought I was ready to get started, I had to ask my kids, how do I do this?   They proceeded to explain to me that I had to first set up a google account.    "How the h-- do I do that?"  I asked.  They helped me with that.    Then summer events disrupted my concentration and I forgot how to even look up my google account.  The kids went back to school, I got busy with a ton of stuff.  Several months went by, and I finally pinned my son down and said, "so, how do I find my google account?"  He helped me with that.  Then, a few months later, (last weekend to be precise), I got back on and started to set up what I thought was a google account. Somehow, I ended up on some site by Weebly, saying, set your blog up for free here.  It was a little complicated, but I did it, messing around with pictures that were on it and everything.  Then, just today, a few days later, I went to get on the site, and some icon came up and said it was not set up right.  Such a shame, really, since it really looked good.  I think I ended up setting up some website instead of a blog.
Now I'm at the library, and decided, I'm going to use the blogspot address and go from there and, voila!, here I am.  I hope I didn't do anything wrong here, especially since I just spent ten minutes of my life typing up this stupid post that no one in his or her right mind will probably ever read!
I will have to come back later (in the hopes of not getting scolded by the computer that I didn't set this up right!) to write about my Ecclesiastes verse and my Title Live Dog.  Until then, cheers!