Hello to any new readers with my for the first time! I know this is really cheesy, but I am going to do something to the effect of an intro post since I know my userinfo is pretty vague and I have a few new readers. Maybe this will get the ball rolling so I can make good on my several promises to quit neglecting my journal...

My name is Laura-Kathleen Redman and I am currently 23 years old. I live in Ayden, North Carolina and I am an open book with very few secrets about myself. My husband's name is Jonathan and we have been married since June 20th, 2009 but together since October 31st, 2004. We don't have any children and don't know if we ever will or not. I met him through the ECU College Democrats.

I live in the country with my many pets. We have a tank full of fish, a bunny named Pandora, a hamster named Cowpoke, and 3 cats named Opie, Marvin, and Rosie. All of our cats are named after robots. Opie = O.P. = Optimus Prime. Marvin = Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Rosie = Rosie the robot maid from The Jetsons.

I work in retail for a successful grocery chain, Harris Teeter. Jonathan does too, although he has a degree in political science whereas I haven't finished school. I hang up price tags and maintain price accuracy for the store. Exciting, no? It's a great company, though.

There's a lot to be gained by reading through my archives. I blogged steadily through highschool and into and out of college but in the last year, I've not written as much. This might have to do with the fact that many of my LJ friends have moved on to other social networks. I, however, would never feel as comfortable blogging on Facebook as I do on LiveJournal. So, here I am and there you are.

If you have any questions about me at all, about anything, now is the time to ask. Like I said: I keep very few secrets and what secrets I do keep are all lurking in the archives, just waiting to be discovered. :)

Hello, LJ Friends! I was just randomly wondering who is really still out there reading, since my Friends page seems a little sparse in the entry department, lately. Anybody still at home?

Well, I'm back to my old layout. I decided to play around with the fonts this time and decided on Garamond -- does it show up for everyone else? Would you take a screenshot of how it looks on your computer for me? :) The one I was using had exceeded its bandwidth, yet the CSS was borked to where I couldn't save the image to my own host. I guess it's for the best -- the CSS was always a little wonky and my comment button was often down in the header of the entry below it. Never figured that one out.

It is a little weird re-adjusting to this, though. It's not that I still love my black and white strips as much as I did, so much as it was nice to see something different and this is the only one I have backed up and on standby.

Personally speaking, I'm feeling very "blah" lately. I think know I am clinically depressed but I cannot afford to see anyone to get on any sort of a therapy program, medical or otherwise. I just know I've been neglecting this journal for months because I cannot work up the energy to let it all out, or I feel overwhelmed even trying. I don't have anything I absolutely love to do anymore -- it's like I am joyless, save for temporary moments. Even Jon hasn't been able to pull me out of this one.

I am tired of using self-deprecating humor to mask the fact that I am so upset nearly all the time. Okay, yes, I will laugh about it. "Oh, I'm just being an emo kid, you know how it goes!" but I am seriously wrecked mentally and I don't know how to get back to normal. It may sound trite, but I don't even remember how "normal" feels. There have been many times in my life where I've had mood swings that go from one extreme to another -- but I have never felt so down for so damn long.

I've felt this way since the wedding. Even on my honeymoon. It's not Jon's fault. It's like I never unwound from all that wedding planning. I had a huge anxiety attack in August [or was it September?] that caused me to be dizzy for nearly 2 weeks -- the kicker being that I didn't realize I was having the anxiety attack. My body starting showing the physical symptoms long before I went into panic mode. I was put on a beta blocker which lowered my heart rate by 20 beats per minute. I am not currently on the beta blocker, but my heart rate remained low after I weaned myself off of it [Propranolol, if you are curious].

Things just blow right now. I miss my friends. I miss my happiness. I act silly at work but at home, I feel so drained. If my friends Susan & Ben weren't recently a larger part of my life, I think I'd lose it. Hanging out with them gives me something to look forward to. They are both a lot of fun and Susan lets me ramble on and on about what's in my brain and it honestly feels good just to get it all off my chest. I'm grateful to have a friend like that in my life once again, since it has been so long, but I am dreading the day they decide to finally get out of Greenville. They have two great kids, too. I'm babysitting for them this weekend. Who would've thought I would every babysit? But I don't mind, they're good kids and it's a lot of fun watching them interact. Between their kids, Allen & Joy's newborn, and Ännä's daughter, I think my stance on not wanting kids is gradually softening. Crazy, huh? Black is white. Up is down.

So, that's where things are right now. I'm done promising updates, because I know I suck about writing them. Figures I'd lose my passion after finally getting a permanent account this year. Grrr.

PS: I ♥ Serifs.

Poll #1473884 Location, Location, Location
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 224

What country do you live in, if not the United States?

What state do you live in?

What state do you live in?

What state do you live in?

What state do you live in?

Click here for pictures from my 23rd Birthday party.  :)  I went bowling and had a pirate ship cake!!!  It's worth the click!

I posted the pictures on Facebook but anyone should be able to view them.  Maybe I'll upload them to Photobucket later?  Who knows.  

23.

I feel old.

Things between August and now have been stressful.

Toward the end of August, Jon and I went to Charlotte for a few days. I hadn't been back for more than a day or two since I moved last May, so it was a little bizarre driving around all the places I called home for almost three years. It actually felt a little bit like we never left -- we segued into conversations with old friends and co-workers as if we had only been gone for a weekend. ...While we were there, we went to the new IKEA they built and all it did was make me lust after cheap-but-stylish furniture when I've got a home full of perfectly good furniture from Ashley that is still as comfy as the day we bought it, if a little bland. But MAN! The lighting, textiles and other home decoration sections are pretty bangin'. We bought a fleece blanket for like, $4! And three new vases for in our bedroom for a little over $10.

While I was in Charlotte, however, something bad happened that has yet to be explained. During my first few days there, I kept getting extremely lightheaded and dizzy, despite being fully hydrated and otherwise healthy. At first, it would only last for an hour or two before going away. When we got back to Ayden, it went from being occasional to being an all-day/all-night sort of thing. It felt like my head was shaking, as if someone replaced my neck with a Crest Spinbrush. My energy levels tanked, too. I eventually went to the doctor and they ran a battery of tests, including a urinalysis, a few blood tests and an EKG. They tested my blood for various vitamin deficiencies, anemia, a thyroid issue, and a lot of other things that'll make you dizzy. The idiot nurse practitioner treated me for vertigo, despite the fact that I told her it was a non-vertiginous lightheadedness. My position didn't affect it, nor did I have any ear aches or stuffiness, and the room didn't feel like it was spinning. I was supposed to get my results the next day, but there was a delay in getting my results back and I had to wait five days before hearing anything. My dizziness was getting worse, though, so they told me I needed to go to the E.R.

In the E.R., I had three people check on me. The first was Dr. Saad, who told me that there was no quick explanation for extreme lightheadedness as the only symptom in an otherwise healthy 22 year old. My motor skills were fine and I wasn't showing any obvious neurological issues. His boss seemed to think it was all stress and anxiety. I hadn't been any more stressed than normal. And my nurse kept pushing for me to get a CT Scan -- like I can afford that! In the end, I was prescribed a beta blocker [Propranolol], which lowered my average heart rate from 98 BPM to about 70 BPM and a few days after I started taking it, the dizziness went away. I have since weaned myself off the beta blocker, but the lightheadedness hasn't come back, so I'm hoping I stay un-dizzy. :) If the dizziness comes back out of the blue, I have to see a neurologist.

It's all rolled downhill from there, though. I am incredibly stressed and feeling a bit depressed lately. Why? Let me list some reasons:

1) Medical bills amounted to nearly $700 for the trip to the doctor, all the tests they ran, plus the referral to the E.R., and the cost of the prescriptions. Gee, you think I am stressed? Now I'll really be stressed! And fuck that nurse practitioner for telling me my results would get in one day and have them arrive five days later. Thanks to her, I have that E.R. bill.

2) I feel so fucking lonely around this place. All the other people my age are either still out partying and being single, or they are settled into careers or have started their families. I don't fit in any of those groups! I only know three couples in the entire county, and they are all from different social groups in my life, but Jon and I never get to hang out with them because Jon and I work completely opposite schedules. I want to meet new people but I can't seem to find them. I posted an ad on the LJ community for Greenville and the only response I got back was a kind reply from someone in the Unitarian church.

3) Brittany -- my bridesmaid, who also did flowers for the wedding -- apparently no longer wants anything to do with me over trivial, petty shit. I was her supervisor on the overnight shift at Harris Teeter and she apparently cannot divorce our working relationship from our friendship. My reasons for why I'd been the way I had for a month or two were all purely work related conflicts, whereas hers were all personal. I communicated with her about that my "work issues" with her had been, per her request. Instead of her communicating her reasons for feeling slighted, personally, she just gave me the silent treatment. So now, I am out yet another friend for ridiculous reasons. I have been told if she was my friend to begin with, she wouldn't put me in this position. But it still hurts. I'm so tired of highschool drama and between her and Karina, I am afraid to open up to anyone else around here because I always get screwed over emotionally in the end.

I guess I am just burnt out. Nothing in my life seems to be going in the direction I want it to go in, and I am financially not in the position to make any drastic changes. I feel trapped in my own mind. Yeah -- I want to have a career, maybe start a family in the distant future, but I'd really just be happy if I could meet some friends my own age and with some similar interests. I have nothing in common with anyone around here, it seems!

It's so lonely out here. I don't write in my LiveJournal very often anymore but that's usually because I am so bored, there's nothing going on.

I hate this stage of my life. I feel like I've got a failure to launch or something, and it really sucks.

June was a much happier month! :)

At the beginning of the month, Heather drove up from Charlotte to host a bridal shower and my mother's house. I want to say there were about thirteen of us there? We played the usual shower games and had a lot of fun -- my shower cake was awesome, too! I'll have to dig up a picture of it. It was great to see Heather again. We had only seen each other once in the year since I had left Charlotte, so her being my MOH allowed me to see her about four or five times that month! :)

The Karina's Dress thing worked out for the absolute best, too. See, Karina originally 'replaced' a bridesmaid -- my friend Sarra, from Charlotte -- who had to duck out early in the year because she was supposed to be in the United Arab Emirates the week of my wedding with her family. Sarra was the first person I had asked to be one of my bridesmaids when Jon popped the question, so I was pretty bummed when she originally dropped out but definitely understood why she had to do it. ...Fast forward to Karina dropping out the month before the wedding! Within a day, I had gotten in contact with Sarra because, by then, she knew for sure that she wouldn't be in the U.A.E. for the summer after all. That said, she was able to rejoin the bridal party. :) I was pretty stoked about that!!! My mother and I took Sarra's dress to Charlotte and she had it altered -- it was beautiful! I had a blast with everyone!

Things were a big blur from the beginning of the month to the day before the wedding.

Joy ordered my flowers the week before the wedding -- hot pink carnations, light pink mini carnations, dark pink spray roses, two-toned pink roses, and white daisies were EVERYWHERE. She lent me the watering cans from her wedding -- we both had something to the effect of a garden theme -- and a bunch of floral supplies. Brittany came over the Thursday night before our wedding and started putting together boutonnieres and corsages. We went back to my mom's house at 7 AM the next day to start working on centerpieces and bouquets.

City Hotel & Bistro was nice enough to let us have the ballroom for the entire day before the wedding so we put together all of our arrangements there [the bouquets were made early that morning at my mom's house] and to get the place decorated. We wrapped up decorating around 5:30, just in time for all the bridal party and all of the out-of-town family members to arrive for rehearsal. It was surreal. After the rehearsal, we had a giant cookout for everyone out at our house. It was a lot of fun.

The day of the wedding, I woke up to horrible cramps. Mother nature hates me, I swear. But the day went off without any issues! I remember walking in on my Uncle Don's arm -- he gave me away -- and the lights were dimmed in the room, the candles were lit up on all the tables. It literally took my breath away for a few seconds! It was so beautiful, I thought I was going to cry, but I held it together! Our ceremony was a bit more religious than we intended -- a lot more, actually -- but it was nice. The food was great at the reception, the cake was awesome, and we had a lot of fun the whole night.

We left for our honeymoon sometime Sunday afternoon and got into Williamsburg, VA sometime around eleven at night. It was great!

By the way: if it seems like I am skimming details for the wedding and honeymoon, I am. I've got an entry in mind that I'm going to write and smoosh into the archives for June. :)

As for July? It was completely and blessedly uneventful. I don't even remember anything notable happening during the entire month. Damn, I needed that.

So, that brings us to August. I feel sufficiently caught up on the major events in my life at the time. I can never get that time back to reflect on current events but, at the very least, I'll know what was going on at that time personally when I look back on things.

During the very beginning of May, my friend Karina and I had an epic falling out. Currently, I can count on both hands how many times we've spoken between now and then. I'm not going into the details of what happened and why, because I'm still not entirely sure what happened and she has never been willing to talk to me about why it happened. That, combined with the fact that what I have heard sounded asinine, in a nutshell, but that took a pretty large toll on my mood for the entire month.

She stepped down from being my back-up at work which saved me some pretty awkward Tuesday nights, considering we don't speak, but also caused me to have to train someone to do my job in a little over three weeks in order to be able to cover me for my honeymoon. Geez. So, two people stepped in to start training and one of them quit at H.T. before she was finished with training. The other, Brittany, is currently my back-up although that is up in the air due to the fact that she is supposed to replace our florist while she's on maternity leave.

Anyway -- Karina and I had started hanging out together somewhere around January or February [I remember I spent Valentines Day with her and Maegan, since Jon had work]. So in those four or five months, our friendship came together pretty quickly and one day, it just fizzled out as quickly as it began. I shouldn't say "fizzled," I should say "exploded." ...But it was a really bad situation for me because while she had all sorts of friends to fall back on, she was pretty much the first person I had allowed myself to get close to in Greenville because I'm pretty shy about actually hanging out with people. I tend to not trust easily, especially in Greenville, because a lot of the girls my age around here are backstabbing and have a one-track mind for partying. That said, it really hurt.

The first two weeks that we weren't speaking, I thought it was going to be something temporary. There was talk of "needing space" and "giving it time," and so I was hurting, but what could I do? Well, mid-May, I had to start putting together the final numbers for my wedding for my caterers, so I shot her a message asking if she was coming or not and she sent something back that was pretty snarky, so I basically sent her a "piss off, I'm through," and that's how it has been since then.

...Oh, I forgot to mention the kicker: she was supposed to be one of my bridesmaids. I wound up eating the cost of her dress because she dropped out of the wedding the day after the dresses arrived, almost exactly a month before the wedding. Fan-fucking-tastic, huh? I know it has been three months since we had our big fight but I still can't help but feeling a little pissed off when I think about how much I had emotionally invested in our friendship -- something I now realize was foolish -- and how easy it was for her to just push me out forever. I don't trust often but, when I do, I trust completely. I've felt pretty burnt ever since and I know I should just move along and stop caring, but I can't seem to actually do it. I'm 22 and married, and I work full time. It's not like I can go to a bar and meet a new group of friends.

I feel better getting this out but it still doesn't take the sting away.

So, May was pretty much one drama-fest after another.

Things kinda tapered off mid-May in time for Joy and Allen's wedding. Jon and I didn't get to see the ceremony because we were setting up for the reception, but the pictures were beautiful and we had a great time. For the reception, we sat with Brittany, another co-worker and his girlfriend, and our store manager. I don't know if I was just nervous from having to socialize with a lot of people I never see outside of work, or if I just wanted to unwind from the two crazy weeks preceding the wedding, but I drank a little too much Riesling [I've heard everything from a bottle and a half to three bottles of Funf, but I think it was a little over a bottle]. Okay, a lot too much Riesling. I still haven't found my earrings from that night and I suspect they are in a ditch somewhere, but it made for a funny story to tell when I had to face my manager at work the following Monday. We had a lot of fun. I really like spending time with Joy and Allen because Joy is young enough [early 30s] that I feel less alone amongst all the early-20-somethings I work with, and Allen is just a nice guy in general, funny too. ...Don't get me wrong, I am a early-20-something, too, but I don't identify with any of them!!! I guess to wrap this up -- Joy and Allen's wedding made me super-excited about my own wedding a month later. It also gave me some idea of what kind of things to expect and allowed me to nip some issues in the bud the day of and the day before my wedding.

I guess those are the only things that are prominent in my mind for the month of May. It was all drama with Karina and Joy and Allen's wedding, laced with my own wedding planning.

Whenever I've stopped writing for a long time, I always hem and haw about writing an update on my life. That's when I realize that it'd take a long fucking time. A lot has happened between May and Now. At least I think May is something of a dropping off point for my writing over the last three months. I'll try to keep it brief, but no promises. I'm going to write a month at a time, I guess.

Well, Hello World. I'm about to start experimenting with this journal.

I've been using LiveJournal since 2004, and I've had some variety of online journal since 2002. That's a long time. ...I've been locked down in Friends Only mode since sometime in 2006. I have found that, while this keeps unwanted eyes off some specific material, it also prevents me from really meeting a lot of new people on LiveJournal. Not to mention the fact that I have several friends who use other blogging services fairly regularly, and I'd like to keep a regular blog, but I don't want them to feel obligated to sign up for a service they don't want.

That said, in upcoming weeks I'll be going through my archived entries, one-by-one, to adjust my settings to a mixture of public and private. I'm tired of feeling like I'm in hiding. So I'll keep my Friends Only banner up people who wish to read my personal entries, but things are changing around these parts and I wanted to speak up about it while the mood is right.

Hello World, indeed. :)

It's funny how many times I scroll through my Friends list and think to myself, "GOD, this person hasn't updated in a month or two, I wonder if they still use LJ at all..."

Today, it occurred to me that I am that person.

I do read my F-List every day -- multiple times a day, in fact, since I am an obsessive-compulsive page refresher -- and I also read just about everything on it.

So, thank you, Friends for not cutting me when I don't update a month or two at a time, when I only stop to post vague sentences, or when I am neglectful with my commenting. [Fact: I'm always neglectful with commenting.]

I want to update, I just don't know where to start. It's been a crazy six months. Crazy enough that I've hardly documented any of it, which is a far cry from the Me of Yesteryear who all but documented everything I ate each day, for cryin' out loud. So, instead of writing this big-ass update which nobody will read, I might attempt to start writing little chunks daily like I used to. I miss writing in my journal a lot and while it's true, nobody has been stopping me, I feel like writing is all I've got that can't be taken away from me. You know, barring some freak accident in which I become like that guy who can only communicate by blinking.

I've got most of my professional wedding pictures up on Facebook, if anyone is interested.

My name up there is Laura-Kathleen Redman. :)

I feel self conscious about some of these because I had started my period that day, so my face is very bloated, like to the point where I'm having my bridal portraits done in another two weeks because we don't care for any of the closeups. Otherwise, I really like them!

I have a feeling metaquotes is about to start looking the way it did the week Jay Pee Squared and Terri Shiavo died... If we start getting a million Metas about Farrah Fawcett/Michael Jackson/LULZWARZ, I'm gonna leave that community for good because people get cruel.

So, I'm officially Mrs. Redman as of Saturday. :)

Jon and I got to the hotel around midnight last night, but not before we literally went in a huge circle around the general area Williamsburg is in thanks to my husband's fine directional skills.

Anyway -- we're armed with about $700 and a brand spankin' new Nikon. Your regularly scheduled laura_kathleen will return in a week!



The cake! :)

Still alive -- just wedding planning. :) I'll be back after my honeymoon for sure.

dbaxdevilsfan and lord_jim, any idea if you guys can make it to the wedding or not? :)

Out of the 19.28 GB of music currently on my computer, I have exactly 7.73 GB of "must have on here!" songs, which is perfect for putting on my 8GB iPod Touch. :) That leaves the iPod Mini [Marvin of the East Siiiiiide] and the iPod Shuffle free for whatever the hell I want, because I've got all my must haves on me with my iPod Touch.

For some reason, this makes me really happy!

It's certainly a good thing that I decided to take my vacation this week, because I've managed to get sick and start my period all on the same day. I'd rather be miserable in bed than miserable at work, you know? ...I suppose I'm not really unhappy about it either, though, because at least I'm halfway into a solid week off that I desperately needed.

I figure I'm not as sick as my co-workers have been -- mine's all nasal -- and my cramps will only last today and maybe part of tomorrow, and then I should be able to fully enjoy the rest of my time. I hope it passes really slowly. If I had the financial ability, I'd drop down to part time in a heartbeat and start enjoying my life again. It's not that I hate my job, I am just at a position in my life where I am having an extremely difficult job juggling it with everything else going on.

I looked up some more information on Elementary Education today. I don't know when I'll be able to return to school at this point in time, and I hardly qualify for financial aid as my credit score has turned to rubbish, but I know that I want to go back for education. One day. As it stands, ECU returned my uncashed check from my application I sent in last Spring today along with a note about how they had misplaced my application and they apologize. Dicks. I could have been back by now, but now it is really a bleak prospect for the immediate future.

Today, I moved Cowpoke [my dwarf hamster] into Madison's [my hedgehog, RIP] aquarium. Can you say "happiest hamster in the whole wide world?" I gave him his small purple igloo filled with about ten sheets of toilet paper and Madison's giant igloo in which he can make a super, ginormous nest. Jon's gone to Sweet Pets to get him a new, standalone Silent Spinner. Too cute.

Spring has arrived for Eastern NC and it's really quite pretty. I always forget how pretty it is in the Springtime, honestly. I've been planting things like crazy this month -- phlox around the mailbox, some pretty flower seeds in our giant planter, gerber daisies along the stairway and I'm hoping to find more things I like that I can add to the landscape. In the front, on our corner, we also planted two Bradford Pear trees, one Yoshino Cherry Blossom and an October Glory Maple trees. We've started removing the AWFUL planter beds that took up our entire backyard thanks to the previous homeowner, too.

Here's a diagram for you of the backyard to the deck edge, not including any side yard or anything:

( CLICKY! )

I don't even know what's growing in the boxes that line the fence, but they are like two feet deep! The mint in the back right box smelled good, but I can plant a pot full of mint and have more than I'll ever need or use. I didn't need an entire bed full of it. It's not even coming back this year, either. ...So the two front boxes are already gone, with two more to go plus the ones along the fence. I'll get my yard back!!!

Oh, and there's a Jasmine tree in the back left corner. It's gotta go, though. :( It's pretty but unless we can transplant it, it's on the chopping block because [a] it's a wasp habitat and [b] it's damaging the fence.

I'm all for gardening but, really, but these things are gonna take over my yard if I don't get rid of them before they bloom for the year. You can hardly walk back there for all the goddamn grass that grows tall between the unmowable parts, and a weed whacker will only do but so much. So, the planter beds are history. I wouldn't mind one of them in my side yard or something where I could start a small veggie garden, but I need some space to live in out there. It's bad enough that the deck takes up half of the usable space, but at least it has a screen room attached to it.

YAY! JON AND I GET A HONEYMOON AFTER ALL!!! :D

It's nothing big -- we are going to stay in Williamsburg, VA for a week and we have a bounce pass for Busch Gardens, Water Country USA and Colonial Williamsburg. But there's SO MUCH to do around Williamsburg! I'm all excited! :)

I ♥ Profit Sharing Checks.

ETA: We're not honeymoon snobs! If anyone can score tickets to Busch Gardens on one of the days we're in Williamsburg, we'd be happy to meet up! Friends always make a celebration better! Just let us know what days you had in mind and we'll make sure we don't have BG meetups scheduled for every day of the week. :) Gotta have some time to get it on, y'know.

"My Immortal," by Evanescence, is playing on our local pop station. I turned it off mid-way.

I know it's been about six years since I experienced the situations I connect with that song, and that band, but it somehow still leaves me a little bit gutted on the inside. ...Especially when I remember the people I connected it with, particularly someone who damaged me in a more permanent way. Fuck Spring/Fall of 2003 and all the time in between. It still hurts.

So, how weird is it that "Hello" should be the next song that came on my iTunes?

I had to write an autobiography as Associate of the Month, to go on the bulletin board. Here's what I wrote:

My name is Laura-Kathleen Mancil and I am 22 years old, as of October 9th. I have lived in California, Virginia, and North Carolina, but I think my life was most influenced by my time in Virginia since I was there from preschool all the way through 7th grade -- just long enough to become the giant nerd that I am today! :) I’m okay with being a nerd, too, because a lot of them wind up being rich, so I hope maybe that’ll work in my favor one day.

I’ve enjoyed reading and writing my whole life – especially writing; I’ve kept a blog since 2002 and thought I wanted to be a journalist at one point in time. I’ve been told that I am incredibly sarcastic, and I often need a crowbar to get my foot out of my mouth because of it, but I try to work it to my advantage. Some say I’ve got a big heart -- albeit often surrounded by the words “bleeding” and “liberal” – and I like to be able to help people, even if it’s just to get a smile on a rough day. I love making people laugh – preferably with me, not at me. …I’m not always successful, and my jokes can be pretty corny, but I’ll still try.

I started attending ECU in 2004 as an elementary education major. I left ECU in 2006 to take the proverbial “semester off,” but quickly realized that I didn’t want to throw away money while trying to figure out something I could really sink my teeth into, and that led me to Harris Teeter in Charlotte. I don’t regret either of those decisions, either. I started out on the Front End, but I eventually migrated over to Produce and Fresh Foods before moving back to Greenville as a cashier. I love working with people and I’m a pretty patient person, so I actually enjoyed it. Last summer, I moved into Scanning and I’ve been working with Jackie ever since. She’s awesome! And Karina, too! I mean, lots of you guys are pretty rockin’ as well, but I would be completely lost in my job without them so they have to get a shout out! I love my job and I’m glad I work with a great team of people.

My arch enemy is the common green shopping cart.

Most recently in my life, I’ve been planning my wedding and preparing myself to be Mrs. Jonathan Redman. Crazy, I know, but someone has to do it. (Just kidding, Jon – I love you!) We’ve been together for nearly five years and we haven’t killed each other yet, so I think we make a good pair. We bought our first house in Ayden last May, and we live out in the country with our two cats, Opie and Marvin. [NERD ALERT: Opie = O.P. = Optimus Prime. Yes, we have a cat named after a Transformer!] Homeownership has its ups and downs, but it’s been a great year for us so far and I feel blessed to have such a great place at my age.

Well, this thing has gotten long and I need to wrap it up. I did warn you about my nerdiness and my love of writing, so if you’ve read the whole thing, thanks! :) And, ummmm, in my reign as Associate of the Month, I pledge to work on the pressing issues of world peace and hunger. …Wait, no? Wrong award? I don’t get a tiara after all? Dang!

Seriously, though, thank you. It means a lot to me to get this!

I discovered that taking five pills for pain affects me more than I care to admit...


500 mg Naprosyn
+ 1000 mg Extra Strength Tylenol
+ 100 mg Ultram
__________________________________
1600 mg SLEEPINESS, OMG SHIT


This does not bode well for my night shift as I feel the way I feel when I am moderately drunk except I am fully cognizant of my actions and I can still type okay.