September 2015, 3 months after starting there as a temp, the company brought me on full time. 12-hour shifts 3-4 days a week. I'm (relatively) happy to say I've been there ever since, and in that almost 2 years my pay has increased by $3.75/hr, which is **** awesome.
November 2015, I proposed to my girlfriend, she said "yes" (duh).
October 28th, 2016 we got married. [USER=31242]@March[/USER] was my best man, and gave the greatest speech ever (even though the speech I gave at his wedding was terrible and still haunts me to this day).
PHOTOOOOOOS!!!!
In these past 2 years I've made new friends at this job, and I've met a lot of new people, which is really great because they are the only people I know out here. As you may or may not know, I moved in with my girlfriend and her parents to get a job out here (about 1 hour away from home), so they were the only 3 people I really knew. It's really great having friends I and chat and hangout with that don't want to jut smoke pot all day. Well... some do, but I don't hangout with them. It's even better knowing that it's a group of people that BOTH my wife and I can have a good time with. Even if it's just going to Buffalo Wild Wings and being loud.
I started as a machine operator, which is boring as hell. Literally just standing in the same spot for 12 hours (aside from breaks and lunches) doing the exact same thing over and over and over again. Plus, if you get really good at a machine, they keep you there forever. I was lucky enough to work at a machine with 2, sometimes 3 others, and we could all talk and pass the day by making fun of each other, or debating whether or not Superman could beat Goku in a fight. A month or two before the wedding an opportunity came for me to "move up" the ladder. Two position openings were posted in the break room for a "Material Handler" (same shift), which are the guys that bring the parts to the machine (pretty self explanatory, but you know). I was the first name on the list, my machine-mate was 2nd. Less than a week later we were BOTH being trained for these positions. The 3rd machine-mate got mad because he wanted to be a quality inspector, but the job never opened up, so he got mad when he found out about us, and quit. Because of this new position my days fly by, and sure it can be tough to keep machines up and running some of the time, but I'd still rather do this than be an operator.
Some of you know our living situation before (and after, really) getting married was not at all ideal. Before the wedding, I was sleeping in her bed on the nights I worked the next day, and she on the couch. When I didn't work the next day, I was on the couch, she in the bed. For literally over 2 years it was this way. Mind you, this is a 3 story house. The bottom floor being occupied by her grandpa. There were multiple beds on the 3rd floor in 2 different rooms, but her mom didn't trust us to not "sneak around" in the middle of the night, because she was on the 2nd floor. Some times we weren't even allowed out of their sight together. After the wedding, we were able to sleep in the same bed, but this time the issue was there is no door between our bed and the family room. You come in the door to the family room, go up the stairs to the left, and it's all open. Borderline NO privacy.
December 2017 her Grandpa decided to move down to Texas permanently with his son, he has a trailer on his property. With this decision also came the decision to let us take over the first floor. Total privacy. Then came the long task of packing up and cleaning out all of his stuff, painting, and moving in. I'll save you the details, but we finally got fully moved in (and his stuff out) about half-way through April.
Those of you that are friends with me on Facebook know that February 2017 was not kind to me.
February 15th my wife got up to work, and a was woken up in the process. After she left I received this from my sister:
The phone call I had with my dad is a phone call I will never forget as long as I live.
I called my wife to come back and we raced down to my mom & dad's house. I don't know how I held it together enough to make the drive. It hasn't truly sunk in. I haven't even talked about it with anyone outside of my wife and [USER=31242]@March[/USER].
Grandma was extremely independent. They said she woke up in the middle of the night with pain in her stomach, called 9-1-1, and was dressed and ready to go, medicines included, when they got there. About an hour after she arrived at the hospital it got bad. They put her under, put her on life support, and at about 6:45am she passed. The rest of the day no one really knew what to do with themselves. Everyone was just in shock.
The next couple weeks involved cleaning out her house to get it ready to sell. Everyone in the family got the opportunity to come claim whatever they wanted. For my wife and I, that included the dining room table & chairs, a hutch, a few kitchen items, and some pictures. My parents took her couch and chair, leaving us to take their couch.
The day of, and every day since then, it's been a fight for me. Not to keep it together, but to let loose. I've been brought up my whole life that "boys are tough and don't show their emotions", basically "boys don't cry". So it's been really tough for me to really express how I feel with this loss. My best-work-friend told me "it'll happen one day. It'll happen at the stupidest time for the stupidest reason, but it'll happen." And he was right. It did happen. This past Sunday, April 7th, my 2 sisters and I went to my parents place for a cookout. It was then that my dad delivered to us our "share of the inheritance". I can't say whether it was shock, or knowing that it was grandma's parting gift, but the tears fell. I fell apart, and the pressure was gone. The pressure from holding everything back, trying to be strong, just trying to keep it together.
Well... this was WAY longer than I originally intended... by a LOT. I thought this would be a quick 10 minute post, but I just noticed I've been working on this for 1hr 22min. I'll give your eyes a rest now.
