General Updates...

Just the quick catch up here...

Physical therapy is going along. I think I'm going to send my doctor a message next week and see if he wants to do a follow up MRI or anything like that to see if the procedure actually did what he was hoping it would do. It's hard for me to tell if it's any better or not since it's still tender to poke at and it's sore at times from activity or inactivity as the case may be.

I know it takes a long time to heal from these sorts of things, and I take a long time to heal in general now, but if there is a way to see if it actually worked I think that would be great. I still have a month of PT to go so we will see if there is a drastic change before the end or not.

As far as Intel goes (and again, any opinions here are mine and mine alone) we still don't know anything. Because they aren't really telling us anything. Which is a terrible way to handle business in my opinion. I think they are waiting to see who self selects to leave because of the return to work mandate. They are insisting on people being back in the office four days a week. It's silly. There are studies out that show people are actually more productive with a flex schedule.

I think all of the return to work stuff shows that upper management doesn't trust the people that work for them. They assume that everyone is out there trying to scam them out of time. To get paid to slack off. They couch it around saying things like they want organic meetings to happen in the office space, water cooler ideas. Well, it's a multinational company and a lot of time the people on your team work all over the world so those water cooler chats are pretty hard to come by. That and they've taken all the water coolers away to save money but...what do I know?

So, yeah, we have no idea what this means for Brent's job just yet.

As far as moving to New Mexico I had been leaning hard to convincing myself that yes, it was a good idea. Then I started having nightmares about being in burning buildings and not being able to find Katie to get her out safely. Or nightmares about being in a mall and having her disappear and not being able to find her. So clearly my subconscious was like, are you high? You think you are going to be able to comfortably leave her in Portland and move to New Mexico in these times? So I was like, yeah, I know financially it's a good move for us, but emotionally I don't think so. And the next night I had a nightmare about Brent dying. So...yeah.

I'm just running on a hamster wheel on that one about which is the right call. I did mention the dying dream to Brent and he was like...eh...everybody dies. But I'm pretty sure he'd prefer us moving to New Mexico so the bills didn't kill him sooner rather than later.

And that's part of the challenge. There isn't a right answer for me on this one and he's not going to force me to go. I feel like staying is the right thing right now. Being close enough to Katie that if something happens, or if things go even more to shit, I can at least be there for her is important. But also right now the financial markets are crashing, Intel is like maybe you have a job, maybe you don't, so moving its the right answer to lighten Brent's load.

What I really need to do is around 17-18 years ago I should have made a few different decisions. But it's a little too late for that.

And of course, I would have arguments on why being freed up timewise during Katie's last few years of high school was actually a great gift and would I really want to give that up? So there's even a hamster wheel for that.

So that's the update. I'm healing, but who knows how completely. I'm deciding and re deciding what to do about moving every day. I'm just spinning in a circle...loading...loading...loading...

It's going great.