There goes that year

It's been a while since i have been around these parts.  Probably around a year or so, save for a slew of hockey videos that i posted which no one cares about.  For the record, i never posted all of the last Penguins season, so I take full responsibilityfor last season's failure, if you call a playoff appearance and loss to the subsequent Stanley Cup champions as a failure.  I imagine it is a Pittsburgh  thing to call a playoff appearance a failure, especially when there are places likeNuffalo, Calgary, Florida, etc. who would be happy to make the playoffs regularly.

That being said, the Penguins success or lack thereof is not a reason for me to enter a period of lacking a desire to blog, rather it is a culmination of events that happened this time last year that has me in this relative funk.  First and foremost would be my mother passing away, which has reached the one year anniversary now.  Notsure such pccasions deserve an anniversary, but my mom was definitely one of the inspirations behind this page, evn though she never read it, or evn knew of it's existence.  Many of the entries would be family stories or ideas that I ran by her in order to fleshout how I wanted to write about them.  It would be so easy to pick up the phone and just talk to heronce something silly happened.   I still find myself reaching for the phone on those occasions, only to put it  back down.

Not that my mom was just my sounding board, far from it actually.  While my father and I have always maintained a strained relationship, it was my mom who would step into the void, trying to fulfill both roles, trying to keep a roof over our heads.  So there were many times when she would be working two jobs and I think that is where I got my own work ethic from.  There were plenty of times where we would have to choose between groceries or bills, but somehow she always made it work.  I rarely wanted for anything and usually went to bd with my belly full and rather quite content.

The second thing that happened was the owners at my last job opted to sell the business.  I view it partially as a personal failure, if i would have been able to make the business work theway it had in the past, maybe they would have been content to keep it and continue to run it.  I don't blame myself fully, because being a manager I did see some writing on the wall as it were.  Cuts were made to staff and management until I was basically the only one doing most everything,  Somehow we managed to run that dynamic for better than a year before not even that could maintain the status quo.  While i was assured tye new owners agreed to keepme on after the sale, i knew that ouldnotbe the case.  Any new owner would be skeptical with soneone theydon't know handling any portion of their finances.  And what ithpught came to pass.  Mind you itdidn't take long for me to find another job after I was let go, within two weeks of my termination I had two new jobs (which I still have btw) and while I don't care for either job all that much, I attribute it to that mom-like work ethic that icontinue to grind away.

The third thing was theending of a brief relationship I was involved in.  It was with a former coworker from the above mentioned job, and while it only lasted for like three months, i had bought into her fora far greater time than that.  Even when she left where we worked, I had went out of my way to get her Christmas Presents and a Halloween basket with candy for her son, it is something my mom had done in the past for other people (there she is rubbing off on me again), and I just wanted to make sure she and her son had something at the holidays.  When this finally went from me pining after her to any sort of reciprication on her part would be last summer.  And it started off well enough, until i realized that my presence was more as an enabler for her drug habit, than any sort of partnership.  I held on as long as i could hoping things might change, though the user has to want that change for it to happenand she was content where she was in life,  my tipping point, even after a long amount of fighting over the issue, came when my mom had her stroke, which led to her subsequent death, and i asked her to be there for emotional support.  The fact I asked for any support at all, should tell those who know me just what my frame of mind was at that point.  Instead I was rejected, she wanted to go party withher friends, which told me all I needed to know about how important I was.

So, my mom dying, being told the business was being soldand the end of my relationship all happened within about a 48 hr time frame and i have spent the last 365 days or so licking my emotional wounds more than blogging.  I would like to get back to this at some point, to not let that period of time define my life (see Captain Sisko merting the prophets for the appropriate sci-fi reference), but i needed toget all this off mychest first, if i hadn't done so already.