Rings Update - FOUND

Just a fluke... I found the bag with the rings outside in the leaves in the carport. Dropped when opening and closing the sliding door? Maybe... I don't know or care. They are found, and I can stop freaking out about it.

Violation and Failure

As my friends all surely know by now, my home was broken into on Wednesday, while I was at work. there was a bit of a mess, but it seemed like the only things they took were DVDs and a home theater receiver. It didn't occur to me, as I looked around at open drawers and closets and knocked-down shelves, that I should look through all the closed drawers, cupboards, etc. I looked for certain things... birth certificates, important papers, anything someone could use for ID theft. That's what the police told me to look for, and it was all there.

Well, today I was doing a bit of cleaning, putting away some clothes in my dresser, and it hit me. There, in the dresser drawer, where I saw them nearly every day... I didn't see my grandmother's rings. Just a simple set; a plain gold band, and a pretty little gold ring with two yellow diamonds and a ruby, my mother's birthstone, installed after my grandmum lost one of the original diamonds. She never took the rings off... working, gardening, it didn't matter. She never wanted to lose them. They were all she had of her late husband. They, and a coin collection, were all I had of her.

It hurt to lose the DVDs, I hated the feeling that someone had violated my home and gone through my things. But now, this is horrible. These are irreplaceable. I feel as if I failed my grandmother by not keeping them safe.

Going Public... or... Why I'm Weird

First off, I don't want your pity. That's not what this is about. This about me freeing myself of the burden of secrets. Keeping secrets like this can destroy you, as it nearly did me. There have been at least a dozen times that I let this secret bring me to a level so low that I wanted to die. Never again.

Well, there's always the basics. the stuff (almost) everybody had to deal with.

When I was a kid, my dad was never around. He was a surgeon, on call all the time, and when he wasn't at the hospital, he was sailing his boats, or sleeping. I was a useless sailor, so didn't do that with him much. My mum decided that he was married to his job and not her, so she divorced him. My brother stayed with my dad, and my mum and two sisters and I moved from Bellevue to White Rock, B.C.
So, from about age 10, I saw my brother and dad 3 or 4 times a year. While that was hard, life didn't seem so bad, as my grandmother moved in with us for a while. I don't remember when exactly, but my grandmum moved to Penticton. She wanted to live near her son, and the family orchard. She needed more care than my mother could provide anyways. By about 12 or 13, my older sister, now driving, was never around. My grandmum was gone, and my mum worked odd hours. So it was just my younger sister Sue and I most of the time. A year later, and my older sister married and moved away. My mother had begun drinking heavily. She had always drank, just not as much. She was getting drunk every night when she got home. She totalled her car passing out at the wheel, as she wouldn't wait to get home most of the time.
That's where I was... thinking, because my mum told me so, that my dad didn't want us, and nobody else would take care of us. I believed that if she were not around, my sister and I would be out on the street. I think that's why I didn't say anything when she started molesting me. It happened a few times. She was always drunk. The last time, she was so drunk that she got sick and collapsed. I don't remember the exact details anymore, and I don't want to. She had to be hospitalized that night. She nearly died, and for some stupid reason I kept the secret. I think I've been a bit weird ever since. I pretty much buried it for years, and thought about it momentarily every few years after i was about 21 or so. Only when my mother was dying of cancer did it really come to the surface, with all the anger, and sadness, and confusion I'd been holding in.
I had pretended it didn't happen for about 25 years, and now when I told my family about it, only my sisters and one cousin actually believed and supported me. My dad blamed the alcohol, my brother stopped talking to me for a while, and everyone else is still pretending it didn't happen. Some of my family still doesn't know. I stopped talking about it after some of the reactions I got.
I guess they'll all find out eventually.

Through the swamp... or around?

This is a ghost story, and it's a love story. It's about a man who loved a woman. A man who thought the flame of their love could never diminish. But it did. What had once been a dance had become a battle. They fought and fought. In the dead of the night, after angry words were spoken, he left their bed and saddled his horse. She said to him, "If you don't come back in 3 days, then you can never come back. Mark my words. I'll be gone."
Still angry, the man rode away. And he enjoyed the solitude. The noise of their argument was replaced by the soothing sound of the forest. But after just 2 days in the forest, he was filled with regret. He wanted to return to the woman he loved. And he wanted to return to the life he missed. So he found a shortcut through the woods and he took it. He was desperate, desperate to get back to the woman he loved before it was too late. Her threat surrounding his head... Would she wait for him or would she be true to her words? Would she be gone? He could feel his horse losing speed as if it wouldn't
make it through the night. The man came to the edge of a dark and unknown swamp. He had to make a decision. Does he go through the swamp or does he go around? We all ask ourselves that question, don't we? It's a very scary question to answer all alone.
Next to the swamp was a boy. The man asks the boy, "Tell me... does the swamp have a hard bottom?" And the boy tells the man, "It does." So the man guides his horse into the swamp. And as he begins to sink, deeper and deeper into the swamp, he says to the boy, "I thought you said it had a hard bottom!"
And the boy says, "It does... You're just not there yet."



(No, I can't write. This was taken from the show Dead Like Me)

Handlebars