So much has happened since I’ve written last. So much so, I’m not even sure where I should begin.

Well, to start, I finally got a job that I truly love. It only took 13+ years but better now than never. I got a job at the gym in here – my technical job title is “Recreation Aid” and I do a little of everything. I clean everything there is in the building and I hand out various workout equipment. Certain equipment is kept with us in the hub and has to be signed out and logged when checked out. Things like boxing gloves people use on the heavy bag, jump ropes, resistance bands, yoga mats and, the TV remotes. We have four TVs people can use to watch more than 100 different workout DVDs we have available. Then there’s the weight pit which is off the main gym and that holds all the hundreds of free weights, medicine balls, and kettle bells along with the Olympic bars, Bela bars , EZ bars and every weight machine or bench you could imagine.

I also currently teach the weightlifting class four days a week. My next undertaking is a class for people with moderate to severe physical limitations. This is geared more towards the older women who just sit in their wheelchairs day in and out. Its just to get them moving and their blood circulating. I’ll let you know how that goes once I start.

My weight class though is going really well. I get so much enjoyment and fulfillment from it, I feel whole. I think that may be the key to doing time… finding a purpose and getting the fulfillment you need in life – it doesn’t matter where your position is at on this Earth. You can make a meaningful life anywhere, you just need to have that drive.

When one part of your life can be going so good it always seems you can’t have it all, can you? Remember the blog I wrote about “funky bunkys”?

Well… my current one takes the freaking cake. She is probably one of the worst drug addicts I have ever seen or known in my life. She’s so bad that when people ask me who my bunky is and I tell them I always get the same response – “Ooohhhh!” When she first moved in, she was coming off the tail end of a month long Methamphetamine binge and she had picked every ounce of flesh off of her face including her lips. To even leave the room she had to borrow my ball cap, wear a mask and have on sunglasses. She looked frightening. Thank God her skin is finally back, but that sure didn’t help any of her other bad habits. Like going days without showering, sometimes up to a week. Not even when its that particular time of the month for her, she still won’t shower regularly.

The few times when she decides to brush her teeth, it only lasts eight seconds, and I’m not talking with counting Mississippies, just eight second flat. I won’t even ask her to clean the room because, well, if she can’t clean herself, she’s not about to clean our living space, so I take care of it in between my full-time job. She lives above me and her bed looks like she sleeps in a garbage heap. She’s never made her bed, just climbs on up there with all her pieces of paper and hair and food particles and actual garbage, and who even knows what else.

Everything that’s up there drops down onto me and I mean everything! When her face was a giant scab I found more than one bloody tissue on my area down here. I can’t even tell you how I felt. A few days ago I gave her a flour tortilla wrap I made for dinner and her front tooth that was half rotten fell out while she was eating it. All I kept thinking about was where the heck did she put that tooth? Because she drops everything in my bed. I’m going to wake up with it stuck to my cheek! And that will be the day I finally lose it.

And if all that wasn’t enough to give you a visual of the living hell I’m currently residing in, to make things worse, I have to listen to her snorting back snot every 10-20 seconds and swallowing it over and over, and she’s not quiet about it at all, quite the opposite actually. I put foam ear plugs in my ears and then my big headphones over top on my ears and I can still hear her sucking back her boogers and this sometimes goes on until the wee hours of the AM.

There’s some days I go to work so tired because of her keeping me awake most the night, I come right back and crash. At this point, every time she does it, its like nails on the chalkboard to my ears. I hope one of these times she sniffs so hard that she snorts herself right on up her nose and disappears.

Welcome to my nightmare!

Hopefully good things are coming my way because this has to be one of those tests we go through right before something good happens, because no one could make this stuff up.

Until next time! Happy New year!

Sammi