Anything been particularly difficult? I have a staff member resigning. She had a lot of anger with me, and her feedback is that I didn't make her feel valued, which is really frustrating to hear. I don't necessarily take it too much to heart. She's probably the fifth person I’ve supervised professionally and this feedback is new. Most everyone else has had a very different statement. A lot of times they leave for a different opportunity or like one -- they got a new job completely elsewhere. So anywho, but she's really good friends with one of my co-workers, and what gives me a little bit of not taking it so personal is how much those two have kind of like isolated themselves and alienated other people.  So like yeah, you don't love me but like, you didn't want to love me. You didn't want to work with me. You didn't want to talk to me. I would give you, you know, guidance as your supervisor and you blew me off and you went to your friend, who is my direct colleague. So, I'd say it was really difficult and that it's like annoying. We put ourselves out on a limb to bring her here, and now she's leaving.

A week ago today I went to my doctor's clinic for my annual wellness exam. That gave me an opportunity to talk to my doctor about the injuries that I suffered last month, when my service dog, a young two-year-old that I had just been partnered with, pulled me down in my front yard and drug me two or three feet, because my dog was in pursuit of a cat. My dog and I are no longer partnered. The company that trained her and provided her to me free of charge decided that we were not a good team, and that I was at risk of further injury. And I agreed with that decision.  I did not see my doctor when I went in to get my rib cage x-rayed. I saw a nurse practitioner that works at his clinic. The x-ray showed that I had two fractured ribs on the left side of my rib cage. The injury has caused great soreness for me on the left side of my body. In fact, for several weeks, I slept in a reclining chair because it was less painful for me to get out of the reclining chair than to arise from my bed from a prone to a standing position. And the soreness was going away, so I knew that my ribs were getting better, and I told the doctor so. But I had a lingering question about my left shoulder. My left shoulder had taken quite a bit of the brunt of the blow when I fell down. And my shoulder remained, has remained much more sore than my rib cage. And it seemed to me that my shoulder was not healing very rapidly. So I asked the doctor last week if the x-rays had also included my left shoulder. And he said no. And I told him that I was worried that I might have some dislocated bones or some small fractures where my arm bone hooks into my shoulder bone. So my doctor ordered two x-rays of my left shoulder and I was able to go in that same day and get the X-rays done. Two days later, I was contacted by my doctor's clinic and the good news is that I have no fractures and no dislocations.

And then Saturday was also a day we got to go see a Ghibli concert by the Lansing Orchestra, or sorry, the Lansing Symphony, Symphony Orchestra, and it was amazing. Like, it was such a nice break from these past two weeks of hectic work, day after day. And we got dressed up, my boyfriend and I, and it was actually a birthday gift from his cousin for us to attend, and so we got like, front row seats, and oh, it was so nice.  Like just being surrounded by the music. And they were playing a list of songs and one of the movies that they centered it on was My Neighbor Totoro, and they had a woman come in who like narrated scene by scene, like what happens in the movie in Japanese, which was like a really delightful surprise. I almost cried during multiple times for those pieces, because it just like, it was so real. Like, we are moving to Japan in three months. Like, that's insane.  And we had just loaded the car with the bunch of our items that we wanted to sell at the garage sale. And it's just like, hearing that piece and thinking about how we're going to be moving to the countryside and we get to literally live the life of Totoro, like we can start a family, find an akiya and like, repair it, and like be so surrounded by nature and like, the -- what, the community there? Like, not just like the people but also like the trees and having a garden and being -- or going on like nature walks and hikes and, I don't know. I could just go on and on about it, but I'm just so excited that all of this work that me and my boyfriend have been doing in order to get us into a place where we can even make that move, like is just mind blowing. And all of that like just came up right onto me, like just hearing the music and like my mind replaying the movie in my head, but instead of like the characters it was, you know, me and my boyfriend moving there.

There was this day last year where I and my partner went to one of the local beaches, and we were like day drinking. And there was this, this big little butterfly that was floating around on the beach, and it would land here and there. And I was like, "Oh, I wonder how close I can get to it." And so I like, I got down and I started kinda like ground crawling just to see how close I could get to it. And I got it to land on my finger. And I don't remember exactly what started this, but I was like, "It's trying to eat something on my finger." And I don't know what gave me the idea, but I like, I licked my finger. I don't remember if it was something I ate or drank, but I wasn't really thinking about it and I licked my finger and it went right to my finger again and started like eating my spit.  And I was like, "No way." So like I -- it flew away a little bit and then I spat on my finger again and crawled up to it again, and it went right back to my finger and ate some more of my spit. Which is really gross but like, you know, nature's gross. And then I made the connection, like it's probably all the sugar in my saliva from the booze that I had been drinking.  And like it kept, like, hanging around and, like would wait for me to like, spit on my finger, to, to drink my spit again. And I'm like, "No way. It's getting drunk!" Because then like, every time it would take off it'd be a little wobblier and like, "Not, not making so much sense there, butterfly." I don't know. It was really funny. I, I like, I stopped after a while, cuz I'm like, "I don't know how much booze this thing can handle. And I'm pretty freaking drunk right now. I dunno, I don't want to accidentally kill it." So I don't know. I totally forgot that it happened until I saw that video. I just -- it's a very -- I don't know. I feel like getting day drunk at the beach in summer in Michigan is a very Michigan thing to do. At least in the UP.

American Airlines was delayed out of Honolulu two hours, two whole hours. It was their technical issues. When we were descending to land in Los Angeles, I went to each of the -- I had to go to each of the stewardesses, the flight attendants and ask them, "Please, will you tell the people at the connecting flight that we're coming, that we're arriving, so that they hold our seat for us?" And none of them, none of them, not one of all the flight attendants bothered.  They just had this look like, "Ah, who cares about you? I'm tired. I’m going out for a drink." They all had this really bad attitude. Every single one had this really bad attitude, and none of them went to go tell, make a notice or anything. They didn't even care. And you know, from Honolulu to L.A. is just five hours’ flight. They can't be that tired. So we get to the Los Angeles airport. And we've -- Los Angeles Airport is huge. You've gotta get all -- and we had to find out which gate it is and run. My kids and I ran. With our luggage, we ran all the way to the gate. We got to the gate. We got to the gate before the door closed, but they had already substituted somebody else for our three seats. And I told them, "We're here! We're here! We're supposed to be on the plane. Tell them to get off and put us on the plane."  And they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't take those people off the plane and put us on the plane. They wouldn't do it.