Transitions

Lots of them.

I'd planned this beautiful new year's post about my aspiration to be a better person with specific goals to help me accomplish that. It was supposed to be one of the first posts of the new year and one of my first posts at bethfred.com (which brings me to transition 1). However, I've tossed my glorious idea for this beautiful post and all of it's lyrical lines. Because as it usually does, life happened.

Transition 1: (No my transitions are not this abrupt in my fiction, promise...or at least only on pages where Jennifer screams in red ink "Are you serious?"). bethfred.com was an idea I had tossed around thinking maybe an easier domain would make me easier to find, friend, follow. But I've grown attached to P-52 and love all the awesome followers I have here. I decided not to do it because I would hate to miss any of you. Then, the unthinkable happened. Yes, my gmail account got hacked by some crazy virus. My password was locked and since blogger is attached to my gmail a year of my life was gone. I cried and screamed while my meticulously logical personal engineer set to work. I'm not the person to have had this problem. Following some steps sometimes allows you to recover your blog, but not always. My p.e. followed the steps and we got lucky. Lots of people don't get that lucky. It was time for a change. I'm taking the chance. I'm jumping to bethfred and hope you'll tag along.

Transition 2: I'm in Milwaukee now and it's cold. That's a big jump from Austin, Texas. The Mexican food sucks here, but I'll have more time to write/blog/comment which means you should be seeing more of me.

Transition 3: Two days before I was supposed to quit my government job and follow my husband to the tundra my grandfather died. It was surreal. My family cried when they called to tell me and several people called to tell me. Pain gnawed at my stomach and in my throat but I didn't cry and as the hysteria wore off so did the pain. We drove the six hours from Austin to Paris and it still hadn't hit me. My grandmother hadn't made it home yet when we got there. The house was empty, dark, and silent, unusual. Still, it hadn't hit me. Ironically, the hardest thing to see in that house was the glass cake pan full of biscuits. The last batch he would ever make. I could feel the tears kicking in, because my whole life there had been biscuits in the center of that table and now there will only be an empty spot where the biscuits go. I quickly turned away from the table before the tears had time to escape. One day later I was asked to edit his obituary. His life reduced to two paragraphs of straight forward plain text on regular white typing paper. The realization sunk in. He's gone leaving a void in my life. A transition I wasn't prepared to deal with. I took a purple shirt and an old copy of Lonesome Dove, and that's all I have left of my grandfather.

This is my last  post here at Project 52, so I hope to see you at bethfred. I'll be kicking beth's blog off with a contest, because that is my style. First prize winner gets their choice of a $25 visa gift card or a book of their choice. Second prize is whatever the first prize winner didn't choose. Sloppy leftovers, but free stuff all the same.