I do agree with Firefly - I think it was she who said - be active in helping the move and family blending work. Enjoy house hunting. Years of parental house hunting when they never could afford to buy was how I got interested in architecture.
I guess I could do that. I know we have to move and I get why but Im still mad about it. House hunting doesn't sound all that fun to me. And except for sometimes fighting with Katie, I am trying to help the family blending thing work. Me and Alaina and Josh and all of us get along great. They already feel like my little brother and sister. And Im not bratty with Katie
all the time. I dont hate her or anything and Im not trying to hurt her. We talked for a little while yesterday when she asked me to help her with dinner and I told her I was sorry. I dont mean to be bratty with her I just get mad sometimes and its easier to just take it out on her I guess. Everythings really different and Im just not used to it yet.
Quote:
Gracie, as others have said, you may be surprised what you'll like, and yes, not like, in the changes.
I know.
end/quoting
I went from a place where, as me, I'd never been so happy - I was an only child and we moved a lot in earlier years. We'd last moved from NYCity where I had one actual friend (we wrote letters, she later visited me in California and I felt we didn't know each other anymore, she wore tons of makeup, gah). When we landed in Chicago after New York (Evanston, specifically), I right away had neighborhood girlfriends, something that was completely new to me. These are the ones I'm still semi in touch with. Their friendship meant more to me, I see in retrospect, as most of those were in big families. Hah, catholics. That set of years was filled with all sorts of pleasures, liking school, playing with the neighbor girls, all sorts of stuff I'd not known about re games and sports and food and, best, friends playing. There was bad stuff too, as my parents struggled re my father's work, and that is a large subject I won't go into now.
I knew we were in trouble, house silence the mode, and did remember California from when I was there before. I was born in Los Angeles, we moved to Dayton, Ohio during the war, back to Los Angeles, to New York, and so on.
The high school I went to in LA was small and very strict. (I've written about it on a2k before). There were cliques, as there are everywhere, but that was when I first really noticed. We wore uniforms, but you could tell who was in because they wore the right socks (I'm not kidding).
I was smart (well, smart enough) but very shy. The other people appeared to know each other, but not as a whole group as they too were from different schools.
I was good in sports back in Chicago and playing golf with my father and uncle but completely nonplussed by gym class where volleyballs were flying around. I'd never heard of volleyball and gym class didn't improve my understanding.
I did make one long time friend that year, a girl like me, not 'outcast' but not in.
I pretty much stayed that way but outcasts and in groups changed - some of the outcasts were pretty interesting and some of the ins were fools, so things evened out as time passed.
In the summers, I spent my days going with my mother and aunt to the grocery store and laundramat and the Slenderalla Salon, which featured leatherette beds that jiggled one's fat. Rest of the time I read every book in my aunt's house, Dickens and westerns left from my uncle who had died in '44. Plus library books, 7 or so every two weeks. Plus the local newspaper, then with an interest in sports, which I'd picked up in Chicago.
Once every few weeks I'd get to see my friend Kathleen. She was particularly into making dolls for Seventeen magazine, a matter that didn't interest me, though I like sewing and had dolls in my past. But I went with her family to Disneyland, just recently opened, and to San Francisco, which, in a way, reopened my world.
In the beginning of my junior year, coincident with my sixteenth birthday, I got a job at our local very good hospital and that changed my life. I was already interested in medicine (read medical history books among all those books I mentioned earlier). But at the hospital I found a whole new world. I worked there something like six years, taking mini xrays, being a cashier, admitting clerk, handling reservations for beds. I stopped being shy, learned a lot about real people.
Meantime, we bought a house, and I got involved in the remodelling. I liked it, had strong opinions. My choice of paint for my room was poor. More learning.
Later, much later, I learned that scholarly boyfriends tended not to know how to fix a window (etc.)
Long answer from me, but I'm hoping you ride with all this.
