That was then, this is now. I do remember that, it sometimes seems my personal mantra. I don't live in the past, but I am the sum of all my parts. It seems a bit TOO convenient to say "Don't live in the past." Because if one does not examine where one has been, how will one know how one arrived at the current point? So. I am not afraid of yesterday.

I feel official, and I said to myself "I live here." As if not having a job made me un-official, a guest whose welcome just might be about to wear out. Entrare has been lovely, no resentment vibes. Quite the contrary. However. Now I have a job, I live here. I feel it.

And so, after Matins, I will do the things people do on Sunday to prepare for the work week ahead. Gods, I absolutely love it.

I watched 'Hellboy' Friday night. Entrare got me hooked, then fell asleep and woke to stumble off to his room. I kept saying, here, I will stop the movie here, but ended up watching it straight through. I'm glad I did, it was a surprisingly good movie, rather well done, I thought. Last night, as Entrare was ferrying little brother of fiancee about, I watched 'The Bourne Identity' and quite thoroughly enjoyed it.

Oh cool, I just noticed this posting box has a spell checker. Now that is nice!

Fiancee is probably going to move in. I certainly hope she does. What a lovely young woman she is. I've warned Entrare that I will be baking now that I will have an income, they had best watch out for expanding waistlines. I am looking forward to going south in two weeks to reclaim my household goods from the storage bins, especially my slow cooker, deep fat fryer, and cook books. And my bed-my 49 year old back wants to know why we left the Sealy PosturePeadic in storage, hmmm?

Lest my gentle reader (sorry, couldn't resist) think me a victim of Southern cooking, I suppose now would be a good time to confess that I have a mild heart condition, more annoyance than anything-a mere bagatelle we used to say of such trifling matters. I use the deep fat fryer to make chips and donuts that are very nearly salt free. Chips being everything from potato and tortilla chips to frenched frys.

OK, about the mild heart condition. As a young child I suffered my father's benign neglect, and his second wife's utter hatred-bad combination, that. So, when a dental infection went untreated, the infection went to my pericardium, which in turn led to Pericarditis, which, of course undiagnosed, became chronic.

It was the cause of my flucuating weight, my fatigue, my aches, pains, and swelling ankles. The military didn't find it, scores of subsequent doctors didn't find it, but that's not their fault, I never told them the symptoms beyond aches, pains, cough...Not enough of the right information, and finally, in the fall of 1998, a dead guy told me what I had.

The dead guy, in life-although, ya know, define death really, since he is pretty lively to me...Ok, so the dead guy, when he had skin, worked as a pneumothoracic surgeon. I looked him up. I tried to Google him, but when one dies in 1978, one needs to have been a bit more prominent than he was in skin to deserve a spot in the Web able to be found by the Google search engine.

Any roads, he hit the nail, so to speak. But it took me five bloody years to believe him, five years.

Now, I keep the sodium intake down to less than 15K per day. I look fabulous, and I haven't had those pesky chest clutching and groaning episodes in ages. Mostly. Don't tell Dr. Dad-I call him that because he swears he is my father-in-law. Define 'late.'

I lost nearly fifty pounds. At first I was on what I came to call the 'grief diet.' That was brought on by the receipt of such horrific news that I literally could not eat, didn't want to eat, had to be practically held down and force fed to keep body and soul in one place-my skin.

But eventually Dr. Dad got through to me about the fact that while the grief diet, oddly enough, had saved my life-imagine if you will the gruesome nature of a dead and completely pissed off person for whom you have nothing but the highest respect despite your not believing him for years as to who and what he was, getting right up and repeatedly in your face at all the oddest moments and demonstrating the surety that he must have been terrifying to first year surgical residents who pissed him off-the point had probably only just been reached where I really should think about "GETTING ONE'S-SELF TOGETHER OR YOU WILL END UP ON THIS SIDE!!!" Talk about a grouch. But he was right, and so I did go about getting myself together enough to pay attention.

What a night that was. He dictated, I wrote. And wrote. And re-wrote, and read back until I was hoarse, and he was semi-satisfied that I would remember the important parts.

As I continued to survive, I spent money for books I would never have known to look for if Dr. Dad had not overcome his disdain for my driving skills. Excuse me, he's dead, how can I possibly scare him...

A year later, when I finally got a computer and went online for the first time, sure enough wasn't Dr. Dad right behind me telling me to go to the BBC and look it up, which I did, and then started to really learn.

I researched BBC Health, WebMD, American Heart, and Googled. And wrote, copied, pasted.

And lived.