Where I've Been

Hello! Welcome to my life!
 For years I have been trying to do two things:

1. Write a book
2. Start and keep up with a blog

Recently the thing that I have been trying to do is grow in my walk with the Lord - build on my prayer life and be a disciple!  I've been praying about how I can do that, and God kept pushing me toward the two things listed above.  I started writing the book several years ago - so I decided to combine the two.  I will post the book in blog form.  So, here is the beginning.  It will deal with life, love, weight loss, hardship, work, happiness, Christianity and oh so much more. Enjoy!

“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye” - Psalms 32:8 

      I don't remember making a conscious decision about what to do as a career until I was in my thirties. When I was growing up, I wanted to be an actress.  These days, they now call performers of both genders “Actors” but when I was in school, we still said “Actress” if you were a female. I also spent time wishing to be a cop, an FBI agent, and a Secret Service Agent – anything that would have enabled me to carry a gun and act cool.  No matter what the current phase – when it passed – it was acting to which I returned.  The problem was that I didn’t like school - so I did not want to go to college.  Everyone was talking about what they were going to major in and I had no plans.  I looked at college brochures and thought about where the best place was to study acting.  I did what several people told me not to do - I decided to take a year off and then think about going back to school.  I wanted to have a full year that I did not have to sit through one single class.  For thirteen years, I spent September through June controlled by the educational establishment. I was sick of it.  I wanted freedom. Therefore, I made my decision - work for year and a half or so, then go to school.  Everyone said that I would end up never going to college.   They were right. That year turned into two and I never again gave college much thought until I was in my 40's.

      When I started working as a server at a Pizza Hut in 1985 - I had no idea that it was the start of a twenty-eight plus year career in the food service industry. Although that job only lasted about eight months, it led me to go up the street and apply for a job at Howard Johnson's restaurant. Many of you are probably taking a break to do a search for Howard Johnson's to find out what it was. It’s okay, I’ll wait – you go ahead.  Howard Johnson hotels still exist, but the famous orange-roofed dining establishments are gone the way of the T-Rex and the Commodore 64.  It was great working there.  I am still friends with people I started working with there over 30 years ago.

      I will forever remember the woman who trained me that first day.  Bonnie was a great server, and one of the nicest people you ever want to meet.  She had a structured plan for training new servers - even though there wasn't anything in writing.  There was a handbook - and it had some details in it that make me laugh when I think about it.  I remember the picture showing the smiling "Johnson Girl" (laugh all you want, they actually called us that) with her perfectly pressed uniform, holding her tray with her side towel neatly folded in her hand. The most memorable part of the training was Bonnie's direction about carrying your tray.  It was the HoJo policy that you always carried your tray.  In order to drive this point home she told me "Your tray is like your underwear, you always have it with you."  Every time I see a server struggling to balance a stack of plates without a tray, I think about that quote from Bonnie.

      It was only a short time before I was called on to train new servers.  My attention to detail combined with a touch of OCD (although we did not call it that in those days) aided in my success as a trainer.  After three years, I had enough of the 20-year HoJo veteran who acted as dictator under our orange roof.  Mary’s (not her real name) Jekyll-Hyde personality was more than I could deal with.  She was so out-spoken that she once told one of my co-workers that she didn’t understand why she was dating the man she was currently living with.  She just didn’t think he was good enough.  She said that he looked like he had flies coming out of his beard.  Can you imagine? If a manager said something like that, about an employee's significant other in today’s workplace – they would be facing a lawsuit.

      I went to work at a factory for about a month – but it felt like an eternity.  I was extremely unsuccessful at the task they assigned to me.  The factory produced paper party items like foldout honeycomb bells.  My job was to put the bell in a machine and use a foot pedal to apply a staple to hold the bell together.  It was so much harder than it sounds.  I think that if I had been doing something that required just my hands I would have been fine, but coordinating my hands to move the bell and my foot to push the pedal just didn’t work out.  They let me go because I couldn’t keep up with the piece rate that was required to be productive.  No matter – I couldn’t talk to anyone while working anyway and that was not the job for me, besides, I never really wanted to work there – I only applied to satisfy my controlling, money-hungry first husband.

      I continued my friendship with the people I worked with at HoJo’s.  We still went there to eat and I knew almost everyone who worked there, but I wasn’t ready to go back to that job.

Goodbye for now! Stay tuned for more!