Panic attacks, yellow roses and the Baltimore Ravens

Yes, I had an interesting weekend….
Things at work, something I don't normally discuss here (only once ever, I believe), suck. Extremely tense, stressful and going down hill fast with no end in sight except for it to suck worse. I, being the normal hard ass that I am, have sucked it up nicely and kept right on plowing through. That's what I do; I get shit done regardless of the conditions of my surroundings and how much has to be done. I should just get the Nike Swoosh tattooed on my ass and be done with it. My hard work, diligence, persistence and 'just do it' attitude finally paid off Friday morning. I ended up in the local ER with chest pains, dizziness, shortness of breathe, high blood pressure and a numbness in one of my hands. Ah, yes, every middle aged woman's dream…
Rest assured, since I'm sitting here blogging in lieu of sleeping in a hospital bed, I am fine. Two chest x-rays, an EKG, blood work and an hour and a half of being on a heart monitor says I'm fine. The two doctors that saw me…

Yes, two. The ER visit alone contains enough fodder for numerous blog entries so I'm not going into much detail here. Let me just say, if you ever have to go to the ER, take Girlfriend with you.

….say that it was panic attack, stress, anxiety, whatever you want to call it. Basically? I need a fucking break. So I went back to my office long enough to schedule a 10 day vacation for December, grab my car keys, and then drove down early to spend the weekend with my Thing.

[sigh] The Thing completely spoiled, pampered and loved me dearly all weekend, starting with the numerous bouquets of yellow roses (my favorite) which he had spread through out the house. Once again, it was an amazing weekend, though I'm not going to get all gushy here again (yeah, I'm completely lying. See video at the end, or just click here because I'm stupid about some things and it may not work). And, luckily, it will only be days until I see him again instead of two weeks. The Thing is coming to my house Friday afternoon, to meet the kids and spend the weekend.

The Thing and I went out Saturday and one of the many things we did, was to stop at a bar just outside of Baltimore, where a friend of his was playing with the band that night. The friend, whom I shall refer to as Dave Matthews (simply because I can and it amuses me to no end to do so) happens to be the same friend who found my blog. While Dave Matthews was an awesome drummer, the music (aside from a couple songs I honestly really liked) was…uh…okay, it sucked. It wasn't bad enough that I was willing to stab The Thing in the head with a fork (per his suggestion) in order to put him out of his misery but it was bad enough for us to amuse ourselves with snide comments. Though, we probably would have done that anyway.
And, you see, I'm a Pittsburgh girl…and I was in a bar in Baltimore…the only thing worse, besides a fork in the head, would have been to be sitting in a bar in Cleveland…While I'm not a huge Steelers fan, nor a big fan of sports in general, I have spent my entire life in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh = Crazy Sports Fanatics. I think some of it must have seeped in or perhaps they stick something in our water, but the Raven paraphernalia was freaking me out.