Jake’s Life

Sandro and I broke up. Other than saying that it was a repeated infidelity issue, I’m not willing to go into it any more than that. There’s no reason to when pictures tell a thousand words.

Wow it’s been busy lately. Life has been good, but there hasn’t been much time for it to be anything else. Sandro is still doing the school and work thing so it’s hard to spend the amount of time that I want to with him, and not living together makes it even more difficult to see him. We’re okay though because he understands my schedule working nights, and I know where he’s coming from working and going to school (it’s only been six months or so since I was doing the same thing). Blogging has obviously been lacking lately, and I apologize for it, but once things slow down it will happen more

Work is busy. Busy busy busy. The new RMS that I’m working on is going great to say the least, and I’m looking forward to its deployment (and payment from it!). I started this job with equal pay to my last and a lot less responsibility when it comes to overall operations, and with the introduction of a new supervisor that changed a bit. I’m one of three people with the same rank, but I am the go-to guy. I don’t mind it, as with the more responsibility I have the more purpose I feel, so it works out in the long run.

Here’s some lil’ diddies for you guys.

This entire week was weird. I’m sorry, I thought it was April, but evidently Mother Nature had different ideas for our Spring in the Northwest.

Complete with winds which knocked trees down into roads and parked vehicles.

I was getting into my work car the other night and forgot my bluetooth headset was in my lap. It ended up in the storm drain.

Gas prices are also pretty ridiculous right now. Thank god we have fleet fuel cards at work.

Taser arc, just for fun.

This weekend was weird, too. I was off work at 0200 Monday morning and slept from about four until noon, then again from one to nine. Back to sleep at two, then up at ten, back to sleep at one, then up at six. I got way too much sleep, which explains why I’m up so early for work today. If I didn’t have things to do I would run to work early and take my patrol car to the car wash and detail it out (it was just assigned to me and still…has the last person in it).

Yesterday I had a killer headache, so I popped half a Percocet (which, by the way, was prescribed to me for headaches when I had shingles…which I still have but that’s another story) and napped. Sandro came over and brought “headache medicine” for me.

We ran a few quick errands to get dinner, pick up something from my work (where he met one of my more attractive co-workers and confirmed my suspicion that he would find him pleasant to look at), and then came home, cooked dinner, had a few drinks, then made babies. Well, tried to anyways.

I got the schedule I wanted at work, which is 7pm to 3am. This leaves me enough time during the day to run errands and spend time with Sandro during the week, and allows me to unwind after work for a while and still get to sleep before it’s light out, which makes it really tough to sleep. I was also put in charge of vehicle maintenance supervision, so that allows me some flexible overtime in overseeing their condition and repairs during the week or one my days off.

I’m horrible at transferring photos from my Blackberry to my blog in a timely manner, so here is some catching up.

V-Day card I gave to Sandro. It’s almost waist high for him.

View from the cockpit.

Ready for meeting at my new job.

I said I was ready, didn’t I?

Sandro being lazy on my lap.

Not in the mood for BS during my last week at work. Taking pictures of myself does encourage me to get working out again though.

Statue on the mantle at Sandro’s parents’ house. Strong and just…I like it.

That’s right. The day before yesterday I accepted a position with a different organization. The pay is the same, it’s closer to my home, and so far everything seems better organized and streamlined. I e-mailed my notice to my current employer yesterday and within two weeks I’m done there.

I’ll be honest, I feel like such a huge weight has lifted from my shoulders.

Well I think it has finally become official. I am eagerly exploring my employment options. No, I wasn’t fired much to the chagrin of some of my co-workers. With everything that has gone on lately it has become obvious that my workplace is changing and going in a direction that I prefer not to follow.
Is it one thing that helped me decide? Nope. Everything has been stacking up lately: The slander against me that has gone un-addressed, being so short staffed that everyone is on mandatory 12 hour shifts, the driving away of the best Sergeant I have ever worked under, and the constant flow of never ending problems that can be solved early on but are ignored despite the screams from us petty field employees. Even if our administration got things together overnight, increased our pay, got equipment that worked, I still wouldn’t stay. The damage has been done. 

Anyone that has follow my blog knows that I have had problems at work before. Everyone does but for some reason I seem to have a lot of them at my current employer. I always seem to pull through though, but at what cost? Not being able to sleep? Dreading arriving to work? Beginning to hated what I do? Stress induced medical conditions? I think that’s far enough. A basic night at work seems to be one supervisor trying to find some way to fire me, along with the few field employees who try to jump on board. It’s been said that I must have something on someone to survive through these shit storms but I don’t. The only explanation I have is that I do the right thing, I document what I do, and what I do covers my ass.

I’m tired of it though. I deserve better, and so do some of my co-workers. The rest of them, on the other hand, deserve to stay in this work environment forever though. Or at least until they professionally evolve.

Yesterday I got that yearly wild hair up my ass to start the father search again. This usually hits me annually for some reason, and I always pick up the file folder I have set aside with everything I’ve done in the last year or two in it: Credit checks, criminal checks, Social Security number searches. I have the file organized by previous addresses, employers, phone numbers, next of kin, neighbors, etc., based on paid background searches I’ve run on him. You know, I wish that people updated their information more often when they move as the California Department of Motor Vehicles has an old address listed for him. At one time, about two years ago, I called every Purnell in California and found a few distant relatives (second cousins, etc.). The most humorous reply I got was a voicemail from a black woman saying that my voicemail message didn’t sound like I was black, so her daddy probably ain’t my daddy.

The only direct relative I have been able to contact is his brother, my uncle, whose name is Adam. Last year when we spoke he stated that they had not seen nor spoken in over a year and he didn’t know where my father was. I left my number but it may have gotten lost in the shuffle of a year’s worth of life. My father worked for an ice company for a long time, and I spoke with his old supervisor and a long time friend/co-worker who had not seen him either. Oddly enough, this co-worker told me that I looked exactly like him before I left California for Washington. I didn’t remember meeting him until he jogged my memory by what my mother drove, where we lived, and what he drove. I can’t picture his face, but I remember meeting him in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in Lancaster, California.

Today I did some more basic things like looking into phone listings. Online phone listings have come a long way to include age ranges, last known employers and job fields, etc. I found a few with his same first, middle, and last name and even his age, which look like a hodge podge of his old addresses, but may have a current one mixed in. So far I know that he has worked for North Hollywood Ice Company, worked in sanitation in Orange County, California (unknown whether for the county itself or for a sanitation contractor), lived or still lives in central California (likely Orange County, especially near the water).

I plan to call my uncle Adam in the next few days and check in with him, and also start tracking down his other children who are around my age (which means that out of the litter there has to be MySpace/Facebook/LinkedIn/other social networking profiles for). It’s amazing, I do look like my father, almost a splitting image besides the nose which is from my mom (and modified by me through a few injuries). I need to dig out some photos to post for comparison.

A while back I didn’t know if I was ready to contact him if I did find him. Yes, he deserves to know that my mother passed four years ago, and he deserves a chance at knowing me and vice versa, but was I ready for that? I had gone 22 years without him, and would his introduction into my life benefit us or detract from what we have built without each other? Don’t misunderstand, he was not the “deadbeat dad” that America is known for being inhabited by. From what I understand from family (both sides) is that he loved my mother and he loved me, but something happened between the two of them that made my mother leave when I was less than a year old. To her death bed she kept his contact information a closely guarded secret, and from what I hear from my grandmother she kept it all in memory instead of writing it down. She knew she was sick and that I would eventually find it if she did write it down. No wonder I’m so damn stubborn! I did manage to find out from my mom (unethically maybe, as she was very medicated at the time on Morphine) that she was in contact with him up until she was entered into a hospice toward the end, that he lived in Central California with his new family, that he knew I was gay, living in Seattle, and really wanted to be in contact with me.

I know that if I put myself into this 100% I can find him. With a hectic life, all of the overtime, changes going on at work, Sandro, Gammy, nothing can get 100%. It’s sad, especially with something that I find this important, but it will happen in time. Working in the field that I do I can always have him found fairly quickly (at least his most current information) with minimal red tape. I know a few detectives that would give me a hard time about using their resources for personal business, but it would eventually be done given the circumstances. That would take my hard work, effort, energy, and fun out of it though!

Have any of you gone through anything like this before? I’m open to your experiences and possible input.

Well, those last two days didn’t go by very quickly. It still hurts, there’s still a lot of redness on my side and back, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as it did during the last 48 hours. No head splitting migraine this morning either.

Now that I’m a bit more drugged up and it’s not as excruciating as it was, I’ll post a bit more about this.

For the last few days I had some red spots on my right abdomen. I figured I’d give it a day or two, but when I woke up yesterday it was from my back, to the front, down through the Netherlands, and down my leg. My right side hurt, and I’ve been having some really bad migraines in the morning.

I went to the ER yesterday and the doctor said I had shingles, and a bad case of them too. Basically they usually only stretch from the spine to the side, but this was quite a bit more, and the migraines are caused by the shingles too. He said that they would usually go away within a week, but he was concerned that it would travel up my spine to my face and brain. He gave me anti-virals and Percocet. Usually shingles only happens in older people or those with lowered immune systems. When I asked him about possible causes he asked about my life, and after hearing about my current work situations he settled on that.

Anyway, he said that the anti-virals will make it worse for a day or two before it gets better, and if Sandro’s never had chicken pox to have him go to his doctor because he could have caught it from me.

I’ve got to say, if you don’t know what shingles are, you should read up about them. I have been sitting in bed for two hours in some horrible pain. Everything hurts because it attacks the nerves. If I could wish this on everyone who has done me wrong, we’d be about square.