Year 2010 At A Glance

It's been two years since I've written an entry on here. As I stated in my previous post, I'm just lazy to write, but I do need to start writing more as I will state why in my next blog entry.

In October of 2009, I had became aware of the fact that the McDonald's restaurant where I am still working at, but hopefully not for long was sold to an independent franchise owner. The way I had found out about it was that the tenant at a place I previously lived at and I will talk more about that in a paragraph of it's own informed me that he had heard a rumor that the McDonald's restaurant I work at had possibly been sold to an independent franchise owner. Well it turned out that the rumor had been true. The very next day, I went into work and my operations supervisor had come in, brought different employees from different McDonald's restaurants in and cleaned the restaurant in extreme detail. They didn't want anyone to know yet at that time that the restaurant had been sold. Then in the afternoon, we had guests come and tour the restaurant in great detail to see what it had looked like. The Wednesday after that, we were officially informed at a special meeting that we had to attend that the restaurant had been sold. Between the time I had found out about the restaurant being sold until the time that the new owners took over, they were making a lot of much needed repairs to the restaurant so that the new owner's wouldn't have to do much if anything. This all took place between October 6th and October 19th of 2009. The new owners had promised that things were going to change for the better. But in my opinion, I don't think things got better. Employee's are doing a lot more cursing and swearing and a lot of horseplay, a particular employee I've hated for years became promoted to manager, and really, I don't like the restaurant manager who runs the restaurant. He seemed good at first, but that changed within a few months. We don't get free employee meals during our shifts anymore. Instead, we do get 50% off our meal. But now if we want to order food when we are off duty, we don't get a 50% discount anymore. This has helped fix the food cost problems we used to have though, and I wish that corporate owned restaurants would do something simulator to this. So even though they said that things were going to get better, in my opinion, some things did improve a little such as food cost, not running out of supplies such as bathroom tissue, paper towel, trash bags, etc... for the rest of the month, the work environment itself I think has gotten worse. I've never really seen the owner come to the restaurant himself to take a look at things to see how they are going which to me is a bad thing. Instead, he relies on his staff to do the job for him. Things would maybe be different if he came and saw what was happening. He's also hard to reach too.

It was New Year's Eve in 2009 and I had stayed the night before at my father's house. Instead of celebrating Christmas on Christmas Day or before, I instead celebrated it on December 30, 2009 due to the fact that I had become sick with a cold. Anyways, we've always had a New Year's tradition where I would usually stay home with mom and we would snack on foods such at Kielbasa, deviled eggs and much more. So I get back home and my mother and brother were having an argument with each other. The minute I got home, he went out to talk to dad and within a few minutes, he was gone. Needless to say, he never came back home that evening and I ended up having to eat quite a bit of the food. That night, I'm doing whatever I could to keep my mom calmed down, but it was just so hard. That night, my brother had moved out. It did take us a week or two to figure out that he wasn't coming back to live at home. So he's been living at my dad's since then.

During the month of February, I had caught another very bad cold. This time it was a chest cold and I was coughing pretty bad for about three weeks. At the two week period, it was time to go to the doctor, so I did. They had put me on Amoxicillan and I had to take a cough medicine as well as a nasal decongestant medicine too. That ended up making me feel a bit better.

In March, I had met a girl on the plentyoffish.com web site. She is from Maine, but had been going to Cornerstone University here in MI. We talked online for a couple of weeks before meeting each other. We would usually see each other every weekend until she left to go back to ME that summer. All was going ok for the most part, but during the summer months, I began to realize the fact that something wasn't going right in our relationship. She was a bit clingy which caused problems in the fact that there were many projects I wanted to get done that summer that I wasn't able to get done and eventually, we had a fight about it and since neither of us knew what we were really doing, in August of 2010, I made the very difficult choice to end the relationship with her. We were both upset at each other for time, and we did talk about wanting to date each other again at one point, but after doing a lot of thinking about things, I believe that I have made the right decision to break up with her. Therefore, I will not be dating her again, but we will still be friends for however long we can be.

My brother graduated from Union High School in June of 2010. He was very glad to have graduated as was the rest of the family. I also graduated from Union High School in 2005 as well. I really hate that school now a days and overall, don't really care for the school district either and some of the decisions they have made in recent years.

In Late June, we had gotten news about my Grandpa that they had found something very unusual in one of his lungs. He had been sick with pneumonia and they had did a catscan to look for the pneumonia. When they had found this lump, it got people suspicious. Well it turned out that he was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer. He had surgery on July 18, 2010 and instead of removing only a little part of what they needed to, they had to remove the entire lung since the cancer had spread even faster within a few weeks. For the first two weeks after the surgery, all was going pretty good and then things had changed for the worse. Before I explain what happened, I will tell you a few things about my grandpa. He has always had a bad leg and some days, it would hurt him quite a bit that it would be hard to walk at times. He was supposed to have been walking a bit after the surgery and there were days that he couldn't do it because of the pain. What had happened was his remaining lung that was still in him, it developed an infection as well. They had put my grandpa on a ventilator a few weeks after the surgery in hopes that it would improve with his breathing. Things got worse from there. His lung had collapsed and the doctor did what he could to revive it and that failed. By that point, there wasn't anything else that could be done. My grandpa died at the age of 76 from St. Mary's Hospital in the Haunstein Center on August 19, 2010. This was a very sad day for all of us. So the next day, I had called my work to let them know that I needed time off to mourn the death of my grandpa. My restaurant manager got a bit smart about it and said that I would face disciplinary action because I would be taking up to a week off and the policy at work is if you miss four shifts in a 120 day period and do not bring in a doctor's note, one is terminated. So then my mom had called the home office to speak with the supervisor, and of course, she had to call back, but mom was on the phone a good chunk of the day talking to other family members informing them that my grandpa had passed and as a result, she couldn't get through. But I was informed that I wouldn't be penalized and all would be ok. We then had my grandpa's memorial service on August 24, 2010. Since then, my grandmother would call anywhere from two to five times daily and it would be complaining about something or talking about the same stuff all the time. It does get annoying.

Back in 2008, mom had applied for disability because she had hurt her back in 2003 and since then, it had never fully recovered. She was however denied for disability, but there was an opportunity to appeal. Well she did that in January of 2009 and found out about a week later that it would be at least two years or more until we would hear about an appeal date. Before my grandpa had passed away. In June of 2010, she received a letter stating that they had set a date for the appeal. She went to the hearing only to find out nothing really and that it would be at least 90 days until she had heard something. In October of last year, we had gotten the good news that the judge agreed that she was disabled and that she would have had to get money from the time she was disabled which was back in February of 2008 until her first check that she got in November last year. It was a pretty decent amount of money, but the money was to be used to pay people back that had helped us as well as make a few improvements.

Well that concludes all of the major events that happened in 2010. I know that it was a lot to write about, but a lot of things happened. My next entry will be about what has happened this year so far.