Denise, there you are...

"Denise, there you are..."

These are the words that dance through my head these days.  Sometimes I think of framing these words and hanging them on my wall.  Why?  Because these words have opened up a whole new world for me that I could've never imagined.  Let me explain..

Back in June, I posted a comment on the 'Following Atticus' book Facebook page in response to someone else's comment regarding their divorce.  Their comment resonated with me and what I was going through and I had found great inspiration from the "Following Atticus' page and so I shared a small paragraph's worth of my thoughts and what the page meant to me.  Well, much to my surprise, the author, Tom Ryan, left a personal comment to me expressing how my comment had touched him.  Then he made another comment and asked me to email him.  Now, I should tell you that he responds to his fan's comments all the time.  That is not a rare thing.  However, I hardly ever commented on the page and never thought my comment would be noticed so it surprised me greatly.  So, I emailed as requested but had no idea why I was emailing so I didn't know what to say.  I think I said something like, "You asked me to email you, so here I am."  It almost sounds rude, doesn't it?  I didn't mean for it to but I had no clue why I was emailing and so I had no idea what to say.  So then Tom emailed back and said he hoped his request to email didn't make me feel awkward.  Truth be told...it did a little, but I was also super excited to get an email from him.  I mean...he's the author of my favorite book!  So he said he just wanted to let me know I wasn't alone and that there were many others going through similar things.  He was just being kind and supportive to someone in need.  That's how Tom is...very caring.   So I emailed back and thanked him for his kind words and that was the end of that....or so I thought.

On July 30th, it was announced on the Following Atticus page that 12 out of the near 16,000 facebook fans were going to be chosen to go on a hike with Tom and Atticus in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  This hike was going to take place on October 5, 2013.  I read this post at work as I glanced at my phone while walking down a school hallway.  My heart immediately started pounding and I began excitedly telling all my coworkers about the hike.  They had heard me talking about this book before so they knew exactly what I was referring to but since they hadn't read the book or followed the page, they didn't really understand why I was so excited about this hike.  They were trying to figure out why I would want to go hiking in New Hampshire with a stranger and his dog.  Nevertheless, I couldn't stop talking about it.

Coincidentally...or maybe not, I don't know.  I believe in everything happening for a reason so I tend to think it wasn't coincidence.  My mother and I had been planning a trip to Jackson, NH for the past year and had talked about it even longer.  But we were seriously planning this time and had chosen that very weekend as the weekend we would go.  So when I saw this post about the hike, it felt like destiny.  I just kept saying to myself, "What are the odds that they would have this hike on the very weekend I was going to be there anyway."  But of course, I am one of 16,000 fans who would love to go on that hike so the real life chances of going were very slim.  I shared the post about the hike with my mom and asked her if she had seen it?  Before she responded, I made this comment, "This makes me want to cry.  I mean..what are the odds of him doing this at the very time we planned to be there?  I have to go!"  I really can't describe it but I felt such a strong pull about this hike.  Mom's response was, "I saw it.  Did you want to hike with him?"  Ok, really mom?  I just got done saying it makes me want to cry and I have to go and you ask if I want to?  That made me laugh.  But YES I want to go!

So the requirements to enter for this chance to hike was to simply send in an email with your reasons that you wish to be chosen.  So as soon as I had a second to type up an email, I did.  It ended up being 9pm before I had that second so I submitted my email kind of late that night and figured they probably already chose their hikers earlier in the day while I was still working.  One thing I had decided though, before I even sent the email, was that if I wasn't chosen, I was going to climb a mountain anyway that weekend while I was there.  It would probably be a smaller climb since I wouldn't know what I was doing by myself but I felt like I needed to be on a mountaintop, with or without Tom and Atticus...but preferably with.  My divorce was set to be final very soon and I couldn't think of a more perfect way to start my new life than on a mountaintop.

And then it happened.  

Within five minutes of submitting my email, I received one back from "Tom Ryan."  The email notification flashed on my computer screen with the first few words of the email which read, "Denise, there you are..."  My heart started thumping so hard I thought it might burst right out of my chest.  I took a deep breath and then I opened the email to read the rest.  I was chosen!!!  Tom said he was hoping I would submit an email and he was holding a spot for me.  What??  Why??  I didn't care...not at that moment.  I leapt off my bed and ran to my son's room and told him, "I won, I won!!  I was chosen for the hike!"  My daughter, Alexia, came rushing out of her room to see what the commotion was all about and we end up in the hallway together as I'm repeating over and over again how I won and I'm going to hike with Tom and Atticus.  I had the biggest smile on my face, bigger than I've ever had.  I actually tried to stop smiling and I couldn't.  Alexia had never seen me so excited about something and so she said she had to record "this" and with iphone already in hand, she started recording.

Eventually, I settled down and responded to the email profusely thanking Tom for choosing me for the hike.  I then told him about the video that Alexia had taken and said I'll have to show him sometime so he can see how happy I was to be chosen.  He said he would love to see it and if I wanted, I could try texting it to him if the file wasn't too big.  So I did.  I sent my favorite author a video of me acting like a complete fool, laughing and crying with makeup worn off, hair a mess, and house a mess, but at that moment I didn't care about any of that.  I was going to hike with Tom and Atticus and I was the happiest person in the world.  And guess what?  I'm still the happiest person in the world.

The hike is this coming Saturday.  I still can't believe I was really chosen and that I really get to hike with Tom and Atticus.  And for icing on the cake.....Tom is picking me up from the airport in Boston and I get to visit with him while holding and petting Atticus and Will for the 3 hour car ride back to Jackson, NH.  I am one lucky girl!  I hope no one wakes me up from this incredible dream.  

More to come after the hike...

The Video:  Reaction to being chosen for the hike with Tom and Atticus.

Hi. I'm Denise.

Hi there.   So here I am writing my very first blog post.  I’ve always wanted to start a blog but felt intimidated by it.  Not sure why because I really don’t mind sharing my thoughts with people but a blog just seemed so much more formal.  I like to use Facebook because it seems like a more casual atmosphere to communicate and I can put small thoughts down as they come rather than writing a whole page’s worth of thoughts.  But alas, it seems I have a lot of thoughts right now so a blog post it is!

So, for starters, let me tell you a little bit about me.  I will be 42 years old in January so I guess I am officially “Over the Hill” now.   It’s weird because I would swear I was more like 30 years old but the calendar and my birth certificate seem to prove otherwise.   Anyway, 41 isn’t bad.  As a matter of fact, it’s pretty great.  Life is good.

I was born in Boston, MA all those years ago and I lived in Acton, MA as a child until I was 5 years old.  My parents then moved to northern Indiana because the cost of living was so much less there.  I hated it.  I always wanted to move back to Massachusetts.  My grandparents on my mom’s side still lived there and so we would visit them every so often and I yearned to stay there and told myself I would move back there when I grew up.  Indiana was boring and ugly and I don’t know why…but I just never liked it there.

Well, I never did move back to Boston but I did move.  I had met my now ex husband, Chris, on a blind date when I was 18 years old and we fell in love.  He was 2 years older than me and in college.  I had always planned on going to college but it didn’t end up happening for various reasons.  So we dated for 2 years until Chris graduated from college and then I moved to Virginia Beach, VA with him when he got his first job out of college as a stock broker.  We lived together for 2 more years and then got married in 1994.  We spent our honeymoon in Cape Cod, MA at a family owned cottage that my great uncle had built and we did go to Boston while we were there.  The stock broker job didn’t work out so well so he left that job and ended up getting into the collections industry, first on the credit card side of things and then later moved into the mortgage collections side and is still in that field today.   We lived in Virginia Beach for 5 years, had our son, Austin, there, and then moved to Chicago.  Austin was 10 months old when we moved.  We wanted to be closer to family now that we had a child so that was the reason for the move.  Chris was able to transfer with his company so it worked out well.  We got to Chicago (suburbs) and hated it.  We lived there for 10 months and moved again.  This time it was Indianapolis, IN.  We were still close to family (within 2 hours) so that was nice and we liked Indianapolis a lot better than Chicago…but it was Indiana.  Boring and ugly.  But I ended up liking it there ok and we bought our first house and had our second child, Alexia, after living there for 2 years.  Then, Chris lost his job when his company was bought and that’s how we ended up in Texas.  He had a friend who was in Texas that he used to work with and so he ended up getting a job through that guy and we moved once again.  Alexia was 5 months old and Austin was 4 years old at the time of that move.  We moved to Flower Mound, Tx, (about 20 minutes north of Dallas) July 3^, 2000, and have been here ever since.

I have really liked living in Texas for the past 13 years.  I like the warm weather and don’t miss the harsher winters but it’s not a very pretty place.  We don’t have any fall foliage at all.  It’s just green and then it’s brown and bare.  There is no in between.   We don’t have oceans or mountains and really don’t even have much to speak of for lakes.   But it’s still a nice place to live.  I have made some great friends here and my town is a nice safe place to raise a family.

So life was going pretty good.  I had no big complaints.  Then January 1, 2013, my husband told me out of the blue that he wanted a divorce.  Our marriage hadn’t been perfect but whose marriage is?  We had discussed some problems in our marriage before but none of those discussions ever involved the idea that a divorce was being considered or even a passing thought.  I never thought of it as being a possibility.  Chris was my best friend.  We did everything together.  Our interests weren’t always the same but we had enough common interests to have fun together often and we chose to spend our time with each other much more often than outside friends.  So when he said he wanted a divorce, I was shocked to say the least.  My heart was pounding fast, my stomach in knots and my head spinning.  I had no idea where this came from and I literally thought that my husband must have lost his mind.  He needed help.  He needed to see a doctor.  My mom and I even discussed what medicine he might be taking and how maybe that was affecting him mentally.  It just didn’t make sense.  He said we weren’t compatible.  What?  After 23 years together, we were suddenly not compatible?  What does that even mean?  Well, long story short, he wasn’t backing down.  He didn’t want to go to counseling and his mind was made up.  He had the papers drawn up 3 days later.  There was no time to discuss, no time to adjust.  It was happening.  So I rode that awful rollercoaster for the next 8 months until the divorce was final on August 29, 2013.  I will write more about the divorce another time but for now, I will just say that although it wasn’t what I wanted at the time, it has turned out to be one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given.  There have been so many blessings that have come from it and through it that I wouldn’t change any of it now.   As my friend, Tom Ryan, always says, “I am right where I am suppose to be.”  And I really believe that.

So now I live in a little rental house, still in Flower Mound, Tx with my two kids who are now teenagers, 17 and 13 years old and my two miniature schnauzers, Ciara and Maui.  I love my little house.  It has a great backyard full of trees and is right next to the walking trail that is very pretty to walk along.  It feels much more private than my last house and I like that.  My work friends bought me a hammock for a house warming gift after hearing me talk about wanting one and it has been the best gift.  I am in it nearly every day.  As a matter of fact, I’m in it right now.  It is so relaxing and it is located at the back of my yard so it feels private even when the kids are home.  It’s a very nice getaway after a long day at work.

Speaking of work, I haven’t told you what I do.  I am a computer technician for the local school district.  I am primarily assigned to two campuses and so it is my job to be sure all the technology is properly working on those two campuses.  But while those are my primary campuses, I can be pulled to help any other campus in the district and during the summer we work in groups and are all over the place setting things up for the next school year.  Previously, I have been an assistant branch manager at different banks in the various places we’ve lived and after that I had operated my own home daycare business for 7 years.

So, that’s a little bit, or a lot, about me.  Now that the introductions are done, I look forward to writing about all my adventures and sharing my thoughts.  Stay tuned.