Two Posts in Less than Two Weeks

Can it be possible?

Do I REALLY have something to say?

Truthfully....... no, not really. Things are .....well......things. I managed to get over to my new apartment complex and turn in my deposits (one for the apartment itself and one for the cat). I'm --not so secretly-- friggin' excited as hell that I'll finally have my own place. I think that Rich and I are at "that place" where we just can't stand looking at each other anymore and that we're ready to move on.

.....or maybe that's just me?

OK, this past Saturday he had mentioned that he needed to go to one of the local outdoor malls. Apparently he signed himself and his daughter up for Verizon cell service and his employer has some kind of contract with Verizon that gives a discount for their employees. He has just needed to bring in a paystub to prove that he works for Goodwill Industries. His car was in the shop over the weekend (another long story) and he was planning on biking the 8 miles to the mall. No big deal. It's #1-healthy, and #2-environmentally friendly.

So Saturday dawns and the weather is looking pretty crappy. He waited until around 10:30am before he got ready to head out, and the clouds were looking a little dark. I told him that I needed to go to the bank and that since my bank has a location over in Perrysburg I could take him to the mall, drop him off, go to the bank, run a quick errand, then pick him up. UNLESS HE WAS GOING TO THE MALL TO SHOP OR HAVE LUNCH WITH SOMEONE and didn't know when he would need his return trip.

He looked me in the eye and said, "No thank you, I'm really looking forward to the bike ride."

Fine. So I went to the closer bank location, ran one of my errands for the day then came back home. The clouds had opened and it was storming like hell. When I got into the apartment, Spencer mentioned that she hoped that her dad was OK and I told her that (if she wanted) she could call him and that if he needed a ride home I'd go to get him. She called him and he said that he WAS MEETING A FRIEND FOR LUNCH and would be home later.

She got ready for her day (working at Subway) and left. I --meanwhile-- was pissed. WTF?!?! Did I not phrase my original question in English? How the hell difficult is it to tell the friggin truth?!?

I wasn't going to waste my day waiting for his sorry ass to come home, so I left him a scathing note. Basically it said that I was tired of him lying to me, omitting the truth to me, and his general passive-aggressive attitude (his biggest pet peeve is people acting passive aggressively -by the way). I told him that I 'get' that he doesn't want to keep hurting me (since he's said that he's actively DATING his new girlfriend and not going to stop until we're divorced --or even until we're in seperate apartments) but I told him that it hurts MORE that he can't be honest. ((And it's not the first time we've had THAT conversation!))

I left the note where he could find it and left for the day. I didn't get home Saturday night until around 11pm. He was in his bedroom, reading/avoiding me.

He hasn't said ANYTHING to me about it. He hasn't apologized and I don't expect that he ever will. --I guess that it's against the Bastard Code of Ethics.

He DID say (on Monday) that he wanted to go to a local retreat center for Thursday night and Friday night this week. He said that he felt that he needed to get away and think about things.

I don't know what this means. Maybe he's coming up with more new and improved ways to knife me in the back emotionally?

Thank God that this is the last month I have to live with him!

In other news, I talked with a lawyer last Thursday. As I've never divorced before I don't quite know the steps involved and am not stupid enough to blindly trust the information given by the guy that Rich talked to. After talking with her, I feel better about the process and I'm pretty confident that I'm not going to get screwed over. I'm also not sure that I want to sign off on my rights and just use Rich's guy.

OK--so about a month ago, Rich says, "Hey, we have the $800 for the retainer for the lawyer, let me call him and get the dissolution started."

I said, "Whoa. Wait a minute. I checked this out online and I was under the impression that we need to have two seperate residences before we do the dissolution of marriage." --Obviously since I'm spiritually dead, I'm probably just stupid and making things up as well, so Rich had to call up his guy the next day and check.

His guy said that we can stay together throughout the entire process. No problem!

I told Rich that regardless of what his guy was telling him, I wanted my own place before we hired anyone. It ticked Rich off (as his tunnel-vision on what he wants is blinding him to EVERYTHING and EVERYONE around him) but he said that he'd wait then.

So I asked this other lawyer-chickie about the seperate residences thing. Mainly just to verify that it's OK to live together while we legally seperate.

SHE said that for the dissolution process, each party MUST RESIDE AT SEPERATE ADDRESSES. For a full-fault-finding divorce, you can still live together, but as the dissolution is stating that "The marriage is over, we have divided our possessions, incomes, liabilities, AND we have seperate households" --you may NOT reside together and that certainly she'd be a little suspect of any lawyer who told us anything different.

So I told Rich what lawyer-chickie had said and how she had described the process. Her retainer is $1000 and $200/hour past that. She said that as we seemed to have everything divided and didn't have any joint property/financial obligations together (Rich has contacted the IRS and everything is under his name now) she didn't see how we'd go over the retainer-time by more than an hour or two at the most.

So Rich gets all bent out of shape by the retainer cost being "so high". Dude. We have friggin' $800 already. It's another $200. AND THIS CHICK ISN'T GIVING US BAD LEGAL ADVICE!! LET ALONE--let me explain how we've amassed this $800: I took our wedding rings and a couple of other pieces of MY old silver jewelry to a gold liquidator and got $200; I called a salvage yard and sold the old GrandAm for $200 scrap metal. Richard friggin called his mommy and asked for the other $400. Who the hell's idea was this divorce?!?! --AND WHO THE HELL IS DOING ALL OF THE GODDAMNED WORK!!!! --Don't even get me started on why the hell if HE wants out am I the one moving?!

He friggin' sickens me anymore.

He's not the same person --let alone personality-- that he was when we met in 1994 and married in 1995.

I'm so ready to be done with him.