No it is no test. The only thing I can figure is that it must be something like PTSD. I don't really have any intention of saying those things - they just come out before I know I have said it. It is very nearly an out-of-body experience.

I know it is not a test because I would be perfectly happy if she agreed and said we should get a divorce. Right now I think she is the only one of us who is really interested in keeping the M together. I stay because of inertia and for the DDs.

This is the first time she has ever openly discussed her A has anything but an "error". I told her that her frankness had really helped me. Something needs to change. We can't stay like this.

Definitely something needs to change Pio. I recommend recovery myself.

If cinderella has ADD, do you think we could insult her and she would forget about it before she had time to reply? i think I'll try. Here goes:

Cinderella,

2much wears army boots!

Wait...that didn't come out right.

Pio, you are sabotaging your marriage.

I don't know why you're doing it. Do you?

On a lighter note, if Todd "reposes" he would have to be wearing a toga, or loafers. (as in "light in the"). <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Cinderella...I am impressed...I see that you are putting your energies into being very very very 'creative'...I, for one, am all for that! (LOL)

Hi Pio,

Thanks for sharing about you and G...

I see that you are in a lot of pain, Pio...I am so sorry!

I hear you repeating to G. that you want a D. Do you really want a D? ...and if it's what you really want, why are you not initiating the procedures? ...and if not, looks to me that you're putting a lot of 'negative' energy in the air if it's not what you really want!

...sounds like you have built up, and are continuing to build, a lot of resentment....were you not also considering IC?



...why not check around to see if there is a good M counsellor to consider to help the two of you out with it?

...the dance you are choosing to dance looks to me to be very damaging all around.

((((((((((((PIO))))))))))))))

Gemela had her first IC today. I don't know if any recommendations came from that. We can talk tonight and see what the IC suggests. For me, getting a D is more complicated than running down to the court house and filing.

Like I told gemela, all I want is to stop hurting - whatever the path. She seems to think we can accomplish that together. I am ambivalent. I wish I could be more positive but I don't trust gemela or her motives. She says she wants the M but keep in mind this is coming from a woman who swore she wasn't having an A when she was. She has no credibility so I am sorry but I just don't trust her. I wish I could find a way that I could trust her. How do I do that?

Larousse??? What's up??

...just want you to know...without being specific...that my WS also works in the 'artistic and creative' world.... and that many could easily be justified in telling me, as well, the 'I told you so!'....

All choices involve a risk.....what's important to know...is when to let go!

(((((((LAROUSSE))))))))))

Good morning all!

No recommendations about a wood stove? I thought that would be something the guys might like to discuss. Beats the he!! out of electrical current talk. ZZZZ

Hi Todd, How are you? I'm glad to see you're back. I too noticed your absence & thought perhaps your WW was acting up again & you were involved with that. Gald to see that's not the case now that you know your health is OK.

How nice you & your son spend a lot of time together. One of the things that makes me saddest about my D is the fact ex is a part time dad & that it's OK with him. I hope that doesn't strain his relationship with the boys.

I almost didn't read your description of marginal utility based solely on the fact you were talking about marginal utility. Then I glanced through to see a little boy with an ice cream & I had to read it. I do have a special place in my heart for boys.

Thank you for pointing out the Libertarian view is really the only one that makes sense. Suppossed to have the little yellow guy with his tongue stuck out pictured here. humph (((Todd)))

Kiwi, I don't think Todd is light in the...

I don't know Pio...your anger is certainly justified...I just don't know that it's constructive.

No one knows if you'll be able to trust G again. I guess that's something all the other BS who have recovered their marriages will have to weigh in on. Perhaps the complete, blind trust you once had is gone for good.

I ask myself the question if ex & I stayed together would I have been able to trust him completely. I don't know the answer to that. I only know I'd want to with all my heart.

Hi Beth,

Good for you in showing your H you're serious about wanting him out. That took a lot of strength.

Thanks for asking about my work. I have gathered some photos of my work on the following link. To view all the photos it seems to work better if you click on thw words under the picture rather than the picture. Please excuse the big blue bowl, I've come to hate that one.

I do have a web site but it's not up to date. Because it doesn't generate income I ignore it. Bad attitude I know but I only have so much time & messing with my web site is waaay down on the list.

http://www.msnusers.com/namspotteryphotos

uhmm....I am going to sound like a broken record, Pio, but why not consider getting some help?



Would you by any chance be trying to make life miserable enough so that she will?

Agree, 100%.



...even so...the way things are going...you may have to consider it.


She doesn't have a chance without you helping her out!


I am no expert..don't think trust comes back so easily...you have to take one day at a time and have a plan...you're thinking too far ahead, I think...

I wonder if you are hurting too much to be able to think straight right now....

...please pretty please with a whole of sugar on it...consider zzz...arghhhh.....g e t t i n g ...(scratch) %&@! SoMe....H E..L....P (just in case my special effects was lost on you guys...it's supposed to be a 'broken' record!)

All right, the weekend went pretty good. I decided late last week that I am going to put my top EN's on a shelf in storage and I'm not going to think about them in the context of my wife meeting them. This helped me to cancel some negative thoughts and disperse some resentments. I feel lighter. My desire for having my ENs met (SF/affection, admiration) has not waned. It is unreasonable to have an expectation that the wife will meet them now.

Cinderella,

There are some pretty good boxed wines now. The Black Box brand is supposed to be pretty good and they stock several varietals.

2regret,

There is a lot of variance in Merlot. Some of the most expensive and highly reviewed Merlots are what I would term as pretty austere in taste. I like something a bit more robust. The best Merlot I've tasted to date and still have a bottle or two of is Conn Creek. When I restarted my interest in wine, I liked Concha Y Tor Explorador, which can be found most anywhere for about $7.00 per bottle retail. I still purchase this and enjoy it. I also like the Bogle Merlot, which can be had for just under $10.00 per bottle.

Pio,

I'll give you a condensed history and will then accept your questions for clarification or amplification.

When I started here in 1978, I mainly did deliveries of packages and 9-track tapes. I worked some odd hours, something like 18:00-02:00. I did this a short period of time and then worked in the mailroom. This involved bursting and shipping of 2-up postcard electric bills produced by large line printers. At that point in time, we have Sperry-Univac mainframes, the 90/60 series when I started there. These computers were interesting in the fact that the used IBM S/70 assembler code, so one could take an assembler class (there was only one assembler class offered at that time and only for IBM assembler) and use it on a Sperry-Univac. At that point, we used a lot of punched-cards and 9-track tapes, and some of the jobs ran tape-to-tape, i.e. one tape was input and one tape was output. There were many removable disk-drives of several platters per drive. We had 10,000 9-tracks tapes, so the management of them was always an issue.

After 1.5 years, I became a computer operator. At that point, I recall that we upgraded to a 90/70 with more "core" memory (the real core memory). We later added a second 90/70. At that point, everything was run in a batch mode. Our customers would send us tapes or we could generate tapes via a modem arrangement. The customers would send in daily transactions and we would post them for them. We would run bills once a month as well as delinquent notices once a month. There were a lot of printed reports because there was no on-line access at all.

We used to have problems reading the tapes and you could flip the head-cover open and press your fingers on the underside of the moving tape to force the tape to contact the heads better. The systems had CRT consoles and the consoles would lock up. The console keyboards thumb-screwed onto the console, so we would remove them and clean the contact strips with a pink pencil eraser. This would usually restore the consoles.

In order to power up or power down these machines, there were many discrete steps of powering individual pieces, turning switches off, etc. To boot them, there was a series of rocker switches on the CPU that you could use to enter the boot address, etc. We ran disk-to-disk backups every night, which required rebooting the computer to a special backup mode, setting up the disk-drives, and then waiting the 3-hours in took to run the backups.

We gradually built a satellite-based (VSAT, KU-band) online system where our customers had synchronous terminal clusters that they used at their premise that communicated via satellite back to our facility. This was a major advance and used the 90/80 platform.

We gradually needed more capacity and elected to stay with Sperry-Univac (Unisys) and went with their 1100-series mainframe. This was an odd machine that was water-cooled, use a 36-bit word length, and used a completely different operating system than the previous 90-series. This amounted to a huge conversion effort. We stayed with this series of computers for a while replacing them occasionally, until the last one was a 2200 that was no longer water-cooled and about 1/4 the size of the original 1100.

We then decided that we would offload our centralized processing unto the customer premise. We did a big RFP and ended up going with DEC at the introduction of their VAX-series. We still have a few of these scattered about. Each customer had their own VAX and they could have various levels of involvement with it, including printing their bills at their premise.

The came the advent of PCs where we finally replaced all of the terminals that we used for product development, etc., with PCs. Then our customers wanted PC integrated into their VAX environment.

The more recently, we rewrote our entire user interface in Java, which runs on Linux servers using Progress and Oracle.

So, the evolution started with really big boxes and now everything that we sell is basically PC-sized.

At that time, I used assembler, COBOL, C, some little languages, and the various flavors of JCL per platform.

About 8 years ago, we started using large-scale laser printers to produce bills, notices, etc. in black and one highlight color. We started with one customer. We now have 800 or so jobs that produce about 5-million pieces in the mail per month. We offer a complete solution where the customer's files is automatically sent to use, we generate the print-file, postal certify and sort it, print it, insert it, and then mail it. This involves a lot of processes, some manual, and some computer.

Our customers are rural electric cooperative throughout the US. These coops mainly distribute electricity, only a few generate it. They are setup as not-for-profit membership organizations. We are mainly a software house; we produce the software for their complete operations. The department I work in started as just a side-line but has grown considerably.

I don' program as much as I used and when I do, it is mostly in Perl, which works well for the tasks at hand. I work a lot with the third-party application that takes input data-files and outputs formatted print streams. I am also the system administrator for several of the productions servers as well as for the actual laser printers themselves.

We put blank paper in the printers and they output a complete billing statement with a perforated stub, etc. Some statements produce multiple pages. Although our primary market is electric coops, we also service telephone coops and small telephone companies. I do quite bit of work with the telecom customers.

Let me know what else.

I totally agree about blind trust being gone.

It's a process Pio. My wife built trust. In the first week she came home, OM contacted her a few times - She told me immediately. She also told OM she was telling me. That builds trust. She knows I can check her email, knows I do check her phone from time to time.

A few months ago, she was in a shop and OM walked in. She ran as far away as she could get. He pursued her. She called me straight away.

My wife has prooved I can trust her and this trust is not blind it is based on her actions.

Trust is earned Pio. For Gemela that would be her being accountable for her whereabouts, you being able to check her email, phone records. It would also be her being totally and completely honest and answering all questions about her affair - without hedging or saying why do you want to know that.......

But you have to be willing to let her back into your life.

Gemela ended up in a big problem yesterday. A few weeks ago a not-so-close Latina friend asked her to participate in a brunch for an American Womens' Group function here. She would have to wear a traditional Mexican outfit. I forget the name but larousse would know (charro?). Gemela said she could not do it because she had a doctor's appt that day (a lie). Friend calls back a few days ago and says she found the suit. Gemela still says no. Friend calls yesterday and asks gemela to put together a powerpoint presentation on Mexico (turns out the Latinas are only going to be the entertainment for the AWG brunch. It is also off camp which I'm not happy about. She repeats she has a doctor's appt. Friend says call and change the time. Gemela says it is with a specialist so not that simple. Friend insists and counters gemela at every turn. Says she needs gemela to help her or she has to change the menu (the hotel is providing the food - what menu?) from Mexican. Gemela tells her it is not Mexican food anyway - it is Tex-Mex which is no where near the same thing and the AWG wouldn't know the difference. Now gemela and friend are not speaking and friend is furious.

Now what I told gemela is that if she had told the truth from the very beginning (i.e she simply didn't want to go), she and friend would be getting along fine right now. The fact that she prefers to lie always gets her in to more trouble and then she has to feed lie after lie. For us to recover our M, we both have to be radically honest regardles of how painful that might be and she needs to be honest with her friends. What she did with the friend is so typical of her. She has always done this and it nearly always turns out badly and I won't support her in her lies any more.

We actually had a very good talk last night - even after the fiasco of an evening. DD1 went to art class yesterday and then she and gemela came to meet me at the soccer field (I was there because soccer starts before art is over). DD1 was in a snit the entire practice because there is another girl who is really good and was getting the better of DD1 at every turn. We get in the car to go home abd I see a drawing of a woman with REALLY BIG LIPS. I don't realize it is a self portrait. I made the comment that it looks like Julia Roberts. Gemela says it is more like Melanie Griffith. I counter with Meg Ryan with implants. We did this quietly but DD1 heard some of it. Anyway most of the rest of the evening was a disaster. I swear artists are soooo temperamental. I learned a lesson though.

Hi BigK,

As we say in my part of the country, you are good people. Excellent excellent advice to Pio. I hope he has his ears on.......

Glad you had a good talk. Honesty is a habit Gemela needs to learn - sounds like lying is her first instinct. That can change.

Thanks Todd.

Pio,
I’ve kept off the site for some time now. Been busy and just concentrating on my life and family. I have looked in every now and then and was extremely happy when I read Todd’s positive news about his tumor and that you and G seemed to be getting along.

It’s a good thing there is a lot of distance between us. After reading your latest posts I feel inclined to whacking you on the head! It sure sounds as if you aren’t using it too much these days anyway! She is finally doing what you wanted! And how do you react?

Accepting that a divorce is a possible outcome is OK. Even wanting a divorce is OK. Having a divorce is fine too if that’s what you really want. But using D as a threat to keep you and your W in some sort of emotional bondage! That is a big no-no.

Look – you are an engineer. Means you don’t handle emotions well but should also mean you are ultra-logical. If you really 100% wanted a divorce then what is stopping you? For a divorce to go through it only needs one party to file. Basically you could file without telling G. You certainly don’t need her permission. You probably also know that most likely you will have to share custody. You will very likely get prime and G visitation rights. Don’t even DARE try to use the “don’t want to tear the mother from the children” excuse. Because that is all it is: an excuse.

Pio – the reason you have not filed is because you don’t want a divorce. You want control.

I guess you are afraid of opening up because opening up for healing also means opening up for another fall. Therefore you pull things out of your hat to keep at a constant level of pain because that pain feels “safe”. You are used to it. It’s one more emotional plateau you are on and now you are not willing to move off it.

Do not allow yourself the mental flagellation of dwelling on the affair, details, divorce and all the negative aspects. Yes – they need to be addressed for true reconciliation to take place but not every day! You really have to make a conscious decision and effort to push these thoughts out of your mind. Perhaps by telling G that at some time in the near future you will need these answers. One suggestion is to try to limit talk about the affair and its aftermath to certain times or dates.

You say you want to be happy…. Well SURPRISE! Gemelia will not make you happy. She might make you feel joy at some point but you alone can make yourself happy. I think G has enough to work on to not have to cajole you into a good mood.

Pio – I say this as a friend. You really need to get professional help. The stress you are in and the pain… The odds are really stacked against you. Is the IC G is going to the same one you went to some months ago?

Pio. I am sorry you are hurting. I think us, BSs, hold so strong through Plan A, that when R appears we just want to go back to Discovery Day and scream to WS: GET OUT OF MY LIFE YOU CHEATER!!!
But there was a reason we decided to follow Plan A. To get M back. Because pain of A will not disappear with D.
You need to let G make it up for you. You need to let her deposit in your love bank, whatever you need. Tell her! And sure, find a safe place to talk about A. Not all the time, and not when you are having a good moment with G.
That happens to me a lot. Good moment brings thoughts of him behaving the same with OW.
Find MC and maybe make it a safe haven to talk about anything/ everything.
Pio, you helped me so much with your advice. Please use everything to help yourself and do not allow destruction take control.
You told me the D is easier than R. You know it is hard. But the worst is over. I really think it is.
((((PIO)))))))))))))
What happens if you cyberhug one side more than another?

I think you fall over Estrela

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cyberhugs lost in space