This weekend, I:
- Slept for 11 hours in one long, beatific row;
- Attended Kim's birthday party, where I listened to an Englishman's funny stories about pikeys, and pretty songs played on a very cool guitar;
- Rejoiced in Wee's successful installation of a fake log gas-fireplace thing. I used to resist the notion; I thought I'd miss being able to burn real wood. But I'll be damned if the pseudo-log-fire doesn't look and feel reasonably close to the real thing - it even has little pseudo-embers (made from fiberglass fluff) that glow orange and purple. And it never dies down or needs restoking or scooping out. While the pseudo-fire lacks the smoky pine smell of a real one, it also lacks the burned-down-candle-factory odor of the Duraflame logs to which we'd resorted last year because it gnawed at our very souls to pay $10.00 for a bundle of three damp chunks of firewood at Von's. In sum, the new fire solution rocks, and I will be spending a great deal of quality time with it this winter.
That's about it. Oh, Wee has some massively good news too, which we celebrated over steaks and champagne on Friday night. However, I'll let him bust out with it in his own blog if/when he's ready. =)
Last week, when I was getting into bed in my old room at the parents' house, I felt a big solid lump in the very middle of the bed under the fitted sheet. At first I was afraid it was something living, but when I poked at it, it was hard and perfectly oval. I pushed it to the edge of the mattress until it fell out onto the floor.
It was a bar of fancy soap.
Hmm.
Maybe Mom was testing for princesses, but just got a little fuzzy on the details?
The risk of coming up with a clever blog name is that some not-so-clever person might one day steal it and pass it off as his own. Naughty fratboy!
So let's say you take a fish oil capsule in the morning. About an hour later, you drink coffee with eggnog-flavored creamer in it. And then you burp. Really unique experience, that.
So it's 5:01 pm, and the only people left in the office are me and the 30-something temp Accounting guy who sits in the cubicle next to me. I can't leave until he leaves, because we like to pretend that this office is a secure facility, which means that only regular employees are authorized to set the alarm at end of the day (the regular employee in question is almost always me, since I'm the last to arrive), so people like temps and auditors have to be gone before I can close up shop.
I'm pretty sure the 30-something temp Accounting guy who sits in the cubicle next to me doesn't like me. Why? Well, during a recent lunch break I was on the phone with Wee, discussing high school reunions and the reasons why someone might possibly want to attend one, and I remarked that some people only go in order to see how the state of their former classmates has declined in the intervening decades, "... you know, like who went BALD!" I said this loudly enough to be clearly heard over the cubicle wall. Evn as as the words flew out of my mouth, it occured to me that the 30-something temp Accounting guy, who was at that very second sitting in the cubicle next to me (as he is wont to do), happens to sport a lovely shiny pleasure-dome of a scalp... which, one would assume, probably was a verdant field of follicles back on that day when he and his schoolmates sat out on the football field in their thin polyester gowns and square cardboard beanies sweltering in the early-summer sun and gritting their teeth through a heartrendingly poor marching band rendition of "Land of Hope and Glory". Surely he heard me, and probably he was offended, and likely he concluded that I'm not a nice person. Hard to dispute his logic, if so.
So this bit of history makes it very difficult for me to approach the temp Accounting guy who sits in the cubicle next to me and ask him if he would please leave so that I can do the same. I haven't even looked the 30-t.t.A.g.w.s.i.t.c.n.t.m. in the eye since making my snide remark (which, after all, could just as easily been, "...to see who gained 40 pounds since they graduated", an alternative that, while equally mean, would have at least been a slam against my own ample ass, with the kicker of being a condition which, unlike male pattern baldness, is correctible if one isn't lazy, which I sort of am), so there's no way I'm going to initiate a conversation with him now, while we're alone. It's awkward enough just sitting here, in silence, clicking keys and pretending we don't hear every single little sound the other one makes.
Therefore, I am stuck working (that is to say, "working") overtime when I would really just like to go home, put on some jammy pants, tuck into a bottle of wine and cast away the pall of having to be back in this stress-chamber of an office after a week and a half off. While having been vacation-like neither in their intent nor implementation (I took a leave of absence in order to spend way too many hours in a Southern Oregon hospital while my dad went through heart bypass surgery), those 9 days were still good times compared to being where I am now, which is here, at my desk, trapped.
Ah-hah! Proof of my theory vis-a-vis the inferred animosity... I just sneezed, like, three times, and there was nary a "bless you", nor even a "gesundheit", issued from across the cubicle wall. Just cold, baleful silence. All I hear from him is the click of a mouse button. Dude isn't even working; he's cruising the Internet. I know it. Can't he do that at home? Dammit.
I suppose I could be catching up on my Price Analysis, sending out some RFQ's, researching some thorny order discrepancies... But I'm too vexed and tired to do anything useful. Dude cruises into work at noon after a morning at the zoo with his kids, and he expects me to hang out here all evening while he pretends to earn his consulting money? I'm guessing he's making about $60 an hour to surf the Web right now. Adding insult to injury, he's a former Qualcommer who exercised sufficient options so that he, to paraphrase his own overheard remark, "doesn't really need to work, just takes the odd consulting job to stay busy".
Just how am I supposed to adhere to a disciplined and healthy lifestyle in my off-hours, when all these small daily torments compel me to seek the sweet compensations of debauchery? It's more than a girl should have to take.
Update, 45 minutes later: OK, so he said, "Thanks for staying late" as he just left. Which was nice. Which probably makes me an even bigger bitch for being mean about his lateness. It's so hard to be a gangsta when you have an over-developed sense of guilt. At any rate... tally-ho, to home and liver abuse!