Because I left my knife at home, and because I require my sandwich to be cut into triangles before consumption, I just cut my sandwich in half using my office scissors.
+3 pts. for craftiness.
+3 pts. cause they are actually my scissors, which I brought here from the house.
-42 pts. for behaving like a 5 year old at work.
+36 pts. because nobody saw me do it.
Mmm. Triangles.
*edit: ALRIGHT. FINE. -1 million points cause I cut off my crust, too.
I woke up this morning with not one, but 5 sores on the inside of my mouth. Usually when I have a combination of stress+period, I get a sore inside my mouth, or swollen gums. I’ve come to embrace the fact that I have sensitive skin that responds to stress and hormone levels. FINE. But FIVE!? I suppose that’s one for every test I have left in Summer 1. Miserable. I think my gums are way more stressed out than I am. I’m starting to feel a little relief from the pressure–mostly because I understood the concepts we learned in statistics yesterday. (Calm before the storm, much?) It’s hard to even describe the weight I feel when I sit through two hours of class and don’t understand the concepts. So on the days when I do get what’s going on, and am able to follow along with the problems, get the right answers, etc.–Man, I’m lighter than Mary Poppins on those days.
Zack is officially done with a portion of his training as of yesterday. He got to sleep in until 6:30 with me this morning, and go to work at 8, like a normal human being. It was strange getting ready for work at the same time. I didn’t realize how accustomed I was to my alone-in-the-mornings routine (Katy has been staying with friends more often than not recently, so I really have been alone) of listening to loud music while dancing around the bathroom and blow drying my hair. I’m a regular Drew Barrymore in Mad Love at 7:15 in the morning. (Sometimes I even employ my round brush as a microphone whilst I am, how do you say, boogieing down.) Zack, on the other hand, is used to sneaking around like a burglar in his own home so he doesn’t wake me up. His quiet morning room-to-room transitions resulted in FREAKING ME OUT several times. I’d be mid-face moisturizing routine when I’d realize THERE IS A MAN BEHIND ME. I just about wet myself half-a-dozen times before he finally left at 7:30.
I ate my lunch-time edamame today with burning fear in my heart.
Last time I ate edamame, I was happily sucking the soy beans out of their salty pods when I realized that I had sucked a bean that been previously ingested by something else. A worm, to be exact, had gotten to it first and that worm had died a full-bellied death in the processing that followed. He was frozen inside the bean pod, packaged, and subsequently microwaved/steamed while remaining undetected inside an integral part of my diet. I did not eat the worm, I only rocketed its corpse into my mouth. That’s like saying, “I didn’t poop my pants, I just ran to the bathroom with clinched cheeks and almost had a disastrous accident at age 24.” Not the end of the world, but still pretty unacceptable.
All that being said, I feel it’s easily understood that rocketing the body of a lifeless worm into your mouth is a shocking and uncomfortable experience. Naturally, it has resulted in some wariness on my part. Having to cautiously pop out every single bean and inspect it pre-eating has zapped a lot of the fun out of the process of eating edamame. I can’t just go for it. I tried to eat them as I have in years passed, but as I stuck whole pods into my mouth and scraped out the salty soy goodness, all I could taste was imaginary slime. Even halfway through the serving, I was still grimacing with every bean, just knowing (despite the fact that I’ve eaten MILLIONS of soybeans in my day, and only ONE of them had a worm in it,) that the next pod was going to contain a fat, dead, green tinted, protein filled worm.
I would hate to think that I could let one little multi-legged creature get between me and my favorite tortilla chip replacement, but it’s looking that way. At least I can save (read: redirect) the $5 I normally dedicate to edamame at sushi restaurants to raw fish/alcoholic beverages. I’m not even tempted by wormy beans anymore.
I don’t know how it is possible that I am still having bathroom-related close calls at the age of 24.
I guess because I sit down the vast majority of the day, I don’t always feel (or at least consciously register) (ahem) the early stages of my urges. So I’m sitting here, it’s 4:00, and I realize, I have to go to the bathroom promptly. At the exact same moment I had that thought, a student entered the office that needed my help. Here I’ve been sitting for hours and hours on end, not working, with plenty of time to escape to the ladies, right? But I didn’t escape to the ladies room, and now I was faced with a tough decision. Either I needed to stave off my bodily processes for a few minutes and help this student, or I needed to look like a jerk-face work evasion artist by trying to shuck the one tiny bit of work that I’ve had to do all day long.
It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal. I realized I had to go potty, and I had to help one more student before I got to go. Simple, right? And it would have been simple, if I hadn’t apparently missed the first 2,236 signals that my body sent me. That signal that I finally caught was not a, “hey, sometime in the next hour, you might need to go make some room in here,” kind of a signal. It was a, “HEY IDIOT FACE. WE ARE DYING DOWN HERE. YOUR BRAIN HAS BEEN TOO INVOLVED IN THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN DISTRACTING YOU FROM YOUR NEEEEEDS. GO NOW.”
I was reliving scenes from Austin Powers on the way to the bathroom, with Fat Bastard taunting me the whole way, telling me that I wasn’t going to make it all the way down the hall. What kind of a working professional has these problems? I don’t have a backup plan in place for bathroom emergencies. Would I have had to go home? Go commando? Wash in the sink? Quit my job? Claim food poisoning? Get airlifted out because of the embarrassment? The answer is yes. There’s no way you can come back from a potty-in-your-pants-on-the-job experience. You just have to quit and hope that when your next job calls for a reference, they don’t ask too many questions.
I made it, by the way. Luckily the bathroom was empty, because I’d gone from a slow-and-steady jostle-free walk (fighting gravity), to a dead stall-sprint (racing gravity) to try to beat the clock. It totally worked, but it would have looked awfully funny to whomever was there, watching me hike my skirt while wearing heels and dodging flying stall doors.
While I have a whole laundry list of things that I could/should be posting about, I can’t focus on any of those. I’m too busy being enchanted by Ethan and all his animals at: http://myanimalblog.wordpress.com/
I just happened to stumble across his blog while looking for a picture of a fox, and I can’t stop enjoying it. Check out his about page before you get all judgey about his spelling issues. He’s 7. And he’s awesome. And he looks just like that cute little Jerry Maguire kid in my mind’s eye.
This morning as I pulled the almost empty gallon of milk out of the fridge, I instinctively checked the date. The date read 6/16/2008. I was surprised at that date, since it is at least a month away from today’s date. “That’s forever away,” I thought as I poured the milk into my cereal. Wondering exactly how far away ‘forever’ was, I checked my watch.
One coronary later, I realized that today is 6/13/08. How the hell did that happen?
Flashing back here to September of 2005. The foreshadowing here is phenomenal, and cracking me up.
He may have had his shorts hiked up like that to make Reno 911 jokes. Or he may just love short shorts. The world may never know.
The sticky note I found on my bathroom mirror this morning took me 40 minutes to deal with.
Sticky notes are my #1 method of communication with Sister Katy. It’s almost comical, considering how many options we have available to us. Rather than text messaging, emailing, calling or talking in person, we use sticky notes. We practically never see each other in our waking hours; Katy comes home well after Zack and I have turned in for the night, and I get up many hours before she would ever dream of dragging herself out of bed. The written word is almost necessary.
Anyhow, this morning’s sticky note asked for me to please give her directions to The Stonehenge of Texas. The Stonehenge of Texas is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a place in Hunt, Texas (read: 300 miles away from the DFW) where Mr. Al Shepperd thought it would be awesome to re-create Stonehenge in 60% height accuracy and 90% circumference accuracy just for kicks. Some years later, he threw in a couple of Easter Island Head statues and VOILA! Here you have one of the most fascinating road-side stops in Texas.
It also happens to be one of the most out-of-the way roadside stops in Texas. Unlike the caverns located on the I-35 corridor, or the Giant Rocking Chair at 20 and 183 in West Texas, these statues, though very impressive, are WAY OUT OF THE WAY.
So when Katy told me that she was going to take “a day-trip out to Stonehenge with her friend,” I had the most mom-ish reaction of all time. Instead of thinking, “WOAH! AWESOME! Those ARE cool and that WOULD be fun,” a fully-formed bulleted list popped up in my brain, listing all the reasons that going to see Stonehenge right now could be a questionable idea. Does she realize how much that would cost? How far away that is? Has she seen gas prices? Who is she wanting to go with? Have I met them? Would they take her car? How long had it been since her last oil change? What were her tires looking like? Was her cell phone charged? Surely they would take someone else’s car cause she doesn’t have a radio right now! Would she try to drive 600 miles in one day with headphones in? That’s ILLEGAL! She’ll need to leave in the morning so that she can see the statues in the daylight. I hope she went to bed early last night, because if she didn’t and she leaves early, she’ll be driving tired! I hope she doesn’t DIE! DEAD SISTERS ARE NOT VERY MUCH FUN!
I realize that I am prone to exaggeration, but I kid you not when I tell you that each and every one of these thoughts shot through my brain with rocket speed the moment I read her sticky note. It took me 20 minutes to whittle down my list of concerns to what I considered to be a “reasonable” number, and then 15 more minutes to edit those concerns into a “Ha, ha! I’m being concerned, but Look! So witty! Not even overbearing!” form so as not to receive the maximum number of possible eye-rolls per minute. (I think I set this family record when I was about 15. Somewhere around 60?)
Turns out that most of my motherly concerns weren’t yet necessary because even though she is planning on dumping over $100 worth of gas just to see some statues for 15 minutes (O, the freedom of youth! O, to not be locked into so many schedules! and O, why the heck isn’t she doing this on a long weekend when it could be part of a fun camping trip!?), she is planning on doing that on Thursday (maybe) and I have plenty of time to lecture her about road safety between here and there. Even if it does require a whole pad of sticky notes.
Photo used with permission from RoadsideAmerica.com
My neck hurts today. I keep trying to pop it, straining my head as far as it will turn. I’m looking like hoot owl here at my desk, trying to look at my own C4 without the help of mirrors, hoping that one moderately painful ‘thud’ will heal me of all this soreness.
One thud isn’t going to take away this soreness, though. This is more than the usual “slept in the same awkward position all night” pain. This is the pain caused by trying to step up an invisible step at 6:15 on a Sunday morning, and the crash and burn that resulted from my inability to do simple tasks such as ‘climb stairs’ or ‘stay upright while walking.’
I’m not even sure how it happened. I was taking Scout outside because she wakes me up on the weekends when she needs to go outside. (Read: when I wake her up on the weekdays, because she’s a scheduled creature, and she likes it that way.) I got her some food, put out some water, and in the blinding brightness of the morning, totally missed the back porch stoop. I didn’t fall all the way down–I caught myself with my hands, but not before I strained my neck in a totally weird way that most of the 60 year olds I work with could relate to. I remember thinking, “OOF!” as I was falling, and I remember pulling at my neck while I was walking up the stairs, thinking, “That might be sore later. Why am I so old?” I thought I had escaped the soreness because it didn’t give me any problems for the rest of the day.
This morning is not the same story. This morning, I am 85 and my neck is even older and I wish I had a little grocery cart to push around my book bag instead of having to carry it. Icing on the cake is that I compulsively cleaned the medicine cabinet this morning while I was getting ready for work, and I saw our extra bottles of Ibuprofen. I thought to myself that I should grab one of those bottles and keep it at work. I didn’t grab one of the bottles. I am a fool. A fool with neck pain and no Ibuprofen.
I have just done myself the grand disservice of finding a house that I want, in a neighborhood that I want to live in, in the price range that we will eventually be looking for. EVENTUALLY. As in NOT RIGHT NOW. As in can’t have it even though Sarah like. Sigh.
I wish that we did have the money to buy a house right now. (Right now is looking forward to November, by the way, when our lease is up on the current rent house with the monstrously cheap rent and disastrously high bills.) With the housing market in a nationwide slump, it’s a good time to buy. If you can get a loan, they have good interest rates, it’s a buyers market, blah, blah, blah. But no matter how slumpy the housing market is, 20% of a house is a lot of dollars, and all of our extra dollars right now are being saved for the extra dollars we will need next year when I’m in nursing school and we’re living off of only Zack’s dollars. The housing market (and the economy) really want us to buy a house right now. Unfortunately, my life plans do not coincide with those ideas. That’s the long way around why I should not be spending ANY of my minutes surfing around realtors.com. Not surfing realtors.com, however, seems to be a lesson that I can’t learn.
I can’t learn that lesson because about once a month, I think to myself that if I have to blow dry my hair in this horrible yellow and blue bathroom one more time, I’m going to poke my own eyeballs out. Unless the paint colors take on a life of their own and jump of the walls and pluck out my eyeballs for me. These colors are REALLY bright. Do really bright colors sometimes become eye plucking monsters? Cause if that was the case, there’s a chance I could talk Zack into painting it a nice neutral stone color. That’s the only chance I’ve got, though, which is the same percentage as NOT A CHANCE IN HELL.
