Have I mentioned that we bought a house?

what's up chicken butts? 

This shit is harder than I remember and I think that's pretty obvious based on what I resorted to for an opening sentence for my first post since March.  My apologies.  I haven't written much more than work related emails and drippy Facebook posts for several months.

I'll cut to the chase and dive right into a numbered list of things that are up my chicken butt:

1.  We bought a house. 

It's your standard Texas-style stone and brick, brown suburban house.  Some might call it cookie-cutter, and I might tell them to go fuck themselves because I've been living out of goddamn boxes for the past 3 years and that's a tiring way to live after awhile.

The house is entirely bigger than anything we'd ever need.  We feel a bit silly since it's just the two of us and a cat, but we chose this particular model with my mother in law in mind, because there are 2 master suites on the first floor, so she could come stay with us for extended visits and never have to climb any stairs.  I love my mother in law.

2.  The woman who sold us this house is a leathery piece of shit and I hope that I never have to communicate with her again after we close or as long as I live, whichever comes first.

She looks about 800 years old, smokes electric cigarettes in the model home where her office is, and seems to think nobody will notice the smell.  She has a tall, teased out Ladybird Johnson style hairdo and wears neon colored suits and turquoise jewelry.  These things are all fine.  In fact when I first met her I thought she was a hoot.  Get a load of this old broad!

You go 800 year old lady!  Go ahead and smoke your electric cigs in public.  Go ahead, be leathery and have cotton candy on your head and call it hair.  What do I care? 

Good for you for somehow figuring out how to embalm yourself while still alive by using a combination of Aquanet, nicotine and Hawaiian Tropic spf 8.  Way to go Leatherybird Johnson.

But don't lie to me through your dentures and get my hopes all up about what the builder can and can't do for us, you sack of shit.  And that is all I have to say about that.

3.  I'm still working from home and haven't lost my fucking mind completely. 

Not completely, although it is quite maddening from time to time. 

The longer I do it the more clear it has become that although the policies at my company are very open to work from home situations and remote employees like myself, the policies and technology used by the IT department (which is also my department btw) to support us... is ummm not designed to support us at all. 

My laptop died recently and it took 1 full week for them to figure out what to do about it.  I had to ship it to them.  Bullshit.  Then I had to wait another full week after I shipped it for them to ship it back to me.  Also bullshit.  They wouldn't ship it directly to my home, because the policy says it has to be shipped a corporate recognized branch office.  Bullshit.  Bullshit.  Bullshit.

So I ended up going half the month not being able to accomplish much of anything.  I could work remotely using (a remote system of logging in that rhymes with) Bitfrix from my home computer, but the connections are so slow and sketchy that the best outcome of this story is that I didn't slit my wrists when it took me an over hour and half to send out an email with an attachment. 

I didn't kill myself, but I cried a lot.  Like, a LOT.  As in, it's been several weeks and my face is still a bit blotchy.

It's also a bummer as a remote employee to constantly get sent group invitations to lunch meetings, potlucks and having to respond to meeting invitations by asking for a call-in number.

4.  Did I mention that we bought a house?  We finally bought a fucking house!!!  Motherfuckin' A, man!!  I don't have to feel terrible for hating my upstairs neighbors and their goddamn barking dogs and anvil footed children who seemingly do nothing but run back and forth across my ceiling all night and wake up screaming bloody murder every morning and carry on all day running around and screaming and tossing toys and shit off the balcony.  Oh dear Llyod in heaven how I loathe them.

5.  I'm stressed out because we bought a house.  We're moving again for the 6th time in 11 years.  We still have that horrid house in Michigan that is still under water.  We had a tenant, but had to evict him because he was regularly 4 months behind on the rent.  Now the property management company has told us that no one will lease it out because the kitchen needs remodeled.  So we're in the process of remodeling a kitchen long distance. IT'S ALL TOO MUCH TO TAKE!!!!!

6.  I'm a bit consumed with the new house.

Anyhoo... that's it.  This is all I can manage for now.

I'm out of practice wrapping up blog posts into tidy packages with bows and ribbons like I used to do.  Besides, where the fuck is my scotch tape?  I can't find anything around here so I sure as hell can't find any ribbon.  Get out out of here.  This post is over.

(I love you.)

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B

Updates, Apologies, Corrections, and a Confession, In No Particular Order

What a morning. Drama-O-Rama.

I would like to take a moment to thank you for all of your kind words and disturbing, yet somehow uplifting, suggestions for violence to be wielded upon the dastardly villains who didn't see fit to hire me. You have all helped me cope with my most recent bummer. Also, as indicated in the title I want inform you of updates, corrections, apologies and a confession having to do with events in my life that have occurred in the past 24 hours or so.

8:25am - The Correction
When I arrived at the office this morning, tear swollen and red rimmed from last night's crying jag, I found a new appointment in my schedule for a short meeting with the co-managers who had interviewed me for the job I wanted and did not get.

The appointment was titled "Hiring Decision" and was set to occur in 20 minutes. I barely had time to remove my snow boots and the furrow from my brow, get coffee or practice thinking about the whole situation without crying.

8:45am - Apology #1
They were shocked to discover that I already knew I didn't get the job because, as it turns out, HR sent me the robo-rejection by mistake and they had intended all along to let me down in person. They were very sorry for the robo-rejection.

9:15am - The Confession
As the meeting was wrapping up we were all smiles and sunshine. Then one of the co-managers insisted on giving me a hug. Under normal circumstances this would have been fine. I'm all about the hugging. I like hugs for the most part and under the right circumstances I find them perfectly acceptable at work and I think that our meeting totally qualified as the right circumstances.

However.

Due to serious downward mood swing caused by the previous evenings robo-rejection, I didn't pay as close attention to my wardrobe selection this morning as I might normally. I chose a pair of slightly too loose corduroy pants paired with a slightly too short sweater, thus causing a theater curtain sized portion of my flabby be-stretch-marked midsection to be exposed to daylight during the hug. I have since learned that stretch marks have nerve endings that are extremely sensitive to air and daylight because I swear to god I felt physical pain.

9:30 am - You're Killing Me
I had just started to recover from meeting and the whole exposed midsection incident and get back to work when I looked up and saw the sweet, kindly co-worker I bitched about yesterday. The one who keeps asking me if I've heard anything about the job. She had that look on her face. I knew what was coming so I cut her off at the pass. People, I didn't even take off my headphones or give her enough time to speak. I just looked her square in the eye and sharply said, "No!" As if I was correcting a bad dog.

And then I pointed down the hall as if to say keep walking.

9:50 am - Apology #2
I received a phone call from HR with a formal apology. I was in no mood to answer the phone and accept the apology graciously or in person, so I let the pathetic HR dude leave a grovelling voice mail. Also this way I get to listen to it over and over again and that can be very satisfying. That's right HR dude. Bow and cower in my presence.

10:15 am - Unfucking Believable
I checked my gmail only to discover that I had received yet again the exact same robo-rejection from HR that was apologized for not 30 minutes ago. Yes. The asshole apologized and then RE-SENT it.

Update - Yippee! I'm Number Two
Here's the poop: It was down to me and one other person who happened to be an internal candidate. They hired someone internally. No surprise there. It is very difficult to get a job here. They almost always hire internally. They have since changed the rules and you can only contract here for a year and a half before you get shit canned, but I know people that were contractors for as long as 6 years before getting hired. So my beef was not so much that I didn't get the job. No. My beef was the robo-rejection. Today they gave me my love, so I'm feeling much better.

Apology #3
I am sorry I called my co-worker friend a Twat in my post yesterday. She doesn't read my blog, but still.

The News Round Up

Hey all... I'm back. Sort of.

I'll be leaving again shortly as MDH and I pack up for a week long stay in a hotel starting Monday when the people we hired to refinish our hardwood floors begin to do so.

They told us that it will take 4 days and after they are finished we won't be able to walk on the floors in shoes or move the furniture back where it belongs for another week after that. That may seem like a long time to have things scattered all over the place, but because it's been this way for so long already, I've become accustomed to living in a pig sty. So whatever dude.

Actually, I've never been more excited to stay at a hotel in my entire life. It's just the crappy Ramada down the street, but it will be a week of living like a semi-normal person again. I won't have to turn sideways to walk through my kitchen and I already know exactly where the phone book will be (in the nightstand drawer).

The floor people were able to schedule the work in just the nick of time. I've gotten so used to living in this mess that one more day of it and I would have begun wearing nothing but mumus and eating all my food straight out of the can.

In the comments of this post, which contains the majority of my bitching, somebody made the clever suggestion that we move everything back to it's proper place until time came closer to the actual date when the work was to be done. Yes. Thanks for that. Marvelous idea. I hear you. It makes perfect sense and would probably have been a fine thing for us to do if we were not the two laziest people on planet earth and possibly galaxies beyond.

Anyhoo... now there is an end in sight.

Meanwhile I realized that not only have I been neglecting my blog I've also left it hanging with a couple of untidy loose ends that I intend to take care of in this post.

Like first of all:

Whatever happened between Gaydar and Jogger? Remember that whole thing with the old man with the crush on the young girl and the mysterious packet of Oreo cookies? Well I swear on a stack of chocolate cream filled cookies that the very next day after I wrote that post - what should I see displayed prominently on my very own desk when I got to work? Yes. A mysterious packet of Oreo cookies.

Anyway... here's what happened... Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was weird and I half wondered if Gaydar hadn't read my blog post where I all but called him a dirty old man because his annoying harassment of Jogger seemed to end right after I wrote it.

Jogger and I still don't know who gave us the cookies.

and loose end number 2:

The Case of the Olive Garden Charges
In this post I wrote a few months ago about a mysterious charge I noticed on our family credit card statement to the Olive Garden to the sum of $52.83 and the arguments and accusations of bad taste that ensued between me and MDH. A week or so later I called my mother who thanked me for the Olive Garden gift card I had sent to them for their anniversary. What a relief! Neither of us remembered having eaten at the Olive Garden because neither of has had.

And now a numbered list of random bullshit:

1. I dyed my hair back to my "natural color". At least I think it's my natural color. Over the years my blond highlight just kept getting lighter and lighter and my hair was starting to look fried. It's brownish now and very shiny again.

2. MDH does not like my new old hair color. He said he finds it "jarring". Too bad mutha fucka.

3. I drove around the block and wrote down the address of the house where the dog lives that barks all goddamn night and keeps me awake. I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet, probably call the police the next time it happens. I have also toyed with the idea of finding out the phone number of the house too and then calling these assholes at 2am when they let their dog bark and howl for hours on end.

4. I have become addicted to the new HBO series True Blood. I know, I know. Vampires. But trust me, it's really good.

5. I have also become addicted to the MTV show called Exiled where the little spoiled rotten assholes previously featured on My Super Sweet 16 are hauled off like criminals in the night, made to live among families in third world countries and forced to perform chores such as making huts out of cow poop and sleep on dirt floors. It's wonderful. A feel good festival of grins and evil giggling.

6. Mr. Boo got me last week. I vowed that I would never let this happen, but it did and I am ashamed. You see, I was deep in conversation with my back to the cubicle aisle way and the asshat snuck up behind me and burst a handful of bubble wrap in my ear. I won't go into detail about what happened or what I said to him afterward, but suffice it to say that he limped away from the experience holding onto his ball sack for dear life and has still not been able to look me in the eye nearly a week later. I have no fear that he'll ever sneak up and scare me again.

Pants Noise

Today I wore a pair of shoes that are a winning combination of cute and comfortable. I hardly ever wear them and when I took them down from the top shelf of my closet and pulled them out of the box, I was thinking to myself - Oh, I love these shoes, why don't I ever wear them?

Because they make an irritating rubbery squishing noise with every step - that's why.

They make a noise like wet socks inside a pair of rubber boots, but of course I didn't remember this until I was well on my way and it was too late to turn back and get another pair.

In addition to this I wore one of my newer pairs of wide-leg khaki trousers. They make a soft, swishing sound that is also pretty annoying after awhile.

So between the shoes and the pants I sounded like a one man band.

I was self conscious about it all day to the point that I made a contest with myself to see how long I could go without getting up to do anything. Pretty long actually. I made it until around 12:30. When I finally couldn't take it any more and got up to go to the break room to heat up my lunch (there was no way I was going to eat cold soup from a can) enough time had gone by for my feet to stir up a little moisture and a new delightful farting noise was now added to the mix for accompaniment.

Great.

Round about this time (12:50, to be exact) a reminder popped up on my calendar for a meeting I needed to attend - on the other side of the fucking compound. Seriously it's a very big place - the meeting was half a mile away. No joke.

It took me 11 laboriously noisy hours to walk there. Farting, swishing and squishing all the way. Of course I got there late and had to walk all the way to the back of the room to find a seat.

Marvelous.

Anyhoo... the first thing I did when I arrived home this evening was rip these shoes from my feet and ceremoniously slam them into the trash. I said, "Take that you noisy motherfuckers".

Then I unceremoniously pulled them out of the trash, put them back into their box, placed a post it note on top of the box that says simply, "Farts", and placed the box back on the top closet shelf. At least next time I'll know why I never wear them.

The title of the post is a little inside joke because when I was in middle school I had a friend named Dana whose mother was into some weird rattle-snake frenching religion and thought that everything having to do with the human body was dirty and any mention of a body part or body function was a dirty word. She was kinda like Carrie's mom.

Dana's mother once washed her mouth out with soap for saying the word "pimple". Her mother created an alternate language for such things:

Zit/Pimple = Place on your face

Fart = Pants noise

Vagina = Special place

Butt/Ass = Seat

Crazy Bitch = Mother

That's all I can remember, but "Pants Noise" always gave me a giggle and when Amy's daughter LBL was a baby, that was one of my favorite nicknames for her.

A Helpful Hint from Amy - The Cool Paper Towel

School started last week and although I'm not a teacher, most of my friends are teachers. Did I ever mention that my best friend Amy teaches the 2nd grade? Yes she does. Did I ever mention that my best friend Amy is brilliant? Yes she is.

One of my favorite works of her genius is this:

She keeps a little mini fridge in her class room filled with diet cokes and a life time supply of water-soaked paper towels tidily folded up and individually sealed in snack-size zip lock baggies.

Do you know how many snot dripping, red faced, sniffling, crying jags occur in the daily lives of 2nd graders? Well, I'll tell you, it's a lot. Bumps, bruises, scrapes, headaches, loose teeth, name calling, hair pulling, pants peeing, booger eating - no matter what your problem may be it can all be taken care of by the soothing relief of a cool, wet paper towel.

Amy always says it really fast too - Go get a coolpapertowel and sit down. The smeary red-faced child person goes to the mini-fridge and gets his or her own cool paper towel. Sometimes they even tell her when they might need one.

Mrs. Amy I'm very upset. I think I need a coolpapertowel.

I would like to state for the record that the cool paper towel works on children older than the 2nd grade also. Like 41 year old ladies who have had a bad day at work only to come home and find the kitchen sink full of dirty dishes so that she has to work all goddamn day and then clean up the damn kitchen before she can fix dinner, and clean up the kitchen yet again before bed. I think I need a cool paper towel.

Yesterday there were lots of cool paper towels getting tossed around at my house after my husband, who had started off the day sticking to the original plan of renting one of those Rug Doctors from the grocery store, ended up ripping out all of the carpet in our living room, dining room and hallways.

This is something that I have wanted to do from the minute we first walked in the door of this house, but MDH has always held back because hardwood floor restoration is in our home ownership fear zone, along with pretty much any home improvement project that goes beyond spackling or painting.

Needless to say there was some drama, but as you can see, it's a bit too late to turn back.

I'm not sure we have the skills to refinish this floor properly because it has some pretty bad stains in the wood, and I'm fairly certain that we do not have the money to pay someone else to do it.

Even scarier, MDH, in a similar fit of reckless impulse to the one that caused him to go from cleaning the carpet to tearing at it like a wild animal, decided to call in his brother Miami to see if he could come up and do the floor for us.

Bad. Idea.

Yes. Miami is by trade a concrete foreman and tends to work on high rise buildings, but started off as a carpenter and general contractor, so he knows how to refinish a floor.

He is also a roaring drunk.

Several years ago he nearly ruined the office of our old house when MDH asked him to make us some built in book shelves. Miami was all disciplined and lovely the first 2 days, but after that I'm not sure what happened, but I do know that he discovered the bar down the street kept Valpolicella in stock, and after that the job was rather untidily abandoned. He claimed it was complete, but I ended up hiring someone to come in to fix nearly everything he had done.

The thought of him coming here and attempting to take on our floors makes me need a coolpapertowl. Maybe five.

Even Turtle needs a cool paper towel after this...

A Quick List of CrabbyLove

I've been such a crab apple lately. Quick tempered. Ugly mood swings. Just generally unpleasant to live with. Even the cat doesn't want to be around me anymore except when I fill his food dish. Ungrateful bastard.

See what I mean? I'm foul.

Anyhoo... I started trying to think of things that I love so that maybe I can start to snap out of this horrible queen of the harpies phase that I seem to be going through right now. So I'm taking a deep breath and in no particular order here goes -

Love:

1. Mashed potatoes - and keep the gravy away or I will stick a fork in your eye. Gravy sucks.

2. Having 10 items in my basket and no one else in line at the 10 Items or Less check out line. It'd be heaven if I had cash with correct change.

3. Finding out yesterday on NPR that those stupid detox foot pads are a big hoax - just like I knew they were. Oh yeah. This reporter put them on her feet before she went to bed and when she woke up the next morning said they were disgusting, gooey and gray, but she took them to some lab at UC Berkley where they compared the amount of minerals the company who makes the pads claim they remove from your system in an unused pad to the gray gooey one she had used and found no difference. HA. Then to explain the gray gooey part she took a clean one and held it over a steaming tea pot full of hot water and guess what? It turned gray - that's what. I knew it was bullshit and I love being right. You can listen to the story here.

4. My haircut. I hated it when I came home from the salon, but it's grown on me, so to speak and now I love it. On a less lovey note though, I have noticed that no matter what hair style I come home with, when I style it myself I do it exactly the same as I always have done. No wonder it never looks like it does when my stylist does it. I always ask for something modern and updated, which she does beautifully, but my hands and arms are in some kind of style time warp and still treating my head like it's 1993.

5. Discovering the other day that Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor did another motorcycle around the world series called Long Way Down. Fuck Ewan McGregor, he's OK I guess, but I'm all weak in the knees for Charley. I know it's strange and there is no accounting for taste, but I have this weird thing for Charley Boorman ever since I saw him half naked in The Emerald Forest, and think he is just about the sexiest man alive. Yeah. Well I did until I watched episode three in which while camping in Italy, he laid down on the ground with his knees in the air, held a Zippo to his ass, lit a fart and laughed like a hyena. I still love him any way. Maybe more now.

6. Marlboro Ultra Lights in a box. Don't worry. I'm not smoking again. Much. No really. I'm not - I'm just thinking about it a lot lately and choosing to over eat instead.

7. Clean sheets.

8. Dental floss.

That's it. I've been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to come up with 9 and 10 and I just can't do it. Why don't you tell me what YOU love... Make it good.

Love, Lady

F-ing Good Ham Mom

Having missed half a day of work on Thursday and all day on Friday, spending most of my weekend recovering from my malaise and having to put up with MDH and his bad attitude about having to finish doing our taxes (he fired our accountant earlier this year) and raking the leaves that he for some mysterious (lazy) reason wasn't able to rake up before it started snowing last November, well fuck it...

Let's just say I had a shitty weekend. I didn't feel good and the husband that I know and love went away and was temporarily replaced by some yelling, complaining tax monkey.

The best thing about my weekend? Honey Baked Ham.

I'm not normally a big ham eater. Too salty for me really, but sometimes, like once every 2 or 3 years I crave it like nobody's business. So on Saturday when MDH's incessant ranting at Turbo Tax and anyone who dared move or speak within a 20 foot radius of his charm-free tax doing (me and the cat) drove me (screaming and peeling out of the driveway like some crackhead in an episode of COPS) from the house for a couple of hours (and cough, cough, ahem, excuse me I still wasn't feeling well) I happened for the first time notice the Honey Baked Ham store across the street from the DSW at my preferred mall location.

What better way to deal with a surly spouse then shoe shopping, eh?

Anyhoo... those of you mall goers out there will realize the degree of my intense craving and subsequent sacrifice when I tell you that I actually crossed the street in front of the busy mall to get to the goddamn ham store. I won't even cross my legs for $50, so we're talking about a serious ham craving here.

Once the busy street was crossed I was greeted at the ham store by a large hand written sign taped to the glass front door that said:

NO CHECKS TODAY
CREDIT CARD MACHINE BROKE

SORRY - CASH ONLY!!

Oh no you don't. I just crossed 5 lanes of Saturday afternoon mall traffic and you're telling me cash only? Under normal circumstances the bad grammar in the sign would make me stomp away fuming, but not today Ham Store. You can't get rid of me that easily.

I walked in anyway knowing full well that I only had eleven dollars in my pocket, and really having no idea how much ham costs. Surely ham for 2 costs eleven dollars or less!

Alas no. I asked the nice toothless lady to please show me her smallest ham and it was like 30 bucks. But she was super sly and reeled me in by peeling away the foil so that I could better smell the damn thing. It smelled good. Really fuckin' good.

So good that I crossed the busy street again, eager as a hog in heat, back to the ATM machine at the mall where I withdrew $60 and then crossed the busy street yet again practically screaming with desire, out of breath (not really because of course I was driving back and forth across the busy street) and waving my ham cash in the air (again, not really, the money was in my pocket. I'm just trying to convey the bizarre sense of urgency I felt to buy a goddamn ham).

When I arrived Toothless was waiting for me with my gorgeous little ham bundle. I picked out some au gratin potatoes from the freezer, paid with my thrice busy street crossed on a Saturday cash and headed back home.

It was f-ing good ham. It still is f-ing good ham because even though it was the tiniest ham they had it's still as big as my head and I'll be eating ham for the next half century.

In honor of my delicious ham and the fact that my friends Dan and Steph celebrated Dan's birthday by seeing The Kids In the Hall this weekend with Amy Ted, Frenchie and Nature Boy, I tried really hard to find an old Kids In the Hall Sketch where a teenage boy accidentally tells his mother that her ham was really fucking good, but this was the closest I could find. Won't you please enjoy it anyway.... the words at least rhyme with ham.