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.)

Doling Out the Punishments - Passive Agressive Style

People have gotten really dumb this week - have you noticed? I mean good lord, it's only Tuesday, but I've already received record volumes of frantic voice mails and moronic emails chock full of flaming envelope symbols and red exclamation points and the word URGENT! in the subject line from project team mates and co-workers who are normally quite lovely and reasonable.

These people are making demands, kicking ass and taking names and I feel like I have spent my entire day talking them down from ledges and reminding them of existing procedures that have been in place for 1000 years and asking them to revisit their old friend Common Sense and I've had about all I can take.

Calm down crazy face.

We are not performing neurosurgery here and nobody's life or job is on the line. Think about it for a minute - why would I need to request graphics for a vat of goo? That's right genius. You just sent out an angry gram, flaming envelope style email, copied to twelve million people including my boss and yours, demanding that I put graphics on a vat of chemicals.*

Re-fucking-lax dumb people.

Take yourself down to whatever is your gender appropriate restroom and splash some cold water on your face (get a coolpapertowel). Calm down and prepare for your punishment for bugging me all day fucking day with this ridiculous bullshit.

Your punishment? I will hit "Reply All" and publicly humiliate you by pointing out your blunder and reveal to the world that you have cotton candy between your ears in the form an email designed to appear informative and friendly, reminding you in a joking fashion that we cannot put graphics on goo (you silly!) copied to 12 million people including my boss and yours.

Take that jackhole.

I've also been experiencing a very high volume of asshats who are trying to work around the normal rules and procedures that have been in place for 1000 years, sending purposely wonky stuff my way and think that I won't catch on.

Well they are wrong.

The punishment is the same. Public humiliation in the form of an email designed to look like an innocent question and request for clarification about the wonky bullshit thing you sent me, copied to your boss and mine, that will make it perfectly clear to all parties involved that you are trying to get away with something sneaky and that I am on to you, you weasel.

URGENT! ? My ass.

*Not a real scenario, but similar and equally stupid.

The Sound of One Hand Slapping

Some people have laughs that I truly love. My friend Nature Boy has a great, infectious laugh as I've mentioned before, and my dad too. When those guys are laughing, you can't help but join in. Also there are certain people who don’t laugh quite so easily, so when they finally do, it's a wonderful sound. This is true of my mom, my husband and my friend Dan.

In theory I think that the sound of laughter is a beautiful thing and just as I like to believe that there are no ugly babies or kittens, until recently I have also liked to believe that are no ugly laughs.

I was wrong. There are ugly laughs.

There is a person who works in my office who has the ugliest laugh I have ever heard. I hear it all day long echoing amongst the rose and mint colored cloth cubicles, but I have never quite figured out exactly who it is. She has a laugh that grates on my last nerve and causes me stumble around my cube when I hear it, frantically reaching for my headphones and the volume control on my iPod. I need to make the horrible noise go away as quickly as possible.

Her laugh makes the laughs of Fran Drescher and Janice from Friends sound like angel choirs singing on gossamer clouds.

It's a laugh that sounds like a robotic goat is being sodomized. Only more fake.

It is a laugh that is both human and machine-like. This laugh has no joy, no inflection, and no volume control. It is a laugh that occurs often enough during my workday that I think this person must not have enough work to do. I mean, what kind of wacko finds every single thing funny enough to bleat out a disturbing cackle like that all day long? This person is either constantly laughing at really stupid shit or constantly fucking a robotic goat anus.

I just don't know. It's hard to tell.

To be fair I think her laugh must be a bad habit, or a nervous tic. At least this is what I tell myself in order to be able drum up enough sympathy to make it through the work day without shoving felt tipped markers in my ears to drown out the sound.

I think I know who this person is, but I have no proof as I have never actually seen her honking out this noise. If it's who I think it is, it's someone who you would never guess. She's a really beautiful woman with perfectly coiffed hair, impeccable make-up and a lean, yoga-toned body. At least she has that going for her because beautiful as she is, the sound of her laugh is so horrific that I think her husband must either be deaf or too depressed to ever crack a joke in her presence.

Anyhoo... it has been a long day and sometimes when I hear that lady laughing, as much as I like my job, I wish I worked from home again, far from the teeming masses.

Stick Around for Joy

Don't get too excited. The picture above is my pipe dream - hopefully soon a reality. The before picture is the current state of our living room floor - filthy and stripped bare. The after picture is of our master bedroom floor, which was already refinished when we moved in a few years ago, but the model of what we hope the rest of the floors will look like when the job is finally completed.

Meanwhile my life is in chaos because my house is in a total fuckin' shambles. I want to move somewhere far, far away. To a place where all the rooms make sense. Where the kitchen is the kitchen and the living room doesn't echo and give me splinters.

What feels like an eternity has passed since my darling decided to rip out the nasty carpets in our house. It was a spur of the moment decision even though we have always planned to refinish the floors in our house. We just hadn't planned to start ripping up carpet that very second.

He is not typically a man of action. In fact most of the time he mainly stays very still, so I don't know what came over him. At the time (Labor Day weekend) because he was supposed to be simply shampooing the carpets, I was thoroughly prepared for a carpet cleaning project. We moved all of the furniture and breakable items out of the way and created a situation that I thought would be temporary, like for one day.

I left him alone with the shampoo-er machine for less than 5 minutes and returned to find him wild-eyed and grinning, on his hands and knees, looking up at me and barking proudly "Look at this! - These floors are perfect, why didn't we do this before??"

Because you need a plan crazyman.

To be honest, at first I was kind of excited to finally get the wheels in motion, but that was a few weeks ago and at this point I am tired of living like an animal. Meanwhile, the estimates have all come in, a deposit has been paid and the job has been scheduled - in another 4 weeks.

So I am writing to you now from a cramped space that I have carved out for myself in the office by moving several large piles of crap. I'm going to post some pictures tonight and reassure you that I haven't dropped off the face of the planet. It's just difficult to get in the post writing zone when I'm drowning underneath all of the crap piles.

Here is what used to be my kitchen, filled with all of the crap from what used to be the dining room and some of the crap that used to be the living room... and some other crap that I have just started piling on top of it because I have no fucking idea where to put it anymore...

Here is what used to be the entry way filled with more of some of the crap that used to be in the living room. We have to tilt the pizza boxes to get them through the door. What? You think I'm going to try to cook something in this shithole?

Here is some of the crap I had to move to get into the office, including the ever present shop vac... like those American Express ads, it's everywhere I want to be...

Here is one of the few rooms in the house I can stand to be in... our lovely empty dining room...

Why Do We Live Here?

Western Michigan blows.

It blows especially hard this time of year, when I swear to you it snows every goddamn day. I bundle up in the morning like a fucking marshmallow. A fashionable marshmallow in my fur and velvet earmuffs and Calvin Klein parka, but still. It's hard to sashay around and maintain maximum cuteness in all this gear. I might slip on the layers of ice and snow that have been building up since it began snowing nonstop at Thanksgiving and break a hip or chip a tooth and that ain't cute at all.


There is a 4 block stretch of road on my commute that I've started calling "the Black Eye express" because of all of the pot hole induced boob jostling.

Why hasn't somebody invented a form of pavement that doesn't buckle, cave in on itself and disintegrate in cold weather?


Why don't they bring back full service gas stations so that I don't have get out of the car to pump gas? I would pay extra for this. I really would.


What moronic clan of mouth breathers decided this type of environment was habitable enough to build a city that my husband would be unwillingly transferred to hundreds of years later causing us to move away from our beautiful and cozy home in a place where it doesn't snow every goddamn day and I never once dreamed of owning a parka, waterproof snow boots or any type of fleece whatsoever? ? ?



Here is a photo that I took while I was driving to work this morning.

(Insert blood curdling scream here.)

I realize that the roads were shitty and that I probably shouldn't have taken my hands off the wheel long enough to take a photo., but I felt it had to be done and look I'm totally fine.

Lady Hates On Everyone Hard

It's amazing how a little blog post on a Saturday morning can make me feel like enough of of a jackass to motivate me to get out and do stuff. Like all I needed to snap out of my inertia was type it out and read my brand of lazy insanity on a screen.

Embarrassment is a fabulous cattle prod.

That's how I was able to run a comb across my fat head, pull on the closest pair of jeans and leave the house to buy some food to feed my family.

Yes. My family only consists of me, my husband and an enormous house cat, but the small size of our nuclear family unit doesn't dismiss me from my duties. In fact, I feel as though I'm obligated to perform this task to an even higher standard of quality, than say one might hold a normal wife with a few children up against. I seldom, if ever, let my family down.

Yes. What I'm trying to say here is that I deserve a fucking award for leaving the house today to go food shopping. I'm back now and it was like battling the forces of evil all by myself.

I decided to stay close to home, because the roads are kind of bad today, so I went to Overpricey's in the glitzy neighborhood down the street.

The experience was every bit as unrewarding as I thought it would be, starting with the overwhelming number of elderly people who seemed to be out food shopping today in droves, taking up 3 parking spaces, blocking the aisles, standing around chatting, and generally being a nuisance indoors and out.

When I worked in retail, every Wednesday we had what was called "Senior Citizen's Day" where anyone 65 or older, with valid ID could get 5% off of their purchases. I'm pretty sure this was to keep the seniors from irritating the shit out of everyone else on a busy shopping day like Saturday. Also for safety reasons, so that the aisles are not clogged with slowpoke fogies who stand around chatting and sniffing melons, when normal people are trying to get shit done. We'd all be stuck behind them in case of fire and die of smoke inhalation (how's that melon smellin' now bitch?). More likely though, one of them may be injured when a tightly wound, impatient lady who hates to leave the house, knocks them over like bowling pins with her shopping cart.

Saturday may be the nanny's and the maid's day off I think, as I have never witnessed so many silvery blue Lexus/Mercedes/SchmancyCar coups, in the parking lot (there were 3) and empty trophy wife souls (uncountable) wandering the aisles with noisy, designer outfitted tots, on a Monday which is my usual food shopping day. Trophy wives also tend to clog up the aisles, as they do not normally frequent the grocery store and don't know where or what the fuck anything is.

I had a list and I stuck to it. A miracle. Over all things went pretty OK. I found what I wanted and when it was time to leave the checkout wasn't too crowded, although the woman in line in front of me asked to have 3 of the items she purchased (little trees and plants) gift wrapped. So I had to stand around and wait while that happened. (Yeah. It's a fancy pants grocery store.) Otherwise, it was not bad.

Then, in the checkout line, while waiting for the completion of the tree wrapping, I noticed a huge pile up of poofy haired, silicone boobed Barbie's in ski jackets and fur lined gloves waiting by the door and realized that they were all waiting for the grocery valets, the boys/girls who take your purchases out to you car for you. Really ladies? You'd rather stand there like a chump than take your own groceries to the car?

I took out my own damn groceries because I'm made of stronger stuff, although silicone is pretty durable.

Now I'm home, safe, calmly eating cheese crackers and planning tonight's meal. Where's my medal?