Much Ado About Litter

It's a done deal. We live in Texas now and I find Texas to be way more Texas-y than I imagined it would be. I mean, I see people who wear ten gallon hats to social events and even though I live in a suburb of Dallas, about 3 blocks from here is a large herd of Longhorn steer. Go 3 blocks in the other direction and you will find large bronze statuary of cowboys riding wild-maned broncos and roping* calves. Please notice in this particular photo, the cowpoke is watching intently** as his horse grazes gently in the parking lot of a mall.

It's weird right?

Mostly though, what has been weird is the fact that MDH and I have been living in a hotel for the past two weeks. With our cat of course, who spent the first week hiding under the bed most of the day after his first encounter with the hotel maid and her very noisy sweeper. He's finally settled in now and is almost back to normal... just in time for us to move again this weekend into our new apartment.

Speaking of the cat - I would just like to take a moment to mention how much fun it isn't to have a litterbox in your living room, which is 3 feet from your bed when you live in a 400 sqft extended stay hotel. Having a litterbox in the living room of a 400 sqft extended stay hotel room goes a long way to making 400 sqft seem as small as a phone booth. A very smelly phone booth.

The litterbox used to be in the basement of our old house and I guess I took for granted that I would never be woken up in the middle of the night by the horrifying stench created when our cat takes a giant shit 3 feet from our bed. It's not Turtle's fault. He's a complete gentleman and does exactly as he is supposed to do, exactly where he is supposed to do it and is quite tidy, but the proximity of his shit box has caused me to decide that our next cat will be toilet trained. I've seen it on YouTube, so I know it's possible.

Anyhoo... other than the whole litterbox thing, living in the hotel hasn't been nearly as bad as I'd imagined. We have a little kitchen (which, not to beat this close proximity to cat shit thing into the ground, but is also 3 feet from the litterbox) where I have been able to prepare simple, elegant meals of microwaved burritos and toast. Delightful!

Needless to say... we're ready to move into our new apartment which, prior to living in the hotel, we worried would be too small, but now seems like a 1200 sqft mansion.

We had a little scare earlier this week with the apartment management company. I missed their call, as I was at that very moment registering my car for Texas plates, to the address and apartment number that we signed a lease for several weeks ago, telling me that the asshole who currently lives in the apartment that we signed the lease for several weeks ago... um... well... he didn't ever actually move out of the apartment. The apartment complex has given us another apartment of the same floorplan to move into, but I was and still am a little bit livid. I set up electrical service, ordered new checks and registered my vehicle, which now has to all be redone.

It makes me wonder though - is this guy a dick or just an idiot? Either way I plan to make his life miserable by requesting home visits to that address from Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses.*** Do you think Dominos would deliver a pizza with ex-lax on it?


*People - I originally typed "raping" by accident and laughed so hard I had to run and change my underpants.

**Probably watching to make sure that his nice horsey doesn't choke on a plastic shopping bag or disposable diaper.

*** I wouldn't really ever do that. Not because it's mean, but mainly because he has apologized and agreed to bring me whatever mail of ours that gets sent to that address, and I really need him to do that. I changed the mail forwarding again of course, but there are sure to be some stragglers. So instead of sending him Mormons or leaving flaming bags of my poo on his porch****, I will smile sweetly and thank him for bringing me our mail, while secretly I quietly curse him until such time as I'm able to get over it or all the mail is correctly forwarded, whichever comes first.

****I don't have a dog.

Em Face Iss On the Wrong Sill AH Bull

One of my co-workers, Bag O'Mice came up to me recently to personally let me know that he had updated one of the many thousands of SOP documents that we have to use to perform our jobs effectively. The first thing you might have a problem with the way this blog post is going is probably the fact that I used the acronym SOP in the first sentence of it.

Sorry, but that is what they are called. This ain't fiction baby and I don't make this shit up. I didn't understand for a long time what it meant either, but then I'm pretty terrible at acronyms, as I have explained in a previous blog post. Apparently it stands for Standard Operating Procedures, which is the second thing that may cause you to have a problem with this blog post.

Standard Operating Procedures. Ugh - It sounds so stuffy, doesn't it? I would be just as happy to refer to these documents as:

HT-DTS - How To Do This Shit

Anyhoo... the SOP's are constantly changing and being updated and it's not enough to merely change the documents - you have to let the rest of the team know when you've changed something. Usually we do this via email, like any normal person in the 21st century would. But I'm not sure that Bag O'Mice understands such high falutin' technical concepts like attaching documents in emails so he often makes photo copies and then hands them out personally. It's a charming touch, very personable, but I can see through him like used Neutrogena.

He's kind of an old timer and a totally nice guy, but he has to be nice... because the man is about as sharp as a bag of wet mice and niceness and good looks is all he's got going on.

It's amazing to me that someone as noticeably stupid as him has remained gainfully employed for over 20 years with this company, whilst I, on the other hand, and many others like me, have been slavishly clinging to my temporary position for dear life.

Bag O'Mice is so handsome, well mannered and soft spoken that when I first started working there it took me several weeks before I noticed that he is actually mildly retarded. It happened as we were walking back to our cubicles together after a meeting one day and he started to ask me pointed questions about the very same subjects that had just been discussed in some depth only moments before in the meeting.

So he cheerfully lays the updated SOP on my desk and points to the spot that he changed:

Bag O'Mice: There's been a change in country code numbers.

Me: Which ones?

Bag O'Mice: Blah, blah and CROW-AH-TEE-AH.

Me: Crow-Ah-What-Ah?

Bag O'Mice (pointing to word on document): See? CROW-AH-TEE-AH.

Me: You mean Croatia?

After he left I tried to think of all the reasons that a college educated, 50ish guy with a wife and 2 grown children might not have ever heard of Croatia. I know that he owns a TV, more than one in fact, and I assume that he listens to the radio because he always calls me a "Good American" in lieu of saying thank you like a normal person when I do favors for him. Then of course there was that little thing called the Bosnian War that was on the news every night for most of the early and mid 90's, right? Did I dream that?

Also the company has a market there. A small market, but we talk about it ALL THE TIME becaus it's kind of new. I'm postitive that somebody would have had to have said the word "Croatia" out loud to Bag O'Mice at some point during his career with the company, especially around the time that the country code for Croatia changed which is what caused Bag O'Mice to have to change the goddamn SOP.

I guess I am feeling more than a little embittered this week as I spend my evenings and weekends updating my resume and looking for work again while dumbass mother fuckers like Bag O'Mice are hogging the good jobs. I wish he would just retire already so that I could have a chance at career complacency and dumbassed-ness too.

Seriously, Bag O'Mice should be collecting disability.

Tell me in the comments about your dumbass co-workers please.

The salad dressing really brings out the green in your eyes

I'm a big fan of the plain white dress shirt. Tucked, untucked, buttoned up or opened at the neck. You can wear them with anything. Any necklace, any scarf, jeans, skirts, dress pants.

I have a closet full of dry cleaned, lightly starched, crisp white dress shirts. They look so smart and pulled together. I love them, but I rarely wear them because inevitably whenever I wear one of my beautiful crisp white dress shirts, I'm guaranteed to slop some kind of crap all over myself.

It's very difficult to maintain a look that is smart and pulled together when the chest-ish area of your crisp white shirt is dotted with blobs of marinara sauce or what have you.

I want so badly to be that pulled together, elegant lady who can wear a crisp white dress shirt and remembers to touch up her lipstick throughout the day, but instead I am the doofus who walks around with a 5 inch zig-zagged ball point pen mark on her face, sweater fuzz in her hair and a post-it note stuck to her ass all day.

I really should have taken a clue from Tuesday's incident involving me carrying on about my business for the better part of an hour before I noticed that my pants were unzipped, and known enough not to wear a white shirt yesterday for my semi-important meeting. It was the kind of meeting where you actually get introduced to new people who will probably never see you again, but will communicate with you regularly via phone and email. The visual impression you make is the one they will keep forever.

The meeting was at 1:30 and I made it all the way to 12:45 without a hint of drop or crumb. In the morning I took the teeniest lady like sips of my coffee and at lunch time ate my salmon and spinach salad so slowly and deliberately I almost didn't recognize myself. I made it through the entire pre-meeting day and the shirt remained pristine.

It was more of a splashing that occurred when I threw the empty spinach salad plate into the trash, splattering my crisp white shirt with a yellowish, oily, fishy smelling melange.

I know from experience that trying to clean such a stain is futile and will only serve to frame the stain and help announce it more prominently. I may as well just draw big arrows on my shirt pointing to it. Not to mention the fact that my meeting was less than 20 minutes away and there was no way my shirt would have time to dry and I would have to walk to my meeting through the public hallways of the building wearing a wet white shirt that you could see right through.

No way man. The stain remained. I went to my meeting.

You'd think that I would know how to handle myself in such situations. Ignore it. Tell myself they probably won't even notice the stain on my shirt and move on. Act every bit the educated, professional and accomplished woman I know that I am.

You'd think that wouldn't you.

No.

I arrived at the meeting and when I introduced myself and reached out to shake hands with the person I was meeting I noticed her eyes dip directly to the very prominent stain on my chest. I pointed to the spot with my other hand and said with sarcastic pride,

"That's a new modern art broach, I wore it special for our meeting today. If you like it I know where I can get one for you too."

Thankfully she laughed.

Hours later I discovered giant globs of spinach stuck in my teeth as well.

I am a hillbilly.

I'm a whiz with bedsheets. I mean spreadsheets. I meant to say spreadsheets...

I came home from my interview and immediately started cooking. Well, I hung up my suit, put on my home clothes (slippers, fleece pants and a sweater) and started braising the lamb roast that has been marinating in some rosemary and olive oil in my fridge overnight. I sliced some onions, minced some garlic, jimmied a very dry cork out of a bottle of Shiraz, and then I deglazed my pan.

If you want me to relax, don't send me to a massage therapist, give me a recipe and hand me a knife so I can start chopping onions.

The house smells really good.

I forgot to call MDH because the cooking vibe was so intense. Sorry Babe.

The interview went great and the receptionist fussed over my outfit the minute I took off my coat, "Ooh I love that color combination. You look so polished!" She made me feel like a million bucks, so it was a good way to start the morning.

And now we wait...

Meanwhile I'm chopping and mincing and braising and mulling over every single word that came out of my mouth and trying not to worry.

At one point, near the end of the interview, the man pointed to the paper I'd handed him earlier with a list of all of my personal and professional references on it, and he said, "If I were to ask any one of these people, to sum you up on one word, what kind of responses would I get?"

The people on my list of references are mostly of a professional nature, as you may expect, but there are some personal references on there too. I have known some of the folks on my reference list for a very long time, throughout my adult life and the various stages of my somewhat disjointed career path. I would imagine (and certainly hope), if called upon, they will say great things about me, because any one of them on that list has serious unpleasant dirt they could say if they were feeling the least bit ornery.

All of them have seen me cry, and most of them have born witness to my various states of psychopathic infuriation and use of the most horrid language unbecoming to a lady, on multiple occasions. Well the foul language is an every day occurance. A couple of these people have seen me totally wasted, obnoxious and have even held my hair back while I puked cheap beer. I've had sex with one of the people on this list, multiple times.

So let's hope if asked to sum me up on one word, the people I've used as personal and professional references do not say things like:

• Moody
• Crybaby
• Enraged
• Frightening
• Lush
• Irrational
• Pothead
• Pottymouth
• Horny

I responded to the interviewer's question by saying, Smart, Honest, Loyal, and Funny. Terrific. Fabulous answer if I was applying to be someone's date to the movies. Idiot.

I'm trying not to beat myself up for not saying things like, Professional, Hard Working, Detail Oriented, Excel Goddess, etc.. I should have used more hirable sounding adjectives. Anyway, since I didn't do such a great job with this question I have something to say to some of the people who may be on that list of references and reading my blog - take good care of me and I'll make you a roast lamb.