NonSoccerMom.com

On Saturday we went down to The Swamp to help my parents finish up their move into a rent house.  And I found it a lot harder than I expected to say goodbye to my old home.  We moved in before the end of my 8th grade year, some sixteen years ago.  A lot of memories were made in that house, and it makes me very sad that Miss T won’t remember it at all.  I made N walk around and take a lot of pictures, although I wish I had remembered to do that before most everything was moved out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, there was a little boy called AE.  It isn’t his real name, of course, but it is how his mother refers to him on her blog because those are his initials and she isn’t very creative.  Anyway, AE recently graduated from kindergarten.

  Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t been blindingly busy at work lately, so I’ve had time to stop and smell the roses.  Or more accurately, time to notice all the quirky things that go on around my workplace.  I know I’ve touched on some of these subjects before, but that’s one of my most endearing traits – the ability to be catty and judgmental over and over again.  Just ask my husband.

1)  There are several different climates within our relatively small one-story building.  You can walk from one end of the building to another and notice at least three different extreme temperature changes along the way.  There are hot spots and cold spots and places that are mysteriously more humid than others.  It isn’t uncommon to see people wearing cardigans or other lightweight sweaters.  However, there is one woman that wears a heavy pea coat.  Every single day, all day long, no matter where she is in the building.  It can be 80 degrees inside and still, the pea coat.  A hundred degrees outside – pea coat.  Standing in direct sunlight in the hottest wing of the building – pea coat.  I don’t get it.  Even standing directly underneath an air-conditioning vent, it is never frigid enough in any building to necessitate a heavy winter coat.  As a cold-natured person myself, I feel that I can say this with some measure of authority.

2)  I maintain that it is rude to ignore someone who is speaking to you directly.  If I say “hello” or “good morning”, and you know that I’m speaking to you – beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no chance that I was speaking to anyone else – perhaps a response is in order, yes?  You don’t even have to say anything, if that’s your preference.  A nod of acknowledgement will do.  Just so I know that I didn’t somehow become invisible.  Is this too much to ask?  I mean, it’s not like I want to become best buddies.  I am not trying to engage you in conversation.  I don’t even want to talk to you.  But I am a princessy spoiled brat and WILL NOT BE IGNORED.  Don’t think I didn’t notice that you came over and polled my cube neighbors to get some information but completely ignored me even though I was sitting right there.  Oh, I noticed.  Now it is a challenge.  You refuse eye contact, I say hello anyway, and around and around we go.  Sooner or later you will break.  Patience may not be my virtue, but I am hella stubborn.  You can ask my husband about that too.

3)  Am I gross?  Wait, before you answer that, let me explain.  As a general rule, I tend to NOT use the paper toilet seat covers in public restrooms unless the seat is visibly dirty.  Therefore, I don’t use them at work.  I mean, it’s a newish building, the restrooms get cleaned every night, and I work with a generally non-disgusting group of people.  I wipe the seat down with a piece of toilet paper before I sit (mostly because the toilets in our restroom spray upwards when flushed so the seats are always wet) and then I’m good to go.  However, the telltale sounds of paper rustling tell me that most of my female coworkers DO use them.  So I’m just wondering if I am in the (dirty, dirty) minority here.

4)  I was trying to make copies one day last week, and the form I needed has to be on green paper.  So I grabbed a handful of green paper and put it in the copier drawer.  But I forgot to tell the copier to print from that drawer so my copies started coming out on white paper.  So I cancelled the job and programmed the copies to come from the drawer, but then I forgot to scan the original again so all of my green copies started coming out blank.  I cancelled THAT print job and started over, and then the paper jammed midway through my set of 25 copies.  So I grabbed the copies that had actually printed, took the extra green paper out of the drawer and gave up.  A few minutes later we got a message from a staff assistant saying that the copier was down.  Apparently - according to one of my coworkers - they “found a green piece of paper stuck in the widget.”  Oops.

If I were giving out awards, the categories and winners would go something like this:

Best Timing of Illness for Maximum Weekend Ruinage goes to none other than little Miss T.  She managed to impressively hail the arrival of a 24-hour stomach bug within an hour of getting to The Swamp on Saturday.  Sometime during our trip home yesterday she made a full recovery.

Best New Catchphrase goes to my sister Sher, for coining the term “hurgly-gurgly”.  As in, Maybe I caught that bug from Miss T.  My stomach feels somewhat hurgly-gurgly. 

Best Effort at Procrastination and Overall Life Change Denial goes to my parents, who are supposed to be out of their house at 8 p.m. on June 27th and have yet to pack a single box.  Oh, there are boxes and bins in the living room, but they are all sitting empty, apparently just waiting for items to jump in and pack themselves.  Sixteen years my parents have lived in that house and now they have less than 16 days to pack it all up.  Good luck with that, folks.

Best Redundant Sentence has to go to me, I’m afraid.  Good thing I proof my work-related e-mails before sending them, because I discovered this gem earlier today:  Originally he had indicated that it was not necessary to do so, but since usually we do so, I wanted to confirm before I did so.  DEAR GOD.  Someone get me a thesaurus, stat.

Best Failed Attempt at Following Instructions goes to AE.  Poor kid.  He tries, but sometimes he just gets half the point.  I told him last night that if he was going to wear socks to bed that he would need to take them off in the morning and put them in his Mickey Mouse backpack when he got dressed for swimming.  That way he would have socks for the rest of day camp.  He listened carefully and then slipped out of the room while I was talking to his dad.  He reappeared a few moments later and announced I put my socks in my Finding Nemo backpack!  Now what do I do?

Best Handler of Challenging Mate goes to my husband, of course.  Having been married for eight years (today!) I think it is safe to say that my husband is worth keeping.  He knows how to make me laugh, how to make me feel safe, and how to sum up important world events in a way that doesn’t bore me.   He can stay.  For now. 

Holy cow, is it ever boring around these parts lately.  AE has been with my parents all week so it has been really quiet at our house (save for Miss T’s incessant jabbering, of course).  I’ve been borderline sick most of the week and haven’t felt like drinking wine (travesty!) or watching movies and therefore have nothing to review.  And I have very little going on at work.  Add all that up and you get BIG FAT NOTHING to write about.  Fortunately, it is Friday so I can be lazy and random.  (Like I need extra incentive to do that.)

*****

We’re supposed to go to The Swamp tomorrow.  N and I have been invited to two parties Saturday evening.  They overlap so we’ll have to leave one early and arrive at the other late.  The problem is that they are both themed parties.  We’re supposed to dress in tropical attire for the first one and black and white for the second (to go with the James Bond/Casino Royale theme).  I fail to see how we can appropriately dress for both parties without having to change clothes.  I’m at a loss.

*****

Our eighth wedding anniversary is Monday.  I completely did not realize this until today.  I mean, I know that our anniversary is June 15th but I guess I didn’t realize that the 15th was upon us.  I think this happens to me every year.  I”m the worst wife ever.

*****

Lately Miss T is very big on putting her “babies” down for naps.  Stuffed animals, baby dolls, a bottle of Thomas the Tank Engine bubble bath, whatever she deems worthy of nurturing gets covered by a blanket.  See?

She covers them carefully and then pat-pat-pats them to sleep.  Often simultaneously while squatting between them.  It is very funny.  And sometimes she will demand that people submit to her naptime routine also:

If she is putting you down for a nap and you dare to lift your head, she’ll point to the floor and chatter while giving you Angry Eyes.  The point is clear – IT IS TIME FOR BED.  She’s very strict.

*****

There’s this lady at my office whose cubicle is fairly close to mine.  She seems to be a nice lady, although I don’t know her beyond the occasional “hello”.  My knowledge of this woman is limited to three things:  1)  She is at least 60 years old, 2) she wears turtlenecks when it is 100+ degrees outside, and 3) she is a very sloooooooooow talker.  (I know this because I can hear all of her phone conversations.)  ANYWAY, all of this to say that she forgot to turn off the ringer on her cell phone the other morning and so I could clearly hear when it started to ring.  And I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.  Because the ringtone?  Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack.  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *dies*

*****

My parents are busily packing up their house in The Swamp.  They close the sale on June 25, I think, but negotiated with the buyers to have until that Saturday night to be out of the house.  I think we’ll be going down the remaining weekends this month to help them pack up, and also so that I can spend as much time as possible in the house they’ve lived in since I was in the eighth grade.  I’m not a sentimental type, but I have to admit, I’m a little verklempt.  When I moved out of that house over a decade ago, I never gave any thought to when my parents would move out of it too.  I guess I thought they would be there forever.

The good news is that they’ll still be in The Swamp for the next year at least.  It is working out quite nicely, actually – some good friends of theirs had moved out of their house last year (right before Hurricane Ike) and due to damage from the storm had yet to put it on the market.  So now, instead of selling it, they are just going to lease it to my parents until they retire next May.  It may not be MY childhood home we’ll be staying in when we visit them, but at least it is a house I remember from my childhood.  That helps to soften the blow.  Next summer, though, they’ll leave the area for good.  Then all bets are off.  GAH.

*****

That’s all I’ve got.  This post is over.  Miss T says “Hooray!”