Sunday Gallery

Today's artist is Rene' Magritte. The caption on the painting above reads, "This is not a pipe", which, of course is true... it is the IMAGE of a pipe.

I think Suzy would enjoy some of his paintings, especially The_Human_Condition. (Go on, go look. I'm tired, allergies are killing me, and I don't have much else to say. Adios!)

By the way...

since Johnny Virgil is now bored with pumpkin porn, all I have to offer is what I carved this year. (The one I was slow-cooking with a Yankee Candle.)

Yeah, I know. Boring.

Say what?

My little niece took one look at my "haunted hotel" and said "That's evil."

She's two.

It took us about five minutes to figure out that she wasn't saying Elmo, or something like that. Finally I said "Evil?" and she nodded vigorously. "It's my toy house," I said. Nope, she repeated... "It's evil."

I guess I shouldn't have shown her the way the ghosts fly around the top, or turned on the sound (of screaming...)

Alrighty then.

We tried to distract her with "I come back fire", but she was keeping her eye on those floating ghosts.

Ooops.

Before ordering a cocktail, even

Yesterday I went to lunch with two co-workers; we were meeeting a larger group, celebrating the retiree.

We walked in to the restaurant in mid-conversation and I turned to the woman standing just inside the doorway, dressed all in black. I told her we were meeting a large group and asked if she could tell me where they were gathered.

She stared blankly at me and said, "I'm meeting a friend here for lunch."

Then the REAL hostess approached me. My co-workers could barely contain their glee although one admitted she would have mistaken Blank for the hostess too.

I think I may make a game of this. In every restaurant I enter from now on, I shall ask a random person to show me to my table.

It's a miracle I've made it to the ripe old age of ...uh... 39.

Geronimo

Friday a co-worker of mine retires after about 30+ years of employment with our company.

Hey, I've got 20 years; despite the jokes we ALL make, it's not that bad. (Actually, at one point I worked for "S", but I have had 5 bosses in the last few years. Not my fault! We keep getting reassigned, as a team. But do YOU have five weeks of paid vacation every year? Didn't think so.)

What I like most about S is the joy with which she goes about everything. It is from her that I learned that is really is ok to day a day off from work and go for a walk in one of our beautiful parks. Just because it's a warm sunny day and the view is amazing, and you have to make time for yourself, Carly. (Which was her parting advice to me, make sure you make time for yourself.)

Upstate NY has an endless array of scenery, always changing, quite often dazzling, especially this morning when a huge long dark cloud seemed to be resting solidly on the Catskills, from one side of the horizon to the other. The top of the cloud didn't look like wisps of cotton; it looked more like white paint that had splashed. When you're in the middle of the hardest part of raising little kids, you don't always notice things like that.

It was actually S who put me up to the whole Donkey & Chico prank (start at the bottom of the May page, and read up...) In the end Jack had no idea it was me. He kind of figured S was involved, but could never prove it.

I really hope that when I'm 60 I'm planning an amazing cruise with someone I adore, and laughing so loudly all day long that I distract the people around me from the stupid trivial things they're doing.

I think it's going to be pretty quiet in my office Monday.


Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in one pretty and well-preserved piece, but to slide across the finish line broadside, thoroughly used up, worn out, leaking oil, and shouting GERONIMO...

Highlights of my evening so far

• cooking dinner for my children who were to flippo to eat any because their friends were coming over soon - bad
• the kids who grab into the bowl... this is my cheap candy, dammit, get your hands out of it - very bad
• calling a kid "you little smartass" because I said "please don't trample my flower" (a giant mum) and said kid mimicked me... so I'll see eggs later I'm sure - not so good
• the little 3 year old dragon - good
• the 15 year old scratchoff lottery ticket (it was numbered balls.... I just had to laugh.. think about it... ) - good
• being told my pumpkin was cool - good (it's a ghost, not like Johnny V's pumpkin porn, which I am hoping he does again this year....)

Well

I lasted until 7:10 before turning to Mr. Carly and saying those three little words*.


*"Get me wine."

Another job for C24SA*

*Carly's 24-hour Safety Advisors

My son is already smarter than me.

"Uh, mom?"

::::typing stops::::

"Huh?"

"I think I saw on tv that you shouldn't put a lighted candle inside of a pumpkin"

::::cursing:::: (me, not him)

"But it's a Yankee candle...." (Autumn Woods, which is really awesome, by the way...)

Damned if it wasn't already scorching the inside of the pumpkin, after only 20 minutes. What the hell is wrong with me?

Slow day

Today at work Viral Johnny Virgil and I amused ourselves with talk of whether one could go to work dressed up as the golden deer. I have to admit, our elevators are so slow I thought about the logistics while I was waiting to leave today. But I hate Halloween too much...

week 3

a few quick jabs:

• new work schedule might actually work out - if I actually leave ON TIME the whole thing after school works better


• 214 days until the next Freihofer's Run for Women


• I really hate Halloween. No, really. I do!


• I didn't work on the mural at all over Saturday & Sunday but I did do over 50 scrapbooking pages. Viva la power layout. No journaling, so dock points accordingly, but frankly when I'm in a big crowd I just can't. Maybe later (okay, months from now) I'll scan a couple of my favorite pages. I tend to rely on solid colors and only a little bit of embellishment but I did drag my 50 lbs worth of sizzix and dies along with me to share, so that helped.


• Today other people's indecision kept me from doing the work I intended to do, because now they might revise the whole thing I spent the last 3 weeks doing. A true welcome to programming.


• So, the most productive thing I did at work was get the handle fixed on the ladies' room door. I had visions of being stuck in there with the handle in my hand, and me without my cell phone, becaus I am not one of Those People who take/make calls in the stalls.
  
• Book of the day - Know Your Pig - I'm planning to buy this, I'll let you know how I like it

Can't try this at home

...because I don't have one, or I'd know. What?

If I ever do win the lottery I will need to hire Suzy as my constant companion and saftey advisor. She will tell me "No, don't do that" as needed, probably at least on a daily basis. Because she knows me, I do things, and, well...

I was away for the weekend with friends, and last night after dinner some of the girls went back down to the room where the entire group was gathered, but I'd already planned some time in the jacuzzi tub. The smart ones among you will see where this is going.

Ok, so I don't HAVE a jacuzzi tub, have always wanted one, and have never been in one. So, yes, I *am* dumb enough to put bubble bath in a jacuzzi tub. Just a LITTLE bit of bubble bath.

Jets? Jets alright. It took less than ten seconds after I turned them on and climbed in. Turbo jets, frothing a few cc's of soap to an IMPRESSIVE wall of foam that would have put out that pesky campfire out west. Holy shit. Literally, 6 to 8" high. From a capful of a sample sized bottle from bath & body works... I mean, you'd think I would have listened all of those times when my boyfriend Alton was explaining what whisking egg whites does to them...

So they were growing SO rapidly, and seemed to still be growing even though I turned off the jets, for a moment I thought The Bubbles Might Be Alive and I got panicky and had visions of calling the front desk to explain about a small flood, so I admit I tried scooping up armfuls of bubbles and trying to throw them over the wall to the shower stall...which worked about as well as you might expect... finally I gave up and just went back in, hoping to sink under the wall of tiny popping bubbles and just never have to explain to anyone what I had done.

But when my roommate for the weekend, who has known me 20 years, came back to the room later, I more or less had to confess because there were still bubbles sliding down the wall of the shower stall. She just laughed, and laughed, and on until she almost almost cried.

In my own defense, yesterday I was forced to listen to the ENTRE CD titled "Michael Jackson - the #1 hits" or something like that. It made my brain leak out my left nostril (very messy, but not quite as messy as the bubbles).

So, Suzy will have quite a job on her hands.

Get Yer Beer Here

For some reason working on this makes me queasy. Not sure If I'm holding my breath while I'm painting or what. I feel sort of bleeeeaaaahhhh from holding my arm up do this stuff.

This was about 2+ hours of work (to do the buildings; the yellow was the other day. I need to work in some blue from the top... I forgot.) The base of the buildings are slightly curved because that white wall will arc around under them.

Oh, and that's not today's full moon, I must have a water spot on my camera lens.

Happy weekend...

Exciting news

1. I don't have to go to work today.


2. The new phones we are getting at work are JUST LIKE Michael Scott's phone on his desk which made me pause the DVR last night and scream "THAT'S THE NEW PHONE SYSTEM WE'RE GETTING!!!" because I clearly have no life.


3. My FFKAA* Marianne, a secret J-Lo fan who writes Saftey Week , is now contributing to Worst Mama Ever. Here is her first contribution. (I don't contribute there because it wouldn't be fair to make all of the other Mamas look so good. Just kidding!)

*Friend formerly known as Amelia, a name which is a little joke between us.


4. I have a few hours to work on the mural today. Somehow that is NOT exciting to me. It's more like the terror when you have to go get a cavity filled, and you don't know how long it will take or how much it will hurt. I mean, I want to do the mural. Well, I want to have it done. I just don't want to actually DO IT.

5. I am going away tomorrow morning, leaving the house as close to 7 am as I can; I will not do laundry or cooking or mediate squabbles or roll my eyes over things that I have complained about 37,000 times.... there will be a massage appointment and a queen size bed that will be all my own... no snorers, bits of legos, cookie crumbs,...... I wonder if the house will still be standing Sunday evening? How much can they mess it up in 36 hours?

6. I'm going back to bed now because as I mentioned, I don't have to go to work today. The kids are on the bus. Adios.

By the way

The ENTIRE time I was writing the previous post, I was fending off the advances of a fruit fly who seems to have come in on this week's bananas, and seems intent upon sampling MY WINE.

No, really.

type type ::::try to smash teensy tiny bug:::::: type type

Rinse, repeat.

Easy dinner

If you've had a crappy day, and the Mr. will be late coming home, hopefully you have this in your freezer; it's better than actually cooking for yourself.

Granted, it's not THE most flavorful thing you could make; freezing makes so many things bland. The IQF method that eluded Hung in Top Chef seems to be at work here, as this comes out of the freezer bag as chunks of sauce, pasta, and chicken, with enough spinach thrown in to liven up the taste a little but not seem Too Healthy. (Hah! It's frozen food. Get real.)

Seriously though, add some seasoning. It could definitely use some fresh grated parmesan cheese on top (buy a block, or at least buy some that isn't the green can...) at least. For those of us who DON'T live in a kitchen stocked with the fresh, cheerfully wholesome ingredients for 30 Minute Meals, it will do, in a pinch. Better than many other crappy frozen entrees, if I say so myself. (Damn, now I've used "crappy" twice in one post. You would never know I graduated Magna Cum Laude from college. Damn. OK it was a math/ computer science dual degree but really... Profanity is the limited vocabulary at work. Did I ever tell you about the time I visited the professor of an english elective I took when I was a senior, and said "Listen, if you can see your way to giving me an A- in this class, even though I know I'm a B+, I'll graduate Magna, so would you do that for my Mom please?" )

But anyway, this can sit in your freezer for months, apparently, waiting for that day when your brain hurts so much that all you can do is cut it open, pour it in a skillet, and open some wine.

But if you have a nice glass of wine, maybe this, which far outranks this meal, but WHATEVER, and headphones to play the ocean on your iPod to block out ANOTHER Hannah Montana rerun, you can get through the evening and procrastinate on your son's mural until "Tomorrow...."

Like me.

Things I have learned this week at work

The client will ALWAYS say "it's a simple change"*, especially if they have no programming background whatsoever. *Because The Program Will Just Know that it's a type X and so then...

I tend to figure something out ( for example, a problem with the program that doesn't Just Know....) when I get up to go to the ladies room. So, either I'm drinking too much water and can't concentrate because my bladder's bursting, or I need to drink MORE water (because it forces me to get up and take breaks and let my subconscious solve the problem). I dunno. I'm too tired to figure out.

We are upgrading our phone system. A year ago when we were upgrading our shared printer network, I was a Printer Champion. It was a title bestowed on me because I was foolish enough to say that I had the time to attend the meetings and be the point person for the shared printers in my vicinity. I even got a certificate thanking me by name, " for his/her participation in the project." It was hilarious.

Anyway, the printers are crap and we STILL have problems, a year later. Pretty soon though, the phone system will be upgraded and I won't be able to call anyone. This means I won't be able to call the Help Desk anymore to open a printer ticket, so my printer problems will be solved, in a way. If you can't open a call record, is the problem closed?

Saying the word "mana-mana" to people will piss them off, especially when you follow it with "Do, do, do-do-do" like the Muppets do.

Lastly, nothing is quite as nice as the Thursday drive home when you know you don't have to go in to work on Friday.

A close brush

Does anyone besides me take a wicked delight in the irony that RIGHT after Marie Osmond fainted, the very next song on the TV show, Dancing with the Stars, includes the refrain "I shall never breathe again" ??



No?



Oh well.



Tonight I started the mural on my son's bedroom wall. I dragged a few things out of the way, then painted for a total of about an hour, then got a little dizzy, no doubt from the extra doses of caffeine I accidentally took today. Lost track of my consumption. Ooops. It wouldn't have anything to do with trying to do toooo many things all at once. Nope.



So I didn't get very far. Just brushed in a sort of lemon yellow and cream blend, where the sky will hit the skyscrapers in the background of the mural. I'm not ambitious enough to start blending blue down into it.



This is the picture I'm working from. (The mural will look only a little bit like this in the end. )



With every cake I decorate, I reach a point somewhere along the way where I say "Woah, this is ugly." Usually I redirect, and work it out (except for that kitty cake). I'm hopeful that in the end I will have a mural he'll be happy with. He's pretty appreciative of things, so I think I'll be OK.

Super Hot & Heavy

If only that were more than the settings to be used to wash the towels while I'm out tonight.

Yes, I'm going to go eat cheesecake with Emmay, (and my answer is, "No, I don't think so, really, heads seem to be pretty much the same size as far as I can imagine" but you'll have to read her blog and weigh in on the question too) . We'll SEE how the condition of the house is when I return. Things have a way of going straight to h-e-double toothpicks when the guard is not on duty.

Changing channels, I'm in waaaaaay over my head on a program change that I agreed to take on because "we just need to add some verbiage to the online form and if they answer yes to the question we need a space to enter the account number." OK. I've now spent about 15 hours on this because that's just SO not what they wanted. They wanted elaborate prefilling and hidewhens on a web-enabled form and I got burned on this one, but good. No good deed goes unpunished.

I am getting help from various people I work with but I was reduced to tears the other day by a simple java concept (something like, the idea of "this" in a test for an If statement... ) because I see how far I have to go, and I want to BE THERE, already, and not be on the very bottom bunny hill of a rather steep learning curve. The others have been on the chair lift for a while now, and I'm on a rope tow, and I keep tripping and then I can't get my damn feet to line up together because someone is calling me to nag me about some random thing someone else on my team didn't do or some other nonsense like that.

SO, there may be wine with the cheesecake. Just possibly.

We remember you

Today everyone wore their ties to mass. It was fun to look around to try to find them all, and see some that I recognized. All of the men gathered after the service out on the church steps for a photo, with Mrs. B right in the front and center.

Nice.

Sunday art

Since I have less than dazzling Saturday evenings*, on Sundays I'll be sharing more art with you.

This is by Gustave Caillebotte and is called Young Man at His Window. (I like art that contains things or scenery that is somewhat recognizable, and yes, that's an obvious name for this painting, but I'm fine with it.)

What I also like about this is the idea of wondering what he might be thinking about. Future plans, past regrets...? You can't read much of his emotion, since his face is turned away. I'm going with "pensive", since he seems to be staring out into the street.

(Edit: I realized later, re-reading the Wiki entry, that this is a painting of his brother, and was painted not too long after their father's death.)

*The birthday cake didn't go over as well as I'd hoped. It was kind of a non-event, and I felt like we were just all going through the motions of gathering to "celebrate". At one point we were all out on the deck, (8 of us) and there was little or no conversation at all, despite being family, sitting together outside on a sunny, mild fall day. Since I was wearing sunglasses, I actually gave up, closed my eyes, tipped my head back against my chair ever so slightly, and gave into the urge to fall asleep for a minute. I'm exhausted and discouraged.