What am I if not obliging?
As requested, I present:or,
The Contents of the Underused Big White Box That Unreasonably Jacks Up Our PG E Bill
1) Three three-packs of Kirkland smoked ham steaks. Low fat, salty and full of yum.
They occupy the entire middle floor in The Bugs Food Pyramid.
2) Five faux-Gladware containers of inconsistent size and manufacture containing a compote of wild plums from the trees in our back yard. Tart but sweetened liberally with sugar and honey, they make an excellent topping for butter pecan ice cream; however, we no longer eat ice cream due to the occasional lactose intolerance thing, and thus the plum sauce languishes in be-frosted loneliness in The Big White Box.
3) Two ten-pound bags of ice, half-thawed and then re-frozen into large contorted blocks after our last summer party. Their value now is as ephemeral sculpture; they will never again be expected to grace a beverage.
4) An assortment of prepared foods from Trader Joe's frozen aisle: spanikopita (bitter aftertaste; I advise against these), pear gorgonzola pizza (quite edible), chicken gyoza (pretty good) and soy corn dogs (taste disturbingly like the real thing; J.
thinks of the four-pack as a single serving and wolfs them down with voracious verve and a dash of yellow mustard, as though he were fourteen and the dogs from Der Wienerschnitzel. Not your typical healthful-but-agonizingly-bland soy product.).
5) Two blue gel ice packs, a bit tacky to the touch due to their intimate proximity to the remnants of a burst plum sauce container.
6) One large Niman Ranch tri-tip. An iron-filled, beautifully textured ode to the grass-fed cow.
7) Seven opaque 32-ounce Trader Joe's French Village yogurt containers, cryptically marked in Sharpie with notations such as "Sun G past OK" and "CEY soup !," which roughly translate from the original Tomatospeak as "Sun Gold pasta sauce, pretty decent" and "Soup of Czech's Excellent Yellows, yummyyummyohsogood!," respectively.
Give me lycopene or give me death. If you do not speak the sacred language of the tomato, this still may not mean much to you, and I apologize. They are my personal religion and I tend to evangelize, but I will try to stop short of calling for converts.
Well, that's my report from The Freezer. Tomorrow, perhaps a scintillating catalog of The Shelf Above Our Washing Machine. Sounds gripping, yes?
What to write about when I'm stuffed to the gills with snot and apathy? Should I share the fascinating details of my seasonal allergic rhinitis, the engrossing tale of my brother-in-law's two-day visit? Or perhaps a few hundred words on What I Have Stored in the Downstairs Freezer?
Once the grievous Pill-induced vomiting passed and my head and stomach contents agreed to a tentative truce with the new dosage, I seemed to run out of blogging gas. The ongoing inability to breathe through my nose may also have something to do with it, as being perforce slack-jawed makes me feel quite dim and uninspired. (O, powerful god of saline nasal spray, hast thou deserted me forever?
)
Today, I have done one thing, and one thing only, aside from lolling around snuffling: I applied on-line for a job. It sounds like a good job--a really good job, even--but as callous injustice likes to find a way whenever I fervently will otherwise, it turns out that my most-reviled-ever boss is now directing the IT group at this new company with the shiny, pretty, precious job. I do not know if he loathes me with reciprocal vigor, as I am generally rather diplomatic with bosses, but I cannot picture him getting the resume from HR and saying, Hot damn!
Bugs wants this Project Manager job and she's just the gal to run with it! Can't wait to work with her again--after all, we got along sooooooo well all those years. She'll be a shining star in the IT Department firmament!
I am really starting to worry about employment. We have money enough to get through till September or so, but I have only seen a spare handful of jobs come on the market for which I am qualified. Does nobody need IT group managers anymore?
Higher-level generalists? All I see before me are endless seas of job descriptions with extremely limited scopes, each requiring one expert skillset and a pair of blinders.
I'm also experiencing the dawning realization that, if both job and baby ever happen, J.
would end up being the primary caretaker, and I think it might just break my heart a little bit to be separated from them, each and every day. J. is the natural choice; he can work from home.
I can't. Woe is me.
Have you noticed that I'm big on the self-pity thing these days?
Please cyberslap me if you think it will help me snap out of it.
Is it just a coincidence that Monday is Valentine's?Apologies. You guys have been more supportive than my favorite jog bra, and I'm not trying to leave anyone in suspense. Well, that's a lie.
I guess I am trying to leave myself in suspense, or clinging to the edges of it, anyway. Double apologies.
The call never came, which I'm assuming means that the lab didn't get the results to Dr.
Meow before closing. Which means I might hear on Valentine's, the Day of Perpetual Horror Monday. By then, well, the chances are pretty good that The Red Tide will have delivered its first tsunami-like blow.
Or not--my cycles are not perfectly regular, but the LP's are usually long, and I'll only be 17 DPO on Monday, which is at the outer limit for me.
Sure, I could pee on a stick, and if I was hopeful at all, I might be driven to do it. But as I still feel so profoundly not pregnant, and since that Sea of White is even harder for me than the subsequent Sea of Red, I don't think I will.
So, I may remain in that state of suspense till Monday. Or not, depending on how enthusiastically my uterus wants to shed its thick winter coat in preparation for spring. (Which is in full swing here, by the way.
Now is the season when our good friends The Environmental Allergens move on from mold and mildew to the entire California pollen spectrum.)
To pass the time as we sneeze and wait, J. and I are wagering on whether The Call or The Tide will arrive first.
J., trying so hard to be positive, is a staunch financial supporter of The Call. I, however, have five bucks and a blow job riding on The Tide.
Now that's confidence.
In which J.worries all the way to 2018 and beyond
Since I have been advised by my R.E. against swimming and any high-impact exercise during the two week wait (or, as J.likes to sing it, the "Loooooteal Phase! Yeeaw!"), J.
has been kind enough to accompany me on long daily walks around the neighborhood. We spend sixty or ninety minutes wandering north or south, east or..
.not so much west, actually, as we're about six blocks east of a really sketchy part of Oakland. Sometimes we take to the hills, with their lovely views and pleasant trees, with the wildly theatrical Mormon tabernacle perched up top.
Sometimes we stroll quaint streets lined with craftsman bungalows and glean ideas for our own house or landscaping.
Yesterday, to liven things up, we decided that our walk could only consist of streets that we had not traversed within the last two years, give or take. We could cut across more familiar Lanes and Courts and Ways and Circles, but for no more than a block, and only if we would otherwise be stuck.
These rules necessitated that we flirt with those neighborhoods a bit to the west, the "transitional" areas where the housing market has not yet caught fire but the local business row is no longer comprised entirely of bail bondsmen, manicurists, pager stores and Dunkin Donuts.
As we made a turn down one of these unfamiliar urban streets, looming before us we saw an enormous junior high school with a giant playground, a hundred kids running around, laughing and playing basketball. My mind immediately started to wonder about their test scores, to file away in the back of my brain should we have the need in thirteen or fourteen years.
It looked pretty nice to me, especially considering the neighborhood.
Now, I should mention here that, with the exception of one unforgettable year at a "real' elementary, I went to a single school for kindgergarten through tenth grade, when I left for good. It was a public "alternative school"--one started up in 1971 by a group of parents, including my mother, for "highly motivated students".
(Its real claim to fame was in having no mandatory courses or homework. If you wanted to make cranberry sauce and do macrame all day, that was AOK.) Anyway, what we lacked in academic rigor we made up for in abysmal facilities.
Our buildings were a series of temporary trailers. Our science lab consisted of a miasma-inducing refrigerator with two or three dozen formaldehyde-soaked frogs, one microscope and a sink. For P.
E., we had tetherball (one pole) and a handball wall against which we generally lounged and enjoyed the sunshine. There was no cafeteria, no locker room, no auditorium.
But since I never knew anything different, I figured it was pretty normal. J., on the other hand, son of two public school teachers, spent most of his formative years in Carmel-by-the-Sea, the tiny, idyllic and stinking rich town best known for having Clint Eastwood as Mayor and for outlawing the public consumption of ice cream in an effort to prevent a Baskin and Robbins franchise from opening up shop.
His schools, as you might imagine, were a wee bit different from mine.
So the stage is set for what comes next, when J. says to me, "You know, I don't think our kid can go to this school.
The whole play yard is asphalt. Where's the grass? Also, it looks like they don't have a pool, so how will he play water polo?
"
As I cackled, I was also a little touched that he was thinking so far ahead.
News RSS