Yikes. Last night was kinda bad. Jamie wouldn’t sleep for more than maybe an hour at a stretch, and he was restless and “murfing” the whole time. Doc valiantly tried to soothe him back to sleep, multiple times, but he kept waking up. He full-on woke up at 3:30, after I’d fed him at 2:15 (and this was after drinking 8 ounces from a bottle at 1:00… seriously, kid?!); I fed him again in hopes that he’d drift off back to sleep, but no luck. He was wide awake and crying. I couldn’t calm him. Doc, who had just come to bed, took him so I could get a little more sleep before work. I’m sure he is completely exhausted today. I just don’t know what to do in situations like that; I have to work and he has to care for the baby the whole day. Both of those are very tiring, so who takes the hit? It’s always Doc. I don’t think that’s fair, but I don’t have a better answer.

Yesterday we gave Jamie his first solid food: rice cereal. He wasn’t really going for it in the morning, so we tried again before his last feeding before bedtime. He seemed to really like it, and got the hang of eating off the spoon fairly quickly.

So maybe his little system just isn’t ready for that yet, and maybe that’s what was keeping him up all night. Who knows. We’re going to stop with the cereal for a while and see if he goes back to his normal patterns.

More random updates:

Yvonne told me that a friend of hers worked her butt off to pump milk when her baby was little, and eventually built up something like a 2- or 3-month supply of frozen breastmilk in a freezer in their garage. One day, a breaker tripped and the garage power went off. They didn’t notice until all the milk had thawed and spoiled. That story makes me feel sick inside. The time investment alone that a supply that big represents… unbelievable. All that work gone to waste. I think I would have cried for days.

Doc and I took an infant CPR class last Saturday, taught by the same woman who taught our baby care and breastfeeding classes. Now we are certified for infant, child, and adult CPR. Hopefully, should the need ever arise, I will remember what I was taught. 30 compressions, 2 breaths, repeat.

My new nickname for Neko is “Helper Kitty.” She’s so sweet — whenever the baby cries, she comes running and hangs out, purring and looking concerned. It’s like she wants to help! Actually, it reduces my stress level to have her with me, rubbing her furry head on my ankles.

Jamie had his first taste of apple juice last Wednesday. Both Debbie and our pediatrician recommended it to help move things through his system. Jamie has really only pooped maybe twice a week for most of his life. I know this is not too unusual, but he gets progressively more uncomfortable and unhappy in the days leading up to each Poop Event. He’s gone by himself on three of the four days he’s been having juice. So… I’m not quite ready to definitively say that it’s solved the issue, but it is a good start. We are also now giving him probiotics (acidophilus bacteria) in an attempt to get his system regulated.

He loves his exersaucer and jolly-jumper bouncer. He plays with all the toys, and especially loves the spinning frog above the mirror, and the three wheels that click when he spins them. We have the exersaucer in the bathroom, and we can usually put him in it to play while we shower, brush our teeth, dress, etc.

Last week he participated in the Infant Research Project at UTD. They had him sit on our laps and look at different women speaking on a video screen in either comforting tones or happy approving tones. They were testing his attention span, and measuring how well he could tell the difference between the two tones. He also looked at faces of different races, to test how well he could differentiate. For his participation, he earned a certificate proclaiming him an official Infant Scientist. This made me both giggle and tear up a little. My baby’s first degree!

Work is going fine. It’s surprisingly hard for me to work from home on Thursdays, mostly because I can hear Doc and Jamie all day and can’t help when Jamie’s unhappy and can’t join in when he’s playful. I’m really busy being an Associate Director now (ooh, how fancy!) Basically, that means that I do the work I was doing before, plus manage two people, and have about three times more meetings than before, and spend so much of my time managing projects and delegating and putting out fires that I don’t actually have tons of time to do design work anymore. Sigh.

I had a really good annual review this year. My workplace insists that we fill out a form where we measure ourselves (and our supervisors rate us) on ten different dimensions, most of which don’t relate to how well you do your job. So my boss likes to perfunctorily go over the form but then just have a conversation about how the year went and about the year to come. It’s a great way to conduct a review. I used that as a model for how I then conducted the annual review for the designer that works for me. That went well too, largely because he’s a good guy with a strong work ethic, and he makes my job easy. My other employee is too new to the company to have an annual review, but I will be doing her 90-day review in a few weeks.

Foiled! Everything except for my work files, for easy access :)

I arrived at work on Monday morning, my first day back after maternity leave, to find my office wrapped in tinfoil. Nearly every surface, including the desk, chairs, floor, computer, and most everything on my desk, was completely foiled. My co-workers wanted to decorate to welcome me back, and they found an ingenious way to do it!

I was a lot more worried about it than I needed to be (me, over-worrying? what a surprise). It helped a lot that Doc and I went over a plan on Sunday for how we would coordinate the morning with Jamie, as far as getting up, nursing him, eating breakfast, and getting me ready for work.

It also is nice that Mom is here this week, helping us out with my transition back to work. She’s been a big help, offering an extra pair of hands, a shoulder for crabby baby tears, help around the house and with dinner, and lots of love and good advice.

I’m seeing the beginnings of a nice routine. Jamie usually wants to eat sometime between 5 and 7 in the morning. If it’s towards the earlier end of that spectrum, I try to get him (and myself) to go back to sleep for a while afterwards. If it’s later, then we just get up after he’s done. Doc gets up when we do, and he takes Jamie while I shower and dress. I make myself some coffee and make sure I have my pump and bottles and lunch and everything else ready to go, then I’ll feed Jamie one more time before I leave.

I really miss my boys during the day. It’s hard to be away, but I am being kept quite busy at work so at least I have that to distract me. Also, I feel good knowing that Jamie is at home with his daddy and not at daycare at this young age.

When I get home, I feed the baby right away, then we have some play time and maybe a bath. We try to get him to go to bed sometime between 8 and 9, and then he’s generally down for the night except for feedings… although sometimes he is still Mr. Cry-Cry Pants for a while before going back to sleep.

Me going back to work is happily coinciding with a decline in Jamie’s colic symptoms. I think that he’s learning to handle his own discomfort much better. He isn’t as fussy as he used to be, doesn’t cry for hours on end most of the time, has long periods of happy or stoic time, and can entertain himself in his crib or pack ‘n’ play for 15-20 minutes at a time without getting upset. This means that all three of us are getting more sleep, which we desperately need.

He’s also learning to coordinate his hands much better. Now he can grab things on purpose instead of merely by accident. He likes to grab his toys, books, clothing, pacifier, his own toes, our hair, Doc’s beard, and my bra. When Doc feeds him, he can now grab the bottle (but he can’t hold it by himself). I think he’s really excited to have more control like this.

He’s also started to laugh when he finds something funny. It’s different than his regular coos and giggles.

And he’s also teething. Tons of drool, tons of sucking on his own hands, and more fussiness (his colic decreases, and the teething starts up… sigh). He loves when we rub on his gums with our fingers. It is time for us to get some teething toys that we can chill. Doc found one that vibrates, which we think he’ll like because he likes sucking on his vibrating duck toy. Unfortunately, even though he’s getting good at grabbing stuff now, he can’t coordinate enough to get things into his mouth yet.

I told a co-worker I was pregnant last week… and got the most bizarre response I can imagine. Read it for yourself and tell me what you think.

First, some background… This woman is a client that I’ve worked with through my office for years, so we go way back. She’s friendly enough, though inhumanly persistent and tries to manipulate you and get what she wants through transparent flattery. I thought we had a reasonably friendly professional relationship. My office hasn’t done much work for her in the past several years; perhaps a half dozen projects a year or less.

She e-mailed me last week asking if we could do a project for her “real quick.” Of course, the nature of the project was such that there was no “real quick” about it. My boss confirmed that we don’t have the time to take it on, so I told her very nicely that unfortunately we just didn’t have the time to work on it right now, and I gave her the contact information for a local creative freelance agency we often use.

She e-mailed back and said thank you, but before she called them, was I certain that I didn’t want to take the project off-the-clock as a freelance job? I considered that option for about two seconds. Extra money is always nice to have, but I don’t really know how to do what she wants done, and I would end up having to charge her double what a freelance agency would likely cost. And the larger issue is that I am not taking on any new outside work; in fact, I plan to phase out the work I do for my regular clients by September, in preparation for having the baby.

So I wrote her back and very nicely declined the job. I told her that I was pregnant and not taking on any new freelance work right now.

And she said… (and this is word-for-word; it’s too good not to post in its entirety):

Pregnant? Eight years ago you were convinced that you never wanted kids. I hope this is something you want and that it wasn’t a mistake that will prove a hardship.

Wait, what? Did she really just say that?!

Because I kinda thought that the appropriate response when someone tells you that they are having a baby is “Congratulations,” not “Was it a mistake?”

Now, I am under no delusions that anyone else finds my pregnancy as interesting as I do, but why in the world would you bluntly demand that an expectant mother tell you if her pregnancy was an accident that she would end up regretting?? EVEN IF YOU THINK THAT’S THE CASE??

Seriously. Common sense dictates that you start off with something like, “Congratulations!” or “That’s great news!”, and if the mother then gives you indications that it’s maybe the news isn’t so great, depending on your level of friendship you MIGHT then be free to ask if anything is amiss.

And we don’t even have a friendship!! We simply have a professional relationship. 

The thing is, I was so baffled by what she said that I couldn’t even take offense at it! It was just so completely out of left field, so unexpected and strange, that all I could do was laugh! Well, laugh and tell everyone I know about it.

I wasn’t even going to dignify that e-mail with a response, but after suggestions from Doc and some other friends that I not let it go, I came up with a carefully worded reply this afternoon that wasn’t mean, took the high road, but also subtly let her know that I didn’t appreciate her rudeness:

Wow. That’s by far the most unique response I’ve gotten to my good news. I am 15 weeks along and very happy, especially considering that I lost the last pregnancy… so I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a mistake.

Hopefully the Creative Group can help you find a designer to work on the puzzle piece project.

Unfortunately, subtlety didn’t seem to do the trick:

Then I’m thrilled for you. Babies and children are wonderful. I just remember that you didn’t want any for a time there and was worried that this was an unwanted accident. I’m sorry about the loss of one pregnancy, but 15 weeks sounds pretty solid.

Please take good care of yourself. Ultimately all the rest of this work stuff doesn’t matter next your health and that of your baby!

So last week the puzzle piece project took priority over my unborn child; now that she knows that I didn’t just slip up in my birth control, the baby’s all that matters?

I give up!

I haven’t felt much like posting lately. I’ve been sick and just not in the mood to write. I’m still not in the mood to write but it’s been almost a week so I’m going to try to think of some things that won’t bore you, my two readers, to tears.

I’m working from home this week, because our building at work is undergoing renovations. They’ve ripped out the ceilings, some walls, a bunch of doors, and have turned off the air conditioning. Oh, did I mention that they didn’t find new places for everyone in the building to work during the duration? No, people are expected to show up, sit at their desks, suffer through the sweltering heat and humidity, breathe in dust and asbestos and mold and god only knows what else that’s floating around in the air, and tolerate the incessant drilling and hammering noises. It’s only because my boss is freaking awesome that I’m allowed to work at home while all this is going on.

I wish we could have cats at work. It would decrease the stress level. They are SO CUTE when they are trying to get your attention. Neko has been all over me, all day long.  She’s either lounging on my desk, or trying to drape her formidable bulk across my mousing hand, or purring and licking my fingers, or trying various other things to get me to pay attention to her. I might set up a cat-cam tomorrow.

“Ha! I wrap myself around your teacup and leave you no room to mouse! PET ME!”

The other thing that happened last week – the building flooded AGAIN. We had a rainstorm Thursday night and it was heavy enough to flood our floor for the FOURTH time in the three years we’ve been there. Just like last time, they did not bother to take up the carpets or dry them out adequately. I am sure the mold is growing like crazy. It smelled pretty bad when I went in on Monday afternoon.

I can’t understand why the higher-ups are continuously and consistently willing to let their people work in a building that by all rights should not be occupied during heavy construction periods (including during the asbestos abatement from last December, when they insisted that the air quality was just fine but refused to show us air test results), or why they seem perfectly happy to let mold grow underneath our feet and enter our lungs when it repeatedly floods.

It just seems to me like there should be a lawsuit mentioned. I have half a mind to pry up some carpet tiles and take some photographs of what’s certainly growing underneath.

Anyway.

I was sick enough over the weekend that I couldn’t go down to Austin with Kathryn, to visit Debbie and tour the wildflowers of Central Texas. I’m bummed about that; I was looking forward to a girls’ weekend! Food, drinks, giggles, M&Ms, staying up till at least 11 p.m…. god I’m old. I hope that we can reschedule for a little later this spring.

We have termites. EW! TERMITES! We paid a painful amount of money for the pest control people to come out and shoot poison into the ground around our house and drill through our foundation to shoot poison underneath the house too. I absolutely hate poisoning the ground but don’t know what else to do to get rid of those little fuckers. I don’t think they managed to do too much damage though. I’m just glad we caught them before they SWARMED. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds. Once they poke out through your walls, it’s only a matter of time before they decide it’s time to look for a new place to nest, and they come shooting out the little holes they’ve made in your walls, one after another after another, and fly around until they find a suitable structure to eat. INSIDE YOUR HOUSE. We scotch-taped over their little holes in the walls so they couldn’t get out, forcing them back underground where the poison is (hopefully). However, this afternoon we noticed a bunch of them swarming around in our front yard. No idea where that batch came from; maybe from someone else’s yard, or the creek behind us. Anyway, apparently today was swarm day so I’m really glad we caught our infestation in time. EW!

Doc did some very cute husbandly stuff over the past few days – today he sprayed that termite swarm in the front yard, and also got rid of a wasp nest that was being built by our garage door. Damn paper wasps. Over the weekend he also fixed my shower; one of the springy washers in the faucet finally disintegrated and the shower wouldn’t stop spraying. He turned off the water to the house, after scooping about a cubic yard of yucky stuff out of the water main access hole in our sidewalk, and went to Home Depot and – surprisingly – found the right replacement bit for the faucet. I say “surprisingly” because nothing in our house is standard size, or made by companies that still exist. We really need to replace the whole faucet though, and for that we have to go down to Teter’s on Gaston to get the right kind. Apparently it’s the only place in town that stocks this old nonexistant brand anymore.

So I celebrated Earth Day by not only telecommuting (which saved about 1/4 gallon of gas and 14 miles on the Prius), but also by being a responsible tree caregiver and having our trees trimmed. The price wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, and they look great. Our backyard looks much roomier and a bit sunnier now that the 30-foot tall Bradford Pear has been “lifted and thinned,” as they call it, and our ginormous Land of the Lost Buford Hollies growing in the courtyard are still about 15 feet tall, but much thinner and lighter now. We were afraid they might bend and crack under their own weight. I’d post a photo, but without a “before” shot it really won’t look like much to you.

Living in a cubicle city is interesting. (It’s also interesting to note that I typed “living” and not “working”… perhaps it’s time for me to think about a change of pace?)

When the only things separating you from your co-workers are five foot eight inch walls and a frosted-plastic sliding “shower door” (which, if shut, apparently indicates that you aren’t being a team player), the whole concept of “privacy” is really just a thin social construct that only works if everyone agrees that it’s important and abides by the rules. You can’t help but listen when someone sitting three feet away from you is on the phone with their doctor, but Cubicle Law dictates that you pretend that you don’t. It follows then that you don’t ask pointed questions about private conversations you’ve overheard. Since there’s not really a way to have a closed-door meeting in a six by eight space taken up mostly by desk, it also follows that you don’t barge in to someone’s space when they’re talking to somebody else and overrun their conversation.

I haven’t yet had an office with a door in my professional life, but hopefully some day I’ll be able to make a doctor’s appointment without going outside the building and using my cell phone. I also hope that the people I work with throughout my life will always understand that not only is it Cubicle Law, it’s also politeness and common sense NOT to enter my office and re-organize my files and my personal items, throwing away what they deem unnecessary, when I’m out sick.

Not that any of this has happened to me. I’m just saying.

On Brett’s blog this week, he wrote about performance review time at work, and it cracked me up so much that I had to share it with some of my coworkers, all of whom feel his pain.

Like Santa, the review fairy has ways to know whether you’ve been naughty or nice. One of the ways is called “The Self Review”. It sounds important but really all it is is a way to take your balls and put them in a vice and give you the opportunity to tighten the screws. See, I told you she was magnanimous. Three things can happen with self-reviews and like throwing a pass in the NFL, two of them are bad. Those two things are you’re honest and you tell your overlords about all the internet you surf at work which then results in you getting a bad review or you totally oversell yourself and the overlords figure that you’re a self-promoting prick with an agenda.

In the end, it shouldn’t be my damn job to review myself. They are bloody well paying my boss to know what I do every day (trust me, he drops by enough that he should). The Self Review is a ridiculous piece of HR double-speak so that the Man can find new ways to screw you….

(click here to read the rest, it’s worth it)

And I responded:

We have to do something similar, except we rate ourselves on ten dimensions (called The Expectations) – things like “Manages Conflict Effectively”, “Handles Problem-Solving Wisely,” and “Builds Trust,” and write paragraphs on how we’ve performed up to scratch. We are required to utilize ridiculous patronizing language (called The Rating Levels) to do it too. For instance, instead of Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, we have to say Excelling, Learning, Doing, Absent. I guess that’s so we don’t feel bad about ourselves if we get a rating less than Excelling. Personally, though, being forced to dance around the issue makes me want to shove the Learning and Doing up their Absents.

And then our supervisors do the same rating bullshit for us, and we have a come to jesus meeting where we sit down and make sure our answers match. If they don’t, then we have to have a fun conversation about why exactly WE think we’re performing better than they do, and why we are wrong.

(Caveat: my own supervisor is fantastic. I think he secretly feels the same way I do about this process, and he makes it as painless as he possibly can. Thanks, Ben!!!)

And as if that wasn’t enough to make you want to choke on your own vomit, then we have to write The Goals, basically our plan of action for the coming year, listing out What Will I Do, How Will I Accomplish It, and How Can My Supervisor Help Me. How can your supervisor help you? You get to choose from a list of ways called The Supports…. things like Teach Teamwork, Remove Obstacles, and Develop Self and Others. And god forbid you actually put specific projects as goals; your goals have to be touchy feely crap like “increase my interpersonal skills by attending more human resources seminars” or “try to be at work on time”… things that have nothing to do with how well you do your job.

And guess what happens to all this paperwork? It goes up to a file in HR and I’ll eat my own underpants if anybody ever actually reads it.

This evening while walking with Brittney in my neighborhood, we found a wallet in the street. Lots of credit cards, $7 cash, no drivers license, but after a bit of digging we located a crumpled carbon copy of a ticket that 19-year-old “Tyler” had received for minor in possession of alcohol. The ticket had his address on it (a few houses down), and probably explains why there was no drivers’ license in the wallet. We returned it to a stoned and/or drunk but grateful Tyler, who only opened the door a sliver when we knocked, but that sliver was enough to let out the overpowering odor of stale beer and cigarettes.

It was a little disappointing in that we thought that perhaps Tyler’s parents might answer the door and ask how we knew to which house the wallet belonged seeing as how there was no drivers’ license therein, at which point we’d gleefully show them the minor in possession citation and Tyler might be grounded until he was 21.

Oh well.

Last night I woke up rather unpleasantly at 2 a.m. to the light of a police helicopter shining in my bedroom window. The helicopter circled my neighborhood, and specifically my street, for what must have been 30 minutes, shining that zillion-watt beam every which way, on roofs, backyards, side yards. As soon as the helicopter left, we heard voices outside and saw a police car and officers walking down our street with flashlights, looking in courtyards. It took me another hour to get back to sleep. I don’t really mind the disturbance; I’m glad they’re searching so thoroughly for their suspect. It disturbs me, though, to think that there might be a criminal of the caliber that would warrant a helicopter search roaming through my street in the dead of night.

This happens from time to time in my neighborhood. Maybe once every four to six weeks we’ll hear helicopters overhead at night. This was the first time that they focused specifically on my street, though. We live a few blocks from some rather shady apartment complexes and an industrial part of town, so it’s not entirely surprising.

Today at work I opened the door to the women’s bathroom to find a maintenance man standing inside. I was, of course, quite surprised and said “Oh! I’m sorry, I’ll come back later.” He smiled and said, “Actually, this is perfect. Tell me, does it smell in here?” Was he kidding? Did he seriously want me to come in and take a big whiff? Did he DO SOMETHING IN THERE? I poked my head in and cautiously sniffed – nothing. He pointed at the floor and gave some long-winded explanation about a backed up drain and the bubbling kitchen sink, at which point I noticed not one but TWO huge cockroaches scuttling across the bathroom floor. I politely made my exit and decided to use the first floor bathroom from now on.

Office Bullshit
It sure has been A Week so far. Some crazy shit going down at work – a tender young employee in my office fired, and a major crackdown on computer security procedures and professionalism in interoffice communications. Are these events related? If I were to know anything about it, would I even say so?

You know, even though I’m pretty sure no one at work knows of the existence of my blog, apart from my two close co-worker-friends, I still hesitate to write in any detail about things that happen at the office. What If, right?

Sometimes I hate that I have a “the office” to talk about. I guess part of me always thought I was going to grow up to be a painter or a chef or an author. Instead I sit in a cubicle 8 hours a day like zillions of other worker bees around the world. I shouldn’t complain, I guess; I have it pretty good for a Cubicle Drone. I do get paid to be creative and use my artistic skills, which is more freedom than most people have, even if I do have to do it within the confines of a drab tan six-by-eight foot box.

At The Doctor
Some of the residual effects of my crazy whacked-out hormone problems last fall included “skin tags,” which are little benign tumors that are raised off the surface of the skin, harmless but annoying. I had one on the back of my neck that gets rubbed and irritated by my necklaces and clothing. Last month at my appointment, my OB-GYN told me to come back and he’d take it off for me. So I went in today to have the one on my neck and another one on my arm removed.

The removal was fairly painless, as the only thing I felt was the pinprick of the lidocaine injection and then a burning sensation as it took effect. However, as I sat there on the exam table, feeling weird tugging sensations as he worked, I suddenly started seeing a large number of black spots. I knew from the fingernail experience in 2005 that I would probably lose consciousness in the next 4 or 5 seconds.

This time I was smart and didn’t ignore the feeling, thinking it would go away. I told him I was about to pass out and it was almost comical how fast he and the nurse were at my side, laying me back on the exam table. They got me settled and dug out the gauze and scissors and things from underneath me, and had me roll over on my side to finish up.

It was pretty embarrassing, even though Dr. Burt was very cool about it. I guess fainting is pretty common. He even brought me a Dr. Pepper from his personal stash and told me to wait around until I was sure I could drive home.

I really like him as a doctor, and I’d like to make him my primary physician, but the problem is that his office is in far West Plano, while I live in East Dallas. It’s a looooooong drive. Of course, my current primary physician is at the same location, so really I guess the question is, do I try to find a doctor I like that’s closer to home?

Which is important, because the idea of having a baby is not so foreign to me anymore. I don’t relate well to children, have no clue how to talk to them or anything of that nature, but I’m reconsidering my once-fairly-solid no-children position. I didn’t think I had a biological clock, but now I’m beginning to wonder. Don’t worry (or get excited), we haven’t decided ANYTHING yet. This is a very early stage, and we’re simply reconsidering a decision we made a long time ago. It could go either way. We’ll just have to wait and see how we feel as time goes on.

By the way, Mike and Bob, this does NOT get you off the hook as far as passing on the family genes. :)

Fuckstripe
Doc and I made up a new word as we were taking a walk the other day: Fuckstripe. I was explaining how, as a designer, sometimes I feel inadequate because I’m not as fascinated by man-made patterns as other “cool” designers seem to be. Like stripes for instance… I don’t see the big deal with stripes, but real designers sure seem to love shit like that. So I told Doc “Fuck stripes!” And thus “fuckstripe” was born.

Weird Dream
I dreamed last night that Doc joined a secret society, sort of like the Freemasons. They had come to our house in a huge bus shaped like a loaf of Wonder bread. He let them in and they made their pitch, and he decided to join because members got to wear neckties that had a little lever at the top that when you pressed it, made a really loud train whistle sound. He told me that he really didn’t believe what they were telling him, but he signed the papers because he wanted the train necktie. And who wouldn’t?!

Mmmmm Chocolate
In other news, I got accepted to be in a taste test focus group study on chocolate bars! Next week I’ll get paid $60 to spend 90 minutes eating chocolate and giving my opinion. Can’t beat that with a stick.

Work Bites
I spent 8.5 hours at work on Saturday, finishing up a project that was supposed to launch today. We found out yesterday that it has been delayed for another week because the client, at the very last minute, decided that she didn’t like any of the copy we’d written. Just a global “I don’t like it,” no specifics given. I wasted my entire Saturday for nothing. At least I got a free lunch (or was it really free? I did trade my weekend for it!).

Dot-Matrix Printer Bike
I read a few weeks ago about a guy who custom built a bicycle equipped with a laptop computer and cans of water-soluble spray chalk. It received messages that people submitted to a website and printed them out on the sidewalks as he rode down the street. I think he was arrested before he ever got to use it (something about intent to perform criminal mischief/graffiti, and how coincidental that this was during the time of the Republican National Convention in New York City). It’s genius, though.

I’ve been fighting a mild cold all week. It’s not bad enough to keep me in bed all day, but I feel like I’m operating on about 50% of my usual steampower. I bet you didn’t know I run on steam, did you? That’s why my ass is so big, to make room for the boiler.

I haven’t really been able to stay home from work to recover, because this week has been one of the busiest I can remember, and next week will be about the same. So will this weekend; I have to go in to the office tomorrow.

I’m going to need for you to go ahead and come in on Saturday, mmkay? Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. Ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too. 

I went to work late two days this week (sanctioned by my very cool boss, of course) so I could try to get a little extra sleep in the morning, since I’ve also been having trouble staying asleep all night. I’m physically tired from the cold and the insomnia, and mentally tired from a long week at work.

Do you ever get that feeling where it seems like your brain is simply full? It’s a weird physical discomfort as well as a mental one, like you’ve short circuited. It’s hard to think, and impossible to find motivation to care about what you’re supposed to be caring about. The brain has shut and locked all its windows and put up a sign on the medulla oblongata stating, “No solicitors. This means you.” Anything you try to force into it bounces right off.

At that point, the only things to be done are: a little solitaire or sudoku, or a walk across the street to JD’s for a sugar cookie and cherry limeade, or an insane laughfest over the cubes (it helps when it’s 4 p.m. on a Friday and everyone’s feeling the same as you), or Karen’s entertainment news report. Basically, something that doesn’t require any actual brain processing power.

This evening, a big storm rolled through. I got home from work, complete with hard-boiled brain, and laid down on the bed trying to figure out if I had the energy to go out to dinner with Leslie for her birthday (unfortunately I didn’t… I simply wouldn’t be able to be “on” and social in any capacity this evening). A few minutes later, the tornado siren in our neighborhood started blaring. We turned on the TV weather station and decided to prepare the closet under the stairs for shelter. Doc rounded up the fuzzy kids, I got the cat carriers out of the garage, and we filled up a couple of water jugs. We put everything plus my cell phone and the laptop in the stairs closet. The tornadoes dissipated before they reached our area, but we did get quarter sized hail for a while, and then some nice hard rain.

I really haven’t felt much like writing lately, and I feel bad about that. Not because I’m suffering any delusions that I’m letting down the two of you that visit my blog on occasion; it’s more that I feel ashamed for not making myself suffer, powering through my creative block until something forces its way to the top. Art should hurt, shouldn’t it? If it wasn’t excruciating to produce, it doesn’t really count, right?

Ugh.

Work is kicking my butt, and my always-laid-back boss has said that the theme for April is going to be “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” I’m sensing much overtime in my immediate future.

Brittney has inspired me to try and find silver linings in lemons (pardon my mixed metaphor, har-d-har), so I will say that being busy is much better than being bored, and that May is looking like it won’t be nearly as bad. Plus, my boss has hard-coded a happy hour into our schedule for the end of April, so there is that to look forward to.

Today (squeamish warning: stop reading here) I had another sonogram, so my doctor could inspect my inner girly bits. It turns out that my right ovary is totally cyst-free, and my left one only has two small cysts, which are both well within the range of normal. Also, since I began hormonal birth control in January, my periods have been half as long and half as heavy (thank god!) and right on schedule. I wasn’t wild about taking The Pill, but I am feeling soooo much better (physically and mentally) that I guess it was probably the right thing to do.

I dreamed the other night that at work we had a new building, similar to the old apartment building we used to work in, but more house-like. I shared an office with Amy, in the 2nd floor bathroom. Her desk was in the tub, and mine was in the sink. Our printer sat on top of the toilet. If anyone wanted to bring us anything, they had to shimmy up the drainpipe on the outside wall, and shove their papers in through the window.

Ben and I are phone-interviewing candidates for our open web designer position, and most of the people that we really like want way too much money — like, $60-$90,000 annually. It’s really disheartening. There are two people we’re bringing in this week who fall somewhat within the salary range we’re offering, so hopefully one of them will work out. If not, it’s back to the drawing board, reposting the position and probably end of summer before we’re able to hire someone. I’m the only designer on staff right now, and my workload is completely insane. I may only be the dried out empty husk of a designer by the end of summer, if we have to wait that long to get some help.

Last night Doc and I watched “The Science of Sleep.” It was a pretty good movie, and a really spot-on representation of the strangeness of the dream state. Things kept shifting, changing, appearing in different places at different sizes, in different environments.

I had a nice productive weekend. Saturday I was awake at 6:30 and doing yoga by 7. I know, crazy. I couldn’t get back to sleep after Neko woke me up. I did some gardening and a bit of housecleaning, and Doc and I saw a movie (“The Last Mimzy,” which was good except for the cheeseball ending that the studio probably made them slap on there for a family-friendly feel), looked at bamboo hardwood flooring options, and then invited Brittney and Chris over for dinner. We grilled sausages and chicken, roasted potatoes, I made a roasted tomato soup, and we ate outside on the patio. I spent most of Sunday re-vamping Doc’s website. He was just wanting minor updates and an additional section, but I insisted that it would be easier to start from scratch and rebuild the pages.

I don’t know if I’m stressed out lately, or if it’s hormones, or the onset of warmer weather, but my skin is in terrible shape. It’s driving me crazy. I do not want to be 34 and have the skin problems of a teenager.