Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Cleaning up

We have a cleaning lady. We've had three different cleaning ladies, actually, one who stopped showing up, one who wasn't very good so we dumped her, and our current one. I don't like spending money so someone does something we absolutely are capable of doing ourselves, but I love not having to clean.

Peggy is coming tomorrow. That means we've done our normal Tuesday night run around, picking up the entire house for the cleaning lady. I say we, but I really mean me. I run around picking up the entire house while Greg makes fun of me for cleaning before the cleaning lady comes.

I'm of the opinion that it pays to pick up for the cleaning lady, because if she spends less time picking up and moving things, she'll spend more time actually scrubbing (and boy, does our house always need scrubbing).

So I have to go now, because the kitchen counter downstairs is covered with kid art projects, unpaid bills, tomatoes (my garden is going great right now!), pens and markers, snack bags full of cereal, and god only knows what else.

I have to go make yet another "bag of mysteries" and hide all our crap. Tomorrow night, my house will be clean and I will be a little poorer. It's worth every penny.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

The Unbirthday List

Things I am not getting my husband for his 40th birthday in the middle of September, despite the fact that he has asked for most of them:

1. A new motorcycle (the one he bought last year is just fine, in my opinion)

2. A new BMW automobile (I don't have $40,000 lying around, which I think would buy the one he wants)

3. A hooker

4. Rock star status (if he really wants that one, he'll have to work on it himself)

5. Nicer children (he's stuck with the ones we have--I'm not having any more)

6. A convertible (see explanation for #2, above)

7. Cooking lessons with Julia Child (that would be cool, except that she's dead)

I'm probably going to keep adding to this list, up until the actual day. Happy unbirthday, Gregory!

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Free for the taking

All I can think about is money.

For the last week and a half, I've been working on calculating annual pay changes for all of the employees of my company, 1300 people.

Manufacturing hourly, office hourly, and salaried are all done separately and with slightly different methods. I've helped a very small amount with this process in the past, but now it's my baby.

I'd love to take the time to automate some of the processes, but this is not going to be the year for that. So I've been crunching numbers and trying variations in the statistics for a week and a half now, with very few breaks to do something else.

I'm pretty close to being finished now, but the company president needs to make a couple of decisions that could cause me to have to start about half the project all over again.

I want this to be over. I want my life back. I want to take a day off work.

Who wants some money? Anyone? I'll just give it away and then I can be finished. Whatta ya say?

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Haunting pasts

It's amazing what "hijinks" people have hiding in their pasts. I say hijinks, but what I really mean is that recently, someone told me about things they think of as pranks from their youth, and I was completely shocked to hear them.

I was asking this person's opinion about appropriate discipline for a guy in one of our plants who was hot and thirsty. He put money in the soda machine three times and it kept his money each time without dispensing product. He got so angry that he shook the machine and actually hit a timeclock that was on the wall adjacent to the soda machine. The timeclock fell off the wall and broke.

This person I work with, that I very much respect, initally made a joke about how angry the guy had been. We talked about how his actions were at least somewhat understandable, and both of us admitted that we've at least pounded on a vending machine when we could see, for example, that our bag of chips was just barely hanging there when it should have fallen.

I made the point that physically moving a soda machine was a higher level of property abuse. He then admitted that not only had he physically moved a soda machine lots of times in the past when trying to get product, but that he had once stolen a soda machine.

This is the same guy who told me recently that he and a buddy went down to the school bus parking lot one night when he was a kid. They used tape to attach sticks to all of the tire valve stems, so every bus had four or more flat tires by morning.

I already knew that this same guy got angry about 18 years ago with a co-worker at our company. He went over the co-worker and decked him--laid him out on the concrete floor at work.

Nowadays, that type of conduct would get you immediately fired. In fact, I've fired four people for fighting in the last month, including one who did a lesser degree of violence than that. What can I say--it's been hot and maybe everyone's been testy.

Nonetheless, I guess you just never know about people. I've known this person for 9 years and never would have guessed he'd have done any of those things. Well, maybe the bus tire thing, but not the others!

What did you do as a kid?

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Old, old, old--really

I just typed a blog on July 13 about how I was feeling old, but now I really am another year older.

That's such a crock. Day before yesterday, I was 40 years and 364 days old and yesterday I became 41 years old. One whole day older, yet for that, I get another year tacked on. It sucks.

I'm not crazy about being 41. 40 was OK because it was still so close to 39. 41 is inescapably sliding down into the mid-40s.

I don't want to be mid-40s. I feel like about 31 most of the time. Can't I just be 31?

If anyone has an objection to me being 31, speak now or forever hold your peace. I can't imagine that anyone would care if I was 31 instead of 41, so I'm going to find my birthday cake candle, light it again, and make magic happen.

Wish me luck.

Monday, August 14, 2006

I've got the munchies now too

What food did we enjoy this past weekend at the Wisconsin State Fair? Well, as bizarre as this may seem, we didn't eat any cheese. How can this be, you may ask. In America's Dairyland? At the state fair? Well, it wasn't for lack of vendor opportunity.

There were numerous varieties of cheese around, including deep fried cheese, cheese on pizza, cheese curds, cheese on burgers, cheese blintzes, cheesecake, etc. And we didn't have any of it.

Instead, we ate corn on the cob, hot dogs, cream puffs, mini milk shakes (for the Got Milk? photo's mustaches), french fries, beignets, and popcorn. Oh my god, what an awful list!

We rushed home and gave our girls multivitamins immediately, I promise you. Oh, not really. But we have vitamins, I promise we do. We'll be stuffing them with at least seven a day for the next week to make up for the fair food.

Umm, what're we gonna do about next weekend? We're going to need more vitamins.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Rules for toast

1. If you are having more than one piece of toast to eat, each piece must be toasted separately, so as to be as hot as possible.

2. You will wait at the toaster for the toast to pop up. In no circumstances should you be further than 6 feet away from the toaster when it's toasting.

3. You will place the first piece toast on a new piece of paper towel for buttering, not on the counter. (This is how I knew Greg was the man for me--he did this even before I told him the rule.)

4. You will not use rock hard butter on the toast. You may use soft (tub) margarine, but the best topping for toast is butter that has been previously softened on the counter.

5. You will use a clean knife for buttering the first piece of toast. If someone has toasted before you and put jelly on their toast with a knife, get a new knife. This is technically in case they come back for another piece, but really, it's because you want a clean knife for your toast.

6. When you have finished evenly buttering your toast, there will not be big clumps of butter or margarine trying vainly to melt. All of the butter will be absorbed into the surface of the toast.

7. You will eat your toast starting with the bottom-most right corner (if you are right handed). I suppose if you are left handed, you may start with the bottom-most left corner, but that is an unusual option and the writer of the rules cannot guarantee satisfactory results.

8. Enjoy!

Monday, August 07, 2006

Musing on Q

Over the last couple of weeks, I rewatched the "Kill Bill" movies. We own the DVDs. They're strange and funny and gory beyond belief and amazing and weird and awesome.

They remind me of when I first saw "Pulp Fiction," which we also own but which I saw again on cable the other night. Greg and his friend, Dwayne, had gone to see the movie when it first came out and they told me I had to see it too.

We sat in the theater (me in the middle, of course) and I was doing fine with the story until the scene when Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames end up in the basement of the pawn shop.

If you haven't seen it, the store owner and his friend, the cop, are rapists and into S&M. They do einey-meeny-miney-moe to pick one of the guys, who are tied and gagged, then head into the back room and start to rape Ving Rhames.

I remember turning to Greg and whispering, "what the hell is this?"

I didn't do that with the "Kill Bill" movies. I had an idea what to expect and they didn't disappoint. Anyone for a sliced off arm spraying gallons of blood?

I didn't think so. Gotta be in the mood for it.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Update

Today marks the start of getting my life back.

I was promoted at the end of December, starting looking for someone to take over my old job at the end of February, interviewed five or six people, two of them twice, and finally made an offer at the end of June.

My new person started today and I am so looking forward to not doing these tasks again, maybe forever--- Seven months was way, way too long to be doing two jobs, especially considering I was doing a third job for a good part of that time.

The training is going to be a bear, but I don't care, I don't care (said in a singsong happy voice). I am a happy camper tonight.

If he quits, I'm going to go to his house and kill him.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Seminar sitting

I attended a benefits seminar today that was basically 7 hours of technical jargon, including immense numbers of acronyms.

I sat on my butt (or bum, if you're from England) and listened to the speakers more or less intently for seven long hours, interrupted only by lunch. I am so glad I don't have to do this every day.

When I got home, I commented to Greg that I absolutely don't understand how some people can attend an all-day seminar and never ask a single question or make a single comment. I am so not like that.

If I'm learning anything at all, I'm going to have a question or two. Was I (nearly) the only one who didn't already know everything they were talking about? Was I (nearly) the only one who didn't completely understand everything the speakers mentioned just by their PowerPoint slides and lecture?

A few years ago, I attended Berlitz language classes to try to learn Spanish in two and a half weeks. Now that was a lot of sitting! Eight hours a day of struggling to remember things from my one year of high school Spanish and build on them.

The only thing that saved me then was that there were only three of us students, so needless to say, it was pretty obvious when you were daydreaming.

I didn't daydream today, but I'm glad it's back to my normal work tomorrow.