Pickles & Dimes

My week off was bliss, and in fact, I could have done another three weeks of it and only scratched the surface of my contentment. There’s something about being left alone to my own devices, without interruptions, that makes me absolutely productive. Ridiculously productive. Also, I made banana bread and homemade chicken dumpling soup. (Thanks for the recipe, Nowheymama!) The last batch will be consumed in nine minutes, not that I am at work counting down until lunchtime or anything.

Last night I doomed myself and Jason by commenting on how well-behaved the cats have been at night, with Abby snuggling as close as possible to my side and warming her icy paws on my neck and Sunny taking up 98% of my pillow, purring brokenly into my ear and occasionally grooming my forehead. But then last night I woke to the sound of one of them licking something. Loudly. Lick. Lick. LICK. And it wasn’t Sunny gagging on my hair, as she normally does 37 times a night, but Abby licking the condensation off our bedroom window. Again, LOUDLY. And then, due to some mysterious scientific explanation, she couldn’t gracefully leap down from the window when she was done, but instead, got tangled in the shade, flailed around loudly and knocked my spare pillow off the headboard so it landed on Sunny, who beat a hasty retreat across the bed with her claws extended. And that is why I buy the Garnier Nutritioniste Skin Renew Anti-Puff Dark Circle Reducing Eye Roller. And why I have mysterious scratches all over.

Thankfully, the other pet in the house is a sound sleeper. During my week off, Shorty was in heaven because multiple trips outside to run in the yard! and plenty of long walks to be scared of the geese in the park! Also, plenty of time to run around the house with this:

He used to eat one of those in less than an hour, but now will have the same bone for a few days. He constantly throws it around to pounce on, and will come sprinting up to me, whining, if it gets lost. He’ll then push his nose as far under the furniture as possible, watching me retrieve the bone from under the couch or entertainment center, which he’ll then daintily grab, and then violently toss in the air to chase down and/or lose again.

This weekend, after napping quietly next to the bone, he stretched dramatically from his blanket, looked at Jason and I watching football, and started looking for a place to bury his bone. After glancing back at us to make sure we weren’t watching, he carefully placed it on the bottom of our DVD shelf. As we started laughing, he turned around, glared balefully at us and started nosing at the surrounding DVDs. After much effort, he got the DVD Young Guns II to stand perfectly in front of the bone, blocking our view of it. And then he looked at us as if to say, “I DARE you to find it now, jerks,” curled up on his blanket and went back to sleep.

It’s Day 3 of my week off, and our weight room downstairs no longer has the name “Josiah” festooned on hot air balloons or features walls covered with paintings of airplanes, clouds or growth charts. Now it’s a nice teal, which brightens up the whole room, matches the Jason-says-it’s brown-but-I-say-it’s-gray carpet and means we can tastefully hang our series of caricatures on the wall. Classy.

Not much to report except that we filled our bird feeders last weekend, and well, bird feeders = squirrels, and squirrels = Shorty jumps the fence and Shauna has to sprint around the block to witness him pooping on the neighbors’ hosta. Now before we let him out, I have to run outside and scare the squirrels away. Ridiculous.

Anyway, last weekend was gorgeous and we went to an apple orchard. It was about 75 degrees out, sunny, and the trees along the way were at their peak. It was the perfect day. Plus, I rode a camel.

See? How cool is that? The camel’s name was Nick and he was super fuzzy.

Just one of the many, many trees that were perfectly fall.

The orchard had their annual Scarecrow Festival. This one was my favorite.

This one, too.

I kind of want one of these for my yard. Only I’d want a koala bear.

They had this maddeningly maze there where you had to reach the pumpkin square in the middle by only following the white tiles and only taking right turns. I must have figured it out in my head on the sidelines 25 times, but every time I actually got onto the tiles, I couldn’t do it. Jason finally helped me do it, but when he tried to replicate his moves himself, he couldn’t.

Hope you guys are having a great week! I’m off to look for shoes (how cliché!) and have a contraband Quarter Pounder with Cheese for lunch.

I’ve had horrible dreams the last two nights: vividly realistic dreams where at the last second, I am spared a horrible death while others perish (a plane crash and mass shooting). In each dream, last-minute events inexplicably save me: Delta Airlines books me on a later flight and I witness my earlier flight exploding into the ground, and a man in a store elevator tells me not to get off on the 9th floor, right before he puts a nylon stocking over his head, pulls out a gun and shoots 20 people. Ick.

I have next week off from work and a delightful to-do list filled with fun things. (Item #4: nap. Item #23: see item #4.) I will not miss work one bit and in fact, am excited about all of the things I won’t have to deal with in my absence:

- Loud meetings being held right outside my workspace instead of in one of our five meeting rooms.

- Being interrupted every single day with an “emergency” project right as I’m about to take a bite of my just-heated lunch.

- That insane person who has to whip open every file drawer and slam it shut as fast as humanly possible.

- People throwing away my cheese.

- Coworkers saying, “It’s so quiet up here!” right before they start talking really, really LOUDLY.

- Being interrupted no less than 317 times a day.

- People emailing me instructions, immediately calling me to see if I’ve received said instructions, and then coming over to my desk to interrupt me to ask if I’ve understood their instructions.

- Cold air from the Cryogenic 5000™ in the morning, and hot air from Satan’s Furnace XI™ in the afternoon.

We’re having a Halloween potluck at work, and the stipulation for the costume contest is that our costume can only be from the neck up. So basically, my head and face. I have no idea what to do, other than not do my hair or makeup and go as “Super Pale Norwegian Woman Who Looks Insane,” so do you have any suggestions?

Ooh, what about a cuckoo clock?

So I was about to enjoy an afternoon snack of my just-purchased-on-Saturday package of snack-size cheddar cheese cuts, when I went into the office fridge and found my cheese missing. The fridge didn’t smell like death on a hot day like it normally does, so I figured whoever cleaned the fridge moved my cheese. But, no. My cheese was gone. (I even dug tentatively on the top layer of the trash ala George Costanza, and had there not been a busload of greasy chicken bones there, dug even further to see if my cheese was salvageable.) Nope – GONE.

And I know there are worse things in life, blah blah blah economy, etc., but dammit, I was really looking forward to eating some cheese. My 401(k) may be hemorrhaging money, mortgage refinancing at this time seems unlikely, and it’s about to turn into winter here, but good god almighty, can’t a person be assured of eating their still-within-expiration-date cheese snacks? I mean, come on!

So naturally, I called Jason to whine, and he told me that at least four times in the past few weeks, someone at his workplace has stolen his string cheese from the fridge. I ask of you, what is this dairy-deprived nation coming to that we are stealing cheese bits from our fellow man?

And if you have your own work fridge story, let’s hear it.