Pickles & Dimes

I’m having a hard time right now. Things are chaotic and I feel like the world has it out for Jason & I.

Jason is still unemployed. It’s a good day if there’s something worth applying for. We’re trying not to get on each other’s nerves and for the most part, we’re successful. Other days, not so much.

My car needed $913 in repairs, which is nearly twice the amount the car is worth. The only reason I didn’t dump it and get another car is that I despise having car payments.

Jason’s truck made weird lurching noises on the freeway last weekend.

Our 5/1 ARM (I know, we should’ve gotten a 30-year fixed loan. Thanks, hindsight!) on our house is set to reset next August. I have been trying for 5 months to get someone to work with us to either refinance (impossible, since our house is now worth $70,000 less than we paid 3.5 years ago) or do some kind of loan modification due to Jason’s unemployment. It’s frustrating because no one wants to even talk to us unless we’re behind on the payments (which we aren’t).

I’m tired of this uncertainty. I want to know when things will be all right for us. I want to peek into the future, to have an end date for this anxiety. Will it be days, weeks, months? I can make it if I just know, you know? I’m tired of picking through dozens of frustrating things to find itty bitty shreds of silver linings.

I don’t want sampler-stitched platitudes. I want to know when we can have a day, or even a week, when nothing is breaking down, when stress takes a holiday, when something goes our way for once so everyday frustrations can just roll off our backs. Because right now, our backs are against the wall and things aren’t rolling. They’re stacking up.

And they’re heavy.

Even though I’ve only been at my job for two weeks, I’m no longer the new girl. About 12 people have been hired since (most of them seasonal, but still).

The Token Creepy Guy already has me locked into his radar.

There is free hot chocolate here, too.

The switch from “not being busy at all” to “crossing one thing off my to-do list only to add eight new things” was difficult to get used to. The first 3 days were HARD.

I honestly now work in a Dilbert cartoon (I’m surrounded by engineers).

There’s a foosball table in the lunchroom.

I work in the marketing department, which has contact with everybody. So that means everybody knows me, but I’m still doing that, “Hey…you” when I don’t remember people.

I don’t care how snobbish it makes me sound, after eight years of working on Macs, PCs are stupid.

My car is protesting the longer commute by making a grinding noise when I brake or drive slower than 25 mph, which is ALL THE TIME, OMG STUPID COMMUTERS.

The vending machine sells giant rice krispie bars for $1.

The people in my department are super fun.

Not to be whiny or anything, but I really miss that extra hour of sleep I’m losing.

I love this job.

In other job news, Jason had a phone interview this morning. Please send good wishes his way that he’ll get a face-to-face interview.

So, um…if you’re hypothetically gargling with mouthwash and feel a sneeze coming on, if you try to suppress that sneeze, it won’t end well and you’ll feel as though your throat insides have been rearranged. And you’ll have to clean the bathroom mirror.

Conversation at the baseball game Friday night:

Me: Kubel is 3 for 3. He just needs a homerun to hit for the cycle!

Jason and guy across the aisle: Don’t say it out loud!

[Kubel strikes out.]

Jason and guy: See?!? You jinxed him.

[Twins are down 9-5 in the 7th. Kubel comes up in the 8th with 2 outs and the score 9-7. The bases are loaded. The guys give me a dangerous look.]

Me: I don’t care. He’s going to hit a homerun.

Jason: ARGH! Don’t say it!

Me: To center field.

Jason: You’re jinxing it!!!

Me: He’s gonna do it. I feel it.

[Kubel hits a grand slam between center and right field, hitting for the cycle and putting the Twins ahead for good, 11-9.]

(My voice is still hoarse from the screaming.)

Sunny is a lap cat. Whereas Abby requires some kind of barrier between her and your filthy, disgusting, humanoid lap, Sunny does not discrimate. She loves all laps, blanketed or not. She routinely hops up on my lap when I have my comforter, burrows in, casually drapes a paw on my chest and snoozes away.

Last week, Jason washed that comforter. After opening the dryer, pulling out a different blanket, taking 10 seconds to fold it, and turning back, he found this:

What up?

The highlights of my weekend: Flirting with Antonio, the cat up for adoption at Petco, taking our bikes for a spin for the first time this year, seeing our lawn turn greener by the second, washing off and putting out our patio furniture, splitting a Twix bar with Jason as we walked outside in 74-degree weather, making chicken saltimbocca for dinner.

How about you?

Shorty sleeps in a crate at night. He has a fleece blanket that he noisily noses into elaborate blanket and pillow configurations and uses to safeguard his Nylabone from the cats. Jason removed the blanket one rainy afternoon and placed it on top of the crate while Shorty was in there drying off, and came back 10 minutes later to discover he had pulled his blanket through the top of the crate and was sitting on the tiny corner he had managed to pull to the floor.

In the mornings, Shorty used to feign sleep when we’d come to take him outside, offering overly dramatic sighs and snores to prove that he was asleep, seriously, and coming out only when we brought him a piece of hot dog.

But then we started letting him hop on the bed with one of us for 5 minutes in the mornings while the other fed the cats. This arrangement was highly satisfactory to Shorty because he is the world’s #1 snuggler. As a result, we’d routinely go to his crate to find him sitting upright, waiting. You could tell it was the highlight of his morning.

And now, he’s even happier. Because Sunny has rolled back her early-morning annoyances by a good half hour. So at 5:45, we’ve been treated to her purposely clumsy attempts to procure food by meowing, pawing open the liquor cabinet, running over our heads, pawing at the dresser pulls, and doing what Jason calls the “shock paddle” manuever: jumping up on the headboard, taking a leap, and landing on all four paws squarely in the middle of his chest.

While my new job requires me to get up an hour earlier, I do not need to be awake at 5:45. So Jason started bringing Shorty into bed with us then and taking him outside around 6:20, when my alarm goes off.

And it is the best plan ever. Sunny stops hopping all over everything (because Shorty likes to invade her personal space at every opportunity, which she objects to for some crazy reason), Jason and I sleep like the dead, and Shorty is in heaven.

He’s also a blanket hog, and I have to literally open his crate and sprint back to the bedroom before he hops up or else I am stuck trying to pull my blankets from under his 48 lbs. of fake-snoring bulk.

At 5:45, without glasses or contacts, and feeling like I’m about to barf from being awake, it’s not the optimal time for me to be running around a dark house.

Which is why this morning I stubbed my toe on the corner of the wall and Shorty beat me to bed.

But at least Sunny was quiet, so I call that a WIN.