Pickles & Dimes

Jason and I just cleaned the house a few days ago. And yet the pets are finding ways to either get dirty or point out my sloppy housekeeping.

Shorty crawled under our bed for no reason other than to collect all the dust bunnies in his paws to distribute evenly throughout the house where they could be spotlighted by the sunlight.

Sunny went bug hunting in our unvacuumed sliding door track, developed half of a cartoon villian mustache, and then got visibly upset when we kept laughing at her.

And Abby made sure to keep changing positions on the couch so that she could cover every cushion with fur.

It’s a losing battle, people.

Wow, you guys. This week. I thought it would end me. No amount of pep talks from Jason or fake-it-til-you-make-it cheeriness or all-out UFC octagon-style malaise fighting was going to push me through. During this week, I actually had the following thoughts:

1. “I totally want to quit this goddamn job”
2. “We are never going to refinance our house – ever”
3. “My car is going to explode right here on the freeway”

For real. I had every single one of those thoughts, usually all at the same time and coupled with either tears or an overinflated sense of pitiness for myself and my life. It is amazing Jason is still married to me, because not only did I bring myself down during the last 5-6 days, but I brought him down with me.

This whole “mood” (I put it in quotes because I have no idea how else to explain it) started last week after my birthday when I made the mistake of checking my work email from home. Good God, never EVER again. Every opened email made me incrementally angrier and angrier, until I was actually cursing out loud at my computer screen and stabbing the mouse button as though it was a voodoo doll with a direct link to my enemy’s heart. Over the weekend, I could not push work out of my mind. The requests were ridiculous, the deadlines nearly impossible. I had a half-day devoted to a training class, and I had to give my social media presentation one more time to a different (and thankfully, much smaller) group. My time was limited. Goodbye, lunch hours! It’s not like I look forward to you every day for the little parcel of peace and quiet you provide or anything. I so totally enjoy eating lukewarm lunches over my keyboard while people stand over me demanding instant completion of things that have sat on their desks for weeks! FRICK.

I kept trying to shrug off the feelings of doom, telling myself everything works out – always – but the anxiety clung to me like a cloud of gnats. Every time I thought I was clear, I’d turn around and walk right back into it. I had the Sunday Blahs all weekend, and when Monday finally came, work was exactly as bad as I had predicted, and I’m more than sure my self-fulfilling attitude contributed to that.

During the week, as zombie projects kept coming back to life after I had completed them and gotten them off my desk fortheloveofgodwhywon’tyouDIE, I managed a few minutes to call our bank to ask about refinancing. And maybe the guy was trying to be funny, or maybe he was just a dick, but when he told me, “Unless you have $100,000 to bring to the table, you’re out of luck,” that kind of threw me into another tailspin, you know? And all my negative thinking breached the levee and came flooding back, allowing me to wonder how we could’ve been so stupid to buy a house in 2005, right as the market was going to crash and burn, and how great it is that our home value has plummeted nearly $72,000 in four years.

So that was my mindset as I was driving home on Wednesday. I called Jason (who ended up working nearly a 50-hour week himself) and vented. Ever the man, he told me to suck it up and stop worrying and being negative, which I found profoundly unhelpful and invalidating and counterproductive to my mood. And then, barely one minute into my commute, traffic stopped dead. And that sucked majestically, because I was trying to get home to Shorty (Jason normally lets him out because he gets home first but he had to work late), who I pictured at home dancing in his kennel with his paws crossed.

Shortly after, my “Check engine soon” light blinked on.

And that is pretty much when I lost it. I started to cry. Or rather, I tried to, because I was a little beaten down by that point and it seemed like maybe a little cryfest was in order. But I couldn’t. And I cry over everything. So I started talking out loud in my going-nowhere-because-traffic-totally-sucks-during-this-commute car, and I basically made fun of myself: “Work sucks and I can’t do anything without being interupted five thousand freaking times and we can’t refinance and maybe our new mortgage is going to triple in amount when our loan resets and my car’s probably going to start on fire or else it needs a ton of repairs or else I’m going to have to get a new car and I don’t want car payments and SERIOUSLY, why the hell isn’t traffic moving yet because the dog is going to explode…”

You get the picture.

So, looooong story short, do you want to know how this all ended? Friday finally got here, work is under control again, I gave my presentation to good reviews, my car is still running and we can afford our mortgage (even if it increases when the ARM resets in September). And yet I wasted God knows how many minutes worrying about stuff that I either couldn’t control or hasn’t happened yet.

I thought my worrying was better and that I was on my way to being a more optimistic person, but this week totally proved otherwise.

Looks like I’ve got a lot of work to do.

On Sunday, we went to an open house for the new Target Field. To say we were excited would be an understatement; all week long we were practically hyperventilating with anticipation.

As we walked the few blocks from our parking spot, the ballpark’s façade slowly loomed into view. Ta-da!

It was extremely chilly out (plus, downtown Minneapolis has this crazy wind tunnel effect), but as soon as we stepped foot inside the (outdoor) park, I felt something amazing. “Heat lamps!” I exclaimed gleefully to Jason. “They have heat lamps!” So while Jason took photos of everything, I zigzagged my way from heat lamp to heat lamp like a cold-blooded hummingbird.

The first thing we did was walk past dozens of other goofy-smiling people to find our seats, which are awesome, because they’re a) in left field, the same section we sat in the last two years at the Metrodome, b) right next to an awesome bar and an awesome restaurant, and c) very near to more heat lamps. Here’s the view of the skyline from our seats:

The field was still covered with plastic, the dugouts were still covered with plywood, and there was still scaffolding in places, but welcome to Target Field:

This will be the celebration sign that lights up whenever the Twins hit a home run. Minnie and Paul will “shake” hands. Hee!

Former Twin Kent Hrbek has a bar here named after him. Here’s the ceiling:

And Target Plaza features a couple of cool things: this giant Gold Glove and the silver “curtain” behind it that ripples in the wind. Note: We bought our hats at the gift store and I am so fond of mine I wear it around the house for no reason.

Only 11 more days until our first game at Target Field – yay!

Happy Birthday to my old-lady. I can say that because I won’t reach 36 for another 5 months. I love you Kid!