Monthly Archives: March 2011

Real Life Updates or Out of office for my blog

Vacations

Tomorrow Lucy & I are flying down to Florida to spend 5 fun filled days in the sun – I expect to spend most of the time in the pool or laying next to in a half damp bathing suit with a half drunk bottle of white wine and a good buzz on while my Mom dutifully watches Lucy (heads up Nana). I am super excited about this vacation, and not just because it gets me out of work for nearly a week – something that is DESPERATE to happen, but because Lucy loves water – I mean she LOVES water, here is a picture of her doing one of her favorite things:

And Florida is FULL of water – or at least surrounded by it… I hope to update you often from the sunshine states – either with cute sandy pictures or random ravings of a complete lunatic (it could go either way). But just in case that doesn’t happen I will defiantly be back the end of next week.

Digression

Uncategorized

Barney Stinson has a theory about releasing anger called the pyramid of screaming, for those of you who watch how I met your Mother you know exactly what I’m talking about, for those of you living under a large heavy rock, here is an excerpt from his blog explain the pyramid of screaming:

THE CHAIN CIRCLE PYRAMID OF SCREAMING

(4/14/08)

HEY STUPID BLOG READERS!!! WHY DON’T YOU READ MY BLOG MORE?!?! Sorry. My boss screamed at me over a few missing schematics and I had to release some steam. Why didn’t I yell at my boss and not at you? Because that would be dumb, idiot.

You see, we all learn as children that screaming leads to results, and it’s no different in the workplace. America was built on the backs of men and women who were yelled at to work harder, and the tradition has been screamed from generation to generation. But you can’t just scream at anybody… that would be counter-productive. That’s why it’s imperative you understand where you stand on the Pyramid of ScreamingTM.

What exactly is the Pyramid of ScreamingTM?

The Pyramid of ScreamingTM is a societal rubric that dismisses the parlor tricks of the Chain of Screaming, Scream Ladder, South Beach Screaming, and other methodologies and focuses on the golden rule of scream etiquette: You can only scream beneath you.

To illustrate how it works, here’s the scream pyramid for a professional football team:

http://www.cbs.com/primetime/how_i_met_your_mother/community/barney_blog/index.php

I bring this up because I’m not a huge fan of screaming but I am a proponent of this whole circle chain pyramid idea… I believe that it’s healthy to pass on the annoyance you get from one party onto another party – that way you don’t let all that angst get pent up inside of you…

Let me illustrate with my own example:

When I was in my early twenties (just a couple years ago) and lived in California I belonged to 24 hour fitness, perhaps the most annoying gym on the planet. I had the cheapest membership they offered and could only get into the gym on something like Tuesday and Thursday afternoons (perfect for me – built in excuse not to work out). But, the people that worked there were most exceptionally annoying. Every time I checked in I was bombarded with requests to upgrade my membership, or to buy their shirts, or to sign up for their towel service or some way give them more money.

And it wasn’t just the front desk – trainers would walk around and interrupt me on the Stairmaster and give me great advise about how more effective my work outs could be if I signed up for personal training sessions… Personal training sessions at $99 an hour (clearly these people didn’t understand I was bringing in $9.00 an hour and riding my bike to work because I couldn’t afford to put gas in my car).  I was constantly annoyed the entire time I was in that place and since I didn’t want to be full of angst all up inside me I would call them… I would call and have conversations like this:

Me: “What time are you open?

Them” This is 24 hour fitness”

Me: “So… you’ll be open when I get out of work?”

Them: “24 hours ma’am”

Me: “But I don’t think I’ll be able to leave until late tonight – like probably around 6:15, and then I might want to eat dinner, do you think I should eat dinner before I work out because I might be pretty hungry by then”

Them: “I don’t really know”

Me: “So, if I decide to eat dinner I probably won’t get there until 7:30, will you be open then?”

Them: “Yes”

Me: “Is Doug working today?

Them: “He’s out on the floor in a personal training session”

Me: “I really need to talk to him”

Them: “Are you just going to ask him how late me are open?

Me: “No”

(repeat above conversation)

I would do this over and over again – calling back to get different receptionist. My theory is they annoy me, I should return the favor – and I didn’t feel like I should pass this annoyance onto my friends and since I was making $9.00/hour there was clearly no one ‘under’ me which I could do this through work.

Which brings me to yesterday.

Yesterday I had an exceptionally bad day at work and left the office with angst building up like a pressure cooker inside of me. On my way home I thought & thought of people who deserve to be annoyed in return and immediately I decided upon the local 7-11 that I often go to while at the office.

You see this 7-11 is staffed by people bordering on hostile. I have had several altercations with them – once resulting in them chasing me through their parking lot… that’s a whole different post. But let me assure you they deserve to be in my pyramid.

So – I called and asked them to look and see how many hot dogs they had on their grill. It turns out they only had one lonely one leftover from lunch – so I politely asked if them would please put 3 dozen more on to cook because my son’s peewee hockey team just finished their last game and I was going to surprise them all with 7-11 hot dogs (their favorite!). I would be there in 20 minutes. I assured them I was for real and that I would see them soon…

See? Don’t you feel better? I do.

Those were the days… random email #1

Random stuff

While I was anxiously awaiting the arrival of my daughter last summer, there was a small period of time where southern California was rocked with earthquake after earthquake – since many of my friends hail from there I was worried, but clearly not that worried – here is an email sent to my very good friend, lets call him Jeff (cause that’s his name) on July 8th:

I wanted to write and make sure that you are okay from your umpteenth earthquake from last night – and I know you are worried that this weird pattern of earth shaking might signal the beginning of the apocalypse or something but I have a much better explanation…
 
I am going to be a Mother, and yes it is all about me, but seriously me – a Mom, Hell clearly hasn’t frozen over yet so something else needs to happen ergo earthquakes.. Its all going to be fine. I promise.
 
I threw up on the sidewalk walking into work this morning… how much fun is that? I don’t understand I wasn’t sick at all for the last 9 months – it’s a great time to start I guess.
 
On that note – I have to leave, please try and have a good evening – I am going home to deal with an exterminator who is coming to handle our roach problem (I’m telling you – all sunshine & happiness on my end!)

Haha – fun stuff, apocalypses, vomit & roaches oh my…

You’re so pretty

Holidays

I’ll be the first to admit that I use my daughter as a shield. Part of her job is to deflect attention from me to her. This means that the cuter she is the less I have to worry about me, most of the time people don’t even notice that I’m out in public in my pajamas – I just hold her in front of me so that no one bothers to look and see whose got her.

I’m not sure that I even recognized that I was doing this until Christmas came. Christmas eve we had plans to go over to my sister’s to spend the evening with her family, knowing it was a prime picture taking event, I went out shopping specifically for really cute christmas outfits for my little girl. In no time I had found a super cute, one piece knitted ensemble – but I am no fool, one outfit wasn’t going to cut it. So, I also bought a back up – you know just in case…

Christmas eve morning we got up and put on our super cute Christmas outfit and low and behold before lunchtime it was downstairs in the washtub, pooped scrubbed out of it so she could wear it again (she never did).

I waited until she was up from her afternoon nap to put her into her back up outfit – I played with her hair until it had just the right curl and we were packing up the diaper bag when she threw up all down the front of her. i tried wiping it off but it was no use, back into her room to get changed again. This time I just stuck her in the first thing I could find. I figured at this point, the less special the outfit the less likely she would be to ruin it. And it worked – we got all the way to my sisters house while remaining clean and dry.

Inside, everyone ohhs and ahhs over her, snapping pictures in front of the Christmas tree, until at one point my sister looks up at me, realizes I’m in my sweatpants and says “Oh my god – have you even brushed your hair?”

I just know if she had been in her first outfit – no one would have looked at my hair…

on becoming a morning person

addiction

As far as I can remember I’ve never been a morning person. My Mother has told me that when I was really little it wasn’t always this way, that I would wake up early in a good mood and be happy to greet the day, but I can’t recall that time. I’m not a terrible person in the morning (not surly like a certain unnamed sister I have) but certainly not chipper and bright eyed.

I decided when Lucy came along that I would change my attitude. I had heard that babies like to get up early and I had read several baby books stating that the manner you wake them up in will mold their future attitudes. The ‘baby whisperer’ went so far as to suggest that you greet them every day with a ‘happy morning’ song – like something out of Mary Poppins (Personally, I think the baby whisperer is nothing but an evil enigma designed to make other people feel bad about their own inadequacies.)

And low and behold, they were right – Lucy was born and she would wake up very early every morning. When I was still on maternity leave and she was very little I would get her up and bring her into bed with me where I would feed her and convince her a two hour nap was just what we needed – most of the time it worked very well, for both of us.

But now she is in daycare and I have to wake her up about 30 minutes before she would really prefer to get up, so I decided to channel my internal child – the child who enjoyed waking early. Now, I get up super early so by the time I walk into her room the shock of sleep deprivation is not still upon me. I’m not Mary Poppins but I make myself chipper and convince her it’s exciting to be awake before the sun comes up.

And you know what I have learned the secret to be?

CAFFEINE and LOTS of it.

By the time 10:00 rolls around I have usually consumed half of my body weight in coffee, my feet start tapping uncontrollably and I begin to talk faster than any normal person can understand me. It’s hard to get any work done (just ask my boss). I usually waste about two hours between complete coffee overload and lunchtime where I just run around my office asking people “whatareyouupto?!?” they often stare in blank confusion, but by that time I’ve spotted something shiny and skipped off to investigate.

I guess my problem is I don’t know when to say when to the k-cup machine…  It’s a little slice of heaven brewing cup after cup of fresh hot beverages.

So yes – I have learned how to be a morning person although it has come at the expense of addiction… ah Motherhood.

Captain Lucy?

space travel

I often worry about the end of the world. In fact I obsess over it. It used to be bad before I became a parent but now it is eleventy thousand times worse. Every time I see a motorist fling a cigarette butt out of their windows another warning light goes off in my head (the inside of my head is beginning to resemble an out of control K-Mart where everything is on special).  I recently watched a show called ‘Garbage City’ on CNN or MSNBC or somewhere which literally kept me up for three nights straight.  

In order to counteract all this anxiety I do two things, I recycle a lot – I recycle things that I’m not even sure are recyclable, hoping that the person sorting through it will see it and think – hey we can use that… And I read science fiction; I read a lot of science fiction, because it’s comforting to know that soon we will be terraforming Mars and developing warp engines that allow us to meet sexy aliens that help us to overcome our differences and grow in ways we never thought possible.

The problem is, there are two categories of science fiction, the kind where the future is better and cleaner – think Star Trek the next generation, and the kind where everything is dark & dirty – think Blade Runner. I try to stay away from the later and focus on the good clean future, but then I watch Wall-E and I get all choked up.

I’m not sure what else I can do, short of quitting my job and working for green peace or moving to some tropical island where I can live off the land and reduce my carbon footprint. But green peace people can be so pushy and my husband refuses to live anywhere without a stable internet connection. So, in the meantime I will continue to read science fiction and pray that Lucy ends up on the bridge of the Enterprise.

$706 later…

Life Lessons

Last summer, I was pregnant and not just pregnant, REALLY pregnant – I had managed to pack on 33 pounds and looked like a dwarf planet walking around sweating like a human dwarf planet would sweat in 90+ degrees in Philadelphia in the summer. My feet were sore and I couldn’t consume enough Gatorade to get rid of the invariable dehydrated cotton mouth feeling that was my constant companion.

One super hot Saturday in the middle of July I decided to head off to Target to get one last thing (there would be many one last things) for the nursery and bask in the glow of full powered central air conditioning.  I backed out of the parking spot behind my house (which, I would like to add leads into a very narrow city-like alleyway) and I immediately heard the crunch of metal on metal. My natural instincts kicked in and screamed “FLEE!!!” and without hesitation I checked to make sure none of my neighbors were out back witnessing my adolescent flight response… and I gunned my car out of the alleyway and on the road to Target.

I tried to forget all about it and concentrate on my raging heartburn instead but I started feeling really guilty, and the constant stream of “no one saw you do it – no one saw you do it” running through my head wasn’t making that guilt lessen. I thought of the time I side swiped a small red coupe in the parking lot of my high school and how I was able to drive off without a second thought. I thought of that time while living in California when I forgot to engage my emergency break and my car rolled back into a Terminex truck and I was able to re-park it and go take part in whatever illicit activity I was engaged in where they might need termite control.

But I still felt bad, even after getting to the store and checking the back of my car and discovering there was barely a scratch on it…. I did my shopping and went home. I did an inspection of my neighbor’s car and discovered a big gash is the front quarter panel of his ridiculously delicate mid-life crisis class of car.

It took me three hours of searching what my best friend would call my feelers to discover that my guilt ridden conscience was not going to wipe itself clean. I thought maybe it was because I couldn’t drink my guilt away… But eventually from the back of my head, somewhere deep inside my cerebellum came an obnoxious screamy voice shouting “YOU ARE GOING TO BE A MOM – IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT TO TEACH YOUR KID. What would your Mom have done?”

Duh.

I immediately came clean to my husband, who gave me a very stern  ”I’m so disappointed in you” glare but who agreed to walk over to the neighbors house and ‘get my back’ in case anyone tried to hit his pregnant wife.

This was the first time I fully realized everything was going to change.