I want to gouge out my frontal lobe!

I got these e-mails today (names and identifying details have been ommitted):

Original e-mail from employee X: Hey this is a friendly reminder that *blank vendor* will be here tomorrow at 8am tomorrow. See you here.

Response, ten minutes later from employee Y: Hey X...I thought it was at 8:30am?

Okay. First - THIS crap right here is why I have twenty e-mails about absolutely nothing that I have to slog through every single day. People insist on copying me on everything. I don't actually need to know that this was scheduled. I had to contact the vendor in order to get the process rolling (hi- not my job!), and now that I've handed it over to the folks who should have been pursuing it to begin with, I want nothing at all to do with it until it comes time to pay the bill for this project. And second...don't send an e-mail response - just pick up the fricking phone! What the eff is wrong with people??

And the coffee is once again not that good! I think I'll go throw myself down the stairs again...

Maybe lolcats will help?

You asked for it

So here's to another Monday morning. I'm sitting here drinking coffee and eating an imitation Hostess chocolate cupcake. (The front of the package shouts "0 grams trans fat"...while the words "200 calories per serving - number of servings:2" lurk on the back. Breakfast of champions!) The sugar in the break room is gone, as well as the good creamer, so I was forced to use Splenda (tastes like sugar my ass), and generic half and half. This coffee is terribly inadequate.

Over the weekend I became a member of another online forum (why??) and I became obsessed with the game Portal. In order to play it, though, we need to upgrade our computer. Since my husband comandeered the laptop that was supposed to be mine, I use the desktop, which has become sluggish and boggy and needs to be rebooted constantly. Luckily, my husband custom built it, so all of the components are upgradeable. All we really need are a new motherboard and a little more memory, so no need to buy a new (unmodifiable) machine from one of the big companies.

We've been hammering out plans for a vacation later this year. We haven't had a break in a couple of years, and it is sorely needed. I always worry that once we start getting the details together, something will come up to prevent us from going. That happened last year with my root canal - which still bothers me a little sometimes, especially when I get tense and clench my jaw. I guess I should have that checked out eventually. We have a trip planned for July, but it's just a weekend, so I don't count that as a true "vacation", as much as I really am looking forward to it (and I really am).

Things have been nice and low-key for the most part lately. Work is...workable, for now. There was a job out of state that I thought about applying for, but my husband and I decided just to take the wait-and-see approach for the next couple of months. I have a lot of work to catch up on, and to keep ahead of, so this spring and into early summer I expect is going to be a little stressful. And it would be great if people learned to spell my name correctly - I know my last name is a little rough, but my first name is pretty easy and has never been spelled with a silly little "i" or stripperific "ie", as much as some of my family members and co-workers would like to believe.

M is around later this week for a presentation, and we may get to have lunch and hang out when she's here. We have to make plans to do something fun before the month of April is a bust. I'll be having happy hour drinks with the ladies from upstairs at the end of the month, and one of them invited me to go shopping with her other little social group. It's kind of weird how I've fallen into this clique after all of this time keeping myself away from just this sort of situation, but they're nice people and it's good to have peers to commiserate with from time to time. I may live in a bubble, but I'm not an island. Whatever I just meant by that...

To me this is heaven

The perfect end to the weekend: tiramisu and a good cup of coffee while watching repeats of Deadliest Catch.

So how was your weekend?

Falling down

I'll cut to the chase today. I'm depressed. A series of events have transpired to make me feel in turn useless, ineffectual, clumsy, and excessively emotional. All before the morning coffee had a chance to get cold.

I've had to ride in to work with my husband because my car has a flat tire, so I've been doing the bare minimum as far as makeup and clothes are concerned - throw on whatever I can find in my closet that relatively matches and put on foundation and maybe some blush to keep from looking like a reanimated corpse. Of course, it still feel like a reanimated corpse due to stress, lack of sleep and general feelings of malaise.

I came in all intent to work on the budget project for the upcoming cuts, and ran some numbers just as an initial exercise (this thing isn't due until next week - I'm just trying to stay well ahead of a deadline for a change). Then I called the budget office to bounce my totals off of someone else's brain and found out that we didn't match. So before I went upstairs to see where I was off, I mentioned it to the manager down here about my dicrepancy, because she was headed to a meeting to discuss "streamlining and reassignement". Later I found out she had gone to the boss and told him that my numbers didn't quite add up to the budget mananger's and by what margin, before I even had a chance to correct my totals based on what I found out upstairs and before I could get in to talk to the boss myself. I won't type what I think about this. Actually, I did type it but I backed up and removed it. Lets just say it rhymes with the words "ducking" and "pitch". It was not her place to do that. I don't think she realizes what she's just done to both my professional and personal opinion of her character. And to add to that, when I was talking to the boss (who makes me very uncomfortable - have I ever mentioned that?), he said he'd been talking to the budget manager and they already had a plan in place. Which he had never, up to that point, bothered to share with me. And the budget manager knew they'd talked when I was in her office and didn't mention it either. So. I wasted my morning. Which pisses me off.

So I decided to go for a relaxing walk and try not to feel to aggravated, and I ended up falling down a small flight of stairs outside of my building. It might be funny to me later, but right now I'm sore and embarassed. I ended up with a couple of scrapes on my knees and one of my shins, sore wrists from trying to prevent myself whacking my chin on the sidewalk, and scrapes on the frames of my glasses from where they flew off and landed on the concrete. I guess my heel got caught on something on the middle step. Or I really am that ungainly. Or I threw myself down three low steps in a pathetic attempt to do myself in because life's not worth living. Whatever the case, my day is shot, I'm grumpy as hell, and I have training in half an hour.

If something positive actually happens today, I'll come back and add it in, but so far downhill is the only direction I've been going. Literally.

Realization/Rationalization

Behold the horror...

The horror of the ritual search for a new bathing suit. I finally faced the terror last night because we were going to the beach today, and the suit I had was too skimpy (there wasn't enough fabric to keep my not-so-huge tracts of land under wraps, so to speak). Last night I had to also face the facts and acknowledge a hard truth: I've allowed myself to gain way too much weight. Lets be honest - I'm pretty short. And short people cannot weigh what taller people weigh without inching into zaftig hobbit territory. I've always been a little...I'll say chubby, to put it kindly...since puberty exacted its vengeance on me, and weight-management (and finding off-the-rack clothes that fit - even in what stores label as "petites") has been nothing short of a challenge for almost all of my adult life (ha - short...no pun intended). But last night I finally had to take a hard look at the issue when I tried on a suit on the larger end of the normal sizing spectrum and felt it was a little too snug. So I wandered over to the "women's" sizing section (as tiny and utterly pathetic and uninspiring as it was), and it felt kind of weird, but I decided to try on a couple of the smaller sizes from that area. I'm pretty sure you can see where I'm going with this. Surprise - the size 14/16 "women's" fit better than the 14/16 "average". The bad part, though, is that they didn't have a 14/16 in a style I liked in the top, so I had to get the bottoms in the size I needed, and the top in a larger size (18) - so now I have excess fabric in the torso of my suit. Which has a decided "bun in the oven" look to it. This is not the look I was going for at all.

(I kinda wish they's bring back bathing dresses...but nooo, it's got to be all teensy tiny bikinis everywhere...)

It's frustrating being in a strange sort of retail sizing limbo. Too big for the average but not *quite* chunky enough to truly peruse the racks with the bigger gals. And forget the conversation I had with my husband before heading out on this self-esteem crushing excursion, as I tried (and failed) to explain not only why women's fashions cost more than men's ("just because?"), but also that there is no universal sizing standard. It must be so easy to be a man sometimes..."Hey, my pants have a hole in the crotch. Guess I should buy some pants before I get accused of being some kind of perv. Hey - here are some {checks waist size and pant length}. All done! Doo do do dee doo..."

That all being said, I have decided that I need to do something. I hold no illusions that I will be able to achieve and maintain a super-skinny state. Honestly - that's not for me anyway. (Tried it once...if you ever want to hear the story of how close I probably came to being one of "those girls" - you know, the ones who don't eat and fill the gnawing void with exercise while their bodies self destruct - just ask) I just can't keep ignoring the fact that I really am heavier than I ought to be. It's not just the aesthetics factor, either - this can't be terribly healthy. Since I recently canceled the expensive gym membership I wasn't using, and I've been finding myself snacking again for no apparent reason, here is the plan: two walking breaks during the working day of at least 10 minutes; increase in fresh fruits and veggies consumed daily; decrease in meats and pre-packaged foods; no soda - water (maybe a Fuze "slenderize" if I need something with flavor, but no soda); family walks in the evening around the lake or the park. I will need help sticking to some of this. Okay...sticking to most of it. I'm lazy and totally unmotivated much of the time. That's just the plain truth. I may discuss my successes or failures here, but I don't plan on replacing my normal urbane, pithy, ranting, pointless and shallow content with anything approaching a "diet blog", so don't worry about that.

But back to the point of the whole terrible and gut-wrenching experience last night. Now I have a bathing suit that kind of, but not really, fits. At least it more than adequately covers my seemingly ever increasing mass. I wore it to the beach. We had fun - it was a beautiful day.

This is what the nation's #1 rated beach looks like

A little windy, just like this same time last year. But it was more crowded, being Spring Break and all, plus with all of the late season snowbirds and Europeans. You can tell the tourists from people who have lived here for a period of time, because we're the ones mincing our way into the surf muttering "Oooohhh....cold. Cold! Ah! Cold..." the whole time. Once you get in though, it feels pretty good. Just remember the "stingray shuffle". We all got pretty burned, which is typical for the inaugural trip to the beach, even though I made everyone slather on the sunscreen. I guess it would've helped to remember to reapply. A least two of us will turn a decent shade of bronze, but the other one doesn't ever seem to be able to accomplish anything more than a serious farmer's tan. I just hope we don't all peel...that shite is just nasty.

Sunday is my son's birthday. It is officially his "big kid" milestone, at least in his mind. It'll be a pretty low-key get together, which is how we like to do parties. Just your typical cake, ice cream, burnt meats and malted hops kind of to-do.

Battle Star Galactica is on. This means I gotta go bask in the glory of Jamie Bamber. Damn...where's that towel pic?

Yeah, it's barely SFW ;)