Welcome to the Middle of the Aftermath

First of all, for all of you who have been pining for my return, and that means both of you, I am in fact back. Odds are, this will be my last post until after Christmas, and the reason for that is the same reason that I haven't posted in 3 weeks or so. And that is that my jobs are kicking my ASS (insert Ian/Rodney noise here). I have been pulling 80 hour weeks since the beginning of the "holiday season", and to tell you the truth my brain has just been too damn tired to process any kind of coherent thoughts into any kind of entry. And how am I doing it now, you ask? Go ahead, ask. Thank you. Well, I actually am off the night job tonight and for some unknown reason have some semblance of mental acuity. So here we go.

I won't give you any boring details as far as Target goes. In fact, I am disappointed in just how uneventful the last month has been there. The only real excitement is that I stopped some woman from trying to do a "ticket switch". That means she pulled a barcode sticker off of an inexpensive item, in this case a $40 vacuum, and put it on a more expensive item, in this case a $500 vacuum. The suits liked that. But for the most part, people have been very cooperative with me and my need to do my job. Ho hum.

Dayside, it is officially the end of the Era of the Asian Mustard Lady. Feel free to sound whatever death knell you wish. However, in her place I have found a new muse. One that I do not deal with as directly, but still one worth monitoring and reporting on. Her name shall henceforth be known as Mother Hen. I mentioned her previously. She is the one trying to organize everything and randomly brings in treats. Yesterday, it was a cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory. Yummy indeed, but sometimes I get the feeling that she is trying to fatten us all up in order to eat us, a la Hansel and Gretel. I have to keep an eye on that. Plus, she collects back scratchers and Elvis memorabilia. Hell of a combo. The Elvis stuff I can at least understand, after all Elvis was a bad ass in his day. But back scratchers? Her walls in her office (she is one of the few people in cubicle world to have real walls and a door) are covered with back scratchers hanging from push pins and nails. It's like she is a sadist, but not a mean one. I just see her conducting experiments on homeless people in the hours she is in the basement by herself (she keeps kinda weird hours), but it's hard to break someone's spirit with a Mickey Mouse Back Scratcher. I don't know.

Anyway, her current pet project is the aforementioned Secret Santa, and the offshoot of that, the Office Christmas Breakfast. Today she sent a spreadsheet to everyone so they could sign up. Maybe I am overreacting here, but it's a little too sterile that way. I am going to have to check under the bowl of oatmeal, Golden Child style.

One other thing before I wrap this up. This past Saturday, the wife and I had a party at our house. We figured it had been 5 months since we moved in, it was time to invite people over. Plus, she is in a play that ends this Sunday, but this way it was a holiday/cast party. The party went well. It seemed to be a pretty big hit. I am a little put off though, because it was my first "adult" rager. By that I mean, we had the drinking and carousing, just like my parties in college. There even wound up being a special smoking room, unbeknownst to me at the time. I went down to the basement at one point and realized that it smelled like Cheech and Chong were filming in the utility room. Oh well. No harm, no foul. And the cat we adopted (a story for another time - I will have to fill you in on the cat falling through the ceiling and breaking my nightstand that I have had since I was 12. It's a hoot. Maybe next Tuesday if I have the gumption) was much more relaxed around all the guests than we thought he would be. He just kept licking his paw and then staring at it. But with all of that, there were conversations abounding regarding people refinancing their homes and discussing techniques on what they do when their children are crying and blah blah blah. It was quite disconcerting to be sitting there and between shots of whiskey to talk about my plans for remodeling the house and the market value of the neighborhood as "the next Canton" (for you non locals, Canton is a neighborhood in Baltimore that was kind of run down, but over the last 10 years or so has experienced a renaissance and is now one of the most expensive, some would say overpriced, neighborhoods in town). And discussing this made me happy because all I could think about were rising property values and what that would mean if and when we sell the place. As I typed those last couple of sentences, I died a little. It is like the Barenaked Ladies said, "Old at being young, young at being old". That has become the description of my life.

All in all, this has been a pretty boring entry. Not nearly as funny as I would have hoped. Still, I am back, and I will do my best to post again before Christmas, or at least before New Years Day. And as always, I will try to do better next time. If I am lucky, someone at work will piss me off this week. That is always good for a chortle.

Maybe I will post pics from the wedding. Once I figure out how to post pictures that aren't saved to the hard drive.