Category: Daily Life

Back in April I complained about our office being freezing cold because the building management turned on the air conditioning system too soon. Now the problem has come full circle as the air conditioning remains on too long into the fall.

I’m sitting at my desk wrapped in a fleece blanket, which I wear through the office as if it were a really ratty-looking pashmina. Now and then I have to stop typing and sit on my hands for a while to warm up my frozen fingers. Right now I’m viewing coffee more as a hand-warmer than a consumable.

There’s something singularly grim about looking out a 14th-story window into an indistinct panorama of fog while simultaneously being chilled to the bone. No wonder I keep longing to go home and take a nap after lunch every day.

As I’ve mentioned, I can’t seem to get a break when it comes to cars lately. Over the past few years I’ve experienced the following catastrophic car issues:

• Totalled SUV, thanks to a careless teenaged driver
• Severe transmission damage caused initially, I believe, by a huge hole in the pavement of a parking area
• One car waterlogged to death in a flash flood

That doesn’t count minor (but expensive) car incidents such as the dent my husband put in my last car by hitting it with his Jeep, or the big piece of trim I knocked off the bottom of my convertible before we got our driveway redone.

So obviously there’s a pattern.

Yesterday I was driving to work through an area that’s being subjected to all manner of heavy construction. A bulldozer was loading big pieces of asphalt into the bin of a large truck and I remember jumping at the loud noise as the chunks of asphalt hit the bottom of the nearly empty bin. Then I jumped because a piece of asphalt somehow missed the bin, bounced out and hit my car. Yes, that’s my new car. The car I’d just licensed the day before.

The construction crew were very apologetic and rushed to give me contact information for their office. I spoke with the owner and got the whole insurance thing rolling with them, so I’m sure it’ll all work out. But still, it’s my NEW CAR.

This morning I’ll have to squeeze in some time to start collecting estimates. My driver’s side door has some pretty heavy-duty dents and scratches, and I’m pretty sure there are bits of asphalt stuck in the metal. Considering that the body panels are made of aluminum, it wouldn’t surprise me if they just decide to replace the whole door. Sigh.

So how’s your week going?

Lately it seems that at least half of the other drivers on the road are complete idiots (and I’m not referring to their choice of political bumper stickers). Even allowing for my own seasonal crankiness as the weather deteriorates, things out there are bad.

On the highway, the other drivers are usually more or less under control, except for the occasional egotist who thinks it’s a great idea to avoid a traffic jam by speeding down the shoulder. On residential and city streets, however, it’s a whole different story.

First of all, why is it so difficult for people to understand how a four-way stop works? I’ll tell you in the least number of words possible: Approach the intersection, observing the three or fewer cars at the other compass points. When everyone who reached the intersection before you has gone through, it’s your turn. The End.

My new favorite rash act on the road involves double left-turn lanes. It seems that some drivers feel it is acceptable to barrel into the other turn lane during the turn if they’ve incorrectly anticipated which lane they’ll need once they’re through the intersection. Hey! Think ahead!

As you might guess, my audible rush-hour monologue sounds a lot like the above, only louder and spiced with a few more choice words. Maybe I need to start drinking coffee before I leave the house…

The focal point of last weekend was an enormous, nine-family garage sale in which I participated. As a people-watching exercise it was second to none. As an efficient way of making money and/or disposing of unwanted possessions it was two days of hard labor for approximately $4 per hour, so it’s best to focus on the other.

I knew that my stepmother had a basement full of things she’d like to get rid of, so I offered to take her items and sell them, too. She had no idea how to price her stuff (my answer: as cheaply as possible), so I agreed to do her pricing for her. I left work early on Friday and ran some errands and when I returned home, she and my dad had dropped off about 10 big boxes of miscellaneous possessions. There were a lot of dishes, ceramic knicknacks and kitchen things that had clearly been stored for a long time, so I decided to run them through the dishwasher before I tagged them.

As for my household, we mainly had samples from my husband’s last sales job and miscellaneous unwanted decor items that I’d deemed too nice to throw in the dumpster when we had our massive cleanout. I can say with no small amount of pride that our bathroom is now completely free of potpourri-filled decorative jars. Hooray!

I washed and tagged and washed and tagged from about 7 p.m. Friday until I loaded the Jeep at midnight. With the boxes of merchandise and a 6-foot long display table, the Jeep was groaningly full. I abandoned my idea to bring a bag of castoff clothing and a clothes rack.

By then I was really, really tired, but I’d promised to bring potato soup the next day, so I was forced to stay awake long enough to peel potatoes and carrots, chop celery and onions and make a large pot of soup. As soon as the soup was acceptably thickened, I put the lid on, shoved it into the refrigerator and went to bed…

…for five hours. I woke up at 6 a.m. and stopped by a convenience store for some really bad coffee on my way to my friend’s house. I unloaded the Jeep in the dark, set up the table and arranged my merchandise before anyone else arrived. Then I made a Starbucks run for a big Caffe Americano so I wouldn’t fall asleep in my chair. By the time I got back, the signs were up around the neighborhood, several other people had set up their tables of goods, and the customers had found us.

The rest of the day is kind of a blur. I worked the cash table with my friend L. and we struggled to keep track of nine different people’s sales. It was very cold outside, despite the space heater we had on the porch by our table. When we finally wrapped things up at 4:30 p.m., my stepmother had only two boxes of items left (mainly baskets and one of the two espresso makers she’d brought) and I had maybe five or six small items. We’d made…well, a little. As I said, that has to be considered beside the point to stave off the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The next day I was so tired that I woke up at 10 a.m., drank two cups of coffee and ate some toast, then passed out again until 3 p.m. It’s probably a good thing I did, too. I could feel my immune system tanking from the long day in the cold with no sleep.

At the end of the sale, everyone kept saying, “We should do this again next year!” If I’m lucky, I won’t have enough saleable stuff for at least a few more years. Still, I’d go and hang out with my friends all day if they want to have a sale. That’s the really fun part anyway.

Sorry, folks. It’s just been one of those weeks. I have so much work to do that I can’t wrap my brain around anything interesting to blog about.

However, here’s the funniest thing I’ve read this week from someone else’s blog: The Gremlins Diet from Words For My Enjoyment.

Believe me, I’m trying to figure out what it’ll take to free up cranial space to make room for amusing observations of my own. I won’t have to tell you when I’m successful – you’ll know it by the sharp rise in blog quality. As for this week: again, sorry.

I accomplished a great deal yesterday, and even though I doubt you’ll find it particularly interesting, I’ll catalog my achievements so I can at least admire them myself:

• Finished a well-received 7-page report for work
• Put away two weeks’ worth of clean laundry
• Washed a week’s work of pots and pans
• Went to the office and tidied up other work projects’ loose ends
• Had a huge lunch of pot roast, mashed potatoes, vegetables and peach cobbler, then did not fall asleep at my desk later
• Attended a club board meeting and submitted my resignation so a replacement can be elected to finish the second year of my term
• Drove 25+ miles from the meeting to band practice and caught the last hour or so of a really good audition of a second guitarist
• Had a shameful dinner of Velveeta on toast
• Watched everything good that TiVo had ready (notably, Scrubs)
• Fell asleep on the couch and crawled into bed around midnight.

My goals for today:

• Complete my timesheets for work (at this point, I’m 6 days behind)
• Clean off my desk at work (no desk surface remains visible)
• Clean out my “In Box” in Outlook
• Do actual work, if applicable and appropriate

Wish me luck!

I’ve been thinking and thinking about what to write this morning, but I’m all tapped out from spending the early part of the morning writing a report for work. Today I think it would be best if you just moved along to the next blog. I’ll do some thinking and I’m sure I’ll have something delightful for you tomorrow.

In the meantime, why not go to my favorite recipe site and find something to make for dinner? That would be a productive use of the time you ordinarily spend reading Average Jane. Just trying to be helpful…

I spent the weekend out of town at a district meeting of my community service organization. I roomed with a fellow club officer and things were going pretty well until about 1:00 a.m. the first night. I don’t know what woke me up, but I quickly realized that my roommate snored. In fact, she snored a lot like my husband, only more steadily. At home, I have a loud fan on my bedside table to drown out all intruding noises. The hotel room, on the other hand, was completely silent…except for the implacable snoring.

As I lay there awake, listening to the snoring that still penetrated the toilet paper I’d stuffed into my ears, my mind touched on each of the snoring solutions I’d ordinarily use at home: pillow throwing, verbal abuse, etc. Unfortunately, these options are all far too rude for use on a casual acquaintance. I realized I was hungry, so I fished a meal replacement bar out of my purse and ate it. The next thing I knew it was 6:00 a.m. and the alarm was ringing. Hooray! I’d fallen back asleep!

The next night I figured I’d be okay because I had a couple of glasses of wine in the hospitality suite before bedtime. I was oh, so wrong. This time I woke up at 2:00 a.m. I already knew that plugging my ears was a waste of time. I’d thought of a solution, but it was a little drastic. If my roommate happened to get up, she’d know how much her snoring was bothering me, and I didn’t want that. I hesitated for a while, but soon I knew there was only one thing to do.

I scooped the sheets, blankets and pillows off my bed and deposited them in the bathtub. With the bathroom fan on and the door shut, I turned off the lights, burrowed under the covers, and slept in the tub for four surprisingly comfortable, silent hours. I woke up just before 6:00 a.m. and dumped all the bedding back on my bed before my roommate awakened. I’d made it through!

It had to be done. Ever since my last hair appointment, my hair has looked absolutely awful. The highlights were uneven and I had acres of dark roots showing. (My bangs are too short, too, but they’ll grow.) At first I enjoyed the brighter blonde hair, but lately it’s taken a turn toward the trailer park; gone from flashy to trashy. My brief fling with the cheaper hairstylist is over.

I’m attending a big client function today followed by a weekend-long conference for my community service organization. Yesterday I took a hard look at myself in the mirror. My hair did not say, “Professional writer” nor did it say, “Trusted club vice-president.” It said something more along the lines of, “Down-on-her-luck, aging hooker.”

I’d been strongly considering dyeing my hair since the beginning of the week. Ignoring the well-intentioned color advice of my co-workers (blue), I selected a dark blonde shade from the drug store last night, knowing that it would probably turn out more of a light brown on my over-bleached hair. I opened the box as soon as I got home, but chickened out and watched “Lost” first. Then I pondered my reflection for a few seconds and realized I couldn’t stand to go out in public in that state again.

As I expected, my hair turned out light brown. The good news is that it’s a shade that you might reasonably expect to find on the head of a person with my eyebrow color. The bad news is that it’s a little bit ginger-colored and it may very well get too reddish as it fades. If I have to, I’ll just go with a darker color through the fall and winter until I decide whether I’m going to have another go at blonde highlights. Who says only animals get winter coloration?

Pounding headache, upset stomach, general listlessness…these are just a few of the delightful symptoms that I’ve been experiencing since yesterday afternoon.

I was planning to work a little late yesterday but I kept having to leave my desk and lie down, which is never a good sign. I left the office and immediately got caught in a horrendous traffic jam that took my 10-minute commute and stretched it to almost an hour.

Once I got home, I installed myself in bed and didn’t really get up again until a few minutes ago. I just had a couple of pieces of toast since it occurred to me that I didn’t have any dinner. I’m trying to knock back the headache with aspirin and a can of Coke.

I have way too much going on to actually skip a day of work, so I’m going to try to suck it up and get out the door, even though I still feel craptacular (not to be confused with crepuscular, which is a really ugly word for an otherwise innocuous idea, don’t you think?). Hey, a language joke – the Coke must be working!

Okay, I’m finished whining now, but you’d best move on to someone more cheerful.