Well, now that that’s all done, I am so ready to start kicking some ass on projects. Last night, while I was working on some writing, Esteban came in and plopped down on the leather recliner in my office, which is his version of Tilly’s plaintive mews and prodding with a fur paw. Both need attention.
I’ve been negatively reinforcing the behavior with Tilly, usually grabbing her to hug and kiss her (which she despises) or scooping her up and giving her some asthma medication (which she despises a million times over but enjoys the treats that she gets after a successful pill swallow).
Esteban was just making excuses for something to talk about, feeling lonely and devoid of human contact, and made the mistake of talking about our plans to turn the dining room into a den (prompted by my mother suggesting that I replace the fugly hanging light fixture in there with a crystal chandelier and I threw up in my mouth at the suggestion and quickly said “No, I’m doing something different in there.” Not only am I NOT a crystal chandelier type person, but our bungalow only has seven foot ceilings, so my mother is smoking crack.) I don’t know why he brings up the subject with me, because I am immediately anxious to start new projects and he just wants to drag his feet and make sure that nothing ever changes, so it was probably more negative reinforcement.
We discussed about what to do with the two hutches in the dining room. I figured that we could sell both of them. Both were handed down from Ward and June and neither is our style. They are sort of huge and hulking and not appropriate for the house whatsoever (but probably more appropriate than a crystal chandelier). He balked because we have a ton of heirloom etched crystal glassware in storage and where would we go with that? I suggested buying something new, which brought about objections. Why sell a perfectly good piece of furniture just to buy something else to do the same job?
Meh. Logic.
However, by the end of the conversation, we had decided to sell one hutch, maybe sell the better of the two hutches (leaving the crystal in storage until we move), and also sell the dining room table, then rip out the carpeting in the dining room and put in new stuff. And also put shelves in my closet in my office, which Esteban had been objecting to earlier. And I agreed to maybe not paint the dining room/new den the rather tawdry shade of scarlet that I’ve been eyeing for a year. Which is fine, because I understand his worry that the room will seem too small if we paint it a dark color, despite a white ceiling.
I’ll just paint one of the walls in the kitchen red instead. Ha! Compromise!
I’m not sure when all of this is supposed to happen. That’s for Future Weetabix to contend with, not Now Weetabix. Life’s sure going to suck for Future Weetabix.
On the day after Christmas, I took a vacation day, continuing to work my way through the remainder of my unused vacation. If we don’t use it, we lose it and I’ve never had a problem using them before, but when I took fall semester off, I suddenly no longer had a use for all of those comp hours earned by working late, so started using them as travel days, which pushed my remaining vacation days to the end of the year. Bah.
Starting next week, however, I will be in my unbelievable tenth years at this company and will get another week of vacation. It’s just funny because when I got hired two days after receiving my diploma, I figured that I’d work here for six months to a year, just so that I could make the house payment and my student loans, and then I’d figure something else out. Bah! So na’ve. I should have looked around at my coworkers. The average tenure in this office is something like 25 years. I work for the corporate equivalent of the Hotel California. They make it too easy to keep coming to work.
I spent the day doing not much of anything. I ran out to Target, because I wanted to check out the post holiday clearance stuff. I bought some MORE holiday cards and gift wrap, which is just silly because I didn’t even touch the stuff I had leftover from previous years, plus I bought more this year while at Broadway Paper, after I had already addressed 90% of my holiday cards. So, in essence, I have eight million boxes of really super cute cards, and yet, more cards were apparently needed. Go figure. I am such a sucker for sparse snowflakes on heavy card stock.
I can’t really hate myself on the wrapping paper, though. It was the very cool but overpriced stuff where you only get 12.5 square feet a roll. It’s such a rip off, and the only way I’ll buy it is if I can get it for 50% off, which means that instead of getting screwed by the man, I’m heavy petted by the man.
I am justifying this purchase in that they are all not really holiday-esque and I can, in theory, use them all year. Well, if I remember they exist.
The real reason I went out was to find those ornament storage box thingies with the cardboard inserts. Last year, I looked for them two days after Christmas but they were all gone. This year, when I got there at noon, there were four remaining on the shelf. I took two. I sort of want to just take down the tree now, just because it needs to come down and because I have appropriate boxes to put things into. That’s just so grinchy, so it’s staying up until after I get home from New York. Also, organizing for the sake of organizing is a bit scary. I don’t really know myself anymore.
We pottered around the house, picking up the Christmas that had apparently exploded all over our domicile and then did very little else late into the evening. I got so distracted playing Zuma that I forgot that I had to get up the next morning and went to bed too late.
However, this morning, I managed to get up on time, get showered and my hair dried and left for work early. I don’t know what that was about, but I was rewarded with an absolutely breathtaking sunrise, full of corals and aquas and filling the sky in a way you don’t often see this at this latitude. The sunrise has been happening after I am already pointed west over the last month, so it was awesome to see it while I was still driving east to catch the highway (and the Sbux).
Esteban started coughing midway through the day yesterday and demanded that I go out and procure Ny-Quil, Day-Quil and any other Quil I could find. He was still coughing this morning and I warned him that he should call and make an appointment to get some antibiotics, because with that aggressive barking cough, it was a lot like his last bout with pneumonia which knocked him on his ass for a month.
He pshawed and got defensive and claimed that they guard antibiotics more closely than medical marijuana these days. He called me at work a few hours later and left a craggy voice mail. When I called him back, the only reason he called was so that he could tell me that he was getting worse. I told him to drink juice and he said that he was but he couldn’t stop coughing. I told him to call the doctor, but he refused. Adamantly refused.
I said “OK” and was prepared to drop it again, because damn it, if you’re 36 years old, you should make these decisions for yourself. I am a pretty codependent person but man, when I give up, you’ve made your point. He immediately countered with “Oh fine, if it will make you happy, if you want to make an appointment for me, I’ll go in.”
I almost started laughing out loud. Clearly he just didn’t want to admit a weakness, but if it will make me feel better, he’ll give in. Whatever dude. I hung up and called the doctor, the entire time musing about how he called me to have me call the doctor for him and then I’d have to call him back? I don’t get men. I made the appointment for tomorrow and sent him an e-mail with the time and location. He called back an hour later, sounding a bit more grave and said “You’re right. I do need a doctor. When’s the appointment?” I explained that I had sent him an e-mail, to which he responded that he was too sick to go into his office and he couldn’t stop coughing and my god, how did I think he could last until the next morning? Clearly I was killing him, with my 9 am appointments!
I sighed, told him that I’d call him back, called the doctor back and explained the situation to the receptionist, who jockeyed some appointments around and got him in to see a different doctor at a different clinic across town in an hour. I called Esteban back, gave him the information and explained where the other clinic was. Would you believe that the man had the nerve to make an exasperated sigh? As though I was seriously putting a damper on his day, with my foolish womanly flibberty gibbeting about silly antibiotics.
The hell?
I may have come a long way, baby, but holy shit, some days I’m still the feminist equivalent of my great grandmother.
Maybe I need to lighten up. After all, if, say, a fucking bat were to fly into our house and terrorize us, my feminist high horse would cease to exist. Sometimes I think the only reason I got married was to have a muscular barrier between me and potential bats.
