What I Learned at Work this Week

1. Podcasts make the day go by faster, especially really sicko ones like Chicken Fried Radio.
2. All the Tamagotchie cheats are on the internet and I now know what to do when Tama starts to cry.
3. After two 12 hour days and during the beginning of the third (and basically throughout the entire third), I get very punch drunk.
4. If I show Jack all the fun new things I learned while babysitting his virtual pet, he regains interest in it and takes it away. :(
5. Kwan's Chinese food on Penn is really good and super cheap.
6. According to the Christian religion, only man on man sex is prohibited, girl on girl is just fine.
7. My coworker "John" got divorced and had 30 dates in 30 days. Now, he's planning date number 2 with 30% of them. I don't think I've had that many in my entire life. But, wait, I don't think I've ever met that many people I would have gone out with, anyway.
8. Todd's idea of variety for dinner when I am working late is getting pizza from 2 different restaurants.
9. When Jennifer showed up with another cart of files, I actually had to fight back the tears.

and the 10th thing I learned this week at work:

10. When "Melissa" bends over to pick up files, I can see her butt crack.

Life in the cube farm.

I Hate People

Someone decided it would be a really great idea to drive through our neighborhood last night and shoot the windows out of cars with a bb gun. Dozens. Of. Cars.

Yes, they got us, twice.

One of the girls I work with had her dog shot by a neighbor on Friday. The dog had to go for emergency surgery, but the bb had gotten stuck in his kidney and he died. They can't prove anything, so the neighbor can't be charged.

People suck.

Is It REALLY Hooky....

I played Hooky from work today...well, is it really playing hooky when you tell everyone you aren't coming in?

Another Mystery of the Universe.

Scene: Amy's house 7:37am.

Amy: "JAAAAAAACKKKKKKKKK" we have things to do, bathrooms to clean, places to go play!!!! GET UP!!!!"

Jack: "Mmmmmmnnnnthphhhhh"

Amy: "I'm calling Luke and telling him everything's off!"

Jack:: "Noooooooooooooo!!!!" At which point child bounds out of bed and goes to kitchen for breakfast after small distraction with small wieners who need love.

In comes Dave, Amy's crazy friend from Colorado, who was staying at the house for Easter.

Dave: "So, whatcha eating?"

Jack: "Cereal."

Dave: "Amy., can I hold Jack upside down so all of his blood rushes to his head and then give him a swirly?"

Amy: "Hrmmmmm, I'd really rather not."

Jack: "Noooooooooooooooooo!!!!"

Amy: "Hurry up and eat your cereal or I'll sic Dave on you."

At this point, the child does go get dressed, brush his teeth, and do his chores (ok, with a minor attempt at bribing me to get out of half of them, which, didn't work, since I didn't want to do his chores, either.)

9:15am Luke arrives and we all leave (Dave, getting into boat pulling semi parked in front of our house all weekend...if I didn't think the neighbors already thought we were nuts, this might phase me.)

10:15am We (Jack, Luke, and Moi) arrive at the Andover "YMCA" since they are supposed to have this Kick Ass indoor water play park for the kids.

10:25am Realize they only run the big slides from 7-9pm during the week. Crap.

10:28am Children pass water test so I can leave them with the bored lifeguard (they were the only kids there) and go run a couple miles on the treadmill.

10:55am

Amy: "So are you guys ready to go?"

Jack: (Coming up from under water and at the far end of kiddie pool) "NO! We want to stay all day!!"

Amy: "Um, ok, I'm going to do the BodyFlow class, I'll be back soon."

11:55am

Amy: "So are you guys ready to go?"

Jack: "No, like one more hour."

Amy: "I'll go lift weights, I'll be back in 20 minutes."

So I get the kids to leave, and we head home. We stop at Subway for lunch, and they are out of bread. Seriously, out of all their bread. WTF. We decide to go home and have pb&j's.

I then feed the boys, drop them at Luke's house (they wanted a different environment) and go take the wieners for a nail trim which, is right next to work, so I stop and say "hi" to all the smokers hanging out in the beautiful weather and they oogle my dogs. Then, some moron goes up over the curb and crashes into the light pole in front of our building, for no reason we can figure, and he totals his truck. The light pole wasn't doing too good, either. I need to start smoking again, all the exciting stuff at work happens in the parking lot. I never did figure out why the fire truck, police, and ambulance showed up at the office last week. All these things I miss!!

Now, it's about 4 and I would normally be coming home from work. I need to get dinner started and my piano teacher comes in a hour. All in all, it was a good day off. I updated my blog, I did take the wieners for a walk when I got home, and I got a bunch of laundry done.

Hooky or not, it was a great day. If for no other reason, most everyone else I know HAD to actually go to work.

And a Vacation She Shall Have

So, we went to Santa Catalina Island.

We left Minneapolis via Northwest Air at 11:25am Sunday. We arrived at 1:00pm in LAX airport. We called for the shuttle service and they picked us up in a black Lincoln Town car.

Why is it that when Todd smiles, it looks like he sat on a tack?
Mysteries of the Universe.
This is the ferry we took:

Ferry's have come a long way since I last was on one. Todd had a screwdriver on the way there, and I think I could have ordered a 5 course meal.
While we were leaving the dock, we saw this:

Which is the infamous Queen Mary. I can't tell you how many times I heard the story from my grandfather, Herb, about when he got shipped out of the US to go to war and they packed the boys on this ship. They put so many on there that only half of them could sleep at a time, the others had to hang out on deck. Apparently, everyone in New York knew about them leaving on the boat, except no one told the soldiers. He found out from some bar fly. Nice, huh?
Then, while we were on our way to Catalina, we saw this:

Which was a school of about 100 dolphins. It was so cool!!! They went right by the boat, and swam off into the distance. Way better than our trip back, which was really choppy, and Todd got seasick and threw up. Yummy, I know.The island is very cute, 88% of it is protected by the Conservation Society so the towns are 2 and on opposite ends of the 22 mile long island. Here's what the bigger town of Avalon looks like:

And a close up:

Yes, it looks very European. The town was very clean, I got to run in the morning and watch the sunrise over the ocean and the locals cleaning the streets and picking up the trash. It's a tourist town, all day long, but the rest of the island looks like this:

Yes, those tiny things in the background are bison or buffalo. There's about 125-150 of them on the island...they ship them off to South Dakota when they multipy too much. Some guy brought them over for a movie back in the 20's and decided to leave them there. There's been about 300 movies/television shows shot there, it's been a set for everything from Europe to Australia.

Fascinating, I know!

The ride home was pretty uneventful, unless you count Todd getting seasick on the ferry and throwing up his doughnut and mocha about 3 feet from me into a plastic bag. Mmmmmm, appetizing.

But, it's taken me 3 days to do this one post, so, I'm going to bid you all farewell. By the time 8:30pm rolls around, I'm like the walking dead. Why, you ask? Because I was in my car at 4:58 this morning so I could go to the gym before Todd needed to leave for work.

If I don't start losing this nice roll of fat around my waist soon, I'm gonna cry.