Charming as a clean baby

My fella is a cat person in several meanings of the word. Including the fact that he has more than a few toes over the line into the autism spectrum. To say he lacks empathy for people would be putting it mildly in general but he does relate well to the many cats that various women in his life have bestowed upon him. He views my smarty-pants old lady Sheltie with mild alarm but was so kind and good when she became horribly ill with gastric bleeding from eating commercial dog food to which she had developed an allergy. Then, when I got sick and was in the hospital, he actually had to make her food, which entails cooking chicken thighs to a pulp and  removing the bones by hand; a nasty, greasy business that he tackled manfully.  It weirds him out that she understands language and does what you tell her, though. I have noticed that he has started trying to talk to her in dog. She comes up to smell the eau de chat all over his sweatpants and he says to her, "Harfle harfle." She looks at him like a hostile Frenchman at a fat American parley-voooing. I think it is charming that he is trying to relate to her. She finds it charming when he obeys her nose-point signals and gets her a treat from the bag in the cabinet.

Thanksgiving

A very odd one this year; the first without my child in 23 years, but she is happy to be in NYC with her grandmother, seeing Rockefeller Center all lit up for Christmas just like we always wanted to. I will make it there one year before she finishes grad school and we will do the sights, too. I let my fella choose today's menu and it was very odd indeed; he chose homemade chicken/spinach and meat-lovers pizzas and my fancy chocolate pie. So we were not nibbling miserably at nostalgic food without my child, I suspect. When he first selected the lineup, we thought I might have just one day off and he didn't want me to spend all my time off cooking the big meal and then have to go back Friday still tired, too. So I am thankful for that consideration as well. This time last year I was too sick to stand for more than a minute or so at a time, and somehow I got our meal on the table by sitting on the kitchen stool and waving the spoon feebly at my family. Then I couldn't eat any of it because of the nausea that dogged me for the next couple of months. So I am thankful to have found a medicine to stop the horribleness that cost me my job and nearly my house. I have an appointment Wednesday with the GI doc to try to talk him into giving me an open-ended Rx for it, since whenever I go 16 hours without a dose the famous poop and the atrocious belly pain and the fainting all come back. Which I am never thankful for.

Don't Pay the Ransom

I've escaped! No, just escaped getting arrested for murder today at work. It was a good thing the person on the other end of the phone was a quarter of a mile of hall and elevator away is all I have to say about that. And my big boss is pretty awesome, she backed me up on the one who needed killin. But still, this job, my god. I have that other interview on the 30th and I am practicing practicing practicing for it.
Also in good news, the girl who fixed my bad haircut called me back and is going to fit me in Saturday for the second repair. I may have semi-awesome hair for the interview, yay! Power hair and power panties and power prep. It's really hard not to get my hopes up too much, like I told my sis, I haven't gotten a job I really wanted in a while, I seem to get offered the ones I have grave reservations about. Maybe my new hair will help change my luck.

Fail

Plan to wander aimlessly and not stress out today? Huge, enormous, massive fail. My day was best described by the paperwork and telephone equivalent of a bear biting your ankle and dragging you around. Any attempt on your part to change the situation is essentially fruitless and just causes pain, the bear has to decide to let you go on its own.
I do have an interview for a much better job lined up on the 30th but it's with a guy who once gave me a good reference then followed it with a poor one according to the next recruiter I used. And I know he's kind of dumb and they just keep him there for his pretty face, but he actually seemed not to remember me on the phone today, with my resume' right there in front of him. With the dates on it reminding him of when we worked together.  So that lacks promise.
Waiting to see how that plays out will make this one travel job in my field go away of its own. I don't want-want to take a job across the country at Christmastime, again, for three months; California isn't really pretty in the winter. But if another one comes up after Christmas, I will make a beeline for the Golden West, crowds of fruits and nuts and all.

I am the Hamster

Work is the wheel. How do people do this. I used the excuse of five people who were playing telephone booth in my cubicle today to go down the hall and dish with an old friend who has an office the size of mine to herself. I have the third or so person who is ostensibly showing me what to do. As if. Nobody knows. The good thing is, the other one is swamped and the alert one is going out of town tomorrow so I think I will wander aimlessly around the hospital Thursday and Friday and visit with people I know and get paid for it. It's not like anyone is training me or anything anyway.
I made sour cream chicken enchiladas for dinner tonight and had a lot of extra corn tortillas so I made chips. OoA#2 was enthralled. I fried some in canola oil and oven-baked some on a cookie sheet and they were all good. He ate a ton. He barely noticed the meal with the novelty of home-made chips.

Why I am going to Hell for Today's Win and Fail

Actually, no one who survived a life like mine has a lot of belief in religious structures like Hell except here on Earth, or in God except as some enormous wry cosmic comedian.  That being said, I know I am a bad person for today but I honestly don't care, it was still funny. Besides, I've been told a lot I have a face for radio and it's brutally true so we can't all be some mother's pretty child. One thing I used to do for fun that was easy for me, probably because of my hyperflexibility weirdness, is to cross one eye, casually, in class, and look over at a classmate without warning to crack them up. It always worked, better than wiggling my ears, and less likely to get me busted than making my boobs bounce by working my pecs singly.
Anywho, I was reluctantly holding down a very uncomfortable seat in the auditorium of Day Two in Purgatory: Or, Nursing Orientation for People Who Do Not Give a Flying Fuck. They pried the Power Point clicker out of the HBIC's hands and had her run a video instead. Oh, thrilling. Entertainment.
 Now, this is a national company who was running the blurb, mind you. but the production values were resolutely local. The camera was definitely in too tight on the Caesar-haircutted talking-head host, who was explaining to us why we would cost the hospital a ton of money if we let the doctors and families throw procedure box wrappers and pizza boxes into the red Hazmat bio-bag trash bins. They entertainingly intercut his lecture with shots of longsuffering black men in Hazmat suits digging through redbags, separating soda bottles and bloody washcloths from pus-soaked sponges. The win plus fail part? The talking head guy, although moderately attractive despite his tragic haircut, had one feature that kept any of his lecture from hitting home with his audience. Every time the camera zoomed in on him and he looked into it, his left eye looked DIRECTLY AT HIS NOSE.  It was like a Monty Python skit. The girls in back of me kept snorting. The camera would zoom in, his right eye would be visible and the left one would go to white, the black guys would find something else nasty or ridiculous, and it kept happening for about ten minutes. There were credits that rolled at the end, go figure. Someone put her name on that.

Today's Win and Fail

Today's Win:
Unlike Friday, my office mate/fellow prisoner in tiny, three-person 7x9 cinderblock windowless room refrained from spraying her foul, nasty, disgusting fake aldehyde chemical "air freshener" which made my sinuses bleed all fucking weekend and caused all sorts of anerobic bacteria to grow in their swollen depths. Oh, and gave me the fun of Neti Pot Surprise all weekend. Yeah, that thing where you clean out the green snot from your head with your Himalayan ceramic neti pot and dab your nostrils nice and dry, then, hours and hours later, you casually bend over and, ta da!!!! Showers! Salty ones! Out of the nose! Onto the cat, or your foot, or anything else below you!!!
How the fuck do Indian people get anything done. Supposedly they do their Neti pot ritual daily. Do they just NEVER BEND OVER?? Shit, no, they are steadily yoga-ing away. Why doesn't the saline shower make them all bust their ass all over their yoga mat?
Oh, so anyway, the win was, no choking cloud of mace-like Dollar Store funk to send me reeling for my inhaler.
She contented herself dousing her rotund person with some horrendous flavor of "body spray". Which I feel sure she "refreshed" about three times. I considered dumping out her tote bag to see if it was "Bhopal" by Dow or "Antikurd" by Chemical Ali. Fail for my conjunctive membranes. Work-acquired pinkeye. I haz it.
Amazon is selling a desktop HEPA unit for $42 bucks with free shipping on my Amazon Prime. I get paid tomorrow. Ka-ching to Amazon.