All of life’s decisions

I’ve made a fair number of life-changing decisions in my time. I haven’t regretted a single one, and I’m usually able to talk down the self-doubt with considerable confidence.

I have an interview next week for a job that, in theory and on paper, I am perfect for. It’s a job that I wanted before I found my current job, and I remember thinking, “How does one get this wonderful job?”

Wishing makes it so, as it turns out, because the person who holds said job recently e-mailed me and told me he was leaving and was recommending me as his successor.

Meanwhile, for once in my life, I wasn’t looking to leave my current job. But then I fell into the end-of-summer slump during which I was — literally — bored out of my mind at work.

This week, however, Fall Quarter started and I’m having a wonderful time. I looooove my job. Want to stay forever. Probably I could come back eventually, this being the largest employer in the county and all. But what if I can’t? What if I leave this job, which I also just happened to luck into through a stroke of serendipity, and never find happiness again?

Here’s the hilarious part…I’m still a temporary employee. Granted, everyone who’s ever spoken to me or received an e-mail from me wants me to stay, but it’s not necessarily in their hands.

So I’ve been trying to decide whether to leave a job I don’t actually have, for a job I haven’t yet been offered.

Shiny toys and drafty abodes

Without warning, on Tuesday I started having work to do again. Some of it was work I probably should have done during the six-week period prior, instead of obsessing over plumbers and ebay auctions and decidedly not doing any work. If only I’d known that I had this work to do.

On the same day, at practically the same moment, an early smurfday present arrived, courtesy of my father. A new laptop. The cable and software that supposedly will facilitate the transfer of Stuff from my old laptop arrived today. So now all I want to do is go home and transfer files.

Amusingly enough, many of the reviews for this software claim that it crashed repeatedly and ruined their new computers by transferring too much Stuff. I’m guessing they bought crap computers that were prone to crashing? I’m surre this latest version won’t cause me any problems. Should be interesting.

Oh, another funny thing, we have to pay a guy to remove all the wet, falling down insulation from under our house. Then we have to have a plumber come look at the corroded copper pipes and then we have to pay a third individual to replace all the insulation under the house. The insulation process alone could cost around $4,000. So excited to find out whether we also have to repipe the entire place.

Awesome.

It’s a good investment, since we never plan to move. Otherwise, I’d have to encourage all prospective buyers to crawl under the house — where I’m afraid to go and I’m not afraid of anything. Not jumping out of planes or most small spaces as long as they’re well lit and I’m alone in them — to see all the renovations we could afford.

The insulation guy stood us up today. Great sign. If he shows tomorrow, it’s gonna be a cold weekend indoors. Thinking maybe I should have held off on the new laptop, since it’s not supposed to heat up as much as the previous one, so I don’t think it will do much to keep me warm.

Stumped

An online survey about TV just asked me if I was the head of my household. I kinda sorta think I am…

How to get a man to mop the kitchen floor

Place an unopened red wine bottle, preferably a not-very-tasty commemorative label from a past Tulip Festival, on top of the refrigerator, just precariously enough that when he shuts the door after retrieving a beer, the bottle topples off, shattering on the countertop before spilling on the floor, but not injuring your man in the process. Done correctly, this will leave a pool of wine underneath the oven and refrigerator and in the stove burner, not to mention shards of green glass all over the countertops and floor. For extra points, make sure the wine splashes inside all surrounding drawers, including the one with pretty dishtowels inside.

Gingerly step around the puddles and the broken glass and pick up a sponge to soak up the wine in the stove burner. (Put the chocolate ice cream you were on the verge of eating in the freezer for safekeeping.) Take your time, as your man should then kick into gear, wanting to protect your precious feet from the glass. He will retrieve towels (watch closely to ensure the use of old dark towels. Bonus points if you can get him to ruin towels of his you don’t particularly care for.) and a mop, perhaps a vacuum cleaner. He will pull the refrigerator away from the wall and mop up wine and glass along with all the lint that predated your residence in the home. He does the same with the oven.

Wipe down countertops, again taking your time, to make it appear as though you are carrying your load of the work. Shake glass out of towels while your man gives the entire kitchen floor a final mop-up. Put winey towels in washing machine and start. Sit down in front of television, you with your chocolate ice cream, him with his beer…and relax, enjoying a clean kitchen floor.

Lazy Sunday

Oh yes. Did I plan this weekend right or what. Yesterday was what may well have been the last beautiful sunny day for a while. I drove out a ways to a farm/nursery and bought myself some Spectabilis bamboo to plant outside Stew’s window. The bamboo not only will give Stew something to look at, but also will shield Rob from the neighbors’ view when seated at his computer.

Of course then I had to stop at Lowe’s on the way home (hadn’t been there in more than a week if you can believe it), to buy some sheet metal for a rhizome barrier to prevent the bamboo from spreading. But really, I can’t imagine that I’d mind if it did. I also bought a shovel, which was a damn good thing, because what no one tells you about gardening is that digging the hole is the hardest part.

I dug and I dug and I sweat and I changed into a shortsleeved T-shirt and clipped my bangs off my face, and I got the bamboo in the ground. The rhizome barrier is higher than I want it to be, however, and I can’t dig any deeper because I encountered a small yellow pipe (?) about a foot and a half deep. Guess another trip to Lowe’s is in order, to get a smaller piece of sheet metal. Kinda surprising that I didn’t pull the one piece out of the ground and immediately get back in the car to go to Lowe’s and exchange it, isn’t it?

But I had social plans, if you can believe that!

Today, I have not showered, gotten dressed or left the house, except to put banana peels in the food waste bin outside (fruit flies). I bathed Stew, did some yoga, worked on some writing projects and um, napped for three hours. When I went outside a little while ago to pick dandelion greens for Stew, little drops of water were falling from the sky. I actually have the heat on in the house.

It’s a lazy, gray day. Good times.

I wonder if it bothers Rob, the sound of my slippers clicking on our wood laminate floors. For some reason, it’s hard to pick up my feet when traversing the house. Hence, I shuffle.

My favorite skin doctor

The dermatologist who helped clear up my skin in my early 20s, tracing the cause to the iodine in Centrum vitamins, if you can believe it, and prescribing AlphaHydroxy lotion, got so busted by Dateline NBC.

No, not for being a child predator.

Dateline went undercover to make an infomercial about a bogus product called “Moisturol,” which was nothing more than a capsule filled with Nestle Quik. (Product placement for Nestle? Why?)

“The producer found a doctor, who agreed to a $5,000 fee to endorse our pill without seeing clinical studies or even testing it before she spoke.”

Ooh, that looks really bad. Granted the video didn’t show what she actually said about Moisturol after they showed her a list of fake ingredients, so it’s possible that all she said was that ingesting those ingredients could be beneficial.

And has anyone proven that ingesting capsules of dry Nestle Quik is not good for your complexion?

I have some firsthand experience with the fraud of infomercials, except mine wasn’t as bad as the Moisturol situation where they were deliberately duplicitous about the product contents. At least I didn’t think so at the time.

I “auditioned” for an infomericial, as an “actress.” They gave me three week’s worth of Slim Patch cream and told me to try it. It was supposed to curb hunger and was “homeopathic.” They got me on camera saying that it was great and I loved that it was all natural and when I used it, I didn’t have the urge to snack. Sad for me, they printed my full name on the screen and ran the thing nationwide. Other people claimed to have lost pounds and inches, but they didn’t pressure me to lie. ‘Course I wanted them to use me (for some reason), so I may have embellished.

I didn’t get $5,000 though. I got $75. And free samples of Slim Patch.

Warm brownie sundaes and Strawberry Shortcake

Really feel like pigging out today. During the house buying process, I gave myself permission to have ice cream sandwiches and enormous cookies on days when I felt overwhelmed by mortgage decisions and the initialing of documents. It amused me how obviously I was stress-eating. Oh ha ha ha, I don’t really want a chocolate chip cookie, I’m just completely freaked out. Then I ate the cookie anyway.

Now that I’m not making any major life changes (this week. Stand by: I may change jobs again), I don’t have an excuse, but as soon as I finished my lunchtime veggie burger, I started wondering what else I can eat today. And I already had two chocolate chip cookies for my midmorning snack.

I’m exercising better impulse control in the internet shopping arena. I’m trying to sell (vintage) Strawberry Shortcakes and Cabbage Patch Kids on ebay. In researching the pricing of similar items, I’ve been swept back to my childhood, and the important role that Strawberry Shortcake and friends played. (I had an excessive number of Cabbage Patch Kids as well, but somehow, they made less of an imprint on my psyche.) My remaining Shortcake dolls no longer have their scents or their accessories, but I can still smell Blueberry Muffin’s rubbery hat. (My dolls do have their clothes, however. I am horrified at the child-pornesque listings of naked Strawberry Shortcakes. What happened to their outfits?)

I had a storytelling record that I played over and over in my bedroom, staring at the primary-colored flowers on the wallpaper. It was about someone’s birthday the Shortcake gang had forgotten. Strawberry Shortcake, in fact, exclaimed that she “plum forgot!” which is probably the first time I heard that expression.

While I’m completely ready and willing to let go of the dolls, I’m tempted by all the vintage Strawberry Shortcake lunchboxes and lamps and corkboards and TV trays and bedsheets. Even the New in Box dolls call to me. And the listings for dolls who still have their scents…

More komedy with keys

I locked my keys inside the house this morning. (all of them, since I’d emptied my purse of all the spares to the car.) Can’t remember ever doing that before (in the car trunk, yes. In the house? Don’t think so). My college roommate used to do it when I was sleeping inside and for some reason, I never heard her banging on my window.

Good thing I had my cell phone on me. While I waited for Rob’s dad to get there with the spare key, I watered the lawn.

The key is the key

Rob picked me up yesterday in my car, presumably because he prophetically knew that he’d find enormous Yamaha speakers at Goodwill and we’d need a way to get them home. He brought along both spare keys to my car for some reason.

At Goodwill, to make room for the speakers, I removed the empty box the toilet came in and asked for his knife so I could break it down. (What? Your boyfriend doesn’t carry a knife at all times for no apparent reason?) He handed me his keys, which have a folding knife on a keychain. He was still loading the speakers when I was done, so I put his keys in my purse.

Cut to 10 minutes ago, when he called to ask if I’d seen his keys. Why yes, I answered, looking in my purse. I have them right here, along with all three keys to my car. Which was irrelevant because I drove myself to work today.

Lucky for him, I knew where he could find a spare key to his car and a spare key to the house. But if I hadn’t, he’d only have himself and his need for those enormous Yamaha speakers to blame.

Latest

Nobody told me there’d be additional expenses beyond the down payment!! $1,700 to install a dishwasher? Are you F-ing kidding me? The good news is, we already put the wheels in motion to get the $40 premeasure fee refunded from Best Buy, because c’mon, we don’t want people installing our dishwasher who don’t return our calls. If they’d called back the next day as promised and quoted $1,700 because of the cabinetry work involved, we wouldn’t have been able to get that refund.

Also, Brian the evil plumber is no longer with Bode’s. And they’re refunding me $75. So that’s nice. They probably woulda come out for free to stop the running toilet, buy nyah, nyah, I replaced it myself. (Brian kept postponing his visits because of doctor’s appointments, so probably that has more to do with his departure from Bode’s than his poor service on our job. Still, nice to know.)