I grew up in Arizona from birth to age 25. So when I tell you I'm used to the heat, I want you to understand the full meaning of that. Back on June 26, 1990, when temperatures soared to 122 degrees and three were found dead from heat exhaustion - I was at a water park. For 6 hours. Developing second degree burns all over my back because I didn't reapply sunscreen. I know hot.
That being said, I've also lived in Utah now for 4 years and I'm beginning to think my blood has thickened during that time. That or pregnancy has just thrown off my entire internal thermostat. Because when we were in Phoenix this weekend I was hot. So hot. Too hot. Not even sweating because my body couldn't cope with the heat hot. I felt like all those years running around barefoot on concrete during the summer hadn't prepared me at all. Four short years spent in a cooler climate had destroyed a lifetime of building up an immunity to iocane powder....I mean, the heat. Shouldn't have.
But Friday I felt it. Felt it like when you open the oven door too close to your face and it feels like your eyebrows are melting. The heat left me drained and miserable. All day I felt like I was on auto-pilot as I tried to visit with my parents when all I really wanted to do was die. Lay down on the floor of the German restaurant we were lunching at and die. A/C was no balm to my stickiness. I had the air conditioner, a ceiling fan AND a rotating floor fan going full blast. But they couldn't ease the burning. That night I even tried sleeping on the bathroom tile but it was just too painful on my overstressed back. Any sort of fabric touching me felt like a heating pad. I was tired, cranky and my skin was roasting in its own juices. So I did the only thing I could do.
I cried. Like a baby. For over an hour. All I wanted {besides not being hot anymore and to be in my own bed with my own pillow with my own cat} was to have Jason hold and comfort me. But I think he knew that if he touched me I would have punched him. Hard. Many times.
The next night Ambien came to my rescue. (Thank you, Mom!) If it wasn't for that little pill, I'd probably still be crying on the floor in my old bedroom, cursing the Valley of the Sun and everyone who decided it was a good idea to live there.
So. The moral of this story - No matter how miserable you feel, a good sleeping pill can help you ignore your discomfort and fall asleep.
A GREAT sleeping pill can make you forget that your pants are literally on fire.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
the venting effect
I'm not one to usually toot my own horn {TooooT} but sometimes it's essential to the story.
My two month time off/rehire process is over and I've been back to work now for about a month. In that time I've come to realize I am DAMN good at what I do and that my workplace suffered without me. And I mean suffered. My desk looked like it had upchucked after some really sketchy oysters and a round of tequila at a shady dive bar. That's not to say that nothing had been done. Some things had. But only the barest minimum. So minimum that you couldn't see it with the naked eye but needed a microscope to find it. For the first two weeks I was just focusing on what I had to do to catch us up.
Don't talk to me! Don't look at me! Can't you see I'm looking for that one specific, extremely important invoice from July 17th that HAS to be around here somewhere? Where is it? Have you seen it? Why are the gods messing with me?
Those were my days. For two straight weeks. But now that I'm caught up (that's right bi-atch, I caught up with two months worth of work in two weeks!) I'm beginning to see where the limited time I had to prepare my co-worker wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. And wouldn't have been enough if I had had a year to try. I don't say this to make what my workmate did while I was gone seem insignificant. She tried. She really did. It's hard when you go from two to one. Without me there, she was basically plugging the hole with her finger while the dam crumbled around her.
Her fatal flaw was thinking she knew what she was doing. She could have called me. Could have asked what was most urgent. Could have consulted those notes she took when I thought she was listening to me jabber on about why we do certain steps that might look redundant but are the LIFEBLOOD of my job! She chose to do it her way instead.
And now it's falling to me. Calls, emails, memos, requests.......they've begun to haunt my dreams. Some things weren't done correctly. Some were done only halfway. Some weren't done at all.
And this is why I vent.
Because if I couldn't, my office mate would need medical attention after I'd shaken her about by her eyeballs.
My two month time off/rehire process is over and I've been back to work now for about a month. In that time I've come to realize I am DAMN good at what I do and that my workplace suffered without me. And I mean suffered. My desk looked like it had upchucked after some really sketchy oysters and a round of tequila at a shady dive bar. That's not to say that nothing had been done. Some things had. But only the barest minimum. So minimum that you couldn't see it with the naked eye but needed a microscope to find it. For the first two weeks I was just focusing on what I had to do to catch us up.
Don't talk to me! Don't look at me! Can't you see I'm looking for that one specific, extremely important invoice from July 17th that HAS to be around here somewhere? Where is it? Have you seen it? Why are the gods messing with me?
Those were my days. For two straight weeks. But now that I'm caught up (that's right bi-atch, I caught up with two months worth of work in two weeks!) I'm beginning to see where the limited time I had to prepare my co-worker wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. And wouldn't have been enough if I had had a year to try. I don't say this to make what my workmate did while I was gone seem insignificant. She tried. She really did. It's hard when you go from two to one. Without me there, she was basically plugging the hole with her finger while the dam crumbled around her.
Her fatal flaw was thinking she knew what she was doing. She could have called me. Could have asked what was most urgent. Could have consulted those notes she took when I thought she was listening to me jabber on about why we do certain steps that might look redundant but are the LIFEBLOOD of my job! She chose to do it her way instead.
And now it's falling to me. Calls, emails, memos, requests.......they've begun to haunt my dreams. Some things weren't done correctly. Some were done only halfway. Some weren't done at all.
And this is why I vent.
Because if I couldn't, my office mate would need medical attention after I'd shaken her about by her eyeballs.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
i don't believe a rose would be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage...
I know it and you know it, but I still have to say it. I’ve been so lazy lately. That’s the only excuse I have. Pure and simple laziness. I’d like to tell you I’ve been busy touring Rome or learning to make bouillabaisse but no - just been too lazy to post anything on here. And I’m going to go ahead and blame the baby for this laziness. Child isn’t even born yet and she already saps all my energy.
All I want to do is lay on the couch, watch Top Chef and eat potato chips in mass qualities. Which I can’t even do right now because I recently found out I have gestational diabetes. No more stuffing of the face with carbs. (Oh the lovely carbs!)
That’s right, throw another log on the raging inferno that’s been my pregnancy: morning sickness for 6 months, allergies exploding all over my face, a bacterial stomach infection that forced me to live on the toilet for 10 days and ended in an eventual trip to the ER. (Yeah, remind me to tell you how much fun that was sometime.)
And now diabetes.
I swear, there must be some kind of memory loss associated with pregnancy otherwise all women would remember how hard the “being pregnant” part was and never want to do it again. Ever. And I’ll freely admit I was one of those snobbishly superior non-pregnant women who thought pregnancy would be a breeze and all the real pain would start at childbirth.
Ha.
Ha ha aha ha.
Remind me again who that woman was when *Thumper’s foot has been lodged in my kidney for 6 hours straight. Oh the agony! Oh the inability to sit, stand or lie down! Is it a 900lb moose rampaging across my rib cage? Nope. Just a baby the size of our bunny reminding me I’m not the center of the universe. I still wonder why the mother’s of the world don’t go around slapping the rest of us upside the head while screaming “Just you wait! It WILL happen to you!”
But even all of these physical ailments can’t compare to the mental agony of choosing a name for our child. And it’s definitely not a shared agony. I’m the one agonizing over it. Jason says he’s fine with whatever I chose as long as I don’t name her Shanaynay. And I'd be fine with that but for one thing. I remember being a child of the 80s and being EXTREMELY grateful that my parents hadn’t named me Jennifer or Jessica. Everyone remembers that ONE name from school that every child seemed to have, leaving the roll call to be filled with initials -
Mike C....... Here.
Mike W
Jessica R
Jessica M
Jen
Jenny
Jennifer
On and on it went. And although I know that every girl, at some point in her life, wishes her parents had seen fit to name her something else, like Shanaynay, I don’t want her to be the “Jenny” in her class.
So I agonize, make lists and pour over name websites. I even have the Social Security Administration name page bookmarked. If you haven’t seen it, you really should check it out.
I will probably still be agonizing over it in 10 weeks when they lay my baby girl on my chest and want me to fill out the birth certificate. If all else fails, Shanaynay Hunter has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
*This might end up being her name if I can't come up with anything else!
All I want to do is lay on the couch, watch Top Chef and eat potato chips in mass qualities. Which I can’t even do right now because I recently found out I have gestational diabetes. No more stuffing of the face with carbs. (Oh the lovely carbs!)
That’s right, throw another log on the raging inferno that’s been my pregnancy: morning sickness for 6 months, allergies exploding all over my face, a bacterial stomach infection that forced me to live on the toilet for 10 days and ended in an eventual trip to the ER. (Yeah, remind me to tell you how much fun that was sometime.)
And now diabetes.
I swear, there must be some kind of memory loss associated with pregnancy otherwise all women would remember how hard the “being pregnant” part was and never want to do it again. Ever. And I’ll freely admit I was one of those snobbishly superior non-pregnant women who thought pregnancy would be a breeze and all the real pain would start at childbirth.
Ha.
Ha ha aha ha.
Remind me again who that woman was when *Thumper’s foot has been lodged in my kidney for 6 hours straight. Oh the agony! Oh the inability to sit, stand or lie down! Is it a 900lb moose rampaging across my rib cage? Nope. Just a baby the size of our bunny reminding me I’m not the center of the universe. I still wonder why the mother’s of the world don’t go around slapping the rest of us upside the head while screaming “Just you wait! It WILL happen to you!”
But even all of these physical ailments can’t compare to the mental agony of choosing a name for our child. And it’s definitely not a shared agony. I’m the one agonizing over it. Jason says he’s fine with whatever I chose as long as I don’t name her Shanaynay. And I'd be fine with that but for one thing. I remember being a child of the 80s and being EXTREMELY grateful that my parents hadn’t named me Jennifer or Jessica. Everyone remembers that ONE name from school that every child seemed to have, leaving the roll call to be filled with initials -
Mike C....... Here.
Mike W
Jessica R
Jessica M
Jen
Jenny
Jennifer
On and on it went. And although I know that every girl, at some point in her life, wishes her parents had seen fit to name her something else, like Shanaynay, I don’t want her to be the “Jenny” in her class.
So I agonize, make lists and pour over name websites. I even have the Social Security Administration name page bookmarked. If you haven’t seen it, you really should check it out.
I will probably still be agonizing over it in 10 weeks when they lay my baby girl on my chest and want me to fill out the birth certificate. If all else fails, Shanaynay Hunter has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
*This might end up being her name if I can't come up with anything else!
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