Only Nola

Nola the Garden Gnome

Let the short jokes begin. I can take it. Really. (...)

Yesterday I decided it was long past time to get to work on the garden in the front of our house. It was effectively naked, home to only three rather horrid looking shrubs of some sort (don't ask me what they were called... we'll just call them ugly. Ugly and sad.) that had obviously been planted by a home builder with no aesthetic sense and a budget roughly comparable in size to the price of his last trip to Great Clips. I'd had enough. I was going to give my yard a makeover if it killed me.

And I have the sunburn to prove it.

Actually, I have half a sunburn. Or, more accurately, I have a full sunburn on only one side of my body. However you want to look at it. The terminology, not my body... get your minds out of the gutter. When one has a south facing house and is doing garden work from 2:00 p.m. until almost 7:00 p.m., one half of one's body is facing the offending fireball in the sky and one half... isn't. Thus begins the start of a lovely burning sensation (and accompanying color! It's festive!) on the left side of my body. This is one of those things that would be funny if it were happening to anyone ELSE.

Where was I?

So we went to Lowe's and loaded up on top soil and Peat and whatnot. Trays and trays of flowers of various sorts. I have no idea what some of them are. Pretty. That's all. Do I need to know anything else? What kind of soil they need? Water? Shade? What are you, on crack? Read my lips, people... PRETTY! I call them 'the pink one' and 'that tall yellow thingy', etc., and we all get along fine. I'm pretty sure I'm fomenting some resentment out in the garden, though... some jealousy issues between the ones I do know the names of and the ones I don't. I think the Portulaca has been rubbing the orange whatchamacallits' noses (so to speak... a flower with an actual nose would scare the shit out of me) in the fact that I do, in fact, call them Portulaca (also known as 'moss roses', FYI. I ruv them. Hardy little bastards. I pretty much couldn't kill one if I did the Tango on it. In cleats.). This may lead to petal pulling and some indescribable scenarios involving stamens and cross-pollination. We won't talk about that.

I have now learned, the hard way, exactly what muscle groups are involved in the planting of a garden. I've had gardens before, mind you, but mostly they were either already in place and it was just planting the flowers, or it was starting from scratch. Starting from scratch, just so you know? Is WAY easier than first having to UNDO what some fucked up assbag did and THEN redo it the right way. We had, of course, the aforementioned fugly shrubs. We also had about three inches deep of some wood chip bullshit that had to be scraped off and removed, to be replaced with actual top soil. This process involved me getting a big ass rake (ass rake... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. *coughs* Sorry.) and gathering up the majority of the offending wood chips. From a rather sizeable garden area, if I forgot to mention that. Then, when I had my mammoth pile of wood chips, I got to put it in the large trash container thingy (one of the ones on wheels... how did we ever live without those?) to be wheeled into the back yard (after which my husband will do something with it. I neither know nor CARE what he does with it. Personally, if I never see that trash can again it will be too soon.). Let me tell you how fun shoveling a huge pile of wood chips into a trash can is. Can you say 'exhaustive repetitive motion'? I. CAN. Now, I couldn't get all the wood chips up. And you can definitely exactly where in the garden I started losing the giveashitness about having leftover wood chips in with my new topsoil and Peat. But, by and large, I got it done. More or less.

Oh, shut up.

Then, the next step was dragging 40 pound bags of topsoil over and emptying them into my garden area. And crawling around on my hands and knees to spread the piles out so that they actually did something constructive, like COVER THE GROUND. My blue jeans will never be the same again. Then I had to shake out this feeding granule crap all over the place. I'll have the healthiest weeds on the block. Then came the planting of the flowers... and the discovery that what LOOKS like a shitload of plants when it's sitting in your cart at the store? Is actually not NEARLY efuckingnough.

*sighs*

Then there was putting the layer of Peat around the top of each planted flower. And having a nervous breakdown when we realized, after a SECOND trip to Lowe's, that we STILL did not, in fact, have enough topsoil or Peat to cover the entire garden. We needed probably one more bag of each. For those of you who are thinking of braving the world of dirt and bugs in order to enrich your lives/souls/property values? Put whatever you think you need in a cart, then DOUBLE IT.

I improvised to mostly cover the remainder of the flower bed. Now I just have to hope that the last few plants I put in, down in that two or three foot area that didn't get the star treatment the rest of the bed did, don't just up and die. One of them is already looking very, very sad this morning. *glances out window to garden*

Make that two.

Just… Ugh

I've about come to the conclusion that my son is cursed. Not in the eye-of-newt kind of way, more in the 'Holy fuck, my mother's got issues' kind of way. And I know this why? Because I'm discovering that there's an appallingly low number of OPK's that I find acceptable for my son to play with. Most of them are either (in my humble opinion) on the fast track for solitary confinement or have the manners of a lobotomized Dingo.

(...)

I'm just sayin' .

I'm trying to get past my personal prejudices, though. He had his first sleepover last night, as a matter of fact. This was something I urged him to do. Urged, I tell you. I must have lost my mind. I thought it would be good for him, form some friendships outside of school, blah blah blah. He tends to stay pretty isolated, left to his own devices, and I was hoping this would a positive thing for him. He's a little socially awkward and already tends to look at his peers like science experiments gone horribly awry.

Can't imagine where he gets it...

Anyway. He invited a boy from down the street. The boy, as it turns out, is also in his class at school. I had no idea. I also had no idea, initially, that the boy in question? Also has a twin brother.

Do you see where this is going?

Yes, I ended up with not one, but TWO strange children in my house for the duration. And while I had, at first meeting, thought I was dealing with two relatively mild mannered children with very little of the raised-by-wolves mentality so prevalent today, I was, in fact, completely and mind-bogglingly WRONG.

I know. I was shocked, too. First time for everything.

Not that the two boys are serial killers in the making or anything, but still... one of them, for example, answers any question that might, in any way, have to do with something he might, hypothetically, have done that he shouldn't have done, by yelling at the person asking the question. Yelling. At an adult. Let me tell you how well THAT goes over with me. I don't take that shit from my own kid, I'm certainly not going to be fond of it from some newbie. In my home. Then there's the other kid. The one that figures that when a parent, in the house you're a guest in, takes something away from you because either a)you were using it inappropriately (a small, portable basketball hoop is not intended for use in beaning the cat), or b)it's 11:00 at night and it's time for small people to sleep before LARGE people have to kill them, it's perfectly okay to wait until said parent leaves the room and then take the item BACK and do what you want with it. Add to this the fact that both boys seem well versed in the art of LYING to your FACE and, well... recipe for disaster.

Wrath, thy name is NOLA.

I have, justifiably, decided that my son should be bronzed. Or sainted. Something. Cloned, maybe. I won't try and say he never lies, but generally speaking, he's just been raised that it's unacceptable and lives with a healthy dose of fear about the consequences attached to that particular piece of inadvisable behavior, so he can usually be trusted to tell the truth. This has always been important to me, as a parent, to instill in my child the importance of honesty. I think I've done pretty well. He also has been raised with manners, thank you very much. He has tact issues (god, does he have tact issues), but he says his pleases and thank you's and excuse me's, which is also something I thought important in the child-rearing process. I can't abide rudeness or intentional disrespect. Makes me want to slap things. People-shaped things. Repeatedly.

The two boys are in the living room now, along with my son, busily raising hell over THEIR rights to CONNOR'S Playstation. This would be the Playstation that they already, due to negligence and general lack of respect for other people's property, yanked off the shelf in the armoire onto the floor last night. Luckily it survived. The fact that THEY survived is a testament to my amazing will power. If I have to go in there to stop Boy A from whining at the highest possible decibel level and Boy B from pretending that everything Connor owns is subject to a flexible right of possession, I'm going to go nuclear.

Connor may have another sleepover soon. Right after they BURY ME.

(...)

I just love kids.

*cabbagepatches around the room*

HA! And you thought hell would freeze over first...

ONE of us got a J-O-B!

And if you guess anyone other than me, you're not paying attention.

Yep, yours truly is gainfully employed again. Yay, me. The checking account was going to start going into convulsions soon, so I'm pretty happy with this turn of events. The HUGE company that I interviewed with a week or two ago? That's our happy winner of the 'Hire Nola so she doesn't have to start looking at her cats as a food source' contest.

They are soooooooo in for a surprise. My new employers, not the cats.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*coughs*

Anyhoo. I had orientation today and go in bright and early Monday for my first full day. Orientation was a hoot. I was in there with seven or so other new hires, going to various departments (some in warehouse, some in the call center, one other besides me going to corporate, etc.), and it became apparent rather quickly that at least two of my classmates (as it were) had skipped a step on the evolutionary ladder. When one has to have it pointed out, repeatedly, that TWO is a bigger number than ZERO (I swear to God I'm not making this shit up. We were filling out our W-4's and two people sitting near me were dangerously close to spontaneously combusting. I even jumped in to help, since the orientation girl's head was about to pop right off her body after she had met with failure THREE TIMES in trying to get these two rocket scientists through the mind-boggling concept of 'the smaller the number of exemptions you claim, the MORE taxes they withhold from your check each week.' I was breaking it down for them in really small words and accompanying hand gestures (my hands kept curling, totally against my will, into the strangling position. It was a close thing.), but to no avail. I have since decided that there are just some people that shouldn't be allowed out of the house without supervision.), then your days of proving Darwin wrong are numbered.

On the plus side, I feel really smart right now. See how it always comes back to being all about me?

Within the next two weeks, since I'm going to have a paycheck again, we're going to go buy the trampoline we've been promising Connor. I so love playing on a trampoline. Tell me THAT won't be a breeding ground for blog posts.

I see broken limbs and liability lawsuits in my future...

Shit, I just remembered I was going to write about the little assbag across the street that's started hassling Connor. Ah, well... it's late and that'll just have to wait till next time.

(...)

Assuming I don't kill him in the interim.

(...)

I promise nothing.

Always VERIFY

I got to give my 8 year old a lesson in fact verification today.

This is why I had kids...

(In the car, on the way to school, just to set the scene)

Connor: Hey, Mom?

Half-awake me: Yeah?

Connor: You know you have to be careful eating peanut butter, right?

*me blinking*

Connor: Mom?

Me: I'm still processing, Connor. Why exactly do I have to be careful eating peanut butter?

Connor: 'Cause if you eat too much, see...

Me: Yes?

Connor: Then the peanut butter, it gets up between your lungs...

*me speechless, and trying to avoid an ugly visual*

Connor: and then the peanut butter makes your lungs stick together...

*me, head spinning*

Connor: and then you can't breathe...

*okay, rational response has temporarily abandoned me*

Connor: and you'll die!

(Side note - to fully appreciate this, you'd have to have seen the grave and disturbed look on Connor's face. He was obviously convinced he was saving us all from the untold perils of the Jif.)

Me (choking on laughter and incredulity): Um, Connor?

Connor: Yeah?

Me: Where exactly did you hear this?

Connor: Oh, one of the boys at school told me. He said his mom taught it to him.

Oh, well, that makes me feel much better. The idiot gene is apparently not only alive and well, but being nurtured to help it THRIVE.

I had to explain to Connor, in the few minutes we had left in the car, that not only was this not true (we had to go into the body's determination to eject anything swallowed if it there wasn't available space. Always good to have a little vomit talk first thing in the morning.), but that one shouldn't take as gospel biology lessons from a brother 3rd grader. Or said 3rd grader's mother, who is clearly a founding member of Mensa. Trust but VERIFY, for the love of God.

I wish I had a recorder handy for moments like this.

Me and My Little Black Cloud of DOOM

So much to say and so little idea where to start. I guess, first off, we'll say that I have a new-found (and profoundly deep. We're talking layers here, people.) hate for Wal-Mart. Why?, you may ask. Well, I got to spend my morning getting estimates on body work for my car. This, of course, is due to the lovely rearrangement of my passenger-side rear quarter panel and bumper that I received in Wal-Mart's parking lot. By this fuckwit in a big, white SUV. The SUV that received, in return for mauling my car, NO damage whatsoever. The SUV driven by the woman who was quick to disclaim any responsibility (even though it was HER bumper that hit MY quarter panel. Do the math. SHE hit ME. I didn't drive along at ninety, lock up the brakes slide my car sideways so that my quarter panel hit her innocently meandering vehicle. It doesn't WORK THAT WAY.) But, it being private property and all, the police don't take an interest, thus making the task of proving guilt infinitely harder (nay, fucking impossible) for those of us who shouldn't HAVE to pay their $500 deductible. I'll be lucky, after sending my insurance company after this ubertwat, to get her or her insurance company to pony up half of my deductible. HALF. When SHE hit ME.

BUT I'M NOT BITTER!

You may wonder why I hate Wal-Mart for this, since it's not like the board of directors physically shoved her car into mine. (Not that I'd put it past them. I swear, Wal-Mart's on a mission... for WORLD DOMINATION. You laugh now...) Well, if Wal-Mart had security cameras in their lots, or even a rent-a-cop, SOMETHING... then I'd be in a much better position right about now. I'd still be sitting here daydreaming about giving that woman the business end of my spork, but I'd be much less likely to actually do it.

Welcome to my life.

In further news, I got a call today from the HUGE company that I interviewed with last week. I'd given up on them at this point, effectively. Turns out? I'm still a firm candidate for the position. They've apparently just had some issues with some of the interviews that had some scheduling issues, which pushed the process back a bit, so they're hoping to have a final decision by next week. Now here comes the fun part...

I got a call yesterday from the company that I've been dying to work for since last August. The non-profit organization, for those of you who have been here that long and actually have memory retention. It's a great company, does all kinds of work helping recovering addicts, battered women, people with disabilities, etc. The pay isn't fabulous, but it doesn't totally suck, either. Plus, they offer good benefits, so that's always a good thing. The chick who called me wanted me to come in for an initial interview with her, so she could tell me about the various job openings and see which ones I was interested in. Of course, she was also the human filter, there to get an impression of me at the same time, so she could decide if it was worth calling me back in for a second interview at a later date. Fine with me. I'm used to it by now. So, I put on the Interview Outfit, hopped in my car (my beautiful, PRE-FUCKWIT-ENCOUNTER car. *sighs* ), and went to the meeting. It seemed to go well, at least well enough, so I was figuring I'd probably at least get a call back when it was over. Then, when I'm gathering my stuff, thinking we'd be wrapping up, she has me wait for a minute while she leaves the office. When she comes back? She tells me she has arranged an immediate meeting between me and the director of the department that I want to work in. (It's a department that handles teaching life skills to people with traumatic brain injury. They're mobile and all, but now they need help relearning basic things, like balancing checkbooks, writing checks, grocery shopping, etc. There's a lot involved, and it takes a long time since their short term memory is shot to shit and you have to work with them repeatedly over a long period of time so that the skills kick over into their long term memory, but it sounds like very satisfying work.) Imagine that. Into the office I went. Met with the director for, oh, forty five minutes or so. Also seemed to go really well. She said they're expecting to make a final choice by next week.

(...)

Well, shit. Now what happens if I get an offer from both companies? While a big part of me really does want to work in the non-profit agency (I'd truly love to do something that is really making a difference in people's lives, on an individual level), a big part of me is very aware that, financially speaking, the HUGE company is probably going to be the best long-term choice. And I do have a family to consider.

I may be worrying over nothing, since there's no guarantee that EITHER of them will call me (I seem to have a case of the plague or something. I don't know.), but I have this feeling that I'm going to get calls on both jobs. Then it's going to really suck.

Oh, and the damage to my car? $600. Isn't that nice?

*bangs head on desk*

Summertime, Summertime, Sum-Sum-Summertime

Okay, so it's not really summer yet. Work with me. It was like 80 degrees today, and after the harsh winter we had, that's close enough to summer for me. Unlike my husband (he with the Eskimo genes), I'm perpetually cold until it clears at least 75. Not happy until it's in the 80's or better, but at least thawed out at 75. Needless to say, we've now moved on from the battle over the heater (I wanted it at barely tolerable 69 or 70; he wanted it at a cozy 50 or so. Don't listen to him if he says differently. He LIES.) to the battle over the air conditioner. I like this time of year because it's a period of time where you can actually live without the heater OR the air conditioner. My husband has a different take on it... he figures that once it clears 70, his skin will melt off. Hence me threatening to break his arms if I see him within 6 inches of the thermostat. Is a month or two without having to layer clothes WITHIN MY OWN HOME to much to ask?

Maybe I'll just start storing his underwear in the freezer. 'Cause I'm helpful like that.

Nothing much to report for today. I sat around on my ass, waiting for some response from any of the potential employers that I spoke with/emailed last week. My phone was obviously not ringing off the hook, but I haven't given up hope. We all know that the employment wheels can turn very slowly. I'm confident that something will come along for me. I'm just hoping it's before I'm ready to collect Social Security.

I've been doing some online browsing for a trampoline. We promised Connor we'd get one, but missed the opportunity to do it last year like we should have. It was, for whatever reason, WAY cheaper last year when I looked around. Maybe there's some unexplained phenomenon that's caused a rush on trampolines this year (fluoride in the water! They say it's for your teeth, but I KNOW BETTER!)... all I know is that the one that was under $200 at Sam's last year is now like $290. How ya like THEM apples? As soon as I get a job, we're going to bite the bullet and get one, even though I'm sure there's a large list of other things we should be doing with our money. But we made a promise to Connor, and it's not like it's four grand or something. It's all about the children, right?

(...)

Okay, so I want to play on the goddamned trampoline. Is that so wrong? Quit looking at me like that.

My dentist should be proud of me, by the way. (Don't you just love my complete inability to manage a segue?) Since I had that work done over a week ago, I've become the dental hygiene nazi. I floss twice a day; brush at least twice, if not three times, a day... I'm bound and determined not to usher in my forties (God, I just threw up a little in my mouth... forties... pardon me while I crawl off and whimper for a minute.) with a nice, shiny set of... gums.

*shudders*

And my hair? Has almost gotten long enough on top to leave curly again. Well, I can actually leave it curly, it's just kind of... close-to-the-head curly, not blowing-free-in-the-wind-like-the-goddess-I-am-on-the-inside curly. Notice I say the hair ON TOP. I kind of got bored last week, and, well...

I really don't need to fill the rest of that in, do I?

WHAT?!?