First Spider of Spring 2012

The First Spider of Spring is always the one that scares me out of my skin, because it always shows up somewhere completely unexpected.

Over the years, I've had several memorable ones:

The Wolf Spider hiding among the cat toys.

The basement tarantula, whose leg hairs I lightly brushed when I hit the light switch.

Some kind of crab-like spider on the ceiling, directly over my head. Just.....yuck. They lie perfectly flat til you try to squash them, then they become 3-D again and run faster than anything with eight legs should.

This year's was extra special. Apparently this spider was mildly retarded, because it emerged from around the sink, and immediately decided this was the best place to set up camp. It's little spidery brain thought the ceramic dish with a wet sponge was good digs for catching tasty snacks, apparently. It wasn't until Hubby sent it into the afterlife that I realized I should have taken a photo.

So here's my crappy artist's rendering:

Perry Men 'O Paws

Just when I thought life was going great, Mother Nature had to throw something new into the mix.

Basically, I'm not sleeping well. I wake up every night at 3:30am, boiling hot, soaked in sweat. I throw the blankets off, then an hour later I'm freezing. I'm usually that person who can fall asleep anywhere, even after five cups of coffee. Well, no more. Once 3:30am rolls around, I'm awake staring at the ceiling.

Welcome to The Menopause Years.

So here's warning to my sisters: it started slowly, around age 38. It only happened when Aunt Irma** came to town. Within the last year, it progressed to Every. Single. F@ck1ng. Night. And let me tell you, it gets old really fast. No pun intended.

It's especially fun now when the hot flashes show up during the day. Or better yet, while I'm getting dressed for work. There have been many days where I'm heading off to work in 35 degree weather with no coat trying to prolong the usefulness of my antiperspirant.

My skin dried out, my hair dried out, I've got fuzzy brain syndrome, although that could be due to lack of sleep. Either way, I need to write notes to make sure I brush my teeth and dress myself appropriately.

Diet and exercise are useless now, the weight just doesn't shift. The only diet that actually works for me is Low Carb. But that's another post.

And there's the mystery rash: hives on my hands daily. It doesn't matter if I moisturize, they're always there to make me look like I've got leprosy. Some Googling finds that hives and The Menopause go hand in hand (That pun wasn't intended either).

Topical antihistamine doesn’t work. They show up out of nowhere, stick around for a few hours, then disappear without a trace. Stress and heat makes them worse – I had a “stress incident” a few weeks back, triggered a hot flash, and the hives blew up to epic proportions. My hands looked like purple balloons.

Although it might also be allergy related. I haven't had them since I started Zyrtec-D. It could also be sleep. Oddly, I noticed they're not that bad when I get enough sleep. Lack of sleep might be putting just enough stress on my body to cause the hives. Which just brings me back to the fact that I'm not getting enough sleep, apparently.

The only upside is that Aunt Irma isn't nearly as bad as she used to be, nor does she hang around as long. After tolerating her for 33 years, I'm glad to see the back end of that bitch.

Estroven didn't work, I'm about to try Femestra. What's worse is I can't take hormones since I had a blood clot a million years ago. I think it was during the Jurassic.

Doc says I'm still in the early stages, most of this is what he calls peri-menopause. Not that it makes me feel any better. I still feel like my body is staging a revolt.

I assumed my father was to blame - I usually blame his side of the family for ailments. I'm surprised any of them made it to adulthood with all the disease in that family. I heard that my paternal grandmother had early menopause. Then I find out from my Mom that her mother had a real hard time with it. Double point score! Both sides are cursed.

I try making fun of this, but it's just aggravating. I'm too young to feel this old.



**Aunt Irma is an episode from the TV show The IT Crowd where Jen has her monthly. I was going to embed a video from YouTube about it, but couldn't find one without advertisements, which suck. But, I highly recommend anything IT Crowd, it's worth it. Go to YouTube.com and search on Aunt Irma. It's pretty funny.

Couch? Toilet?

Yes, that's my couch enveloped in a flashy layer of aluminum foil. It's all the rage now, yo.

Potty training a puppy is one thing - you expect to have accidents throughout the first 6-8 months. But what do you do when your cat, who is old enough to know better, decides the world is his litter box?

I use the term “potty training” loosely, obviously the dog isn't using the toilet. You know what I mean.

It took a good 6 months to get Meatball to signal properly when he needed to go outside, then another three months before he could hold it long enough that he wasn't signaling every hour on the hour.

The cat is another thing.

Leo's been a good cat. He learned to use the litter box quickly, and never had accidents. Unlike our first cat, our beloved Tracy-Cat, who frequently enjoyed playing poo-hockey with her desiccated turds. Thankfully, it only lasted for a few weeks during kitten-hood.

Leo's sedentary life was turned upside down once we brought the dog home. Did you know that dogs eat everything, and ANYTHING? This would include dog food, cat food , cat litter - including said litter's tasty tasty contents.

The cat box resided in a closet, so the door was closed up except when the puppy was being crate trained, and therefore, unable to access it. Same with the food. Up on the counter so puppy can't get it. There was ample time for Leo to eat and do the needful, but he was usually indulging in more interesting things like sleeping, or teasing the crated dog.

Most of the time this situation worked out okay, but one day we noticed the couch in our back room looked....weird. It had a blotchy yellow sheen to it. Since I don't work from home anymore, we don't use the room much. As you can see from the photo above, it's an old, putty colored, “leather” (or so they claimed) lump. Ugly and oversized for the small back room, but it served it's purpose for 12 years. Apparently it's purpose now was adjunct toilet for the cat.

Why he picked there, I have no idea. Maybe because the room isn't used often, maybe he had an axe to grind with the couch. He must have been doing this for a while, because the underside of the cushions showed each subsequent level of urine stain, much like rings on a tree.

At this point, everyone is thinking, “Didn't you SMELL it?”. Well, actually... no.

I have no idea why. Maybe he drinks a lot of water, but it didn't smell, and I'm just thankful for that anomaly.

Of course I was completely skeeved out – I wanted that thing GONE. The carpet too, simply because it was too close to Leo's pee cooties.

Hubby wanted to see if we could salvage it, or at least make it less likely to get peed on until we get it to the dump. We bought several bottles of Urine Off and saturated the couch. Urine Off works great by the way. It didn't matter, I wasn't EVER sitting on that piece of furniture again.

I should also point out that the back room is a small, sunken room, accessible only by bare wood steps. Meatball is afraid to go down them, and we've reinforced that. Maybe that's why the cat picked that room – the one place the dog isn't allowed. With that revelation, I moved the litter box back there too.

Leo christened the couch a few more times, so after dousing it with magical Pee-B-Gone, it's now engulfed in aluminum foil. Oh yeah, I find little pin holes in the foil now and again, so I know he's tried to walk over it, or taste it, but we haven't had any pee problems as long as we keep the couch covered.

There's only been one other incident.

I'm very diligent about cleaning the litter box. However, I went on a business trip, and the day I came back it was time to clean the box. It was late, I was tired, I went to bed. Bad decision.

Next morning, the entire downstairs smelled like a sewage treatment plant on a hot day. There had to be a turd somewhere, probably one the size of a football, I just couldn't find it.

Then I did. Under my desk. A turd of epic proportions. A protest poo.

Sigh.

Anyway, I think we've fixed everything now. As long as the couch is foiled and the litter box is consistently cleaned, "V For Vendetta" Kitteh rests quietly at my feet.

By the way, on the next nice day above 50 degrees, you best be sure Hubs and I will be outside chain-sawing that lump of leather into pieces and hauling it to the dump. And the carpet too.

The Big Move. Or, Another Day At Sirius Cybernetics

After a particularly difficult few months at work, I called in a pile of favors and managed a transfer to another department.

There was much rejoicing.

Then it came time to move my desk.

I have a great collection of tech manuals, and these bricks are the most difficult when doing a cube move. However, I never brought them into this office. The programmers in my department were the kind of psycho-weenies that memorize every line of our code base, and think anyone who uses books is a cretin. So I gave in to peer pressure. Besides, why haul books around when Professor Google can produce it for you?

My spartan cube consisted of a few toys, pictures, magnets, pens, dust, etc. Barely enough to fill a copy paper box. Plus, I didn't have to move my computer monitor. Every cube has the same one, so they're left in place. It's not like they're heavy anyway. I'm not talking about those those giant, forty pound, boxy things from ten years ago. This was a slim-line, flat monitor that I could pick up easily with one hand.

Other than my box of cube detritus, the only other item to move was the docking station for my laptop, which weighs about one pound. 

Now, everywhere I've worked in the past, a cube move is not a big deal. You pick up your shite and go. Apparently that's not the way it works here at Sirius Cybernetics.

Welcome to the world of bureaucracy and unions.

So, when I started filling my copy paper box with stuff, my cube neighbor, Daphne the Socialist, informs me I can't do this by myself.

“Do 'what' by myself, exactly? Throw some photos and toys in a box?” I said.

Daphne is super nice, and extremely good at her job. A real go-to person when you've got an application functionality question, but all of her conversations gravitate to national healthcare or that the President is going to give everyone a free college education. 

“The desktop IT department has to move your stuff. It's their job!” she exclaims.

“That's silly, I don't have much to move... ”

She cuts me off. “It doesn’t matter. It's a union job and they're supposed to do it. I can't believe you didn't know that! You can get in big trouble! Just put in a work ticket and assign it to their group. They'll come over with a hand cart and move your things to the new cube.”

Sigh.

Okay fine. Whatever. I relent, and put in my ticket.

(As a side note: This procedure was put into place back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, because computer equipment was made of rocks, and too heavy for programmers to lift. Now that technology made everything smaller and lighter, it seems nobody thought to change this rule.)

I waited all day, then called the help desk for a status. They told me the ticket would be completed in the order it was received. I begged and pleaded. No dice.

The next morning, I returned to my old desk - since that's where my stuff was, and waited. Called again. No status. It could take a while, they said, depending on how busy they are.

I tried doing some work. New job requires a bit more concentration, and a bit more quiet. Unfortunately, my soon-to-be old cube is in the middle of a high traffic row, across from the men's room, and was apparently constructed of leftover partitions. Half the walls were full size, and the other half being a mismatched pair of four foot high slabs that left an unusually large exit/entry point. This meant that the flow of screaming, cursing (in several languages), sneezing, bellowing and giggling floated through my cube like a hot cabbage fart. Violent and noxious.

I decided I'd had enough. This was stupid - I had work to do, and this was holding up my productivity.

I grabbed my copy paper box in one hand, the docking station in the other, and slid out. I just needed to get past a few conference rooms and one of those key-card doors. Once I reached the door, I tucked the docking station under my arm, and with my free hand, pushed the door open.

Sadly, I was unaware that our department head was also opening the door from the other side (I swear, I think I only saw this guy twice in all the time I'd been there, but there he was). I fell through the doorway, and somehow managed not to sucker punch him in the gut with my Box O' Crap.

“Where are you going with that?” he asked.

At that point, something in my brain snapped. Nothing was going to make me stay in that adjunct ring of hell for another second.

“Whaaa? Nowhere. Stuff. Box for new cube....moving. Bye!” Then I ran.

With my two measly items, I reported to the “Facilities Engineer”, “Floor Plan Artist”, “Cube Farm Controller”, or whatever they're calling the person who assigns the human stalls these days. She also lectured me on moving my own cube-shite, tickets, union, etc. Aargh.

Finally, she lead me to my new digs. No window, but hey, no noise or weird smells, either. Desk was filthy, but that's fairly normal – I'm probably the only person who actually mopped off my scungey desk when I vacated.

However, in the middle of my new cube sat an apparently dead old laserjet with the plastic casing busted, two monitors and giant ball of cables.

“Oh dear,” says Cube Lady, “I put a ticket in for Desktop IT to come and pick those up a week ago. I'll have to give them a call.”

“Yeaah.....you do that.” I sighed.

Sometimes You Get Pee With That Karma

I work with a bunch of passive-aggressive jerks. Specifically, they love their 18 hour day so much, they whine about anyone who actually has responsibilities outside the office. Like raising children and feeding them before 9pm.

Logging in from home to get a little extra work done won't get you anywhere, because these lunatics can't actually observe you working. It's like working with overly caffeinated, psychopathic kindergarteners.

The superstitious part of my brain says it's karma. I've been so cranky and stressed about office politics, that I may have inadvertently grown a crusty, bitter layer over all this awesomeness.

After months of holding it all in, some squirted out the side and splattered everything with bad karma.

To illustrate:

I spent lovely evening in our veep's office due to a crisis, only to find it was a non-issue. The person who created the crisis, lied about it - in order to get his problem looked at sooner. A complete waste of time, which meant I couldn't pick up my daughter from her friend's house, or make dinner for my family.

So last weekend, in order to try and relax a bit, Hubby and I had a daylong “date”, only to find numerous angry messages from work when I got home. During this time, daughter was tasked with reading a 300 page book for a report due at the end of the week. Since I was going to be out most of the day, this was her one and only job for the day. She opted to sleep for the entire time instead.

Between getting yelled at by work for not having my cell phone on me, then trying to pry out of a 16year old why sleeping suddenly became a moral imperative with a major assignment due shortly, I think I snapped.

Broke down in tears, had temper tantrum, threw a few things, then stepped in pee.

Apparently during the maelstrom of stress, Meatball needed to go out, and no one noticed him bouncing up and down in front of the door. Bouncing as well as a Giant Papillion Moose can do.

So I cleaned up the pee, grounded the daughter, logged into work and fixed the problem, then had a nice, fat vodka martini to compliment the swelling on my mascara-stained face.

And yeah, other than having a puffy face the next day, the sun rose and life was fine again. Well, except for the work thing. I ended up working all day Sunday.

I think I need to consider a new career path. Something that provides a bit more satisfaction, and involves less screaming.

I wonder how long it takes to get through Beauty School?

Not Now Cato !!!

In my last post from March, I believe I made the statement “Meatball is only going to grow to about ten pounds, so Leo will still be bigger”.

HA.

He's four times the size of Leo.

He looks like a Miniature Collie with elephant ears.

If he didn't have those official papers, I'd swear he was a mutant sheepdog.

He's the biggest Papillion in the universe.

Giant Papillion. GP, for short.

GP and Leo still have their daily wrestling match, usually with Leo getting his bladder stepped on by a moose, and the dog getting his neck chomped by vampire kitty. Lovingly of course.

The cat usually instigates it. He launches himself off the windowsill like a flying squirrel, and rides the dog halfway into the kitchen before GP shakes him off.

Those are my boys. Cato and Clouseau.

Dear Blog

Dear Blog,

I've missed you so, please forgive me.

I realize it's no consolation, but I've thought about you every day since that last post in March. Really, I have. I miss commiserating with you after some idiot nearly kills me on the way to work, or when I tell you I have no quiet time in the bathroom, or write about the cat and dog's last smack down.

Ah, those were the days. *sniff*

I've begun so many posts for you, but they always fizzle, sounding hollow and forlorn.

Life is still throwing me the finger, but I'd like to give it another shot. I can't promise I'll have something clever every day, but I'll sure as hell give it try.

Jen

On Top Of Spaghetti

Last night, we brought home the newest member of the family. His name is Meatball:

Apparently his "fetch" mechanism is built in. He wiggles and bounces everywhere.

He's a two month old Papillion puppy, and the funny thing is, his marking and coloring is almost identical to Leo's.

Meatball is only going to grow to about ten pounds, so Leo will still be bigger. So far we're working on housebreaking. He's had a few accidents, but a few successes as well. It's to be expected. He cried a little last night, but only for a few minutes before passing out.

Leo is taking things slow. He's not sure what to make of his little brother yet.

Head Pigeons

Just like milk that's gone bad, one always has to share: “Does this taste weird to you?”

So I'm sharing.

I've always been told shampooing your hair every day is very drying, so you should give it a break and wash it every other day. Apparently, this is not an option for me.

A few weeks ago, while I was working days AND nights, I didn't wash my hair every day. No big deal, I wasn't going into the office since I was chained to my laptop at home. Tied my hair up in a clip. When I did wash it, I tied it up as well.

Woke up a few days later with a weird, oily patch of hair. About an inch in diameter, oilier than normal, but not particularly noticeable. Seemed to wash out.

The next day, the patch grew to cover a three inch area, and was beginning to be very noticeable. I looked like I was smacked in the side of the head with an olive oil water balloon. Or that paste my daughter uses to make her hair stick-straight. It was wet, waxy and STICKY.

I couldn't figure out what I got in my hair. Did I accidentally get paste in my hair? Was there something weird in that new bottle of conditioner? Is the cat somehow to blame? He's usually guilty of something...

I polled some relatives, figuring this was another death-inducing ailment passed down through the family. Everyone told me to go to the doctor. Sound advice, however, it requires taking time off work, so I tried Dr. Google first.

I was surprised to see how many other people had this problem. The most common diagnosis seemed to be seborrheic dermatitis, but more likely a fungus.

We're talking FUNGUS here, people.…...FUN-gus. FunnnnGUS.

Evidently this is fairly common, and occurs when you TIE YOUR HAIR UP WET, REALLY, REALLY OFTEN.

Why is it that you can do something perfectly normal, a zillion times, then suddenly you get “head fungus”?

I know....yuck, right?

So I found two solutions, aside from investing in hats: Nizoral and T-Sal. Salicylic acid in T-Sal to break up the waxy, sticky crud, and the Nizoral to eradicate any FUNGUS!

It's been about five days now and I think I've killed it. Or stripped every drop of oil from my head. Either way, it's looking mostly normal, albeit quite dry.

So no more air drying or tying it up wet. I will embrace technology and utilize the tools available - like the hair dryer.

Can you imagine how people handled this 100 years ago? You know they didn't shampoo every day. I don't even know if there was shampoo back then. That's a whole lotta fungus going on.

I just can't get over the fact that this was so random. Out of the blue. I suppose the combination of work stress, hormones, and general oiliness left me open to it.

Either that or the cat was dragging his ass across my pillow.

Because he's usually guilty of something.

Murphy's Law Applied To IT

When you're on call, there's large swathes of time – literally hours and hours that go by, where no one calls. Nothing's broken, and the business is chugging away at full steam.

However, if that burrito you ate for lunch suddenly needs to make an exit, you can guarantee there will be a network outage at that exact moment.

When you need ten minutes to get your child to the school bus stop by 7am, your servers will sense this and burst into flames.

If you run to the shop for milk - only five minutes down the road - the database will eat itself.

On the other hand, maybe you've had an extremely busy on call week. Maybe you've been awake for 48 hours straight, and those fluffy, bunny-like spiders crawling up your arm don't want to listen to Kylie Minogue on their very tiny iPods anymore. You need sleep.

Five minutes after settling into a cozy cocoon on the couch for a power nap, your cell phone rings. It will be the crisis team informing you that every user on the East Coast can't log in.