No Such Thing as a Bedtime Routine

I was chatting with one of the kids on Facebook tonight, and told them I needed to put the puppy away, so I'd be right back.  Here's what happened afterward:


Picked up puppy.  Started down stairs and realized she had put the water bowl on the stairs.  Picked up water bowl to avoid a fall on the stairs, and put it on the counter.  Went in and turned on dryer to warm up the hubby's Browns' blanket before I took it up to him.  Put puppy away.  Realized Mickey had followed me downstairs and is now staring sadly at me by the door, wanting to go out.  Let Mickey out.  Went to kitchen, filled water bowl and put it on the floor.  Mickey was now barking hysterically to get in.  Let Mickey in.  Grabbed blanket from dryer.  Start up the stairs, but Mickey stops to get a drink.  Call him to come upstairs.  I get upstairs, only to realize that Bandit is pounding on Seth's bedroom door, which is closed.  Let Bandit out of bedroom and he runs downstairs, wanting to go out to the garage.  Go back downstairs and let him outside.  Go back upstairs.  Realize I forgot to get hubby's evening meds.  Go downstairs and get meds and refill his Mason jar of water.  Go back upstairs and realize that I never too my evening meds.  Go downstairs and take said meds.  Come upstairs and climb onto bed, only to realize that now Facebook has frozen, so the "I'll be right back" is truly a lie now.


Try to reboot computer.  Go and brush teeth whilst it is rebooting.  Come back, only to find that it still hasn't even shut down.  Shut it down manually, while thinking that maybe my hard drive is dying.  Don't really care, because there are several broken keys on the keyboard, so it's a lotta work to type on it.  Restart computer and decided I'd better go pee while it's booting up.  Go pee.  Climb on bed, only to realize that Mickey had apparently followed me downstairs and he is now scratching at the bedroom door.  Let dog in.  Settle into bed with all my comfy pillows.  Mickey comes around to my side of the bed, wanting up.  Pull him up on to the bed.  Open Facebook.


Kid has signed off.

The Monthly Hideout

I spent today hiding from the cleaning lady.  This is a monthly thing that I do, and it drives me kind of crazy.   Jim has had this cleaning lady coming by to do her thing every month or so for several years.  I told him that we really don't need her, but he said he wants to do it for me, so I don't have to worry about cleaning so much.  He even said he'd have her come very two weeks, but I said not way.  That's just too much hiding.

You see, the first I heard of the cleaning lady was when we were first dating.  He told me that Big Boobs was coming over the next day.  Whhhhhaaaaat?  Well, you know, he's a Marine, so you never know what's gonna fly outta his mouth.  He explained that the first time she had come over to clean, she got talking to his late wife.  One of the things that she saidin that first conversation was that she had had a breast augmentation done.  And then she lifted up her shirt and showed her.  As in, new client.  New cleaning lady.  New client now face to face with the girls.

WHOA.

This more than freaked me out, but it wasn't an issue because I wasn't usually here when she came.  I was living in town, I was working days.......no big deal.  Our paths never crossed.  Well, now I live here, and I work later in the day, so I'm here when she comes.  The first time she came after I moved in, Jim was still home recovering from his knee surgery.  I wasn't here, for some reason -- maybe a doctor's appointment or something, but he was alone with Boobs.  Thank God, she didn't show him her ta-tas, especially because it was the first time he'd actually met her, despite her tenure here.  He did say that she had talked his bloomin' head off.  As in, nonstop talking.  She was here talking for an hour before she started working, and then she forgot to do things like empty the trash in the bathrooms and vacuum some of the upstairs.

The next time she came, he suggested that I just flat out leave the house.  Now we were not only afraid of the boob show, but we weren't sure she'd get any work done.  Given the fact that I work from home, he wanted her long gone before I had to start work, so not giving her a chance to engage was the best way out.  I spent the afternoon hanging out with a friend. and came home to a nice clean house.  Jim reported, however, that Boo had gotten out of his cage sometime before she got here, so when she opened the garage door, he took a tour of the yard before she could coax him in.  Oh well, at least he didn't bite anyone.  He may or may not have seen her boobs.

Well, it's a pain in the patootey to hide every time she comes over, because she is always an hour or two late, so I don't know when the leave the house, nor when to come home.  Jim has somehow brainwashed her into thinking that I absolutely cannot be disturbed if I am in my office, so I usually just take the dogs and lock myself in there whilst she cleans.  I try to do it before she gets here, because if I don't, it's a nonstop barrage of meaningless chatter until I can get the door closed.  I literally hide in there organizing, surfing the web, playing Candy Crush, listing sewing patterns, doing actual work, or whatever else I can think of until she is long gone.  Heck, today I came home and she was still here.  She was upstairs, so I made a sandwich, grabbed a drink, and went into my office.  Never saw her at all, but she chattered away until the door closed.  No word from Bandit if he got an eyeful, but I will say that he refused to come upstairs while she was there, ran upstairs and then refused to go downstairs till she was gone.  It all seems rather suspect to me.  That poor cat.

Give it to Mikey

The Heir to the Throne works with me, doing data entry. He likes it, because it's the perfect job: get paid to have essential no human interaction. It's perfect for him.

He enters all of our pages into our software, so the nurses can stay busy doing nursey stuff. Put your aces in their places, as McDonald's teaches. Essentially, he gets to see all the topics of the pages as they come in, but never really hears too much about the end result. He looked forward to starting there, because he knows about all of the weird things people call us for. Sadly, it's been pretty quiet there since he started, but I think yesterday took the proverbial cake.

I was over checking out the situation with another nurse. The boss had shown up on a weekend, which is unusual, but we were trying to solve a software issue someone was having, so she dropped in to play tech support and see some staff who normally don't see her. I walked over to see if they'd resolved the software issue that had plagued my co-worker for weeks, when over walked Thomas.

"I want to know how this call ends," he said. "Why," I asked, because he rarely expresses much interest in the calls. "You'll have to read it yourself," he said, so I headed over to read the incoming email, which read

"thinks the babey ait the cat"

Granted, this particular answering service is not known for its accuracy. They do give us some amusements, like paging a name as Yoda instead of Yoder. They drive us nuts with the misspellings and, when we call to have the doctor paged, they page the nurse sitting in the next cubicle instead. One of my co-workers calls them The River People, because she's sure that they are a by-product of some Deliverance-like environment. Either way, I'd never seen anything like this, and we all started arguing over who was going to take this call.

I had a trainee who was asking how they wouldn't know if the baby ate the cat, but how would the baby do that anywhere, when the call disappeared from the screen. Suddenly everyone started pointing fingers at each other, griping that they never get the good stuff. When I looked it up, I realized that my friend Ann had snagged it from home, where she works, complete with lap dog and bunny slippers. Man, the home agents are not supposed to get these calls, because we miss all the fun discussion afterward if no one in the office gets it.

I watched for a while, wondering how a mom wouldn't know if a kid had swallowed the cat. Wouldn't the tail be hanging out? Would he yack up a hairball? Ann hung up the phone, and I promptly called her to get the scoop, and read her the riot act for taking the most interesting call of the day. She answered with her typically angelic voice that meant that she hadn't looked at the caller id to see that it was me, which always then turns into giggles when she realizes it's me.

Turned out the cat was safe when mom found the kid sitting in the litter box, and thought that he might've eaten cat POOP. This, for those who are less informed, is not a big deal, and you just need to watch the kiddo for any GI signs like vomiting and diarrhea, which rarely show up. But, jaded as we are, we got some leverage from this discussion, which meant that Ann had to go into a description of where the cat poop was smeared on the child's body (basically head to toe), what kind of cat it was, the consistency of the poo, etc. At this point, my trainee probably started reconsidering her new career, but we had fun with it for the rest of the day. Amongst all the vomiting that seems to be taking over our city, the labor patients who all were delivering yesterday, and the stray "I have to go on a job interview, does alcohol/marijuana/insert drug of choice show up on a urine test", you gotta admit, the possibility of a baby eating a cat seems fodder for some pretty interesting discussions.

Discussions which, of course, made me think of Mikey, the Life Cereal kid back in the day, whose cat disappeared shortly after his brothers agreed "give it to Mikey, he'll eat anything." Click to see the video.