work
Quote of the day:
Jul 21st
“Not all Democrats are evil. And not all Republicans are good guys.” -spoken during the legislative update portion of my continuing ed class today.
Thanks for exposing your bias. FYI not all insurance agents are Republicans.
One of these days I’ll get back on track
May 2nd
I start work again tomorrow. When I talked about my 10 weeks of maternity leave, it sounded so long. I thought for sure that I would be very ready to go back to work at the end of it; that I would have gotten bored staying home all day with a baby. But I discovered that when it’s YOUR baby it’s different. I love being home with James. He’s so sweet, and I love to just watch him and hold him. I think about how much I will be missing when I go back to work and it breaks my heart. He is doing more and more. Finally discovering his hands, and grabbing on to things purposefully. He smiles, and is on the verge of laughing. He loves to look you in the eye, and he will “pet” a soft blanket or his own clothes when he’s tired.
Tomorrow I will drop him off with a stranger. Sure, I’ve met her, and we’ve talked several times and I’m comfortable that she’ll do a good job as a day care provider, but she’s still a stranger. And instead of getting to feed my baby face to face, I’ll be pumping milk in an empty office. It will make our time in the evenings more precious; those few hours before he goes to sleep for the night. I will finally know how Ryan has felt these past couple months.
Thankfully, Ryan uploaded a couple videos to YouTube of James just hanging out in his pack-n-play. I will be able to watch them when I just need to see and hear him for a moment. And as soon as work is done I will be racing to be with him again.
Poor, neglected blog. Also, no baby yet.
Feb 19th
It occurred to me that we haven’t updated the blog in a while, and if I was reading a blog and someone was expecting a baby at any minute and they didn’t update for days I would assume they had it. I would hate for you to assume that, because you would be disappointed, so I’m here to let you know that no, we have not yet had the baby. Although we have been trying to convince him that it’s pretty awesome out here and he should come join us. No dice so far, though.
I’ve been a little “nesty” although not much. I have lots of plans of things I would like to get done, but my motivation doesn’t last long. I warned my mom that if we have the baby this weekend there is a good chance she will come to our house and there will be boxes of books everywhere (we sorted through them and are donating/selling a bunch).
Work has been kind of crazy lately; we switched over to a new system for managing customer information, but we were “down” for a month in between systems and the new one is very different from the old one, so it’s a learning process while we try to catch up with all the stuff that got done but not entered in the system during the month. It’s been pretty stressful for everyone, and that’s part of the reason that today will be my last day at work until May. My blood pressure has been just a little elevated at my last 2 appointments, and I’m pretty sure that the work stuff had at least a little to do with it. Our pay period ends on Monday, and I have a day of vacation left, so I’ll be taking it to get my full paycheck, but I’m technically done as of today. So that’s exciting; especially because it means that besides the donuts I brought to work there are more donuts from someone else and cookies from another person. We like sweets around here; what can I say?
I have a doctor’s appointment scheduled for Tuesday, and if I make it that far we’ll be scheduling an induction for later that week. Hopefully it won’t come to that (do you hear that, baby?). I don’t mind the waiting; I just don’t want to be medically induced if I don’t have to (but I don’t want to be pregnant for another 2 weeks, either). All that is to say, we should for sure have a baby by next weekend!
None of this seems real; even with the baby stuff everywhere and this huge belly and the weekly appointments and putting the car seat in the truck (it’s that or I have to drive everywhere and Ryan has to sit in the back seat of the car because the seats need to be so far forward)…even with all of that it doesn’t seem real. I’m sure it will become real very shortly, though. And I can’t wait!
Conversations
Jan 5th
Ryan: I have to go up to [apartment complex his workplace services] today after work. I’ll drop you off at home and head up there. (We carpool to work)
Me: OK. How long do you think you’ll be?
Ryan: Between 20 minutes and 5 hours.
Sadly, this is not a surprising answer, and he wasn’t really joking. It’s been over an hour so far. This does not bode well for the apartment cleaning we were going to get done, although the overtime is nice. Especially with my maternity leave coming up.
What’s that? You think I should do the cleaning on my own while he’s gone? HAHAHAHA. I can barely put my own socks and shoes on these days so picking stuff up off the floor is definitely out, and I can hardly reach the faucet to turn on the water, much less stand over the sink to do the dishes. I was going to sweep/mop and dry the dishes after Ryan washed them, so it’ll have to wait.
In exciting news, the cloth diapers we will be using arrived in today’s mail, and they are SO CUTE. Seriously – adorable. We have 6 different colors, and I like them all. I’m sure they’ll be much less adorable once they are in use and full of poop. We ordered the BumGenius 3.0 diapers. We have some friends who use them, and they like them a lot. I’ll try to remember to let you know how they work for us. One word of advice they did give us was to not let the diaper pail sit for more than a day. Apparently it is not pleasant. I can only imagine.
We also had my 34 week appointment today. The baby is head down, and I’m measuring exactly right. The Doctor asked if we had the hospital bag packed yet. We don’t, and she suggested that we should probably have it ready by our next appointment in 2 weeks. That makes it all even more real. At most I have 8 weeks left of being pregnant. More likely it’ll be less than that. Yikes.
Well, I suppose I should get to the picking up I can do around here. Ryan just called and is on his way home with Erberts & Gerberts (only an hour and a half tonight! woo!).
A Work Vent
Dec 31st
I have a New Year’s Meme (copied from Sundry, among others), but I’m too annoyed to do it right now. It is 6:25 AM. I’ve been here (at the office) since 6:10, which I was actually excited about. I have a bunch of work to get done that has to be finished by noon today, and I like working early when no one else is here. But do you think my computer will cooperate? NO! Grr. It keeps giving me an error that it can’t access some file it needs in order to log me in to our customer management system. Without logging into the system I can’t actually do ANYTHING. Seriously. Nothing. I can’t attach any of the emails I have waiting that go with customer accounts, I can’t send any policies or applications out to insureds because I can’t access the form letters I need to do it, and I can’t scan in and attach any of the paper piled on my desk because I need to access customer accounts for that too.
I’m so annoyed (if you can’t tell). I will do some filing and that kind of stuff, but this is kind of ridiculous. And it’s cold outside and by the time I got home I would just have to turn around and come back, so there’s no use doing that.
I feel a trip to Starbucks coming on soon (I can get there through the skywalks, so no need to go outside). Something to get out of the office once I’m done filing, because otherwise I might drop-kick my computer, and that wouldn’t be helpful to anyone.
I hope the last day of 2009 is going better for everyone else!
We aren’t dead or anything; I promise.
Dec 14th
Things have been busy around our place, between getting all the Christmas shopping done (we weren’t able to do it all online) and catching up on stuff that should have gotten done the week after Thanksgiving but got put off because we were in class most of the week. We are finally mostly caught up, but over the weekend we had Ryan’s company Christmas party, and I didn’t get nearly as much done yesterday as I wanted to. I had big plans to be making candy and stuff all day, and then I just didn’t want to. I did get the caramel made for chocolate covered caramels (it has to refrigerate overnight before I can dip it), but that’s about it. Although I made a real dinner, so that should count. My mom’s beef stroganoff recipe is AWESOME, and I really wanted some yesterday, so I ran to the store and grabbed enough stuff to make it twice. One recipe is enough for Ryan and I to eat our fill and still have a few lunches out of it, so that’s exciting.
I can tell that I’ve become more comfortable in my cooking because I remember when she first gave me this recipe I was like “What do you MEAN you don’t know the exact measurement of flour/ketchup/whatever ingredient!?” I’ve always been a big recipe follower (which is why I like to bake so much). And in the past I’ve stressed over the stroganoff because I wanted it to turn out, but I was so afraid that it wouldn’t because I would use 2 tablespoons of ketchup instead of 3, or I would put too much flour in the beef broth or whatever. This time I didn’t worry about it. I didn’t even measure those things really. And it turned out great. Just goes to show that I should just chill out. That is the story of my life.
My work Christmas party is this Friday. We leave the office at noon to head over to a local restaurant and eat and drink all afternoon while exchanging gifts and generally just hanging out. Afterward, those of us that drink go out to the bar where the spouses join us. While I’m obviously not drinking this year, I still plan on going out afterward because it’s part of the tradition and I would feel lame just going home. Of course, true to tradition it is also supposed to snow on Friday. Lucky for Ryan he doesn’t have to pick my drunk butt up anywhere. He can actually just come drink with my coworkers if he wants to.
I have a lot of stuff to get done this week; Christmas cards need to be mailed, candy needs to be made, packages need to be shipped, and I drew a coworker’s birthday (we exchange names) that happens to fall on Saturday, so I have to come up with a treat that needs to be either made or purchased and brought in to work at some point. Thankfully I already have her gift ready to go. A few of us from work are also volunteering one night at Bentleyville (a huge light display down by the lake done by a guy in town and free to attend – it’s pretty awesome). I think it might be Wednesday, but we don’t know for sure yet, so that will take one night out of consideration. All of this stuff will make the week go by quickly, that’s for sure. Which is awesome, because then it’s a really short week and then it’s Christmas!
Things that make my day:
Nov 18th
Aside from this cold hanging on by it’s scratchy gross fingernails, I am having a great day. There are a few things contributing to this:
- My friend, Gwen, sent me pictures of her son, who is just over 2 weeks old. We saw them the day he was born (it was the day we flew out East), and he’s just SO CUTE. I can’t wait until I can hold my little one.
- It is Wednesday, which means that there are only 2 1/2 days of work left this week, and next week is Thanksgiving. Only a week left until we get a nice long weekend to go visit family.
- My mom just informed me that she plans on making potato dumplings on Friday while we are home. I LOVE potato dumplings. And in case you have never had the pleasure of trying them, they are basically ground up potatoes mixed with flour and boiled. You serve them with butter and salt and bacon (or side pork if you can get it), including “drippings” (aka grease). They are extremely heavy, but they taste sooo good. And in the morning, if there are leftovers, you slice them up and fry them and they are even better. You can’t get them in restaurants (at least not outside of my hometown, that I’m aware of), and so the only time I have them is when we go home and mom makes them. One of these years I want to get the grinder attachment for our kitchenaid so that we can try making them. But until then it will be a once or twice a year treat. Considering how we eat them it’s probably better that way anyway.
- Ryan and I have our first baby-related class tonight. I’m a little nervous about it, but it makes me excited that we are at that point. In a related item, we will be picking up some baby stuff from my sisters over Thanksgiving, and so we’ll be one step closer to getting the baby’s room ready. I remember when Thanksgiving seemed so far away. Not anymore!
So, I’m in a good mood. Now I should take advantage of it and get back to work.
The cold that just won’t die
Nov 16th
I am still sick. I feel about 4 times better than I did when we got back from vacation, but I’m still not feeling great, and I still spent about 1/2 an hour last night coughing when I went to bed. I finally got a cough drop and that helped, but I don’t like doing that at night because it means either getting up after it’s gone and brushing my teeth again, or leaving them but knowing that the cough drops have coated my teeth in sugar to sit all night. I don’t like either option.
I bought some organic unpasteurized apple cider vinegar this weekend. I is supposed to help with all kinds of ailments, but sinuses and sore throats are supposed to be 2 of them. You mix a tablespoon or so with 8 oz of water (and honey if the taste is too strong) and drink it. I haven’t done it yet because I’m kind of a chicken, but I really should try it because if it helps it will totally be worth dealing with the icky taste. Has anyone else tried this before? Recommendations?
Being sick has also pulled a number on my productivity. I’m tired a lot of the time and just not feeling as “with it” as usual, and so I’m not getting as much done as I’d like. After being gone for a week that’s not great. Hopefully I can get back into the groove soon.
ps. Can we all agree that it seems insane that Thanksgiving is NEXT WEEK already? I’m super-excited, as we will be going to my parents’ place and I haven’t been there since August, but still…crazy.
2 things
Nov 11th
1.) I got my glucose screening test results back while I was on vacation, and all your positive thoughts worked, because my sugar was at 101, which they said was good. Or good enough. Whatever. I don’t have to do the extra test. Yippee!
2.) I have come up with the best idea EVER. Workplaces should be more like airplanes. And I don’t mean being strapped into a seat right next to/on top of the person next to you while breathing germy recycled air. I think that every once in a while someone should come around with a cart and offer you something to drink. Seriously – I am a genius, I know.
On that note, back to the grindstone. I need a job where they pay me to read novels. Or even non-fiction books. But some sort of real books. Not insurance policies. And I would like to do it at home while lazing around in my pajamas drinking Dr Pepper and eating ice cream with the yummy (accidental) chocolate fudgey syrup that I made (yay for happy cooking accidents!). Is that too much to ask, world? I would probably eat some “healthy” food too, if that would help my cause. No? Fine. Water while sitting in my cubicle it is.
