ninanevermore

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Lots of little things have been going on in recent weeks. School let out. Sweet Pea has attended birthday parties and done well at them. Things with the babysitter are going well. On a personal level, my father is not doing well and I am not sure how much longer I will have him. And then there is the cruise in July that I should be looking forward to but am dreading. I have plenty to write about, just no time. I’ll start with the end of Kindergarten. I’ll try to take up the other topics in the coming days.

( School’s Out For Summer!  )

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“Have you been paying attention to the news out of The Woodlands lately?” Jeff asked, “I think the place is cursed.”

I told him I hadn’t noticed any curses. I haven’t been paying much attention, but I drive through the master-planned splendor that is The Woodlands, Texas every day on my way to work, and I haven’t noticed any obvious signs of a hex. There is some construction along my route that has part of the road closed down to one lane going either way, but that is more of a life-around-Houston thing than an obvious curse.

( Dying for decent parking. )

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I met my son’s fiancée this last Saturday at the party for her 6th birthday. She seems like a nice little girl. A bit goofy looking, but judging by how pretty her mother is, I suspect she will be very attractive once she grows into her features.

“Are you [Sweet Pea’s] mom?” the mother of the birthday girl greeted me, “Mallory talks about him all the time at home. She tells me she’s going to marry him when she grows up.”

“He mentioned that to me,” I told her with a smile. I didn’t mention that he is not yet ready to commit to her daughter. There are so many little girls at his school that he’s not sure which one he will marry, he has confided to me. I told him he doesn’t have to pick one for a couple more decades, and not to rush. There is a good change (say 99.9%) that he will marry someone who he does not go to Kindergarten with. But his world is very small right now, and he has no way to imagine how many people (including girls) he will meet as he makes his way through his life. Right now the dozen or so girls in his class are overwhelming enough to him.

( Sweet Pea Syndome )

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Back when I first worked for the Toll Road Authority, Priss was the receptionist. She was, without a doubt, the worst receptionist I’ve ever met. She was not a people person, and she hated the telephone. Since greeting people and answering the phone where the two prime components of her job, I got a kick out watching how bad she was at it. It’s not she couldn’t do a good job; she simply didn’t care to.

The phone at the front desk rang non-stop because the calls from the public to ask about getting a Toll Tag or to check on their Toll Tag Accounts were routed through the main switchboard. Priss answered it in a monotone. “Toll road authority can I help you one moment please,” and transfer the call. If it was an EZ Tag call, she would put them in a voicemail loop where they would sit until one of the 10 or so people working in the EZ Tag store at the time picked it up, or after 20 minutes or so it would ring back to Priss.


( One Caustic, One Long )

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Kourtney’s mother stopped by the office the other day with Kourtney’s 2 year old son in tow. While he was her, she took him through the cubicles and offices to show him off. One of the women in accounting still had balloons up in her cube from her birthday the week before (the tradition in the office is to decorate the workspace of each employee on their birthday), and Kourtney's son scored a blue balloon and a red balloon from her. He was delighted.

"What do you have there?" I asked him.

"Bah-LOON!" he answered. This was a man who had obviously just mastered the art of saying multi-syllable words, and he acted proud to show off his verbal dexterity.

"Cool!" I said. Because it seemed like the thing to do (even though we had just met seconds before) I picked him up and spun him around, which made him throw back his head and giggle. It was a beautiful sound, and it was hard to believe that it came from a little boy who had died a few weeks before.

( Little Boy Code Blue )

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Book Club last week was a lot of fun, even if the book we read wasn’t much fun at all. The fact that the book was almost universally hated by the five of us who showed up made it fun to sit around in a circle and talk about just why we hated it so much. Only one member was sympathetic toward it. She didn’t consider it great, finally admitted that it made her sentimental for her dear departed grandma, who used to like such books.

( Can we make Mary contrary? )

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The job isn’t bad. I hate the first few days of a new job, where you feel useless and someone else is not getting their own work done because they are spending all their time training you. I am working for another Entrepreneur, but this one is more focused and less spastic than the last one I worked for. The Last Entrepreneur was 50ish, and he threw money into all kinds of projects at once to see what took root and bloomed and what blew away. The New Entrepreneur looks to be in his 30s or early 40s, and he focuses on insurance. This has allowed him to grow one of the top 100 privately owned insurance agencies in the United States (it just misses being in the top 75) after a dozen years. He’s not as flashy as the Last one. A case in point: the company cars with the logos wrapped all over them are Honda Civics. They don’t even have power locks and windows. He’s not out to impress anyone with glitz. He just want his logos to be seen.

The offices are nice, unlike the Civics, and are adjacent to the food court of a very nice shopping mall, which is full of a sort of retail glitz. When I look out the window to the left, I see a two-story Barnes and Noble bookstore. When I look to the right, I can see the carousel in the mall food court. Today I figured out that if you walk around the food court at just the right time and look like you are reading the menus and trying to decide what to eat, you can collect enough samples on toothpicks so that you are no longer hungry and don’t need to buy anything. I’m not sure how many days in a row I can get away with this, but it worked out nicely on my second day. On my first day, the COO (Chief Operations Officer) bought me lunch. If I’m lucky, I might get fed again on my birthday.

( Jack’s Mom Has Got It Goin' On )

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Saturday was the Fall Festival at my son’s elementary school. His teachers had been talking up the event a lot, and little Sweet Pea wanted to go so bad he could barely contain himself. My own elementary used to have a Halloween Carnival each October, and I always enjoyed them. At some point it was decided to make it more inclusive by linking it to a season that everyone experiences rather than a holiday that some people may not celebrate, so all the Halloween Carnivals became Fall Festivals at some point. It is a big fundraiser for the school, and a blurb in the school’s newsletter made the event even more worthy of my support: The Fall Festival is our school’s main fundraiser. We are deeply committed to never asking your children to sell cookie dough or wrapping paper, but in order to meet that commitment, our Fall Festival must be a success!

The idea of keeping my front porch free of sad-eyed tykes selling cookie dough that I don’t need and that they would rather not be selling impressed me plenty. I purchased advanced tickets so we could get the early bird special, and made it a date with my 6 year old son.

( Sweet Pea as one of Three Peas )

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All day Friday, I waited for Mike to tell my not to come in on Monday. The man never spoke a word to me. Never acted like anything was up. For some reason, he never liked speaking to me. I specifically told The Owner in the letter that I wrote to him that I would stick around until Mike let me go. Which he didn’t. He just hired someone else, and acted all surprised when I walked in the office on Monday. What a dolt.*

On the upside, I did get to see my replacement – about half my age, half a foot taller, and slender, and pretty. I thought she had too much product in her hair, making it look like it would be sticky and gloppy to touch, but what do I know? Maybe that’s just her style.

( Jeesh! Do I have to do everything around here, including fill out my own termination paperwork? )

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As of today, my son has been in the world for 6 years and I am a week away from unemployment. My head is a whirl of reminiscing, celebrating, and anticipating; no wonder I feel exhausted. Six years ago on this date, I was happy the whole pregnancy thing was finally over with, that I could see my feet again without straining, and that they were starting to look like my feet again. Since I had just had a Cesarean section, I was also stoned out of my goard.

( Walking on Water Balloons  )