First up, have you ever been doing something, anything, and, for a moment, completely forgotten how to do it? Just now, as I was typing the title for this entry, I couldn't remember how to spell "promised"! Thank God for the little red squiggly line that pops up when something is typed incorrectly!
This has happened to me several times over the years and not just with spelling. There have been times, for instance, when I've been in my car driving to, say the store or to the dry cleaners or the vet or any number of places I routinely go to when, all of a sudden, I can't remember where I am going. It's only for a second but it's a long second.
Several years ago, I arrived at my office bright and early in the morning as I was wont to do back when all I cared about was working 12+ hours a day. It was a Friday and the halls were eerily empty. I got to the door to my office bay, reached out to punch in the code to open the door, and, had a brain fade. I couldn't remember what it was! I punched in several different combinations of numbers; nothing. Luckily, one of my co-workers (who was even more obsessed about working than I was) came ambling down the hallway and let me in to his office bay so I could call security. Duh. How embarrassing!
So, I've been off-line almost a week here. Life got busy, or, rather, I finally broke through and found my groove for writing these personnel policy statements for the company I'm working with. Talk about bor-ing. But, hey, it's money, and money well needed. After I wrote the first several (dealing with expectations of managers and supervisors), I asked Mr. B to review them for tone. He told me, "They read just like what I would think I'd find in an HR manual". Good to know I haven't lost my ability to talk (and write) like an HR Weenie!
Pet update. Lucy's leg has almost healed! Yey! I'd post a picture, but, it'd probably still gross you out, so I won't. Suffice it to say, the wound is just shy of being knitted together. What is unsightly now is simply all the pinkish scar tissue and puckered skin where the sutures were. Her fur is starting to grow back; she's got little tufts of it all over her leg. Interestingly enough, the skin on her leg is black; something we never would have known had this whole thing not happened. Not that we needed to go through this (or put her through this) and play almost $4,000 to find out what color the skin on her leg was! Seriously, given the amount of time, effort and money that has been put into Lucy, her status in the household has definitely risen to "top dog". She doesn't know it and the cats certainly don't, but we do.
The cats are all doing very well. They are happy because dad put up a new storm door over the front door so now they can sit at the door and stare out at the front yard and street; something they've only seen before from the perspective of one of the upstairs front bedroom windows. Said storm door is quite lovely; Mr. B did a fine job of selecting one with a pretty tulip shape etched on the glass. And, the door is a Pella; can't go wrong with that.
Pete has decided it is fun to chew on the underside of the glass shower door in our bathroom. Why, we cannot imagine. Time to spray some "Bitter Yuck" on it, I guess. Pete took a swipe at Lucy the other day and Lucy growled back at him and that was the end of that (thankfully). In general, Lucy appears to be afraid of Pete; she'll walk around him, for instance, or will refuse to go by him if there is not a wide enough berth. Now we know why. Lily is enjoying her summer being Queen Bee of the house. Her new favorite thing to do is spend the days sleeping in the closet or sprawled out on top of one of the dressers.
I took The Little Kids to the vet last week for their annual exams and shots. Not so little now, really; Ares is over 11 1/2 pounds, Apollo is 9 1/4 and Athena is 8 1/4. Apollo and Athena might be a tad on the small side, but, with the way Apollo eats, he'll probably catch up to Ares fairly quickly. Ares continues to torment Pete (and has a big bare patch on the back of his neck because of it). Apollo has really become the sweetie of the cats; he loves to beg food from Mr. B in the morning (lunch meat) and will come running from wherever he is when the garage door goes up in the evening, signaling Mr. B's return home from work. Athena, well, she's just an odd-ball cat. Mr. B calls her "Loopy". She plays with the shadows from the light spilling out of the partially open bathroom door in the morning. She still runs away from both of us 50% of the time.
I'm still working on my twin self-development/improvement projects of patience and kindness. It's been a tough row to hoe, let me tell you. I got so fed up with the people in our neighborhood bitching and complaining on the Yahoo message board that I finally had to just sign off of it; worried that I'd say something I shouldn't that would not reflect well on either me or Mr. B (who is the President of the HOA Board). Still, stupid, stupid, stupid people. There, I feel better now!
Really, I think society has come to a point where it is just too easy to sit on your butt and type anything you want into the black hole of technological communication. There is not another person that you see or have to deal with face to face; so, the sky's the limit on what you (think) you can say to them or about them. I am really, really trying my best to think long and hard before I shoot off at the fingers (which is why I signed off the message board; I wasn't convinced I wouldn't fire off some nasty gram to some well deserving moron).
On Facebook, people routinely type snarky comments on people's status updates or posts, only to delete them once they realize maybe they were not appropriate (or maybe someone tells them "that wasn't nice"). The thing is, even though it is deleted, most people still receive email notifications of comments so they can still see the comment. One of my Facebook friends got pretty irritated about this; saying, "If you are going to say something, then say it. Don't then later delete it and try to pretend you didn't". I agree, and this goes back to my original train of thought of, "Better to be really careful about what you say in the first place". What is society coming to? We are all so insular now. It's like we're all living in Los Angeles (one of the best places in the world to live if you don't want anything to do with anyone else).
We've been home from our lovely cruise over a month now, which I find hard to believe. Even harder to believe is that the first part of 2010 is gone. I went looking for it earlier this morning but couldn't find it.
Because I am simply not happy unless I have trips planned (I've got the wander lust but good), we've gone ahead and made definite plans for a few trips and tentative ones for another. We know we are heading to Northern Indiana in early September for a family reunion. This will be a relatively short trip, but, a fun one, to be sure. Other than attending the World Beer Festival here in Durham in October and maybe taking an overnight trip to attend the Renaissance Festival in the fall, we'll be hanging around the homestead until January. Yeah, we've been bitten by the cruise bug and so have booked a 5 night Western Caribbean cruise out of Tampa on Royal Caribbean's Radiance of the Seas for January 17th. This will have an added bonus of being able to visit with Father and Margot on the way down and also, hopefully, Mr. and Mrs. Senior B on the way back home. Yes, I do plan on writing an entry about cruising. As I said earlier, it is not all about eating until one pukes, in fact, I doubt we eat more on a cruise than we do on any vacation we take. But, there is more to the topic than food; so, I'll not say more right now.
In May, we've made plans to go to the Indianapolis 500 with friends from California. They'll fly into Durham and then we'll take a road trip to Indy. This will be quite the memorable trip, I'm sure.
Lastly, my 30th high school reunion will be in San Diego in July. At this point, we're fairly certain we'll go, and, in fact, I somehow got roped in to helping plan it (which will be a trick since I live in North Carolina, but, there are some positive aspects to the world of technology which we live in these days!)
After that, well, it'll be time to think about another cruise :-) Just kidding. Well, maybe I'm not!
For now, we've got two months of summer ahead of us; baseball games, family get-togethers, swim days at the pool, working on house projects (time to seriously considering planting those trees at the bottom of the slope and configuring the terraces), and, I'm sure, lots more fun stuff that I'm just not thinking of right now.
So, there you have it. My random ramble of an update. Now, it's time to go write polices. Blech.
Mrs. B
