I decided to not entertain the notion of working a night schedule. I was really NOT looking forward to that because I remember how incredibly tired I was doing it 8-10 years ago when the kids were small and I can only imagine how hard it would be to do that schedule with a baby. It’s not like I can plop an infant in front of a movie while I take a nap. My supervisor was really unhappy when she found out that I was thinking of leaving the team and I know she had a lot to do with the raise that I received. I like working with her too so I’m going to go back to work after my maternity leave with the same schedule I have now with Wednesdays and the weekends off.

Our neighbor is going to watch the Bean. I love her and her family to death (her and her husband are raising their 3 granddaughters, whom I adore as well) and I know the Bean will be in good hands. This way, on my days off, I won’t be a tired grouchy mess and I’ll get home early enough at night to have some family time and Sweety will pick the baby up after he gets off of work.

If I find that this schedule makes me feel like a horribly neglectful parent then I will revisit the idea of changing my schedule or quitting at some point.

Tomorrow is the first day of my five day weekend and I am so looking forward to it. I had to fight the urge that I had of driving to Oklahoma to see my niece. I know she’s really missing her Mom while she’s in basic training because she calls me a lot more than she did before just to talk about random stuff. Poor kiddo.

Hey! I can do that!

I decided that breaking the tablets into quarters and putting one quarter at a time in my left cheek squirrel-style would be the way to proceed. It was okay until my phone rang and I started talking. The sudden flow of saliva caused the Alka-Seltzer to quickly foam up and run down the left side of my face. It’s hard to deliver excellent customer service while shielding your new rabid look from coworkers while trying to not foam into your microphone because you damn sure don’t want the customer to ask, “What’s that fizzing sound?”

Lesson learned: Don’t do shit you see in the movies. Especially a cartoon.

BB had two baseball games about an hour away today. Last week, a couple of his teammates parents asked Sweety if he could bring their kids home from the game because they couldn’t stay for both. Sweety said sure and had to make a special trip to the school to fill out some paperwork since he’d be transporting students from a school event.

Sweety and I both have little cars. Honda Civics. We decided instead of cramming 600 pounds of sweaty teenage boy into the backseat of one of our cars for the ride home that we’d each take a car. Sweety and the boys in one (since they had to be there extra early to warm-up) and I’d follow along in Penelope.

We watch the games and after they were over we decided that I would go ahead to the restaurant we were eating at to get a table. Sweety calls me on my way there and tells me that it’ll just be us and BB – the kids we were supposed to bring had made other arrangements or their parents stayed or whatever – one of the parents told Sweety after the game that he was “off the hook” and didn’t have to take the boys home. Sweety said he just bit back telling her that it would have been nice to know that before the game so his family wouldn’t have driven two cars an hour away. I told him from now on to politely decline any inquiries of being a taxi.

Sweety met the coaew somewhere to drop off BB and then met me at home where we promptly fell asleep across the bed. Well, I slept and Sweety watched the television and snoozed. The dogs were docile beside the bed. I woke up full of beans and kicked took the dogs out to do their business.

I heard Oliver barking ferociously and wondered what the hell was going on. Yes, when I let the dogs out I sometimes don’t even look outside but just open the door while they scoot out to be devoured by chupacabra.

This was what I saw.

Here. Let me tweak that for you.

I leave the porch door open and the bird had wandered in for a snooze. I was really glad that Oliver hadn’t noticed it until he was on the other side of the porch and the screen was between him and the bird because I’m pretty sure he’d have reduced it to a mess of feathers.

Sweety keeps some plants on the porch and the bird tried to land on one but it the plant stalk didn’t support its weight. The bird bounced off the table and onto the floor but recovered and took flight before Oliver reached it. Luckily, it made it off the porch without flying into something and breaking its neck.

While the melee was going on, Tiny Dog was daintily waiting to be let back into the house. She doesn’t give a damn about birds or anything outside. I think it tired her to watch the excitement because she went back to sleep and hasn’t twitched since. She’s a great lap warmer.

I was supposed to work last Saturday but only lasted a couple of hours in the hellhole before coming home. I don’t like my job but I’ll do it. I get extremely annoyed though when the very basic tools for my job aren’t available. And sick *cough*cough*….Sweety came home to find me and Tiny Dog under the covers. He peeled the blanket off of my face and asked what I was doing home. When I told him “hiding from work” he tucked me back in and went away.

Saturday night we went to a local restaurant/bar. I was meeting a couple of girlfriends from work and Sweety wasn’t going to come but I talked him into it after I got there. They place had a sign up saying they were going to charge $5 after 9 o’clock to watch the UFC fight. (I hadn’t even realized there was a fight that night.) I thought this meant if you got there before then that you wouldn’t have to pay and sent Sweety a text to come up. The bartender tried to collect $5 from us after we’d been sitting there eating and drinking for 2 or 3 hours and that really ticked me off. Sweety spoke to the manager and the people in our group didn’t have to pay. Note to self: go somewhere else for the next UFC fight.

Have I mentioned my love for UFC fighting? For the longest time it was my little secret. Sweety would be away bowling on Friday nights and I’d come home from work and watch a fight channel for hours. He got home one night early and surprised me. He had a genuine look of shock on his face when he saw what I was watching. I like to watch men beat the hell out of each other.

I have a bad habit of staying awake at night until the wee hours of the morning. I watch the television while playing games on my phone. If I try to sleep I twitch around in the dark. But I have discovered a magical cocktail! If you take two generic sleeping pills and two melatonin as soon as you get home? The Sandman bashes you in the head right about the time you get done with showering and brushing your teeth. As an added bonus – when your asshole weenie dog and his yapping little chihuahua friend start losing their minds at 2 a.m.? You will either sleep right through it or wake up long enough to let them out and then fall right back asleep.

Waking up this morning was a complete repeat of last Thursday. Realized the house was STILL clean (holy shit, a week! I’ve kept up with things for a week!), fed the Oliver and tucked Tiny Dog back in bed with me. I did wake up long enough to have a sandwich. Then I went back to bed while things digested.

The sandwich?

On Sunday we went to a friend’s house for the SuperBowl and I came home with a bowl of her spinach dip. I love me some spinach dip. This morning’s sandwich was spinach dip on good bread.

I’m going to have another now.

I will be working for the next few Saturdays instead of on Thursdays. A sucky shift. 1 p.m. to midnight. I did it to improve what I call my “shift trade karma”. Hoping that when I need someone to trade with me that they will. I like to sit at work and look at all of the vacation days that are planned for the rest of the year. It keeps me occupied.

I’m hoping to get to see Bekah in a few weeks. She is in a new roller derby team and I’d love to visit and see her in a bout. I worked a ton of overtime awhile back so my check at the end of the month should be nice. Hopefully, nice enough for a plane ticket. I’m going to try and get the house clean tomorrow and keep Sweety agreeable so maybe I can go.

In the effort to save a money (and my fairly good relationship with Sweety), I’m doing away with the purple hair. It’s just a hell of a lot cheaper to dye the it brown just to cover the greys. Purple, I’m really going to miss you. Maybe we’ll meet again someday.

This used to be a garden but now I call it “the killing field” in my head.

It’s the only place Oliver is allowed to dig in the yard. There’s probably half a cow and several toys in there at the moment. I think it’s hilarious to watch him dig because he’s so short. It takes about 15 seconds for him to dig a hole big enough to hide his body.

Tiny Dog has taken her meanness to a whole new level. She now actively sits almost on top of Oliver’s food dish and dares him to get close so she can bark at him. I have to put her away so the poor little fellow can eat in peace. She doesn’t realize that she only needs to gain 1.2 pounds to be big enough for a shock collar. Sweety says I should just throw a pillow at her. I don’t want her to associate me with an object falling out of the sky. I figure I could put the collar on her in the dark and then she wouldn’t link me to mild electrocution when she’s being an asshole. Or maybe I’ll just keep holding her while he eats. I’d hate to fry her brain like an egg.

My job makes me want to poke bamboo shoots under my fingernails but at least I have a job. I get plenty of paid time off and health insurance. The insurance is the main thing that keeps me there. If Sweety were to carry the boys and I on his insurance plan, it would cost 3 or 4 times as much as what we pay now under my plan. I work inside. I can surf the internet at work to read the news and whatnot. I know what the fuck I’m doing so I’m left mostly alone. That is a good thing.

Living in Florida. Well, I hate the weather but we are close to all sorts of fun things. It’s been neat to take the kids to theme parks and different places. When my sister and her family were down last week, I let LB miss a day of school and we went to Kennedy Space Center. He’d never been before and he’s pulling all As in school so I didn’t think it would kill him to miss a day. BB is not doing as well with this grades so he didn’t get to go. (And he’d been to the place before on a school field trip.) He was bummed about it but he understood why he didn’t get to miss school.

Now that I have a GPS, I can always find my way home if I get turned around in this stinking town. That is nice. I do not like being lost. Um, sometimes though? I forget that I have a GPS and drive around aimlessly, looking for something familiar. I think my brain cells are dying quicker than they should.

This concludes my personal pep talk.