Sticks and Stars

For months now I’ve been dealing with construction-type issues around my apartment building. Some people have been hired to reside and paint the south side of the building (my side of the building…the only apartment on this side) and they’re doing a hell of a job (as in, the job is going to hell). They show up on random weekends, park in my parking spot (or just block my car in…even though there’s an empty spot two cars over…god forbid they should walk ten extra feet), do a few hours of work that leave my entire patio in disarray, and then don’t return for another few weeks.

If it was just the noise and hassle of weaving my way around workers and a work zone coupled with a few days or a week of my patio being inaccessible (and thus my boys being stuck inside when I don’t feel like packing up and heading to the park), I wouldn’t mind so much, hell, compared to what’s been happening that would be a luxurious vacation complete with heated towels and mints on my pillow at bedtime. Unfortunately for me these people do things like remove the gate that encloses my patio meaning that my patio is entirely unavailable to my children because while my four year old can be trusted to play outside under less than constant eagle-eyed scrutiny, my one year old is on a mission to get himself run over by a car and the speedway that we live on would be only too happy to help him out. After weeks and weeks of this huge annoyance (hello! It’s summertime! Small children complain bitterly in unpleasant voices about not being able to walk outside their front door!) my gate was finally resurrected (in an entirely half-assed manner that means that every time we come or go I have to shove the thing open with all my might against a hugely loud protesting squawk) but only after the friend who came to take care of me after my surgery insisted to multiple people that it be done.

They also don’t seem to be concerned about the large and pointy screws, nails, and assorted other rusty metal bits they leave scattered on my patio, presumably with the express purpose of enticing my children to step, chew, gouge or otherwise contract tetanus from them. Oh, and then there’s the general destruction and mayhem. They dropped something (like a person) onto my brand new grill that I had only used once and destroyed it. They break new branches off my trees every time they come. They feel that the perfect place to set my watering can and any toys they encounter on my patio is in the midst of my bushy plant containers (thus damaging the plants). And my personal favorite was discovering that, during their recent painting effort, they spattered the entirety of my (green) car with tiny speckles of white paint.

Today, the guy in charge came to tell me they’d be painting tomorrow and that it would take two days, and so after spending the afternoon on my patio, enjoying my bushy and riotous container garden, and then spending this evening removing all items I didn’t wish to be subsequently covered with paint, I stood outside and bit my lip for a long time and finally decided to drag the entirety of my container garden inside.

Let me tell you, dragging around one hundred (okay, ten) very large, freshly watered, soil-filled containers is perhaps not the most appropriate activity with which to engage a mere eight days after abdominal surgery, but I just can’t bear the thought of my beautiful container garden being destroyed by these fucking clumsy oafish morons. I love my container garden. When my concrete bunker of a patio isn’t beseiged by the siding crew, it feels like an oasis (lacking only a tinkling water feature). If every time I went outside I had to see more broken branches and crushed plants and paint covered flowers and leaves, I’d be really unhappy, and that, my friends, is some bad feng shui.

So now my living room is filled with plants (including three hunched over trees), not to mention my adirondack chair, my bistro table and chairs, and my boys’ wagon, trike and pink and purple ride-on toy. My carpet is filthy (although I did have enough sense to spread bags beneath my freshly watered pots, and my apartment smells like a combination of rosemary, dirt and (concerningly) cat pee. My guts are a bit achy but my patio is bare! Let them wreak their havoc!

I am a bit worried that I made the wrong decision though, and that my plants will suffer from the drastic shift in climate, particularly since I realized that while the painting is supposed to take two days, they did not say that the days would necessarily be conjoined, and given the work ethic demonstrated thus far, I’d say chances are not looking likely.

But at least my plants are safe.

I wish that you people would post to your damned blogs so that I have something to read to relieve the insane stress of my day. I have a massive deadline on Friday for which I left a few last minute details to attend to post-surgery because I was naive about the amount of recovery I’d require after my surgery (and I was feeling lazy pre-surgery). I came in today (resentfully, and for the first time this week) to discover that all the work I thought was finished had actually been undone (or rather, done in an misleadingly illusory fashion) so I’ve been scrambling all day. And then, just to keep things interesting, I got slammed with two huge surprise deadlines (also due tomorrow). My plan was to spend a couple of hours working and then go back home to lay on my couch some more, but instead I’m working my damned ass off with no relief in sight.

Why, then, am I wasting my intensely pressured work time writing a pointless blog entry? Well, because my head is pounding, my gut hurts, and I just do not want to look at these stupid reports for one more minute!!

Okay, I’m done. Back to my goddamned job.

I was just cleaning out my inbox for my old blog and was noticing how many of you put some variation of “holy shit” in the subject of your email to me when you read the note on my site about the custody battle. Very nice!

You all need to clean your language. Don’t you know that profanity is the refuge of those who don’t have the intelligence to use a more refined vocabulary?

Or so said my high school debate teacher.

I am concerned that the previous four years’ proliferation of posts may have come directly from my gallbladder.

Now that it’s gone, I’ve got nuthin’.

My lovely caretaking friend left tonight. It’s nice to have the house to myself again, but I’m also sad to see her go because it’s been fun to have company, someone to talk with and make jokes with and laugh with over crappy movies. She also did many nice things for me while she was here, such as cleaning my kitchen and bathroom, vacuuming my entire apartment (the edges and everything!), scrubbing my kitchen floor, laundry, replacing lightbulbs and feeding my one year old and I three meals a day (not to mention taking him in the morning so that I could actually sleep in).

But by far the best thing she did for me was give me a break from my little one. Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about what a lovely baby he’s been, but then I realized that he’s actually just being the baby he always is, but for once I could relax and just enjoy him instead of jumping up every five seconds to attend to his latest need. I actually liked him and found him to be sweet and very funny (and so, so smart!!) and let me tell you, those aren’t the feelings I generally feel for him on a daily basis. I feel simultaneously happy and sad — happy that I had these moments to appreciate what I have in this little babe o’ mine and to understand why it is that I don’t feel so appreciative on a more regular basis, but sad about the fact that I indeed don’t feel so appreciative on a more regular basis, and that I often don’t feel much of anything other than resignation and resentment.

Hopefully, just the realization will make a difference.

Well, I survived. Or at least that’s what they tell me. I feel so drugged and groggy and achy that I’ll have to take their word for it until I can verify it for myself.

They were supposed to do two surgeries, one to remove my gallbladder, and one to repair a hernia resulting from my most recent cesarean, but my gallbladder was so full of stones and bile (that spilled everywhere) that the doctor was concerned about an infection and decided to hold off on the hernia repair. That was the first thing they told me when I woke up, when I couldn’t get my eyes to stay open or focus and my body felt like it had been hit by a truck, and the thought of having to go through it again was so awful that I immediately burst into loud and long tears. Now I’m a little calmer and understand and appreciate what happened and I can face the thought of doing this again, but it was perhaps not the best news they could have given me immediately following the loud and sharp, “Sarah!!” that brought me back to consciousness in the first place.

Everyone kept telling me that this surgery would be no big deal, that I’d be up and around in no time and indeed, I feel a hell of a lot better than I did at this point after my cesareans, but I think I was expecting that this would be a walk in the park or something, that I’d wake up and be perfectly fine, ready to hop out of bed and onto my elliptical trainer for a nice vigorous workout. Alas, that’s not quite how it’s turned out. Even now I feel like someone used my abdomen as a punching bag during a really long and particularly aggressive sparing session and that every inch of the rest of my body has been immersed in thick, dense jello.

I’m so grateful to have a friend taking care of me. She prepares me the tiny diet of food I feel comfortable eating (I’m so afraid that eating will make me hurt worse), she plays with and cares for my one year old, she fetches me anything I (guiltily) ask for, she went outside and lectured the people who are making a mess of my patio while doing this horrible construction process (something I’ve wanted to do but am way too intimidated to attempt), and she seems determined to clean my house from top to bottom as well. I can’t say that I’m enjoying it completely because it’s not easy to let someone wait on you hand and foot and not feel like a whiny lazy ass, but outside of my own issues, it’s really nice.

For anyone who might be wondering, taking a four hour nap and drinking an iced mocha before bedtime does not do wonders for the falling asleep effort. Thus I am awake at 1:00am, eating toast because my stomach has been very angry with me over the past few days and/or weeks and/or months and so I figure that toast can be our compromise until Friday when my stomach is knifed and/or lasered into submission.

Hmm, that’s perhaps not the nicest way of describing my impending surgery. And to get technical, it’s not my stomach that will be undergoing the knifing and/or lasering, it’s my gall bladder and my ambiguous abdominal wall. But regardless, my general abdominal region will stop protesting so fiercely my attempts to eat actual food. And I will be very grateful.

However, tonight’s insomnia has benefited me by inspiring an idea as to how I might solve this stupid benefit problem with my workplace, the one that’s costing me $650 a month for benefits I don’t want and won’t use. As I was tossing and turning (gently, so as not to disturb the assorted mammals cuddled around me), I flashed to a brief memory of seeing something about Medicaid qualification possibly being reason to allow someone to drop benefits in the middle of the year. At the time I dismissed it because I didn’t yet understand that these were IRS regulations, and not regulations determined by employers and/or insurance companies. So when I remembered that bit of info tonight I leapt out of bed (gently, so as not to disturb assorted mammals cuddled around me) and did a little research and sure enough, qualifying for Medicaid (which my boys do) is reason to allow a mid-year change in coverage, per the Internal Revenue Service.

This is so fucking exciting that I’m going to have an extra hard time sleeping now. I’ve been worrying about this for days since I essentially told my boss that I’d have to quit if we couldn’t make the change because it kills me to waste this money every month, especially when I need it so desperately. I’m not opposed to quitting my job, especially for a great opportunity, but it’s entirely something else to quit my job in order to take whatever I can get, which might look less like a great opportunity and more like some horrid customer service job that would leave me so, so miserable, especially since I thought I (oh so thankfully) left that part of my career behind me long ago.

I’m not going to get my hopes too far up, though, not until the paperwork is successfully submitted (or whatever the process is). But I emailed myself several reference websites and will present my case tomorrow and hope for the best. I worry a little because the person who deals with these issues at my workplace is one of those people who’s very protective of their little fiefdom of power and if you dare to suggest that you know something they don’t, they’ll go to extraordinary lengths to come up with excuses to block you, just to punish you for daring to cross that line. So I’ll need to make sure to be properly deferential and kiss-assy.

And not to completely change the subject, but in more exciting (or at least less anxiety provoking) news, I met Barbara tonight! She’s the first person I’ve ever met as a result of my blog and the first person who reads it who I’ve ever met in real life (besides those of you who I knew before you started reading). It’s funny to realize that she’s been reading my blog for years and knows so much about my life. It’s kind of weird, really, to meet someone who knows you so intimately, who casually refers to your children by their first names, but who is essentially a stranger you wouldn’t recognize if you ran into on the street…sort of.

But now she’s not! And she looked so different than I expected! But she was just as nice as I would have guessed and even easier to talk to. I only wish we could have talked more but alas, I am always under the limitations of my babysitter who likes me home by 9:30pm. I guess one small trade off of losing my child care at the end of July is that I’ll no longer have that annoyingly early curfew! Strange how that doesn’t make me feel much better about it.

Meeting her makes me fantasize about taking some cross-country road trip where I stop in all the cities of bloggers I “know” and take the opportunity to meet and hang out with them and put real-life faces to the names. Sigh. That would be so cool!

Now Barbara, even though you don’t post that often to your own blog, you must post about meeting me and confirm that I am just as amazingly cool as my blog led you to believe so that I can link to it and show everyone that I am just as amazingly cool as my blog leads you all to believe. (And those of you who know me in real life, well you can just keep your opinions to yourself…unless of course you concur…which I’m sure you do…so yes, let the festival of “Sarah is so cool and awesome!” begin!).

Anyway, clearly I’m getting a little punchy, which suggests that it’s time to take myself back to bed, squirm my way into the mammal pile, and see if it’s yet sleepy time.

I’m a little down today, mostly because I’m feeling incredibly ill of the nauseous and dizzy variety (for no reason that I can discern), and only partly because I keep getting bad news tossed at me. The bad news is nothing unexpected, which is probably why it’s not that upsetting, but it isn’t really improving this whole nauseous, dizzy downness.

The first piece of bad news is that my current babysitter, the one I rely on to provide me with childcare on Tuesday and Wednesdays nights, is moving away at the end of July. I knew this was coming as she told me up front that she was moving away for graduate school at the end of the summer, but I hoped she might not be leaving until the end of August and really, I hoped that if I just didn’t think about it, she might not move away at all. She has sometimes been questionably reliable, but more often than not she’s given me the much coveted breaks I so desperately need and I feel anxious about what the future holds in that respect.

A friend of mine is contemplating moving here (from the state to which my babysitter is moving so it would be a perfect trade) and is interested in living with me rent free in exchange for evening child care as needed. This would be such an awesome and excellent arrangement but I’m trying not to get my hopes up since I’ve gone through this process with this particular friend two times in the past year and she still has yet to come. I wish she’d just stop bringing up the possibility because I cling to it so desperately every time she does and am then so frustrated and disappointed when it doesn’t happen, but who knows, maybe the third time’s a charm.

The other thing that’s bringing me down is that I just got news from my boss that they aren’t going to let me quit and be immediately rehired so that I can get out of this stupid benefit plan for which I signed up. Not realizing that my boys would still qualify for state benefits once I started this job (because I didn’t know that my childcare costs would be deducted from my income), I joined my workplace’s dependent benefit plan (and pay $650 a month for the privilege). Unfortunately, now that I’ve learned that my boys still qualify for free (and far superior) benefits through the state, I can’t cancel the plan until open enrollment, which doesn’t happen until December.

So until December, I have to keep paying $650 a month for benefits that my boys are not going to use. After carefully reading the IRS guidelines to see if there was any way I might get out this stupidity, I came up with the idea that I could quit my job and then be rehired for it. Of course, I didn’t think it was very likely that my employer would agree to this and indeed, as I learned this morning, I was right.

So now I have to decide whether I should stay in a job that I find incredibly unfulfilling and pay $8k for the privilege, or whether I should quit and take my chances temping, surely making more money but also taking a chance that I might not only not be able to find a job, but that if I do find a job it will require hours and/or a commute that might cause trouble with my daycare provider. Obviously I’d work things out for the right job, but I just don’t know how well she’d take to my schedule changing every few months until I found that right job.

I’m sure there are good and/or positive things to think about, but right now I’m just not in the mood to go digging for them.