Why you should probably hold a protest if I mention moving to your area.

You may never again mail a package without having to stand in line and deal with disgruntled postal workers and the 40,000 people in line who brought in their packages and yet forgot to bring the address to which it needs to be sent.

Anyway, with my own hopes of avoiding such issues, I planned to mail the packages I was sending from a post office I know that has a kiosk thingy where you weigh it and stamp it yourself and put it in a little barrel thingy and lift the lever and poof your package has now disappeared into the postal realm.

So I was childless for the evening and thought that the best time to do such an errand was before picking up anyone else and after my lovely dinner I headed in that direction.

I weighed each of my packages, and paid for the stamps - one which was $2 less than the other and even though the more expensive one was smaller and lighter and supposedly traveling by the same priority mail...so confusing. One thing asked me for it's size and the other didn't and whatever, the whole ordeal was fine. It asked me to make sure my package would fit in the barrel thingy and I set it in there. It did indeed fit, so I went on about purchasing my stamp.

Upon completion of the transaction, I put some extra tape on my package, because it said I had to cover any and all "other" markings. Then I placed the larger of the two packages in the barrel and lifted the lever. And the lever would not come back down. I jiggled it and whacked on it. I yelled "Curse you, Perry the Platypus!!!" Aaaaand. Nothing. I looked around, I asked my fellow late comers if they were mailing packages. They were not. I said "Good, because I think I just broke the post office, and I'm leaving before someone who is mailing a package comes after me."

Early morning lessons, and maybe some from yesterday

Landon needed a blood draw for allergy testing. I've been putting it off for a month, but his doctor sent a letter that basically said "Hey, 'member when I said he needed this blood draw? I was totally serious, so do it!"

Anyway, I took off work a couple minutes early yesterday, thinking the lab was open until 6, and I picked Landon up and went over there at 5:25 only to find out that they close at 5. I guess I should have called. But they do open at 6:30, so I decided to take him over there this morning.

And based on what happened when he was 3 months old, I think I should have been prepared for the next problem. Um, the phlebotomists that are on the super early morning shift...are apparently not the best sticks - combined with the fact that Landon has deep veins with hiding super powers. Well...they stuck him once in each inner elbow (is there a word for that body part?) with the butterfly looking doo-hickeys with no luck. They asked me what I wanted to do. I asked Landon if we could try again and he said no, I said, if they don't try again we're going to have to come back, and he freaked out about not wanting to come back.

One lady, during the freak out went ahead and stuck him with a more regular looking syringe, no butterfly or long tube, just the little syringey thing and the test tube. They got the blood, then they taped him up.

To his credit, Landon did everything they asked him to do. Even as they were doing the third stick, and he was saying he didn't want to, he was pretty still. He didn't even cry until they told him they might stick him again.

So lesson - if we do this again, we need to come later in the day so we can get the best stick in the place, and also the lollipops I put in my purse were essential for recovery - also, maybe we should bring our own fun bandaids, it's like these people never see children or something.

Something I learned at work yesterday

So, yesterday I went into the bathroom at work to find a co-worker hacking up a lung and laboriously scrubbing her hands as if about to perform open heart surgery. (And no, we are not surgeons here.)

So I asked her: "Hey, what's going on Hacky McGee?"

And she says: "Dude, Angus* put this thing** on my desk that has walnuts on it...it's the ONLY nut I'm allergic to, and normally casual contact doesn't do this to me."

So I say: "Well, I have some Chlortrimeton in my purse if you think that would help, it's an antihistamine."

She says: "Maybe later, if it doesn't get better."

And I went back to my desk to discover that I also have some Benedryl Spray. So I head back to the bathroom to offer the Benedryl Spray. She says - can you spray it in your mouth? And I'm like, uh - I don't think so, I spray it directly on ant bites, so I thought maybe if you touched the walnuts, that you could spray it on your hands or something.

She came into my office, sprayed it on her hands and smelled it...deeply, repeatedly. And within seconds her symptoms were starting to go away. She did it 3 times within a few minutes and was back to normal by the time she walked out of my office.

I had no idea you could snort Benedryl. Well, I suppose I figured you could snort it, I just didn't know it would be effective.

* I was going to make up a name for him, but I couldn't, I just couldn't do better than Angus.

** We had a bake sale at work yesterday so various home made items made the rounds...they even faked a sign saying the second level entry was closed forcing everyone to pass the bake sale on the way into work.

The Secret to Getting Good Customer Service

There's a certain phone company around these parts, they now handle our TV, Internet*, home phone, and wireless accounts. We like having all our eggs in one basket.

I have consistently had pretty poor customer service out of them when calling with any issues, and even in their store fronts, those people seem to be whacked with a stupid stick when they clock in**. I have stuck with them because I don't have to call them much, because mostly stuff works.

But I discovered through 4 customer service calls this morning, and the remembering of the final customer service call for the TV package we got. There is definitely a secret to getting good service.

I'm going to share it with you, in case you have to call BS&S***.

And please don't throw rocks at me, because I know how bad it sounds. But I also know how true it has been for me, and I will now and forever believe it.

It's this simple:

Ask to speak with a guy.

Their male customer service representatives have consistently done what their female employees said they were going to do, but didn't.

* - Why does spell check want "Internet" to be capitalized? Is "Internet" really a proper noun?

** - Actually there was one guy**** who knew what he was doing in a storefront in LJ. When we went there, I would rather have waited 30 minutes for him than get served by someone else. And he quit. And I will hate him forever for that.

*** - Pseudonym.

**** - See? GUY!

UPDATED: Was there a recall on yesterday that I missed?

UPDATED WITH SCAN OF ELFIN WOMAN: Who is not so much elfin as I remember her, I thought she had pointy ears last night, now she's just big boob sexy comic book stereotype.

Because, I'd like to take mine back and trade it in on a less defective one. Probably not as much as Clinton would like to, but I'd like to none the less.

I stayed late at work yesterday to do a quick project for my project that was supposed to be over, but the client will not let die. Actually the head client guy just seems to be humoring the guy I worked with, because they are asking for things that are not normal deliverables. Anyway, I stayed late.

And I learned a few things.

• Someone in this office is drawing large breasted elfin looking women after hours, enlarging them to 11x17 paper, making copies and then forgetting to take the original off the copier. If it's who I saw walking away from the copier just before my discovery, this does not compute.

• I now know why my office doesn't seem very clean. Custodian came to my floor, left the backpack vacuum out in the hall near my office and never showed up again, and I was here until 9:15 or so. Well, he did show up once. He seemed to be wandering around drinking a coke.

That's not the bad part though. Clinton arrived home to a toilet that didn't flush properly. And after 20 or 30 minutes of plunging, and sewage, and running hot water in the bathtub to try to clear what he thought was a clog, he discovered that the clean-out cap was off and our yard was full of hot water.

This is the 3rd or 4th time we've called the utility district, so the guy with the truck, who has always been the same guy who comes, because it always happens in the evening, came out and about 85 feet out from the clean out he found the problem. As usual. It's cleared and things work well again for the moment, but he said since it's happened so much he's going to escalate it to the engineering department. Hopefully they find a fix for it, because it never happens at a nice reasonable time, you know, like when both of us are home and able to deal with it, or when the baby is in a good mood. Poor Landon, he just wanted to help, but Clinton didn't think he should be helping with sewage water.

This morning, when I woke up Landon, his face was in a puddle of blood. The air has been uncharacteristically dry here for about a week, add a toddler and a crusty booger he just wants out, but isn't awake enough to pin point his activities and poof you have a bloody nose! (And, yeah I should probably set up his humidifier again in order to avoid this.) I have said before that they should make peppermints on sticks like lollipops for just this reason. Peppermints will stop a nosebleed, but I don't like giving him a choking hazard so early in the morning. Luckily I found a candy cane leftover from Christmas, so it worked out, but it would seriously be neater if I could just find peppermints in lollipop form.

He really didn't want to be cleaned up. He kept saying "Enough!" But he did get to have candy before breakfast, so he finally gave in a little. On the way to school, sucking away on his candy cane, he had already sharpened it into a shiv like instrument, and he jabbed the inside of his cheek. "Mom, dat hurt!" "Well, bite it off and chew it, so it won't be pointy anymore" "Oooooh, dat good." And he only ate about an inch or inch and a half, so he's not set up for a big sugar crash either.

This evening, I have all kinds of blood stains to look forward to trying to clean off of various articles of clothing and sheets. Because it's not enough to bleed on your own sheets and pajamas, you then need to wipe your nose all over your ready to go work mom, so she has to change clothes, and roll around on her bed as if your goal in life is to have her wash the sheets that were just put on the night before. I guess I don't have a lot of room to talk, I have a blood stained stuffed armadillo from precisely the same kind of behavior.

Maybe there will be a recall on today too.

When you make something good

I've spent the last week typing up recipes.

342. So far. I have roughly 10 to go before I'm down to a confusing bunch of recipes.

Here's the deal. These are recipes from the recipe boxes of 2 deceased family members. And if I've learned anything from this process, it's the following:

#1 - If your family member cooks something you absolutely love, ask them for the recipe while they are still alive. You may not be able to find it after their death, and if you do, you may not get complete instructions. See #2

#2 - Just because you know how to do it, doesn't mean the next person to read the recipe knows how to do it. I have 20 recipes specifically, in which the writer either left off an amount of something, or instructions, or the NAME of the recipe. Is this a marinade? Is this a salad dressing? I do not know. I have 7 recipes I will have to blindly make to find out what the heck they are and then name them, if I can't find someone who recognizes them as something they ate.

#3 - When you pull a recipe from a magazine, mark the one you pulled it for, or the one you used. I know that I have extraneous recipes in my collection, because a magazine page containing 7 recipes was in the box, but it didn't indicate which one it was cut out for.

#4 - Just because an appliance, like a crock pot, comes with recipes doesn't mean you used all of the recipes. Once again. Mark the ones you tried and liked. Same applies to stacks of recipe cards, if you used it, mark it.

#5 - Take the time to write it down. I know that a lot of cooks make something good, Something that everyone loves that they make. They don't make it the same way every time, they don't really have a recipe for it, take the time at least once to write down what you do as you do it (or have another person write it down as you do it.) Ideally, then take it out the next time you make it and see if you can write down any variations. If you don't do this, your recipe will die with you, and what will they make at your memorial party if they can't make the dish you made the best and bitch about how it's still not as good as when you made it even though you gave them the recipe and how much they miss you?

Your future grandson's or nephew's wife will appreciate it. Trust me.

Realizations

Hey guess what? If you don't plug your camera into the charger for like 2 weeks and you use it like every day at least for about 10 minutes, eventually the battery dies. Go figure.

My gigantor of a test is in 5 weeks. I feel more prepared for it this time, but GAH - I'm already tired of studying. I have been given 15 tons of advice on this test and most of those people want me to spend $1500 on a class, but for some reason they aren't offering to pay for it.

I spent the last 2 evenings doing Girl Scout stuff, so I've got no cute stories or pictures or anything (not that I would be able to download pictures anyway - see dead camera.)

I'll try again tomorrow.

New Year’s Resolutions

Still relevant, because I say so.

Aren't everyone's the same?

Lose Weight.

Exercise more.

Be healthier.

Some people’s are more specific than others. (Lose 15 lbs, work out 3 times a week, actually go to the gym occasionally if nothing else to see what they’re using my money for.) But they generally fall under the same categories. Even more so if you include mental health in the “be healthier” category – you could even add stop cursing like a sailor, or be nice to other people.

One time I gave up caffeine for like 2 years. And then I had finals and it was all downhill from there.

And this other time I gave up milk and milk products for like 8-9 months. Fine, it wasn’t a resolution, but it felt like one.

One year even I resolved to not resolve anything ever again. And I totally broke that the next year.

I tried keeping my resolutions secret, and I tried screaming them from mountaintops. It doesn’t seem to matter which way I go, I just do not resolve well.

I have, in my lifetime, only had one resolution that stuck. To drink more water. I was like 14 at the time and probably read an article about how great water is in "Seventeen" magazine. And since we all know that "Seventeen" magazine is the very best at fact checking and a great resource for all your medical advice, I started carrying around a water bottle. I carried it around from then until I graduated from college (not the same one, how gross do you think I am?) and then I switched to an insulated tumbler. I drink water all day long. I probably drink more water during the work day than I do on weekends, but I even have a large cup of water on my bedside table every night.

I would love to hear if anyone out there has actually succeeded in a resolution. I don’t get a lot of comments and people certainly don’t seem to answer my questions, but I am genuinely curious that if we continually (as I do) fail to actually succeed in continuing our resolutions, why do we keep making them every year? Tradition? Tradition of failure?

Outtakes

This is what happens when you try to take good pictures of a one year old and think he'll need a distraction to stay in the area. Apparently goggles are not the best option.

Today's Lessons (#3 & #4)

When you're feeling like you’re missing something when you leave in the morning, you probably are. I normally take 4 bottles, 4 lids, and ice packs with me to work for pumping. One of the lids I brought yesterday was actually a ring – the kind you hold the nipple on the bottle with. And no ice packs. Thank god we have ice at work and I was able to pack a grocery bag with it. And I made the 3 bottles I did have work. Oh and I sent Landon off without a sippy cup – not that he uses it really.

Additional lesson, when your dogs are behaving themselves so well at dinner that you wonder where they are. Confirm where BOTH of them are, not just one. One asleep under the table, one outside eating grass until she pukes.

Today's lesson (#2)

Put in your contacts BEFORE cutting up the habaneros and jalapenos for the carnitas.

Today's Lesson

When you pack your pump bag, and you pack 4 bottles, it's probably a good idea to pack more than 1 lid.