Yesterday was a BummerDay, because of all the amassed work – work that piled up waiting while I’d dropped everything & done a bunch of other work for two days prior AND SUNDAY (on a market that’s not even mine. Can you smell what the martyr is cookin’?). What made it all even more depressing was that the two days’ worth of work PLUS SUNDAY got put ON HOLD by the client, which is their prerogative, of course, as they hold the checkbook, but still, I, as worker bee, get to say THAT BLOWS. So today, I sent emails to the people in the market, letting them know why they weren’t getting windfalls of money from the sky, because one of them called (advice: never call me before 9 a.m., bitches & hos, I don’t care what time zone you’re in) and proceeded to WHINE AND COMPLAIN. Look, beyotch, you had to drop stuff & do some work, but I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that I did more work than you! I will win this contest AND wear a crown of thorns with more style. Back it up!

So, pre-emptively, I sent emails to everyone else.

And the first response I got started like this, from a guy I’ve labeled a CLASS ACT:

“We are all at the mercy of the client, n’est pas, madmoiselle?”

And all my irritation just washed away, like one of those Calgon commercials.

Because apparently, if you speak to me in French (VIA EMAIL) before 9 a.m., I am putty in your hands. I don’t care if he misspelled mademoiselle, the sentiment was there, cherie, and it instantly mellowed me. Come to think of it, when Eddie Izzard did his whole standup bit in French, I found him even more irresistible – kimono, eyeliner & all. Ze language of love, zees ees. Ecoutez, et repetez.

Can you believe I gave myself a SECOND papercut within hours yesterday? And this one was not an ordinary paper cut, or even the next level-up, the manila folder paper cut. This was the shove-your-hand-in-your-purse-and-get-a-paper-cut-UNDER-YOUR-THUMB-from-your-checkbook maneuver.

That one? That one I’m hoping never happens again, ever. I will take the regular paper cuts in stride, but that one really sent me into a tizzy.

World Market (CostPlus to those of you out West) sells Haribo Gummi Bears by the 3# bag! I am in heaven. Haribo bears are the only ones (I’m aware of) that come pre-toughened. I love the chew factor. If I get reincarnated as a dog, I hope I get an owner who believes in pig ears & rawhides.

I am about to crank out a major buy, so I’m jammin to Janet J’s Velvet Rope, and got my portion of gummies sorted by color/flavor. It’s important to be prepared.

And happy.

Ah, joyful dog ownership.

I came downstairs last night planning on heading to bed – actually sort of early for me, 9:50 p.m.! As I hit the last stair I smelled an AWFUL stench. So bad I actually looked on the floor for dog poop.

OH NO. “What happened?”

“Your dog.”

“Huh?”

“I let them out & she ran out front & ate cat crap.”

“Wow. It’s AWFUL.”

Scrambling ensued, as we tried to find the giant CostCo can o’ Lysol. Polly was banished to the living room & James paraded through the house, spraying disinfectant.

“I can’t believe it smells this much!” I said, tossing Polly two “Yip Yap” dog breath fresheners.

“This is an emergency!” James declared, still pressing down the nozzle & eradicating germs everywhere.

So he trundled off to bed & I decided to hang out & wait for the smell to die down. I finished the “Grim Grotto”, by Lemony Snickett, and around 10:30, called Polly to go to bed. As I headed into our bedroom in the dark, the stench hit me again, like a 2×4 cracking me across the nose. “Sheesh!” I thought, and leaned down to find her collar to “click” her in (we prevent night wanderings by keeping her on a leash, tied to the window.) My hands found stiff, icky fur.

OH hell. She didn’t eat cat poop, she found a new dog poop cologne, and bathed in it.

Back to the bathroom. The smell was gageriffic. 30 minutes later she was clean, towel-dried, and I was ready for bed with a vengeance.

The joys of dog mommyhood. Just as poop-filled as regular people parents.

I realized several years ago, after giving myself a paper cut, that I had gotten old(er). Because instead of thinking, “DAMMIT! I’m NEVER doing that again!” – I found myself thinking, “MAN that sucks and the worst part of it all: it’s going to happen to me again someday.”

I’d like to think part of growing wiser is one’s acceptance of the inevitable. And today, it happened again (the manila folder paper cuts, seriously, are the WORST) and I did think DAMMIT. But I know, like so many other things in life, there’s another paper cut out there, just waiting, with my name on it.

And not with yarn. Apparently, the Blue Valley School District is on a mission to ban books. Books like “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”, by Maya Angelou, and “Song of Solomon”, by Toni Morrison. Now, I actually called The Buzz this morning because it got me so wound up. I didn’t get a chance to say much (and I didn’t get on the air), BUT, what I did say is this: Schools do not exist to legislate morality. That is the job of the parent. When parents step in and start telling schools to behave like parents, I go crazy. Of course schools should be safe. Schools are a public institution, open to everyone, regardless of class, religion or politics. I understand that these parents care, they care about their children, and they care about society, from their standpoint. But we are not talking about a school being able to furnish “Hustler” or “Playboy” to students. We are talking about literature that has stood the test of time! “Catcher in the Rye” for pete’s sake. I just keep thinking, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Because these students, in this school district, are not going to get subversive or sexual ideas about life from these books. They’ve already gotten that from MTV, Hollywood, and even The Buzz. Hell, Abercrombie & Fitch. And if you’ve raised your children “right”, then they’re not going to fall prey to “subversive literature”. Stop being AFRAID of books & be responsible, instead. Here’s a wacked-out concept: read one of these “subversive” books WITH your child, and discuss it. You might find out a lot more about your kid, and yourself.

Good GOD Mondays are a drag – but you knew that, right? That’s why you’re blogsurfing, instead of working! I have so much work to do, it stupefies the mind. So I am giving myself a “treat” and taking a break. Because Cybill Sheperd told me a long time ago that I’M WORTH IT.

I realize, yes, we have to have flat days, in order to have a baseline for the High days and Low days to register. But geeeyod, this is a flat day, flatter than Kansas as you drive across it, searching for anything, something, to rise and break the horizontal line of neverending flatness. I allowed myself to slip into a Walter Mitty moment, and fantasize about other careers ….. police officer….. crackwhore…. undercover crackwhore would be better I think…. owning a yarn shop…. owning a coffee shop…..working at Blockbuster…. being a garbagewoman…. being fantastically wealthy & not having to get out of bed until I say so…… So, pretty much the gamut of opportunities, some with some SERIOUS drawbacks (like, I’d NEVER pass the physical exam to be a cop, and I don’t know how to handle a gun so I’d probably shoot my toes off.)

Oh, you thought I’d talk about the drawbacks of being a crackwhore? Actually, I always wanted to work “Crackwhore” into a client presentation. I never did. Except jokingly, in a meeting, just once, and it was with a client I knew really, REALLY well, so it really doesn’t count. You’ve got to be standing there presenting a whole campaign and say something along the lines of, “So, it comes down to this: are you marketing to women, or are you marketing to crackwhores? You have to choose.” And do it with a straight face.

Anyway, the stuff I have to do is putting me into a catatonic trance. Good thing I’m wearing a novelty yarn scarf, to catch the drool as I sit, slackjawed, at the computer, staring at numbers. It’s the lime-green variegated RED HEART “Foxy” yarn scarf, I made it extra long for looping (and drool-catching) options. I also just ran out of my special coffee concoction – creamer, brown sugar & cinnamon – what Betty Crocker called “Mexican coffee” & I’d make it as a kid (because it’s never too early to start drinking coffee, you know.) Wah. Just when you thought the earth was flat, somebody gets out a level & shows you it’s even flatter just ahead.

OK, I have (what I think are funny) stories & I’m going to try to write at least one each weekend. Thus the 8-track flashback. Now, on to the more intriguing part: how I ended up in a women’s prison.

Last week I referenced the stupendous ’86 Ford Escort that died in a blazing fire – that story’s pretty damned funny, and it’s on my list. Maybe next week. It’s a long story. But in any event, I was living in St. Louis, the Escort was charred, I had to get a car, and I didn’t know what I was doing. (This would be the pre-Consumer Reports-addicted Jennifer.) So I ended up with a black four-door Neon, mostly because the car salesman didn’t treat me like a stupid woman and worked with me on price. It had power nothin’. No power locks, no power windows, I guess it did have power steering, but it would prove to be a car that would provide me with a laundry list of what my NEXT car would have on it. But it did have air conditioning, which was an awesome improvement over the Escort, especially in those St. Louis summers!

So, I had to go register the car. I worked in Clayton at the time, and I called a phone number to find out where I needed to go. They said, go to the courthouse & go to the third floor. Okey dokey!

I got up early (no small feat) and drove to work. My office actually faced the courthouse, and I saw an entrance to the courthouse on the lower level, rather than going up all the “front stairs” like in a movie. So I gathered up my paperwork, grabbed my purse, and walked the block to that lower-level entrance. I am, in general, a pretty observant person. I notice smaller details – whether it’s because I’m always seeking humor, or having been a fine arts major, I think you just never know what you’re going to find and it’s important to look around and notice/see as much as you can. This is a quality that exists quite harmoniously within me, right next to the sing-song doomPAH-DEEdah fogbanks quality that finds me staring at the cloud formations and nearly stepping on a four-foot black snake. So! As I enter this corridor shortly after 8 a.m., I notice, as I head to the elevators, a small sign above a doorway labeled “Sex Offender Registration”. I think, “Huh! Well, I am in the basement, that’s probably where you’d put such a room.”

I get on the elevator. I am surrounded by five men, all of whom are law enforcement sorts. The are all a foot taller than me, but I DON’T CARE: I HAVE A NEW CAR. And I got up EARLY. Look at me go. GO GO GO. I notice that one of them looks at me strangely. I think, “Whatever.” Being a big gal and having a unique style has garnered me a lot of looks, so I filter them and buffer them and remember that my favorite part of visiting New York City was the fact that NOBODY looked at me. I press my button. Everybody’s silent. In retrospect, I wonder what in HELL they thought I was doing! They all got off on the next floor & I continued on to my floor. When I got off the elevator, it was strangely silent. I started walking along the corridor, because it looks like the only way to go. There are small rooms behind thick glass, but they are empty and it doesn’t really dawn on me what they are: cells. DoomPAH-DEEdah! I see a bank of small black-and-white television screens through another glass wall. There is a man sitting in the room, back to me, facing the screens. I do not see myself on any of the screens, because these cameras are on the rooms – uh – cells. A little alarm starts ringing in my head as I clutch my papers and head further into the building, and then there is a door, marked “authorized personnel only” and I think, “I do not think I am supposed to be here.” and I beat a hasty retreat. On the lower level, I spy a janitor. I say, “Hello! I am trying to register my car. Where do I go?” And he says, “You need to go next door! To the NEW courthouse.” I say, “Oh! No wonder I am confused! They told me to go to the third floor, and I went up there and didn’t see anyone!”

He said, “Ma’am, that’s a holding facility for female prisoners. You’re not supposed to be up there.”

“I know,” I said, meekly.

Now, of course the rest of my morning did not go smoothly. Turns out if you live in St.Louis CITY you can’t go registering your car in St.Louis COUNTY. Two separate things, like church & state. So after getting to the right building and the right floor, I was told I had to go somewhere else to get my plates & registration. It’s all very complex & rigid and there is no getting around the rules. However, it was very simple for me to just stroll IN to the women’s detention center via an employees-only elevator, and I could have registered someone as a sex offender, for kicks. Which just goes to show that the DMV is probably our country’s greatest, impenetrable, complex infrastructure, and we should have THOSE people fighting terror, because they would simply frustrate & stupefy Al Qaeda to the point they’d pack up & go home & drink some gin and thank their lucky Allah for not having a DMV. Imagine if we combined the DMV with the Post Office! We’d have this country safe again in no time. Because the post office, my friends, also holds some 8-track flashback memories, and they are equally stupefying. Tune in next week. We might have to push the burnt Escort story back again.

I LOVE SATURDAYS! And this Saturday, I get to sit & watch tv & knit from the new loveseat or the new giant chair. This furniture is SO much bigger than our old furniture, it’s crazy. I’m going to have to seriously re-think the arrangement of everything in the room, because it’s just that big. (Funny how it didn’t seem that big in the enormous, airy, spacious showroom!)

I’m going to finish the Foxy Red Heart Novelty Yarn scarf, and then keep slogging on the Folly cardigan fronts. I am going to have to break down & do some scribble lace soon, or at least get some socks going, because I can’t just do stockinette stitch in gray (no matter how soft the yarn is!) without something else with quicker gratification to distract me.

I’m going to post a few pix right now – I had fun being “arteestic” yesterday, both picking photos to take, and then editing them on the computer. The ice storm is gonna melt over the next couple of days, and my camera’s not fancy enough to find the beauty in the coming mudhole…..but don’t you worry, hubby said another ice storm’s coming next week, and you know what that means, right? DON’T PUT DOWNED POWER LINES IN YOUR MOUTH alerts, all night long.

The outside seating at work, encrusted in ice. I was struck by it when I was leaving Thursday night – I couldn’t pull myself away for several minutes. It was like the old days, when I could sit & sketch. (edited: I liked this one in b/w).