Everyday Stupidities

My work schedule has changed from Sun-Thurs to Mon-Fri as of yesterday, ergo I had a rare 3 day weekend. I managed to find a span between rainfalls to mow the lawn, I visited the dermatologist, and I barbecued on both weekend days. So here I am at work, not really wanting to give top-notch customer service, and in my rush I left my driver's license and building access card at home. You'll see in the third paragraph why breakfast was a generic Pop-Tart and a double-chocolate cookie as I dashed out the door fifteen minutes late. Tangental thought: I was telling a coworker today about my absence of keycard while I sat at my desk eating my lunch (I wasn't going to leave the building once I got in!), and I realized that she's got one of the oddest "boobiedoos" I've ever seen -- usually this refers to having a belly that protrudes beyond one's bust, but in her case her paunch stuck out further than her tits, and what more the seam/zipper down the middle gave her junk-in-the-trunk the appearance of a fine butt in pocketless jeans! Wasn't sure which sense of aesthetics to believe, the delight or the disgust. Anyhow, here are a couple nature photos I took recently around the yard. The gastropod above is my new friend... I found him under some rocks when clearing some dead weeds from the yard. I moved him to the cattail pond and minutes later he was making a break for it.

The continuing saga of my prescriptions: Still no word from the insurance company about the Lamisil, ten days later. I want a job working in insurance claims, I could spend all day doing nothing but pissing people off! (Not that I don't already have such a job, but they do it so much more leisurely.) They had no issue approving the prescription I submitted on Friday for Nizoral, but as for the pharmacy... It was submitted Friday afternoon, and they said it'd be ready by 7pm. I got caught up doing fun stuff so didn't make it back in that day. I go in Saturday and there are signs up in the Walgreens pharmacy dept saying they're closed due to lack of staffing. Erm, alright... I go in there Sunday and they say it's not ready. Translation, they didn't actually attempt to meet their 7pm quote! (Even the bottle label says "promise: 5/3 5:33pm"!) It was ready soon after that and I'm going to hold off on taking it for a bit. The doctor had said that one takes this, then after a bit does some exercise to break a sweat to distribute the medication over the skin, then stay sweat-covered for six hours. Mowing the lawn is the best way of perspiring, and I did that on Saturday. So it'll be a bit longer before I have an excuse to do anything physical... grr.

Sometime last week, my bride discovered that there were little black ants wandering among the spice jars in the cupboard and across the range hood. It wasn't a large number, so we were squishing them as we found them. We decided that this would be a prime opportunity to redo the shelf paper in the cupboards, since we'd never really looked at the stuff which came with the house. Out with the sky-blue flowers, in with some beige marble on the upper 3 shelves and some 1970's mushroom Con-Tact paper I found in a thriftstore years ago for the lowest shelf. This also gave me more chances to squish ants, which seemed to materialize every few minutes to see what the commotion was. The contents of the cupboards were on the kitchen floor and drainboard for three days, ever in the way, while we tried to rid our home of ants and swap out the shelf paper. With the paper job done, we put the stuff back on the shelves in some semblance of order. (I say "some semblance" because after I got the spices arranged logically, she rearranged them illogically to make space for a tray to put Kool-Aid and seasoning packets in.) I also put in a couple bait traps to get the little buggers. I got up this morning and go for a box of cereal... ANTS! All over the place! Muerte! Muerte! Apparently my breakfast products appealed to them, and I spent the time I usually use to eat breakfast and read the paper squashing, spraying, moving boxes, moving the boxes again when ants would emerge from underneath them and squashing some more. D'oh!! "Stupid bug! You go squish now!" -- Homer Simpson. Sprayed the hoard of ants on that freshly-papered now-empty shelf with pyrethrin like a bug-blastin' Rambo (complete with war cry), wipe up the wet cadavers and move a bait trap from under the stove up to that shelf; grab some food that's handy and antless off the drainboard, toss out the still-full box of Honey Bunches of Oats and last scoop of Trader Joe's Ginger Granola, and drive like NASCAR to get to work on time. And the first thing I did when I got to work, beside submit those three requests for replacement PDAs that I couldn't submit last Thursday due to system issue (the customers should have had those replacements in hand today), was got some aphids off my chocolate mint... with more of a vengeance than normal.