aw sheeet

this month has been all about me complaining, hasn't it? even though some awesome fun stuff happened; like anne and the boys coming for a visit, buying a bike, and realizing that bad haircuts lead to cute barrettes. i went out the other night with friends and also had a rocking good time.

however, pop is in the hospital with some awful infection and flu combo so i think march might have to kiss my ass. i'm taking a few days off work to go home, my sister is out of town and the baby is sick (she started it!) and i love my pop, but he is a bigger baby than she is when he's sick. mom's also got whatever it is baby brought home from daycare, so it is a house full of sickies. i'm going to pack up some knitting projects and toys for maggie and head down there for a while to help out. it will be nice to be able to spend some time with pop but i wish it wasn't in the critical care unit.

a few facts for you to digest

if your boss asks you to willingly violate a labor law, and you realize later that what you did could totally get your ass fired, you should go to the union. STAT. the offense might be minor in and of itself, and when you're asked you might think, "whatever," but you know what? your boss, especially if your boss is an asshole, doesn't really care if you lose your job or not, so long as they make gross (or quota, or figures, or whatever they use to call "money"). the day after you go the union management will spend a lot of time trying to sweet talk you and tell you that you didn't need to go to the union in the first place. this, my friends, is bullshit. just because they look bad and now their superiors know what jackoffs they are, doesn't mean you did anything wrong. covering your own ass, making sure that you don't get canned for doing something your boss asked you to do, is not only okay, but totally commendable. if you belong to a union, don't be afraid to use it. after all, you pay for the privilege, and sometimes the union is the only thing other than yourself watching out for you.

so what happened? i was asked to work but not clock in. not because they weren't going to pay me for my hours, but because i was working late at night and they wanted to avoid anyone knowing i was working earlier than i am supposed to. i was told repeatedly that i had to keep it "quiet" or else i would get in trouble. also, i got screwed out of two hours of sunday pay, which where i work at is time and a third, as well as over 6 p.m. pay (another twenty cents an hour). at the time i was asked, it was late and i didn't care. i just wanted to get my shit counted and get out. later, when i realized what i was asked to do, and how i got screwed, and that i could be fired i felt both angry and ashamed for having been such a chump. i mean, come on. my mom's in a union, my pop and i did nothing but study marxist and socialist theory our first few years of college, and i thought i knew my shit. the change in my attitude and awareness has crept up on me; after about six months of being jerked around, of being expected constantly to "take one for team" and/or "be a good team player" i realized that i am indeed, totally getting played. this grocery store is a fucking mess. my senior manager is a two-faced, snarky creep of a bitch and i'm tired of being taken for a ride. when i started i was glad for the job, when pop was sick i was glad for the long weekends, and when i got my new job i totally loved it. i still love what i actually do, but i'm finding the politics real hard to swallow. what makes it hard is that on paper i can see how royally fucked over i'm being, and want to just quit and run for the hills (which is actually the plan right now) but in real life i work with a whole bunch of nice folks who i honestly care about. i like my co-workers, i like the work i do, i feel like i'm part of a community that i enjoy. the thing is, my personal relationships and capital there don't translate into rent money or car insurance. it doesn't even translate very well into actual groceries! the store i work at is crazy expensive, and i can't afford to buy my food there. i also can't pay all my bills every month and the us department of education kind of wants to garnish my meager wages. awesome!

it might have been foolish to hope things would work out and get better, but oh well. maybe that means i'm saving my real bitterness and cynicism for later in life.

odds n' ends

having anne and the boys up this weekend was awesome. i was worried about my tiny, furniture-less apartment, but aside from tiernan observation that it smelled like smoke, i think it actually fit everyone a lot better. there's a lot of usable space in an empty apartment! and yes, it does still smell like the old smoker tenants, although what's sad is that it smells so much better to us that we don't notice. it was fun to show them around my cute little town, and it makes me want to go down to portland soon.

i bought a bicycle today! i have been threatening to do this for years now, and even have a bell for the bike i didn't even own, but today i got back my colorado state income tax return and bought a simple cruiser style $60 bike at the evil empire. as bikes go, it is decidedly unsophisticated; brake with your feet, no gears, and cheap decals instead of fancy paint job. i probably could have bought a bike at the thrift store for less, but i won't lie, i really like the look of a cruiser. i have plans to scrape off the stickers, and need to adjust the seat/handlebars, but i took it for a ride tonight and it was awesome fun. it was also seriously cold, but i drove on down to the pizza parlor to show the fisherman the goods and get a sandwich. (he gets a great discount, so i do too! my whole meal was under $5 and included half a sandwich, a side salad, bag of chips and a soda! whoo!) i suspect i'll be a bit sore tomorrow from the extra exertion, but this is why i bought a bike. exercise and i hate each other, but for some reason tooling around on a bike just seems like fun. the fact that i do indeed get in a small workout is just a bonus. i have a feeling when i go back into the doctor's next week they're going to want to talk to me about my cholesterol, so i can jump start that conversation with, "yeah, i just got a bike."

i have lots more to say, but am beat. i'm headed to the bath and then bed.

ahhh-chooo!

when did people stop calling seasonal allergies "hay fever?" because the past few days when anyone has asked, "what's wrong? what are you sick with?*" i've been saying "oh nothing, a little hay fever" and they look at me like "what the fuck are you talking about? fever? from hay?" i can literally see the pollen in the air, so it's not a big surprise to me that i itch like a sonofabitch and am sneeze-tastic. i'm on the claratin, but not to much avail. nothing stops the sneezing, yo.

easter was super fun. we had both lamb of god and ham, too many side dishes to count, and three desserts. maggie had an awesome day, and we spent the day running around after each other and trying to sneak more candy than her mom (my sister) thought was appropriate. because i had to work late last night doing inventory, we took a little nap in the afternoon together and that was pretty much my favorite part of the day. she was a little cuddle monkey and even though she woke me up a few times with a foot in my belly, it was a good nap.

anne and tiernan and henry are on their way here as we speak! yay! i should have more of the apartment cleaned up, but it can actually be difficult to tidy up with nothing has a place to be stored. i feel a giant closet stuffing coming on... hopefully pizza for dinner and lots of photos to come! it will be fun to have guests, although i feel a bit sheepish about our apartment. attaining furniture hasn't been high on our list of priorities, and getting my stuff out of storage has been a major issue, so we still live with one lame-ass futon, two camp chairs and four plates. not exactly fancy. plus, nothing is up on the walls because we don't have nails and you can't really hang up stuff if you don't know where anything else is going. we are a bare walled, white and messy apartment right now. they've seen my messy nests before, but i'm sad because the one thing that's fun about me is that my rooms are fun to poke around in. lots of interesting things to get your hands on, pictures to look at, weird stuff in jars or piles. now, not to much.

*this is actually our new standard greeting at work, what with all the plagues running rampant. up next: rain of frogs!

happy easter!

egg dying cups, originally uploaded by pinprick.

home for the day; i have to do inventory tonight at work, so i get to do an overnight shift. that's fine, i got to spend last night with maggie and my folks, and today we're going to have lamb of god for dinner, as well as about three different kind of cakes and pies. mom, she went crazy with the cakes this year. maggie has been impossibly adorable since i got here, and tomorrow i get to see my favorite boys! it's going to be a great weekend, even if i have to spend all night counting cheese and salad bar condiments.

i hope your easter is awesome, i'll have pictures of my cuties soon!

mimolette!

isn't that a totally fun word to say? mimolette! it's adorable. it's also a cheese, if you didn't already guess. after spending the morning being stabbed with needles and worrying, the fisherman and i did a little afternoon driving and found a cute little grocery store in the middle of nowhere that i had read about. i'd been wanting to go there for a while, after hearing that they were tiny but carried a pretty varied selection of gourmet foods. i was after cheese, and cheese i found! along with some salted anchovies that i should have bought, in retrospect.

mimolette is a french, cow's milk cheese. they age it anywhere from a year to two; this particular wedge is about 18 months old. the older it gets, the darker in color it gets. you might notice it has an unusual crust, sort of speckled and pockmarked (a bit like cantaloupe skin), due to an equally unusual aging process. what's mimolette's secret? cheese mites! yes, little buggies eat at the rind and this leaves it marred like the surface of the moon, tiny craters everywhere. how does it taste? delicious. like most cheeses aged for over a year, the paste (that's the fancy word for the cheese itself) is hard and a bit crumbly. it's nutty and slightly sweet, with a bit of a cheddar-y tang. it's not very strong, like you might think a cheese aged with bugs would be. you can grate it, it would be good on pasta or potatoes (then again, not much isn't good on either of those thing), but it's nice just sliced and eaten. i would pair it with an ale of some sort; nothing too dark or heavy. pretzels, mimolette and beer, maybe a nice crisp apple, a smidge of salami, would make an awesome snack or light dinner. this afternoon i ate it with some pretzels and some aged goat cheese.
and here's my awful haircut. i'm smiling on the outside but a sad little clown on the inside, trust me. i mean, look at how ridiculous my pinned back bangs are. i can only really do one side, they weren't really long enough to start pinning them back, so the other side is all puffy and defiant like "bitch! this is what you get for going to hairmasters!" i just suddenly have so much fucking face, you know? nothing to hide behind. bleh. in a few weeks i might like it better, but right now i'm not loving it. plus, i think i found the spot the doctor said is thinning. i can't see the back or top of my head, obviously, so i used my camera to take some photos and checked those out. it's not a huge spot, and if he had never uttered the word "thinning" i would have just thought it was a combination of my hair part and cowlick. as it is now, i wish i were a faithful jewish man so i could use a yarmulke to cover that shit up. grrr.

i gave them tons of blood this morning, so in a week or so i should know what's wrong with me, if anything. i might just be a fat girl with a hunchback and unfortunate female pattern baldness. in which case, i should change the name of my blog to "rogaine and liposuction."

i do want to show you

yellow button, originally uploaded by pinprick.

my new haircut, but i haven't washed my hair now in a day or so, and so this isn't the best time to take it's picture! i took a shower last night before i went out to drink some green beer, and never got a chance to take one today. i will admit since then i've just been wetting it and applying product at times, and it's holding up pretty good. i imagine right now it smells a lot like chicken grease, but it doesn't actually look that different from when it's clean.

had to get up early this morning to go the doctor's, and found out a few troubling things. for one thing, i am a hunchback. to be clear, i have a buffalo hump. a few weeks ago i noticed this weird lump on the base of my neck and was like, no fucking way, i'm a HUNCHBACK. i mean, my neck and back hurts a lot because my bed it shitty and i work bending over a lot (insert sex joke here), but a hump is not in any way, shape, or form acceptable. the doctor was so nonchalant about it but i was pretty depressed. being compared to a buffalo at any point in time, for any reason, just doesn't make me feel too good. tomorrow morning i go in for a few blood tests to see what might be causing that as well as some other stuff.

what other stuff? he thinks my hair is thinning. hair thinning is right on my list of things i never want to happen to me, and so after being sucker punched with news of my buffalo fucking hump i'm also losing hair. they should give out razor blades or xanax with those kinds of diagnoses! shit man. being slightly hungover, unwashed and learning that it's not enough my hair is short now, but it's falling out, is not my idea of an awesome day. again, he's thinking some of the tests they'll do tomorrow will figure that shit out.

then to cap it all off, i got called into work on my day off. true, i could have said no, but we are down three people in the deli due to one broken foot, one case of mono and one staph infection, and what was i going to do today but cry about my hump and thinning hair? getting out of the house was good for me, even though now i kind of want to slink inside a hole and have some cocktails. dear diary, this week has sucked major ass. humps and hair and hangovers, oh my!

i'm a monster!

i got the world's worst haircut last night. no, i take that back. the haircut itself is pretty sweet, and the lady did a good job, but it looks horrendous on me. for one thing, it is way too short. when i said three inches below my chin she took that to mean "right at my chin." my bangs looks so ridiculous with this haircut that i have to pin them back, using a massive amount of product and two strategically placed bobby pins. the only redeeming thing about this haircut is that i use less shampoo and i won't have to get it cut again for a long time.

i feel so ugly.

i had a horrible dream last night that my sister was pregnant and her new baby daddy put the kibosh on me seeing any of her kids. i was like, "hey! baby's not even his! he can't do that!" and she was all "sorry, dude, what my man says goes." it was infuriating.

i have to go try to fix myself up for work. i might look like a matronly soccer mom who wanted her hair cut in a "fun and easy!" way, but i want to at least be the best looking soccer mom i can be.

sad but true

i've been listening to a lot of linkin park lately. sometimes it's so hard to fight my natural desire to be a 15-year-old-emo-boy.

also, i got these new plugs thinking they might be sort of incognito, but i think they are pretty much just as low-key as shoving elephant tusks through my ears. dammit. i like them a lot, but that means i shouldn't wear them to work. the official policy is "no more than one per ear if you are a woman, and nothing dangle-y." technically these pass, but the look i got from the perishable manager today was interesting to say the least and i just don't feel like talking to him about why i do this. generally speaking i try to keep our conversations cheese-based.

maybe plugs made out of parmesan? functional and delicious.

baby, baby. baby

oh boy. i will start by admitting i have indeed had some wine tonight. some penny wine, so named because the first glass leaves the aftertaste of penny, and some box wine, which is a lot more like candy than i realized. i wish i had bought more than one box. hmmmm....

the fisherman and i have made up. it's weird, but i don't think either one of us is very good at arguments. i want to not talk, he does, and um...that's not so awesome. at the same time, what kind of fight is a good fight? there isn't much awesome in not getting along.

i have a line-up on what sounds like a very cool job, but it's like my grocery store is is psychic. the week i go for something else, they give me forty hours. they not only do that, but then they make a big point of giving me 40 next week, and congratulating me on my sales increases (25% average!). now what? how long will this last? i'm stoked, because getting to know new kids and learning new rules doesn't sound so fun, plus i have a million fantastic ties now, and they are part of my uniform! who needs new work clothes? hmph. i'm not sure what to do or think, but until daylight savings kicks in i refuse to make any decisions. that seems reasonable, right? yay!

want to hear more bitching?

today i was super-cute. i tell you this first, so that the rest of the story makes sense. i did my hair, i put on this new shirt i got with my belated christmas present (a macy's gift card), was all excited about it being sunny and pretty and having the day off.

the fisherman spent all day sleeping, which was irritating enough. i did my errands and shit, then came home to nest a bit. i was making a nice dinner when he decided he had to go to work and fix something minor. i pointed out that he could wait until later to go in, or call in and fix this thing, but he wanted to go and i said, "okay, dinner will be ready in half an hour." he says, "i'll be gone for ten!" if you say to me you'll be gone for ten minutes, you can actually be gone for half an hour before i care. one whole hour, however, is a totally different story.

to be frank, i know i'm a late and pokey person. so i let a bit of that go with everyone else. since i am always five minutes late, i don't consider you late until 15. and even then i don't bitch until 20. tonight, however, i was making a nice dinner, was looking good, and was (i think totally reasonably) upset at him being absent for an hour being some big-shot at work. i know he's the manager, his co-workers are coming to grips with that, and he's there all the fucking time so why take an hour of out his day off to go in?! then he has the gall to get mad at me for being mad and leaves.

he's been gone now for an hour and half. i don't know where he is, or what he's doing (although i suspect he's at work), and i'm annoyed. i think it's okay, and even understandable, that i would be upset. when he wanted to chit-chat and make nice after he came home i told him that i was mad and just didn't feel like talking. then i read some of my book and he got all fussy that i was giving him the "silent treatment" and stormed out. i think i have every right to have given him a little silent treatment, and i wasn't being overly hostile. i told him to watch what he wanted on tv, i was just mad and needed some time to cool off. i am not a big talker when i am upset.

he could have called. he could have waited until after dinner--but to get mad at me for being mad just makes me more angry. the storming out, also not winning him points. am i being unreasonable? is this sort of thing normal? what the fuck is going on. you don't need to answer that one, i'm just thinking out loud.

a list of people who annoy the shit out of me:

1. jerks on cell phones in libraries. when did it become okay to even talk in a library, much less do it on a phone?! where did this trend start? libraries are awesome because they are quiet, and fun to hang out and read in. the only other place i remember being this quiet was church as a kid, and that stillness made both places feel special. i gave up church when i realized i didn't believe in god, but why are assholes ruining my library experience? i don't ask for much dammit, just a nice librarian or two to hiss "shhh..." on occasion.
2. people who insist on their lunchmeat being "shaved." this means they want it so thin it unravels, and this, my friends, is a pain in the ass to do. when they say they want it shaved i want to say, "you should go buy your own meat slicer then." so annoying. i hate shaving meat! how on earth are meat scraps more delicious than regular slices? i don't get it.
3. mailmen who are dicks. i have been dealing with this one guy at the post office who is such an insufferable jerk, and waiting in line i just hope that i don't get him, but of course i always do. today i was impossibly rude back and then he was nice to me. i gave him the stink-eye-extraordinaire and he smiled at me. i want to break his kneecaps.

things that make life worth living and negate the above list:

1. getting six feet under season 2. man, i love that show. i dn't believe i love it enough to keep it when i'm done watching it, though. the fisherman thinks it's retarded, but i'm totally going to donate the series to the libary when i'm done. that way the next suckers who get all wrapped up in it will at least have some more fisher goodness!
2. sifl and olly! the set i bought on ebay is obviously transfered from vhs, taped-from-tv, but it's awesome nonetheless. i could watch that show all the time! it reminds me of a pretty happy time in my high school career, too.
3. laughing cow cheese being on sale at the grocery store. it meant i could buy two kinds! original for the fisherman, and garlic and herb for me.
4. awesome booty from the grocery outlet. seriously. check it out.

dear diary,

someone to eat cheese with, originally uploaded by pinprick.

amen.