You know, I think it’s about time I got in on the “give offerings of chocolate to …” when we get someone new in the MMP. Attention: Henceforth all new MMP’ers must offer chocolate to ELLEN CHERRY High Priestess of All That is Sunny, Merry & The Chocolate-Cherry~est.
All in favor say AYE. All against say NAY. crickets OK then! Chocolate for me!
Taters, when you’ve had enough, here’s my advice: confront the evil wench(es)/bastards. It’s easy to be snotty when you just sit there like a superior lump. So, call them on it: “Excuse me, but I’ve noticed your attitude toward me is somewhat cool? Have I done something to offend you? What can I do to make it right?”
This has two benefits – 1. If you’ve actually inadvertently done something to piss them off, they can clear the air and 2. If they’re just being nasty, they either have to admit it, or be publicly labeled as a bioytch. Make sure you do it with plenty of people standing around if you suspect the problem is actually 2). Nine times out of ten you’ll get, “Oh no! I just have a headache today! Everything’s fine!!” smiles, smiles and then they’re too embarrased to act bad later. Try it, if you dare. I’ve done it exactly once and got the second result. Kill 'em with kindness! It’s the MMP Way.™
Morning, everybody. It was hard to get up this morning; the cat was alternately bathing herself and me. Since she has the roughest cat tongue in the history of the universe, my arms are now beautifully exfoliated.
I got nothin’ much today. I finally finished the last ghastly patent appeal last night. This one was a guy with a thick German accent and interesting sentence construction, not to mention pronunciation. Do you know how hard it is to understand “molybdenum” when pronounced with a thick German accent? Oy. I’m just glad it’s over. I shall make sure to avoid them forever now!
I’ve got a nice quiet day of working and playing with puppies ahead of me. It’s supposed to be sunny and 74° today, so I expect we’ll have nice playtime this afternoon. But I have to caffeinate first. <yawn>
'Ullo, all. Not much to add here (which is why I’m not posting much here)–I have to go run MORE errands now. (and when do errands end, anyway? With death?)
Hope all the Tuesdays here are good ones. Or something like that.
Lawdy, I miss one day of the MMP and I’ve already got a billion messages to read. (Give or take…) I’ll have to take it in bits.
Nava - Welcome back! Nephew is adorable. I think I missed it – did you transfer positions as well as apartments? Same company or different?
Puggy - Love bugs? Whassat? Only thing I can think of being particularly thick this year – at least to midwesterners – are the cicadas (All Hail Brood XIII!).
So, the long weekend in Canada is over. I miss it already, but at least it was relatively relaxing. Other than helping with the housecleaning and such, I was able to catch up on sleep and get some fun in.
Last night’s fireworks (as seen off my 6th floor balcony) were rather lacklustre. It seems like a lot of people this year opted to go for quality over quantity, splurging on one of the big, expensive and brilliant 'crackers instead of a bunch of the smaller, rather humdrum ones. I did manage to get a few pics. It’s bloody hard to take pictures of fireworks when you don’t have anywhere specific to aim; half the time I just opened the shutter and hoped some fireworks would show up where the camera was pointed. Unfortunately, because it was in landscape focus mode, most of the pics ended up too blurry to be worth keeping. Still, I did snap a few acceptable shots. There were balls and more balls, plus a rather nice burst that I only caught the bottom half of. The best shot I got was one that was already in progress when I hastily repositioned the camera and opened the shutter. It was a nice starburst cluster. It was surprisingly long-lasting – that photo is a 16-second exposure caught mid-display. For reasons unknown, I also took a shot of the moon at 12x zoom , plus a landscape shot that I kept because the streak punctuated by flashes of light caused by a jet going by in the top-right corner was kinda neat.
There will be more fireworks on Canada Day (July 1st) but I’ll have to go elsewhere to take pics of fireworks because the tennis court lights my balcony overlooks will be on and blaring by then, which will end up washing out any potentially useful shots.
I must confess, MamaTigs, that the computer (a.k.a. That Infernal Contraption) reacted poorly to it’s bath. I need a hardier computer.
Swampy, good guess on the laptop. I sneezed, and that’s what killed it. Well, it wasn’t so much the sneeze as it was the steristrips on my belly button coming undone. That hurt. A bunch. And bled a lot. When that happened, I dropped my OJ and splashed my computer. Welbywife as usual made a lesson out of it, to wit: Don’t drink and compute if there’s any chance you’ll be a wimp and drop your drink. Sympathy isn’t her strong point.
My response to this type of thing was always the same:
“I had a lousy upbringing. You’d have thought my mom would have loved me enough to teach me these things, but she didn’t. Siiigh.”
So far, the MMP remains pee-free, though last week’s Poop Charts kind of pushed the envelope.
Welcome TPlay. I’ve enjoyed reading your things here, you seem like you’ll fit well into the group of which there are no standards to fitting in or not.
“Someone should do the ironing”
“OK, I’ll tell 'em when I see 'em”
Mind you, I prefer it to “hi dear, how was your trip, the ironing’s in your room.” Mork, same company. Bosses sort of change, though, because we’re opening a new chapter in the project. I’m supposed to be “in Central” now but apparently I’ll be assigned to another team at least part time. Sure hope I am, my boss in Central is the one who says that I can’t listen to music with headphones while at work because that “gives me communication problems.” Makes me want to pump the volume as high as it’ll go and pour out Rammstein’s Ohne Dich. What? I need to practice my German!
**Mork, ** here’s a love bug website. We saw the cicadas on tv the other day. They’re creepy!
We are somewhat nervous about hurricane season. We are pretty far inland but we still got hit with bits of Rita, which wasn’t fun, but it could have been much worse.
Thanks again. Is this a good place to confess that I’m scared shitless about what will happen next? Losing a son and then a pregnancy has not been the funnest things that happened this last year. My wife’s period is scheduled to come this Friday, and if it does then it means we need to wait – at least – another month. Sometimes I wish I were the one who could cry in public, but someone has to be the supportive one.
That’s when you start blaring Du Hast (with particular emphasis on the du haßt homophone. :D)
Good luck on working things out there though. Sounds like they’re pretty strait-laced and starch-shirted. Just the sort of people I have trouble playing nice with.
Tel - Those are … a wee bit creepy-looking. But if they congregate in clouds when they mate then we already have our share of those: Gnats. I hate those things.
BusDude - Mock not the poop charts! They may one day save your life. Or your colon. Or something.
TPlayer, I know you’ve had a rough time; I read all your threads. I’m thinking of you and your wife and hoping for the best. Have you considered there may come a time when you decide not to pursue pregnancy? You can still become parents, though. My heart does go out to you. Take care.
Mindfield – Do you ever have problems syncing your Treo. Rather, does your Treo ever get confused when you update. Somehow I’ve got three alarms today for only one task due. It’s a repeating event and I’ve probably messed with it, but someone it thinks it has to tell me in three separate alerts. Not three instances of the same alert, mind you: it’s three new separate alarms.
The thing is that love bugs are bigger than gnats, aren’t they? Some years the swarms are really crazy bad. In 1999, I think, there were swarms so bad that when I went out on the porch one summer day, one of our white plastic chairs was completely covered in love bugs. It looked like a black chair with red spots.
I’ve had my entire car coated with love bugs on more than one occasion. Once when we evacuated to Texas for an incoming hurricane, I hit a patch of love bugs so thick that I literally had to stop at the first store I saw to buy something to scrape them off the windshield with. They can definitely be annoying, especially because they’re big and juicy enough to go SPLAT!! on the windshield.
It’s that time of year in Annapolis again, Naval Academy graduation. Last year at this time I was afraid WWIII was breaking out because I suddenly started hearing fighter jets zooming around in the skies – it’s not something I normally hear, but there’s no mistaking the roar of those afterburners. And this close to D.C., it does make you wonder. Then I caught a glimpse of them in formation – it was the Blue Angels. Duh!
They’re baack! I just stood on my front porch and got a bit of a free air show. I’ve been anticipating them for a couple days now, so I’m glad my warnings to Alice to not be alarmed by the noise were in fact accurate!
Whew! I’m finally caught up. My parents were here for the weekend and I took yesterday off to spend time with them. We had a good time. Went to the zoo on Saturday, drove around Mpls and St. Paul after church on Sunday, and then went to the arboretum yesterday. And stopped in at work yesterday so they could meet all my crazy coworkers.
And we made them dinner all 3 days. I’m not sure whether they liked the weird stuff we eat - pumpkin pasta on Sat., quasi-Asian noodles on Sun., and a yummy fusion-y sort of thing from Rachael Ray last night. They said they liked everything, but they might have just been being nice. Dad’s really more of a meat and potatoes kind of person. But we had a good time in any case.
Congrats on finishing the thesis, Haze! And don’t worry about being nervous about the first day of teaching… Mom was a teacher for 30+ years and said she got nervous the first day of school every single year. It’s just the way it goes.
Been there, done that on the coworker fun, Taters. It sucks a lot. Here’s hoping you can get moved to a new group soon. (Although Ellen’s method seems like a good idea if you have the guts to do it. I never did and things festered for more than a year until I left.)
::waves to everyone else:: Gotta get back to work!
Love bugs are evil. They’re the main reason I left Florida. OK, maybe not, but still, I hates them!!
Home early - I came to relieve **FCD ** from carpet installer watch so he could go to the boat. But the carpet installers were done within half an hour of me getting here. YAY! So, I took pics!! The first 7 show off the new carpet and the lack of mirrored tiles in the master bedroom. No furniture in any of the rooms yet - I’ll get to that. So don’t nag!!
I’m about to run the carpet shampooer in the dining room - gotta clean the traces of hork away. Then I’ll start moving what furnishings I can back to the bedrooms. Then I’ll be back here to whine about it. Because that’s part of my charm
Hugs 'n stuff all around! I’m off to labor manually…
(((Taters))) Your post reminded me of why I left my last job. :shudder: If they’re doing it to be really nasty, even doing what Ellen suggested may not work. Mean people suck. :mad:
TPlay, welcome to the MMP. You can share anything you like here. I’ve been following your posts for a while, and you and your wife are in my thoughts.
You all can uncross appendages for me, since I probably won’t hear anything until tomorrow about the job. At this point, they’re probably wanting to wait until after Memorial Day.
I have really got to get help with my irons this year. If I was fairly competent in that part of my game, I could easily be shooting in the low-90/hi-80s. But it adds about 30 strokes to my game. Seriously, I suck on the clubs between a putter and a fairway wood.
Taters, I once worked at a job where they refused to ask a coworker to stop wearing a perfume that was triggering ER-visit-causing asthma attacks for me. I found another job (higher pay, better benefits, nicer people, etc.), gave my notice, and for my last two weeks I worked in utter silence; nobody in the office would say one single word to me unless it was 100% work-related, and even then not if they could help it. It was really, really uncomfortable, but I opted for the moral high ground; no way was I stooping to their level of childishness.
In addition to what Ellen suggested, I’d also recommend going to HR or a higher boss if it doesn’t produce results. As long as you’re behaving professionally and courteously, you’ll retain the moral high ground and have a better chance of getting the bitch in trouble as a result.
But how else will they get any use out of those nifty Severe Weather grphics they bought from the National Hurricane Forecasting Ceneter and Graphics Shoppe?? You can’t write them off unless you use them!
