moving week

not moving emotionally, more physical moving. on monday, we drove back down to iowa from the twin cities after s's g-ma's 85th birthday celebration at a twins' game. it was a huge family affair with almost all of his mom's relatives there. on saturday we had a pool party at one of his aunts' houses and all the aunts, who are notoriously judgemental, asked s's brother when he was going to buy a ring for his gf, who was also there. nice, since s & i have been together twice as long, but hey "when the aunts like someone, they like someone" yay for me!
on tuesday, back at work, getting back from lunch, i find that my phone is gone. not to worry, not my cell phone. i mean my work phone. apparently, while i was gone the dial tone stopped as my coworker was using it. she called telecommunications to see what was going on & they suggested maybe the cord was loose. oh no, apparently even that department doesn't communicate with each other because one of the guys had moved it back to where our new office is. at least we kindof knew that the move was coming some time in the near future and that we wouldn't have much notice. the rest of the day i had a computer, but no phone unless i stretched across to the check-in desk.
about midmorning wednesday, my boss's supervisor came by and we unplugged my computer and everything and else and carried it down the hall to bfe where the new office is located. there will be 4 of us in that room, including my boss who has had her office moved 4 times in the last 5 years because the new doctors need offices.
thursday was great, fully functional and moved in. i felt like i accomplished a great deal of work, even though we're still extremely far behind.
and then, my boss calls on friday morning saying she'll be late because her boyfriend is in the emergency room. in california. okay... she didn't call her own boss until afternoon and i ended up staying over an hour late. at least my bank account will appreciate it.

suck it!

man, do i suck at this! going to blogher in 3 weeks and i haven't put up more than 2 posts in the last 2, oh, make that 3 months. yeesh!
i'd like to say that work (boss has been mia off and on since the beginning of the year & we've had 3 new people to train. guess who most of that responsibility falls on?), the (town)house (so many more places to get messy that need picking up!), the puppy (stop sleeping on our bed! 2 goodly-proportioned adults & a 25lb dog do not fit well on a full-size bed) and my health (after 9-ish years, my gi doctor no longer knows what to do with me & wants to either pass me on to mayo clinic or another large hospital because he's exhausted all treatment options for me with my gi-induced excruciating joint pain) are all to blame.
weee! what an interesting life i/we lead. thought i would be able to get back into the swing of things and work more on my bip, revising and whatnot. possibly even working on the 2nd book in the series that i started just after finishing up with the draft of the first one. or maybe even getting down to the nitty-gritty and submitting to publishers. yeah, right!
but that doesn't mean things aren't going swimmingly here in i-o-way. in fact, despite the work stress, house stress, health stress i feel in a good place. life really truly is good and i can't wait to see my ladies in nyc! so excited!
more again soon; i promise.

new title

am officially an auntie! baby sophia was born at 6.03am and weighs 6lbs 8oz and is 19.5 inches long. can't wait to see a picture, even if we won't get to actually see her until probably thanksgiving time if we can get away.
congrats to my brother and sil and my parents, first-time grandparents! yay!

tgif

even though it's no longer friday (whew! saturdays are so much better as there is no getting up and going to work involved), i'm still glad i made it to friday.
this past week was okay, but the last two weeks at work were complete torture. my boss always takes spring break week off to visit her bf, the plastic surgeon, in la. fine, we knew that and the new girl was aware, but then we found out that both boss & new girl were going to be gone that friday, leaving 2 to do the job of 4. my coworker and i managed to get through the day since half the docs were gone leaving the clinic almost manageable. whew! crisis averted, or so we thought. come monday morning (almost 2 weeks ago now), we show up to discover that boss has an 'emergency' and isn't going to be back that week and no idea when she will be back. not that she bothered to inform us or even be in contact. and the coworker who'd helped me on friday was off half wednesday and all thursday and friday because she was getting a colonoscopy. that left new girl & i alone for two full days and she hadn't even been working in the clinic for much more than a month. what the h#ll!?!? that means we got 30 minutes of break in a 9 hour day (rather than leave the other person alone for a full hour to answer phones, schedule patients at the desk & try to complete orders and paperwork). and these were full clinic days, not slow spring break days.
finally our retired administrator, who came in to inform us that our boss was gone, said that boss would be back tuesday this last week and forwarded us the e-mail. the e-mail she forwarded? boss's out of office message that she'd set up when she originally left for spring break and intended to be back on tuesday the week she was out for 'emergency'! argh!
so apparently something bad went down with bf or his practice or something. and boss showed up on monday, didn't really say anything to us, so we're still in the dark. when one of the receptionists asked if everything was okay she got all teary, then pulled herself together, but didn't say a word about why she was gone or thank us for keeping the place from completely falling apart without her. oh! it still makes me steam! i do understand that 'something' happened and i'm sorry for her for that, but she didn't even really acknowledge the position she put us in at all.
or maybe i'm just being a b#tch...

home/wedding trip pt ii

we left off at wednesday night & safely arriving at my parents' house. i took grover out to pee and play with nikki. nikki is almost 3 and a black lab. my mom likes to joke that she's so open-minded because she has two black grandchildren. a little later in the morning, while s was still sleeping, dad had me get on the trailer and go for a ride with the puppies.


mom made us waffles for brunch and then we had to go get fitted for our dresses. she had hers made by a seamstress who graduated hs the year before me and had just 'eloped' with her bf, who used to be my brother's best friend when they were kids, exactly one week before. my bridesmaid's dress was disgustingly tight, but then i'd ordered a 12. sara managed to get it zipped up (hey, working in theatre, you can get anyone into their costume). she said she'd let it out as much as possible, so i could hopefully breathe.
s & i went to eat a late lunch around 2pm at homesteaders', a place i insisted on eating in hopes that they had their divine wheatberry salad on the salad bar. sadly, all they had was something like glorified rice only with acini de pepe (sic?). it was still tasty & i introduced s to knephla soup. yum!
i'll try to cut this boring stuff short. we hit the mall to look for shorts for s & a supportive undergarment so i could squeeze into the dress. more family time after that, including making bars for the rehearsal dinner the next night.
friday i helped my aunt (pronounced aw-nt, not ant) make her famous beans. s's family calls them calico beans & they flew off the table that night. the giant crockpot was completely empty. s & i went to see 'the time traveler's wife' in the early afternoon to get some alone time. it wasn't too bad, but i don't know how anyone who hadn't read the book to follow the story.
i'll finish up this dull account with the rehearsal and wedding day tomorrow.

still here!

things have been busy, going to my brother's wedding last week and then getting back to work stuff. i will be posting an update on what happened on our trip to north dakota soon (this weekend, but we're also pupsitting for another dog, so i'll try to work it in!)
xoxo

crap!

crap! crap! crap! with all this going to blogher and getting a ready-made roommate, i've neglected to prepare for my brother's wedding on the 15th. i haven't finished his wedding present & it would take 2 weeks from now to get a custom frame made and mat cut for his gift. i haven't broken in the 3-inch heels that go with the bridesmaid's dress i can't zip up completely. until this evening at s's parents' for dinner, it had totally slipped my mind that i might have to give a wedding toast. i hate crowds, specifically speaking in front of large groups, so that'll be awesome. especially since i haven't even started thinking of something to write/say. my car needs some work before we leave on the 11th & i've at least got an appointment for the requisite oil change that's due for tuesday already. but my as yet unnamed car needs some new tires & i thought i could use the awesome employee discount slip from michelin that i picked up at blogher, but no one around here has any michelins in stock. hopefully s's mechanic will be able to get us worked in this week and he can take care of that part.
the apartment is still an unpacked mess & i'd really like to get that remedied before we head out on our 800 mile drive. coming back to a sty isn't in anyone's best interest. hopefully this week i can work through a little bit every day & things will slowly but surely be finished in time for our departure. and i won't forget anything, like the dress before we leave here. i can just see that happening.
the heels are currently crushing my screaming toes. yippee!

big move

poor little grover really doesn't like all this moving around of furniture. last weekend we shifted some desks from the bedroom to the kitchen & vice versa (i've had my old desk from elementary/hs in the kitchen as counter space is close to nil and in order to put s's computer up in the bedroom & redistribute space we flipped them.) we also moved s's dresser into my room & grover, showing either his displeasure or fright, peed on the carpet about 3 times.
today we moved a bunch of things at my place & s's old place into the new storage unit. his pillowtop bed into our room & my mattress out, his big bookshelf into the bedroom, my new flat screen tv into the bedroom & his giant one into the living room. it's gonna be a tight squeeze with 2 people in a one-bedroom where i've been settled for 7 years now, but we'll make it work. and rent will be totally feasible now so that i may actually be able to put money in a savings account every month while paying more down on my student loans, etc. even with the extra $$$/month for the storage unit. anyway, i was worried grover would freak again so we mostly left him in his crate. he cried that we weren't letting him out & we were "playing" without him, but he seems to be doing fine now that most of the big stuff has already been taken care of. it probably doesn't help that the poor little bugger is teething either. s found a bloody little puppy tooth on the carpet in the living room (after he stepped on it with bare feet). this was after we saw blood on his rawhide twist earlier in the evening. thought he'd just bit his tongue again. then today, i noticed that one of his long canine (haha) teeth in the front is gone. our little baby is growing up! (plus the fact that he's 3x the weight he was when we brought him home less than 3 months ago.)
so most of what we have left is organizing the mess that is the living room. a few more trips over to the storage unit in the car will do. we got to take the "free" moving truck (less $250 in cash they had to hold while we had the truck) this afternoon. after they called us this morning to say we couldn't have it for the 3 1/2 hours we'd reserved it for because the person before us would be late, they called at 11.30 to say we could take it whenever we got there until 3.30 before they closed so it worked out perfectly. and s & i didn't kill each other (yet) with moving everything, even though it came close. and grover is digging on the icecubes i keep throwing him for teething toys. it's hilarious to watch.
this has been quite an adventure so far. i look forward to the rest of it.

fall down, go boom

and there i went awol again in the same month as blogher. man, i suck! what excuses this time? well, s has been as good as living here and the puppy monster has been running us ragged. his cuteness far exceeds the drawbacks, though i have barely been able to get any kind of writing in the past 2 months. (don't ask if i mean s or grover.)
about the falling downness: on friday at work, the clinic administrator took us all aside and informed us that, although we had survived the first round of layoffs, the hospital planned to cut salaries across the board by 2%. hey, at least we still have jobs. and i figured out from my salary and my annual hours that i'm only losing $.33/hour. i'm not gonna argue with that versus losing some kick-arse coworkers. (simply because we wouldn't be the ones choosing who goes, so i'll put up with the barely tolerable ones if i have to. or if i am one of them.)
then on saturday, s & i went to a wedding. the ceremony itself (including processional/recessional) was a whole 12 minutes. at the reception at the country club we had a seating chart, which was my first experience with that formality. it turned out to be a pretty awesome match up for all involved, though. the one flaw with the evening was that an extra chair was randomly placed at our table while we were up getting hors d'oeuvres. i sat one chair off from my original seat and in an attempt to correct the error i was in the process of scooting my butt to the one to the right. s also thought to correct the extraneous chair by pulling it away from the table, right out from under me. in front of the entire table, i fell down and crashed to the floor. fall down, go boom. i have 2 parallel bruises on my right leg, one on my thigh and the other on my shin.
and finally, the boom. s, as i'd mentioned above, has basically been staying here for the past 4 weeks if not longer. there was a falling out with one of his whiny, baby roommates (recall, if you will, that they have all recently turned 21 or are younger & s will be 26 in september) who is now refusing to pay his share of the heat/electric that is under s's name. beyond that, s was supposed to have a place to live, but when he went to dinner with the 2 current roommates (4 people total, 2 of whom were staying & 2 new people coming in) on the 5th, the guy freaked out because s went to hs with & knew his ex-gf only as a passing acquaintance. to say it was a bad breakup is an understatement. the girl apparently took out a restraining order on him & he goes into a month-long depression every year at the time of the breakup. thus, after much discussion, s will be moving into my apartment. we'll be getting a storage space because when someone has lived in a 1 bedroom apartment for the past 7 years as i have, one tends to accumulate a great deal of stuff. not to mention that last year s lived by himself in a 2 bedroom before this house fiasco. we haven't killed each other yet, despite the close quarters this past month & i'm making room for some of his "junk" to replace my "junk". i know that "they" recommend you don't move into a place that someone else already lives in for fear of being territorial, but it should be fine with an adjustment period.
i guess s will have all of the weekend after next to get cozy while i'm at blogher. hopefully, we'll have everything situated by that point & i'll be able to get my groove on with all the cool blogesses out there in blogland! wooo! can't wait!