They say that a family/marriage that survives renovations can survive anything. But what about your workplace?
We are in the middle of re-carpeting the entire church, upstairs and down, inside and .... well Ok maybe not 'out', so for the last week I've been living in complete and utter chaos! We have to move EVERYTHING off the floor, absolutely everything. Every bookshelf, every desk, chair, garbage bin .... etc. Then the carpet layers move and begin the demolition of old carpet.
It's disgusting (just like my spoiled milk from earlier this week)! The dust that is created from pulling up the old carpeting is positively gross - and every where. I go home after work and all I can smell is the dirt. I won't even describe what happens when I blow my nose.
Once the carpet is all up the glue goes down. A veritable assault on the olfactories. At least it gives a better 'buzz' than the dust does.
That, accompanied by all the extra bodies is very overwhelming for my introverted little soul. I function best in peace and quiet. It's very safe to say that I have not accomplished a heck of a lot this week. I'm thankful its summer and generally a little quieter around here anyway.
The carpeting guys are very nice, and are very appreciative of us plying them with coffee and donuts. These trades people have wicked senses of humour!
We have several thousand feet of carpets around here, so I'm girding my loins for another two weeks of this. Next week - if I survive until Friday - will be a mass move out of the office area. And, I might add, most of the staff are on holidays. How fair is that!
I think I'm going to call in sick that day!
Friday, July 25, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
A Successful Morning
I'm happy to report my cereal had not unexpected, gruesome, unpleasantness today.
On another success note - I found a rubber stamp with a Rhino on it this weekend. I'm so excited (little things do that for me). He's about to be mailed to a girlfriend with a quirky sense of humour for her birthday.
What do you think of him?
On another success note - I found a rubber stamp with a Rhino on it this weekend. I'm so excited (little things do that for me). He's about to be mailed to a girlfriend with a quirky sense of humour for her birthday.
What do you think of him?
Monday, July 21, 2008
A Disgusting Thing Happened at the Office this Morning
I have never been one to do breakfast in the morning. The thought of eating within the first few hours after waking is not a pleasurable though. However, in the efforts to keep 'better health' in mind I have begun to bring a bowl of dry cereal with me with plans to consume it once I was ready. This morning was not exception.
We have had an over abundance of dairy products in the fridges lately. There coffee pot is always on, so there is always cream for it. We do a "Cafe" on Sunday evenings, after the service, and serve latte's and the like. But lately our purchasing of milk has been greater than the need.
I picked out of the fridge a container of 2% milk that had not been opened yet, but the expiration date was just today. Without thought, and without testing the waters I went directly to pouring it on my lovely fresh bought cereal.
The ensuing glug, blurb, bubbling, milky sludge that ozzed from the carton onto my cereal was enough to put me of EVER eating breakfast again - EVER!
I did not gag, but simply mashed the rest of the soured milk down the drain, and made my way to the box of fresh donuts. The breakfast of champions!!!
We have had an over abundance of dairy products in the fridges lately. There coffee pot is always on, so there is always cream for it. We do a "Cafe" on Sunday evenings, after the service, and serve latte's and the like. But lately our purchasing of milk has been greater than the need.
I picked out of the fridge a container of 2% milk that had not been opened yet, but the expiration date was just today. Without thought, and without testing the waters I went directly to pouring it on my lovely fresh bought cereal.
The ensuing glug, blurb, bubbling, milky sludge that ozzed from the carton onto my cereal was enough to put me of EVER eating breakfast again - EVER!
I did not gag, but simply mashed the rest of the soured milk down the drain, and made my way to the box of fresh donuts. The breakfast of champions!!!
Friday, July 18, 2008
Memories Form the Corners of My Mind
How to write about my lying childhood memories has been mulling around in my brain for too long. It’s time to sort out thoughts and lay them to paper (or cyberspace if you want to get specific).
Harkening back to my holidays in Ontario (I’ve been back a month now), I was visiting scenery and people that I hadn’t seen in 26 years, and hadn’t lived there for some 34 years. That’s a long time for the memory to fade and regrow a new, more romantic version of things. I am thankful for the harsher rememberings to have had their edges dulled with time, but I had not anticipated the realities of physical places to have shrunk. The house was smaller, the yard was smaller, the long and painful walk into town seemed - - bitterly short compared to the ways I remembered any of it. You know “I walked to school every day barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways”.
The first reminder of faulty thinking was as we were closing in on town limits, my girlfriend ask “Do you remember the fort you found and showed me in that crop of trees?”.
The mental picture that I drew in my head at the word “fort” saw a large stand of trees far off in the middle of a farmer’s field. What I saw when I looked in the direction she was indicating was a much smaller group of trees with lots of brush, a child’s mere stone throw away from the road. It did not look familiar.
Once in the town limits my eyes were immediately scanning for familiar buildings – the house where my only “towny” friend had lived, but I didn’t recognize it. Shortly after her house was the lumber yard and store that my dad had managed. And when we first moved to town my parents and I lived in the apartment above the store. I had a grand playground of warehouses and saw sheds - a creative child’s veritable kingdom for imagination. However, once again my eyes and memories deceived me as the yard, the lumber, the outbuildings were all gone, and the store area and attached warehouse had all been converted into an apartment building. The once glassed store front had been bricked in and doors and windows from a ground level apartment greeted me.
Even the one main crossroad (no four corner stop, or stop light for that matter) had changed. The business’ had all changed, but to my now overwhelmed psyche is was (silly enough) relieved that the Appliance store was still the same old store with the wide cement stairs leading up to the front doors. It reassured me that I had not been dropped into the Twilight Zone.
My next major shock came after we passed through town. We only lived above the store for a year or so, and then my parents purchased an old farmhouse on an acre of land just a ¼ mile south of town. It was and still is the very first house you came to after you left town limits. Again in my mind’s eye I pictured it as I remembered it – huge yard with tall coniferous trees lined on one side and three big tall maple trees lining the driveway on the other side. The house itself had been your usual two story farm house, small rooms with small windows, a closed in porch on the front and at the side. I do distinctly remember its exterior being covered in ugly grey sand stucco with bits of coloured, sharp, broken glass in it. Never liked the stuff. I also had a HUGE weeping willow tree in the back yard that my dad had hung a three foot in diameter swing from. I spent hours out there in the summer.
My jaw dropped as we drove by that day. You could have blind folded me and plunked me down in front of it, and I wouldn’t have believed it was the house I once lived in. Half of the coniferous trees had long since been taken out. There was a 15 foot hedge that grew on two sides of the entire acre, they had once been shorter that me at 11 years of age. And the house!!! The house was now wide white siding, large-ish windows upstairs and huge bay windows upstairs and down. Upstairs where the single bay window is now was once two windows signifying my mom’s bedroom on the right and my bedroom on the left. Since the bay window was all one, I had to assume that they’d knocked down the wall between the two small bedrooms and made a decent size one bedroom (bravo!). And my wonderful giant weeping willow – was gone – as if it had never been. In my hay day in the house it took three friends and myself to link hands to make it around the trunk of the massive old man. I silently mourned the loss of my tree.
But I was also silently mourning the loss of my youth. The reality that life moves on was very powerful. The reality of my childhood memories of how things ‘were’ was being challenged. I hadn’t expected to feel so betrayed. I’m not naïve. I know things in life change, move, evolve, but I really hadn’t expected how I would feel. I actually preferred to remember things as they were. At least some things. The ‘harsher’ memories I alluded to earlier can stay with their dulled demeanor. I have no wish to revisit them.
It was, all in all, a good visit to see it all again. I wouldn’t trade any of it for any price. I did attempt to speak to the people not living in my old farm house, but no one was home. I’m not sure I would have known what to say to them anyway.
All of this has given me pause in thought of every visiting the town I was born in and moved away from at the age of 10. I had thought that it would be fun to show my husband where I spent those single digit years. But I think maybe I’ll just live in the moments that will live forever in my memory and leave it at that.
Harkening back to my holidays in Ontario (I’ve been back a month now), I was visiting scenery and people that I hadn’t seen in 26 years, and hadn’t lived there for some 34 years. That’s a long time for the memory to fade and regrow a new, more romantic version of things. I am thankful for the harsher rememberings to have had their edges dulled with time, but I had not anticipated the realities of physical places to have shrunk. The house was smaller, the yard was smaller, the long and painful walk into town seemed - - bitterly short compared to the ways I remembered any of it. You know “I walked to school every day barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways”.
The first reminder of faulty thinking was as we were closing in on town limits, my girlfriend ask “Do you remember the fort you found and showed me in that crop of trees?”.
The mental picture that I drew in my head at the word “fort” saw a large stand of trees far off in the middle of a farmer’s field. What I saw when I looked in the direction she was indicating was a much smaller group of trees with lots of brush, a child’s mere stone throw away from the road. It did not look familiar.
Once in the town limits my eyes were immediately scanning for familiar buildings – the house where my only “towny” friend had lived, but I didn’t recognize it. Shortly after her house was the lumber yard and store that my dad had managed. And when we first moved to town my parents and I lived in the apartment above the store. I had a grand playground of warehouses and saw sheds - a creative child’s veritable kingdom for imagination. However, once again my eyes and memories deceived me as the yard, the lumber, the outbuildings were all gone, and the store area and attached warehouse had all been converted into an apartment building. The once glassed store front had been bricked in and doors and windows from a ground level apartment greeted me.
Even the one main crossroad (no four corner stop, or stop light for that matter) had changed. The business’ had all changed, but to my now overwhelmed psyche is was (silly enough) relieved that the Appliance store was still the same old store with the wide cement stairs leading up to the front doors. It reassured me that I had not been dropped into the Twilight Zone.
My next major shock came after we passed through town. We only lived above the store for a year or so, and then my parents purchased an old farmhouse on an acre of land just a ¼ mile south of town. It was and still is the very first house you came to after you left town limits. Again in my mind’s eye I pictured it as I remembered it – huge yard with tall coniferous trees lined on one side and three big tall maple trees lining the driveway on the other side. The house itself had been your usual two story farm house, small rooms with small windows, a closed in porch on the front and at the side. I do distinctly remember its exterior being covered in ugly grey sand stucco with bits of coloured, sharp, broken glass in it. Never liked the stuff. I also had a HUGE weeping willow tree in the back yard that my dad had hung a three foot in diameter swing from. I spent hours out there in the summer.
My jaw dropped as we drove by that day. You could have blind folded me and plunked me down in front of it, and I wouldn’t have believed it was the house I once lived in. Half of the coniferous trees had long since been taken out. There was a 15 foot hedge that grew on two sides of the entire acre, they had once been shorter that me at 11 years of age. And the house!!! The house was now wide white siding, large-ish windows upstairs and huge bay windows upstairs and down. Upstairs where the single bay window is now was once two windows signifying my mom’s bedroom on the right and my bedroom on the left. Since the bay window was all one, I had to assume that they’d knocked down the wall between the two small bedrooms and made a decent size one bedroom (bravo!). And my wonderful giant weeping willow – was gone – as if it had never been. In my hay day in the house it took three friends and myself to link hands to make it around the trunk of the massive old man. I silently mourned the loss of my tree.
But I was also silently mourning the loss of my youth. The reality that life moves on was very powerful. The reality of my childhood memories of how things ‘were’ was being challenged. I hadn’t expected to feel so betrayed. I’m not naïve. I know things in life change, move, evolve, but I really hadn’t expected how I would feel. I actually preferred to remember things as they were. At least some things. The ‘harsher’ memories I alluded to earlier can stay with their dulled demeanor. I have no wish to revisit them.
It was, all in all, a good visit to see it all again. I wouldn’t trade any of it for any price. I did attempt to speak to the people not living in my old farm house, but no one was home. I’m not sure I would have known what to say to them anyway.
All of this has given me pause in thought of every visiting the town I was born in and moved away from at the age of 10. I had thought that it would be fun to show my husband where I spent those single digit years. But I think maybe I’ll just live in the moments that will live forever in my memory and leave it at that.
Monday, July 14, 2008
A full Sunday
It started off by me sleeping in until 11:10am, and missing church. Missing church was not an upsetting moment, but sleeping in so late was a bit of a surprise.
Another surprise came a little later. It is a habit that the hubby and I go out for breakfast/lunch after church on Sundays. We get a newspaper and enjoy a good breakfast at a local haunt. Yesterday was no different and we were just finishing our meal I began to look for our waitress to get the bill, but she seemed to be absent. I should also add that we had never seen this waitress before. A few minutes later out of the corner of my eye in a small secluded booth I spied her. She was visibly upset and crying while talking to another co-worker.
I'm not sure what compelled me to do it, but as we got up to depart I went over to her and gave her a hug. She began to apologize, but I shhh'd her and told her that its ok, and whatever was wrong was also going to be ok. She called me a 'Sweetheart', thanked me for the hug and we left.
I thought that the hubby would think my actions odd, but instead he asked why I did it. I explained that she was obviously upset and looked like she needed a good hug. He responded by telling me that me giving her the hug was a very nice thing to do.
Later that evening God gave me a hug, by showing me one of His summer creations - right in our back yard - it was a Doe (female deer) and she had her beautiful set of triplets with her. All three fawns still had their spots, and were completely adorable. Its a shame the little rotters eat my garden.
Sunday was a very blessed full day.
Another surprise came a little later. It is a habit that the hubby and I go out for breakfast/lunch after church on Sundays. We get a newspaper and enjoy a good breakfast at a local haunt. Yesterday was no different and we were just finishing our meal I began to look for our waitress to get the bill, but she seemed to be absent. I should also add that we had never seen this waitress before. A few minutes later out of the corner of my eye in a small secluded booth I spied her. She was visibly upset and crying while talking to another co-worker.
I'm not sure what compelled me to do it, but as we got up to depart I went over to her and gave her a hug. She began to apologize, but I shhh'd her and told her that its ok, and whatever was wrong was also going to be ok. She called me a 'Sweetheart', thanked me for the hug and we left.
I thought that the hubby would think my actions odd, but instead he asked why I did it. I explained that she was obviously upset and looked like she needed a good hug. He responded by telling me that me giving her the hug was a very nice thing to do.
Later that evening God gave me a hug, by showing me one of His summer creations - right in our back yard - it was a Doe (female deer) and she had her beautiful set of triplets with her. All three fawns still had their spots, and were completely adorable. Its a shame the little rotters eat my garden.
Sunday was a very blessed full day.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
I couldn't help myself
This is too cute not to post.
Please enjoy with my compliments.
Stop Motion Spaghetti Cooking - Watch more free videos
Please enjoy with my compliments.
Stop Motion Spaghetti Cooking - Watch more free videos
State of Mind
As I laid in bed last night with the usual babbling brook of thoughts running through my brain, that I had not been "present" when I posted yesterday's .... giggle. For anyone who may wander by this site (and this is a true test to see how many readers I actually have) you might have noticed a small mis-step in my titling and post from yesterday.
Can you see the discrepancy?
Just put it down to a snoozey, summer state of mind.
I promise to be more alert when next I post.
Can you see the discrepancy?
Just put it down to a snoozey, summer state of mind.
I promise to be more alert when next I post.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Down on the farm Part 1.5
Here are some pictures that I thought you might like to see.
I realized as I looked over my pictures that I completely forgot to tell you about "Howard" the 'house' cat. He weighs in at a hefty 22 pounds of purr, and dream of all dreams - he loves to be vacuumed (which he gets once a day).
Here is a new born calf - less than 12 hours old. His knees were still wobbly when I came in to see him. And because he was a "bull" he was just as large as his sisters in the barn who were 6 to 8 weeks of age. I felt sorry for him poor momma, this was her first calf.
And finally, this is "Tugger" one of the many barn cats. I was really trying to figure out a way to fit him in my suitcase and bring him home. He was so loving, and purred like there was no tomorrow. Most barn cats are feral, and not very approachable, but this little guy ..... he was ludicrously affectionate.
That's just a little sumpun'sumpun to tide you over until I find the next slot of time to update.
I realized as I looked over my pictures that I completely forgot to tell you about "Howard" the 'house' cat. He weighs in at a hefty 22 pounds of purr, and dream of all dreams - he loves to be vacuumed (which he gets once a day).
Here is a new born calf - less than 12 hours old. His knees were still wobbly when I came in to see him. And because he was a "bull" he was just as large as his sisters in the barn who were 6 to 8 weeks of age. I felt sorry for him poor momma, this was her first calf.
And finally, this is "Tugger" one of the many barn cats. I was really trying to figure out a way to fit him in my suitcase and bring him home. He was so loving, and purred like there was no tomorrow. Most barn cats are feral, and not very approachable, but this little guy ..... he was ludicrously affectionate.
That's just a little sumpun'sumpun to tide you over until I find the next slot of time to update.
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