Today was the mandatory quarterly meeting at work. The one where they make us go in at 7am on a Sunday and sit for two hours to listen to stuff that damned well could have been gone over in an email. As an extra-special bonus this time, a good hour’s worth of today’s meeting was having one of the muckety-mucks bitch at us about how bad our call metrics are and how we have to shape up because it makes her look bad. Y’know, if they would FIRE some of the drama-llamas and the constant chit-chatters, I bet the stats would look a whole lot better pretty darned quick.

But not my problem. So, this week was less than spiffy, mainly due to a digestive virus that kept me out of work for 2 days, several migraines (including both yesterday and today — still have the one that hit me today), having to work up at the hilltop site, finding at least one spot of cat barf somewhere in my house daily, and sucktastic news of the financial sort (above and beyond my bank that I’ve been with for 15 years being bought out by another bank, of which I know nothing). Also, all of the DVDs I got from Netflix recently were atrocious…at this point, I think I may have hit the bottom of the barrel in their documentary category.

At least my dragons are doing well. And I am crocheting like mad, and enjoying that — at least when Hasani remembers the very important lesson: “The yarn is Mommy’s toy, NOT the kitty’s toy.” To those who say cats can’t be trained, let me assure them that my other two (smarter) cats don’t EVER mess with yarn — and it took no more deterrent than angry scolding to teach them.

However, they still haven’t learned to yarp on the easier-to-clean floor instead of the carpets. *sigh*

Normally I don’t bitch much (unless I’m sick; then all bets are off), but today was a term commonly abbreviated as CF. Here’s how my day went:

2am(?): Sometime in the very early Ay-Em, anyway. I awoke, for the first of several times over the next few hours, to my guts very painfully attempting to churn themselves inside out and backwards.
5am: While spending another session of gut-wrenching misery in the bathroom, I hear my alarm clocks go off. All three of them. So I have to listen to them for several minutes, wondering if they’re going to wake up Geoffrey, until my intestines give me the go-ahead to dash upstairs and shut them off.
5:20am: I take Lyse’s advice and call in sick, though I am tempted to take a ton of Immodium and head in to work anyway.
6am: I thank Lyse for her advice after spending another several minutes of discomfort in the loo, at a time that I normally would have been in transit to work. What a disaster that would have been!
9am: Exhaustion forces me back to bed, despite my still-upset tummy. I’m freezing cold and feel like I have the flu as I fall asleep.
11:30am: I wake up, having gotten a miraculous two hours of uninterrupted sleep. Still feel like I have the flu. I text-message my kids & Dustin to ask if they’ve had the same kind of problems.
Noon: I get a phone call from Geoffrey that some goram bastard has stolen the license plate off my scooter, which I had left parked in the driveway instead of inside the garage. They even took the bolts & nuts. The kids all tell me their tummies have been fine, which rules out food poisoning as the culprit, since we all ate exactly the same stuff on Sunday.
2pm: The youngest text-messages me that her back is spasmed up completely. I ask her to tough it out for the last hour of school, and we already have a doctor’s appointment set up for tomorrow afternoon.
3pm: A baby migraine starts brewing. I make a mad dash for Starbucks, and obtain enough caffeine to keep it down to a low roar. I’m still exhausted enough that I want to nap, despite 4 shots of espresso, but I stay awake and fold laundry because I don’t want to completely wreck my sleep schedule. (I did get a lot of laundry done. Sadly, this is the best news I have all day.)
7pm: I make dinner, an easy tuna & pasta dish because it only takes 10 minutes to make and my gut is still churning. Besides, say what you will about tuna casserole, it’s comfort food.
7:30pm: My tummy has quieted enough that I decide to make cinnamon rolls. However, I forget to set the oven timer and they BURN. No tasty pastry treats for me.

I hope Geoffrey & Lyse are enjoying their Cthulhu movie night. I’m going to take some more Immodium and hope I can go to work in the morning.

Can you solve this puzzle?

You are riding on a beautiful white horse.
On your left side is a drop off.
On your right side are several ostriches being chased by a lion.
In front of you are four large gazelles that won’t get out of your way and you can’t seem to overtake them.
Behind you is a stampede of horses.
What must you do to get out of this highly dangerous situation?!

To see the answer, click:
And now for something completely TMI…

The Goddess from Down Under has shown Geoffrey the funniest thing since I Can Has Cheezeburger:

The LOLcat Bible Translation Project

I. Am. Awestruck.

I can has hardcopiez pls?

On a less sacrilegious note (and can someone tell me why the first “i” and “e” in “religious” are swapped out in “sacrilegious”?! — this seriously bothers me), I’ve been having Entirely Too Much Fun with my dragons!!! I almost can’t believe it’s been a month since I started my DragCave account. Leave a nice comment and maybe I’ll name a dragon after you.

My “baby” turns 16 today. She’s not having the best week, but hopefully the presents and love from her family and friends will brighten her day a bit.

And now for something completely TMI…

Geoffrey is enjoying his stay in Costa Rica tremendously! He discovered the hotel they (he and his mom) are staying at has complimentary Internet access, so he’s written me 2 emails since he arrived there late Friday. Some of the excerpts from Sunday’s email:

I am on the Caribbean coast right now. I´ve seen more wildlife than you could shake a stick at, and a good chunk of them are lizards. The house geckos here are so terribly cute, I wish we had them in our house. And just to set your mind at rest, no, I have not yet managed to track down the poisonous snakes. Tomorrow, I will be getting up at about four thirty am (3:30 your time) to hopefully see baby green turtles make their run to the ocean. It sounds pretty brutal, but the howler monkeys do their thing at about that time anyway, so waking at that ungodly hour is not as difficult as you would expect back home.

All I can say is: howler monkeys. Howler fraking monkeys.

The email he sent about his adventures today was pretty neat, too. Here’s some of it:

I am currently up in the cloud forest which means lots of fog and relatively cooler temperature. It’s almost like I’m used to in the Pacific Northwest since we have our own type of rainforest, however, Costa Rica was quick to show me how tropical it truly is here. The drive up we disturbed a fairly large spiny-tailed iguana who was basking on the roadway. And then as we were getting settled into our room, I spotted a small family of white face monkeys and flock of mealy parrots. I am totally getting my biology geek groove on…I will treasure the memory of sitting at the bar looking out over the darkening river and having an American crocodile slowly swimming by about three yards away from where I was sitting.

Crocodiles! And howler fraking monkeys, I say! *twitch, twitch*

…boarded another boat for the ride to the Baro Colorado airstrip about twenty kilometers away, give or take a few due to the twisty nature of the river. We did get to see a variety of toucan we hadn’t gotten to yet on the way. The airstrip was about what you might expect, a single stretch of pavement cut out of the vegetation with a few houses and buildings nearby. We watched another plane leave and I harassed a small little lizard for a few minutes while we waited for our plane to arrive. It was even smaller than the one we saw leave ahead of us. I’ll have to show you the picture when I get home. My mother rode in the rear section, but I was given the opportunity to sit in the co-pilot seat. Like hell was I going to miss out on that. So not only did I get to wear a four-point restraint, but I had a flight stick and pedals right in front of me. The flight was awesome! Take-off is totally wild when you’re only a couple feet off the ground and can see the trees rapidly approaching through the windscreen and prop.

At that, I had to stop and throttle down my over-active imagination, because that sort of description usually ends in my mind’s eye with fiery crashes and a smear of red on the rainforest floor. *shudder*

Friday night can’t come soon enough for me, so I can have my beloved back in my arms. Minus howler monkeys.

I am now the proud owner of 20 ounces of custom-made yarn, thanks to the awesomeness that is Yarnia!

Michiko checks out the yarn…

It’s 4 strands (3 black & 1 purple), and a ratio of 50% silk, 25% linen, and 25% rayon. I’m going to make myself an openwork sweater (the kind you wear with a tank top underneath, since the whole point of the sweater is to show off the design and stitches). I lurve my new yarn very much!

In other news, Geoffrey left for Costa Rica on Thursday morning, and is probably enjoying the rainforest as I type. He won’t be back until next Friday evening, and I already miss him. I will be crocheting my butt off during the next week, I can tell.

I’ll have to miss the 2008 Fall Knit & Crochet Show happening next weekend at the Oregon Convention Center, though. It looks really neat, but I don’t want to spend any more money on crochet stuff for a while!

I made the mistake of reading the news today. Since Governor Palin announced that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, it seems that everyone wants to use that news to promote their own agenda. The only non-hypocritical views I’ve seen have been from conservative commentators. LawDog had some terrific words of wisdom to offer (and some really interesting info, to boot), and I agree with his view on this topic.

As for what people are saying about Governor Palin choosing to run for high office while also having the responsibilities of being the mother of 5 (including an infant with Down’s Syndrome), or about her daughter’s pregnancy, IT IS NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS. And everyone should SHUT THE HELL UP.

Those who call themselves “pro-choice” need to keep in mind that choice doesn’t end when a pregnancy does (whether through abortion or birth). The non-abusive choices involved in parenting a child — whether the parent involved is Sarah Palin, or Bristol Palin, or me, or anybody else — are NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.

Don’t like abortion? Fine, don’t have one. Don’t like someone’s parenting choices? Fine, make different ones with your own kids. But before you make a proclamation of right or wrong on another’s parental decisions, you’d better have a pretty impressive set of credentials to base that upon. And last time I checked, nobody was a perfect parent.