Month of the Red X

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My husband has a habit of putting a red x on the calendar every time I am “wrong”.  It does not happen much, but when it does, he is elated.  His biggest triumph was July 2014.  That month had a sea of red check marks.  Check this out.

We wanted to start out with a nice BBQ with friends, but we underestimated the enthusiasm for parades in Minnesota.  1 hour and 45 minutes and 3 detours all because I wanted to take the shortcut instead of the long way around, and forgot that the city streets where my friends live are all tore up for construction season.  Holy circuit breaker, Batman, I was ready to blow a fuse.  Going back home later that night, I took the long way and got back in 20 minutes.  Getting too old for that nonsense.

Then we had an incident with our foster kid.  He is a good kid and I love him dearly, it’s just he is a storyteller. And when he told me about an incident that happened at his job, I did not totally believe it.  So, I test his voracity by having him tell his dad what happened.  His dad chews me out for not calling the police.  Then I ask him to tell his supervisor what happened.  And he is telling the same story and naming names.  I just went in to tell the supervisor to let DK work inside if the creep shows up again.  Instead I get chewed out by the supervisor for not calling the police.  Dang, that was surreal. Every other time, I am the one chewing out the wannabe hero for not calling police and I go and not do the very same thing I tell everybody else to do.  Swear I had the word stupid tattooed on my forehead that weekend.

So, I was almost wishing for the weekend to be over.  The workplace would be so much more sane, right?  Wrong!  Before he left on his long weekend, the boss left a message for the landlord that the closet door would not open.  My boss was thinking, fix it.  Instead, the landlord had a fit and I mean FIT.  He was so mad, he started hauling files and boxes out of the offices and stacking them in the carport.  It looked like we were being evicted, but it turns out that he just wanted the placed cleaned up – by cleaned up, I mean one file cabinet, one desk, one computer per room.  Since there was more than that in each room, and since no law firm works like that, and since the landlord was pumped up on adrenalin, he started throwing everything out by himself.  I was between a rock and a hard spot.  I had my boss and the landlord venting their frustrations on me and all I could do was listen and “get it”.  I have a solution to pare down the files by giving them back to the clients.  But you can’t make people change if they don’t want to.  So this will get shoved in the “would be nice” file like all my other brilliant ideas.

So at the end of the day that Monday after the long holiday, I was leaving work and hear the tell tale signs of a massive thunder storm moving in.  Wind, heavy rain, thunder and lightening.  Farm girl, so I knew a storm’s abrewing.  Anyway, those two nuts had moved the extra file cabinets and boxes to the carport which is exposed on 3 sides.  Right before the raindrops hit, I made an off-hand remark that it was too bad he did not have a tarp to put over the boxes because they would soon be soaked.  He surprised me and had a tarp, and was surprisingly clever by putting paver bricks on the stacks so that the tarps would not blow away. 

I half expected that by the time I got to work the next morning, that the stacks would have fallen over with paper flying all over the neighborhood.  But they were okay.  I hope there is nothing in there that will get us in trouble if ne’er-do-wells just have to see what’s in the boxes. 

So for the rest of that week, the boss man was getting ready to go out of town again and everything had to be done right now.  I was prepared to cull files and try to find space where there is none.

Thankfully over the next several days, the excess stuff had been moved off site, and the file cabinets were moved around.  Every spare chance I got, I put stuff in the cabinets, and came back a couple hours later to find the cabinet emptied again.  It was an endless circle of getting nowhere fast. 

About the time that things were calming down with the landlord, then comes a major client needing real help real fast.  So lots of extended hours.  Then it happened.  I found something new to be thankful for.  I am thankful that I can still project my voice when needed which is a hard thing to do with a severed vocal cord.  On Wednesday of Week 3, a little mouse came scurrying out of its corner, stood in the middle of the room, and I screamed...like a girl....yes, I did.    I think I scared it because it then scurried back to where it came from.  I was left with my heart racing, breathless and embarrassed.  My boss came bounding out of his office to try to track down the critter because I was NOT moving, but could not find it....Oy vei

I knew that mouse would surface again.  And it did the following Sunday.  This time I was in the copy room and heard a noise to my right.  I looked over and there it was being bold and daring.  And I screamed again.  Like a girl.  Again.  The boss came running.  Again.  He asked if he could do anything and I had no problem saying:  “Kill it.  Get a gun and shoot it!”  He did not want to do that.  Instead he put out one of those useless live traps.  He surprised me again.  I saw two mice and three were evicted.  Yahoo!

And I know that if anything like that month happens again, my next residence will be the moon.