Work

Today, for the first time in six years, one month and seven days, I left the house to go to work. Pretty zany, huh? I brushed my hair, put on shiny shoes and mascara and teetered out the door at O'dark thirty with a briefcase. Aren't I such a FANCYPANTS?!?!?!?!?!? I felt all smart and PROFESSIONAL, and it was FANTASTIC!

Well, until I got there. I will actually be working in a smallish office very near my house, but had to go into the main office first to fill out reams of paperwork, get my equipment issued and attend a Senior Staff meeting to meet all the muckety-mucks. I'll just skip the part about how the phone box to get through to security to get through the gate is like one of those japanese puzzle boxes with no visible means of opening it and the security guards laughed at me, shall I?

After I finally weaseled my way into the place, which is literally a huge maze-like bunker two floors deep, I was presented with a pile of paper taller than my head and a ratty ballpoint made by blind people in Wisconsin. Or somewhere like that; how the hell would they know?

Then it was time for the meeting. A little backstory might come in handy here: you might recall my recent involuntary diet, during which I dropped a significant bit of weight. This, as you might guess, caused me a significant pants problem, as in, I had none that I could wear, so for the past two weeks I have been frantically shopping for office-appropriate legwear. Desperation does not make shopping fun, friends. Finally, just this past weekend, I cobbled together some suitable attire, or so I thought. Really, you should test drive new office clothes, but pressed for time, I went with the new pants. Which are FINE, don't get me wrong, but they have one of those flat metal tab things that slides into a little catch for a fastener. This is not a secure arrangement, as it can just slide right back out, so there is also a button on the inside. Not being a fan of extraneous fastenings, I went commando on the button and paid the ultimate price while making my way to the cluster of bosspeople. Too bad I wasn't in the pen factory. Note to self: no such thing as extraneous fastenings.

After that smashingly successful meet and greet, I gathered up my equipment, including a mobile device that I'm pretty sure could simultaneously program a missile guidance system and break the Vernam Cipher. Naturally, I can't even turn it on, but I cannot possibly admit this, and am therefore now forced to capitulate and learn to.... do whatever the hell that stupid thing does. I went to the smaller office where I will be working, and got my cube. It's nice and clean, or WAS, until I spilled tea all over my desk. Normally, I would have SOMETHING to sop up spills in my office- gym clothes, paper towels, kleenex, SOMETHING, but since I had just moved in, I had nothing. Nada. Zip. Now that I'm sitting here after the fact with some wine, I realize I should have used the fancy contraption because that totally would have solved two problems at once, but since I wasn't thinking clearly, I wiped it up with my ivory colored coat. It wasn't especially absorbent, and so I just sat on the desk and squirmed around in the offending pants to soak up the excess, and to teach them a lesson. After all, I didn't want to make my new cubicle neighbors think I was WEIRD because I spilled tea, right?

With that accomplished, I set out to send emails to all my friends, find the coffee pot, and do all the other REALLY important stuff. It was going great, until I started smelling something very, very foul in my cube. I sniffed around like some demented little dog until I figured out that it was the floor. I think it's rotten tuna fish juice, and it was fine until I started spilling tea on it and rolling my chair around and walking on it. Lucky for me, I was assigned an office 'sponsor' whose duty it is to help me out. This poor sucker had no clue what he was in for, but he gamely helped me spritz the floor with some carpet cleaner and scrub it with paper towels. Then we started questioning all the folks in the cuberhood about who was there before me and what the stench might be. A little information was gleaned: the previous occupant might or might not have been named 'Don' and he may have left a few months ago to work for the state, but no one knows why. It's BECAUSE OF THE SMELL, fools!

So that's the day one report. I'll keep you posted, but right now I have to find my febreeze, and some super glue for my pants.

The Mother of All Diets

I just thought I'd start off my Mother Loss Chronicles (MLC) with a look at the bright side. I've always been a half a loaf kind of girl, and this ML whole business is pretty dreary. I don't want to skeeve you out or anything. To catch you up if you're a little unclear on what is going on here, my mother has recently died from lymphoma. And, just so you know, if I seem to be just a little, ummmm, flippant, rest assured that my mother always thought I was HILARIOUS. Well, maybe that wouldn't be her EXACT word. A more direct quote might be, 'You are just too, too much', or 'Very funny', but I'm sure hilarious is what she meant. And since she's dead, well, what I say goes (just another fantastic little side bennie!).

And what I say is that the MOAD is by far the most effective one I've ever seen. Forget South Beach, Atkins, Weight Watchers, that stupid cabbage soup thing or whatever else you've tried. No lie, people, it's effortless. Here, let me show you what I mean:

6 a.m. Wake up with raging headache from extra wine

6:15-8 a.m. Drink pot of extra strong coffee; eat some tylenol, rhodiola and St. John's Wort

9 -11:30 a.m. Raging stomach ache

Noon Drink small glass of milk or ingest a small amount of some non-objectionable food, if available

2 p.m. Force down a lump of food to stave off increasing faintness and hostility

6 p.m. Another food lump

7:30-11:30 p.m. Drink wine while listening to mournful Uncle Kracker tunes and perusing grief websites to learn how bad it's REALLY going to get

Repeat.

See? Simple, yet effective. AWESOME, though I can't really whole-heartedly recommend it. After only 10 days I've had to put my fat pants away. A few more weeks of this oozing, sucking morass of agony and I'll be in territory I haven't seen since the mid-80's, when I could have rocked a leopard print bikini with reckless abandon, but didn't because I thought my butt was too fat. Stupid, I know; just look at Kim Kardashian. I won't make THAT mistake again, and you can take that to the bank. Normally, of course, this would be cause for great celebration, because then I would have to go thrifting for new pants. Sadly, however, I seem to have lost my taste for just about everything, including the thrift store. Damn you, MOAD!