RevGals Friday Five: Labor Day

From the RevGals:

Here in the USA we are celebrating the last fling of the good ol' summertime. It is Labor Day weekend, and families are camping, playing in the park, swimming, grilling hotdogs in the backyard, visiting amusement parks and zoos and historical sites and outdoor concerts and whatever else they can find to help them extend summer's sun and play just a little bit longer.

It is supposed to also be a celebration of the working man and woman, the backbone of the American economy, the "salt-of-the-earth neices and nephews of Uncle Sam. With apologies to those in other countries, this is a Friday Five about LABOR. All can play. Put down that hammer, that spoon, that rolling pin, that rake, that pen, that commentary, that lexicon, and let's have some fun.

1. Tell us about the worst job you ever had.
I think canvassing door to door for a political group was probably the worst. It so goes against my introverted nature. I don’t like selling anything, even a cause I believe in, and no one wants a canvasser to show up at their door. On the other hand, I worked with some really cool people. So, perhaps the worst job was the time I worked for a researcher at Emory, where I had to dispose of the radioactive waste. I mean, it was low-level and all that, but still.


2. Tell us about the best job you ever had.
I’m not sure it’s happened yet. There are aspects of every job I’ve had that were positive. I worked at Cambridge University Press for a while—that was a connection with a prestigious history and legacy and knew we were publishing some of the best intellects around. On the other hand, the books were pretty boring. Working for a literary agent was kind of glamorous. I met some authors, even some Russian spies (and it’s pretty cool when you answer the phone and it’s Michael Nesmith on the line). But the husband and wife team I worked with were pretty much insane. Working for a Hispanic press introduced me to a culture I didn’t know much about, and the work atmosphere was very relaxed. The head of the press was completely nuts, and the managing editor was chronically late with everything (which is really not what you want in a managing editor). The computer publishing company sounds dull, but there were some very quirky and interesting people there. The educational publisher. Well, maybe that was my worst job. My boss had no ability to feel compassion. Even when Firecracker was in the hospital for a week she expected me to be at work. She never even asked about her. When I had the shingles, she expected me to be at work. So, I guess she was a . Where I work now is pretty cool. It’s not the work I thought I would do, but they have been extraordinarily understanding of my family emergencies, and despite the fact that some of their beliefs don’t sit well with me, I know that they have warm hearts.

Afterthought: Holy cow, I can't believe I forgot about working in Walmart summer of my senior year of high school. Walmart had just moved in, right across from KMart. It was so awful. I was in the fabric department, and I developed conjunctivitis from the dye. We had to take shifts as greeters--no one was used to that then, so they skittered around us suspiciously. Customers left stuff in an unholy mess, and we had to spend hours in the evening "zoning", putting everything back in order, labels facing out. I once had a freaky old man pray for me in the linens section, and there was a biker in automotives who took a shine to me. Whew. I'd never want to do that again.

3. Tell us what you would do if you could do absolutely anything (employment related) with no financial or other restrictions.
I would like to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s kind of ridiculous because I am horrible at creating a viable structure for myself, much less anyone else, but I have this longing to be there when the girls get off school and not having to rush rush rush in the evening. We can’t afford for me to go to part-time, even. Part of me wants to home school, which is probably even more ridiculous, given my chronic disorganization and inattentiveness (not to mention my distaste for the religious tone of most home school communities), but there it is.

4. Did you get a break from labor this summer? If so, what was it and if not, what are you gonna do about it?
Not exactly. I had almost no vacation time, and we moved. But I did take a Friday and head off with the family to Savannah and Tybee Island. Savannah is becoming a favorite place to visit. I’m not sure why. It’s not as if there’s tons to do there, particularly for kids, but we love the waterfront with its cobbled streets and the old, gracious houses.

5. What will change regarding your work as summer morphs into fall? Are you anticipating or dreading?
Fall is easier for me than Spring, when there’s a major conference to prepare for. The pace is pretty steady now. But, someone just retired, and her jobs are temporarily being spread amongst us. And then there’s the hurricane season. If there’s a major disaster, the work here will increase greatly. We also do a lot of projects for Thanksgiving and Christmas, fun stuff for us as well as community work. It’s pretty jolly, but it means the workday is a bit crunched.

Bonus question: For the gals who are mothers, do you have an interesting story about labor and delivery (LOL)? If you are a guy pal, not a mom, or you choose not to answer the above, is there a song, a book, a play, that says "workplace" to you?

Oh, do I ever have a labor story. Firecracker was determined to leave the womb early. It was so unexpected—DramaQueen had been full-term, healthy as could be. We had to go to the hospital twice. The first time the stupid nurse told me it was Braxton Hicks. The next day all hell broke loose when I got to the hospital. The doctors were in a kerfuffle figuring out what to do. They didn’t have the facilities to care for a baby born so early (26 weeks). Soon I was loaded onto a helicopter for transport to another hospital. Things were getting surreal. To this day the sound of helicopters is a little unnerving. They put off labor for as long as possible to give me various meds, but they couldn’t do what they hoped, which was to put it off for weeks. My room was full of hospital personnel for the delivery. I don’t know how they all fit. They warned me that she probably wouldn’t have enough lung power or energy to cry, but she managed it—feisty right from the start. I got to kiss her and she was whisked away to the NICU and oxygen and a heated bed. This was probably the single most frightening experience of my life.

Tiddly Pom

I feel antsy today, unable to settle and concentrate. Nothing that should hold my attention does. I would so much rather be reading a book. Or napping. Or alternating napping and reading. Instead I am staring at emails, staring at my to-do list, working in fits and starts.

I hate being bored. My brain craves stimulation. I want to talk, I want to read, I want to listen to people tell me their stories. I want to bob along in the flow of ideas. Instead I’m plashing in the shallow here, just me and the dead frogs.

I look out my window. It’s hot and humid out there. The sky is dull with moisture. The clouds look sluggish. It’s the right kind of day to be bored. The heat inhibits enthusiasm, movement, vigor. In this weather, everything is itchy, including my mood.

I just stepped outside to see if I could scrounge some change from my car (in the hopes that a coke will bully me into productivity). Do you recall in Harry Potter the image of the Dementers sucking out the souls of their victims? Yeah.

God, I wonder what it would be like to have a work ethic.

And They're Off

That's how it feels as the seasons begins to speed out of the starting gate of Thanksgiving and careen out of control on its way to Christmas. I've been lying low, wondering what to do with myself. We still don't have a date for Firecracker's surgery. I seem to forget things left and right. There's a poem about losing things, but I can't remember who wrote it. I have an enormous fine at the library and I will soon have to slink in sheepishly and pay it off (actually, Dear Husband told me he took care of it, bless his heart). Today we went in search of colored lights on white wire. You would think that would be pretty easy to come by, since trees come in a rainbow of colors these days. Firecracker almost had a meltdown because it looked as if we would have to settle for clear lights on white, which according to her: "That not going to be beautiful." We finally found the blasted lights, at which point Firecracker pointed at a tree with CLEAR lights and said "I like that".

From now until Christmas work is a madhouse. I have to make cookies for two different events, purchase tea for another, and make it to both my girls' school parties and the volunteer project my office signed up for, which of course are on the same blessed day. Oh, and then there's Secret Santa presents to prepare, and my final surgery, which means hauling myself to the hospital for blood work, and then there are at least three other medical appointments and probably more if I were actually keeping up to speed.

And now if I can just fend off the impulse to try for a "perfect" Christmas. I remember the Christmases of my childhood as magical, which given my parents cannot possibly have been the case. Maybe I thought Santa was so great because he had nothing to do with my family and that gave me hope. But still I surround myself with magazines full of picture of perfectly decorated trees and tables, with attractive families trekking across the snowy fields with freshly gathered evergreen branches to put on the mantle. And there are always these suggestions for inventive ways to wrap presents. Good heavens. I was so excited that I can find gift bags and tissue paper at the dollar store that I thought surely we would no longer need to tie red raffia over hand-stamped brown paper, affixing a cookie cutter or wooden spoon, loofah, manicure set, small animal or other item to the package as a sort of lagniappe. Our presents have presents. It's presents all the way down.

I'm off to figure out how to keep the cats out of the tree, since the other day I walked in to find it lying forlornly on its side.

Report on the Conference

This past weekend we attended a regional conference on Tuberous Sclerosis. I have information overload. They did drawings for one-on-one meetings with various specialists, and we were able to snag meetings with Firecracker's surgeon-to-be and a geneticist. The genetics are too complicated to think about. Abby's genetics test came back negative for known mutations on the TS genes, but it seems that you can have the mutation in particular tissues (as opposed to the blood they test) and nowhere else, or there may be mutations they don't know about yet. So her labwork is going off to some research center to be mulled over.

They fed us well at the conference. That's more important than people think. We met many nice people, very few of whom had a child diagnosed so late. Some had children with severe autism and developmental disabilities. I met one person who found out she and her sister had it after their children were diagnosed. Dear Husband joked that he was going to Home Depot to buy a blacklight (to look for the characteristic depigmented spots on the skin). We're all very fair, so it's hard to see if we have hypopigmentation.

That's all for now. I'm tired and very sad about it all. DramaQueen is feeling insecure because Firecracker gets so much attention. I feel too tired to be nice to anyone. Someone at work ticked me off royally and I thought how annoying it is that people think I should give a damn.

On a postive note, the director once again passed along some PASTE cds, and he's promised to hand on a Sufjen Stevens CD. Finally I can find out what all the fuss is about.

Perkier in Some Respects

On Friday last I had the second surgery in the reconstruction process. This was outpatient, so they booted me out the door before my head had stopped wobbling from the anesthetic. I don’t remember much about the rest of the day. I am now rather itchy, and I have to wear this very attractive heavy-duty surgical bra that practically goes up to my neck. This procedure was a walk in the park compared to the last one and I can see that by the time all is done I will look pretty decent. In fact, since they had to modify the left breast a bit to achieve a match, I’ve had a lift gratis. I can stave off the aging droop a bit longer.

Now that I’m through this hurdle, the full realization of Firecracker’s condition is creeping upon me. The very idea of brain surgery makes me feel queasy. And how on earth do we explain this to her without scaring her half to death? Particularly when I myself am pretty scared?

I’ve been wondering why I don’t feel much like shaking my fist at God, and I conclude that my idea of God is so flat and remote that it would be like shouting at a cardboard cutout or talking to a psychoanalyst:
Me: My kid has weird things growing in her brain and who knows where else and this is just one but probably the worst in a long list of catastrophes we’ve had to deal with in the last 8 years.
God: That’s very interesting. How do you feel about that?
Not exactly Abba, huh?

I’m also feeling terribly restless. Reading is how I usually soothe myself—it gives my mind somewhere to go. But I can’t stop in the middle of the work day and open a book. All my work is in aid of church planting. Does North America really need more churches? What should I be doing instead? Don’t know. Have never known. What do I want to do? Stay at home. I think. Maybe.

Day 2 of work and some fanciful rambling about nothing much

I'm going to go take a nap. Really. I'm drinking a big glass of water, which is good for you, and that's the only reason I'm sitting at my computer instead of resting like a good girl.

I finally dug through more email to find that my boss had asked a number of people to review and return stuff to me by yesterday. Thankfully I did find everything, eventually. Except my center. Well, the plastic surgeon did reorganize my mid section. My center may have migrated. It's probably in the wrong chakra now, and that's why I dream about David Krumholtz. Could be worse. Only now to get centered . . . well, never mind.

A little chocolate, and then a nap. Bless the church lady who brought me this ginormous block of Hershey's milk chocolate. And I'll admit that sometimes I snitch my kids' candy. They have tons of the stuff from Easter. Bad Mommy.

Oh Crap

And this was just a half day. I came home and slept until 5pm. I had 500 emails in my inbox. And my pay will be short about $400 because of unpaid leave. Whee. Thank you God for people who want to bring us casseroles, and for our church, who sent us a love offering.

Oh, and the pollen count is sky high and I feel like I have feathers in my throat.

Hi Ho Hi Ho It's Back to Work

So after my super duper revelatory previous post, it's back to the mundane.

I'm going back to work tomorrow. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I'll work half days and then start back full-time next week if all goes well, meaning I don't collapse or something along those lines.

I've discovered something. I like not working. I've always been a working mother type--get out there and have my own career.

But that sucks.

And I don't really have a career. I have a job I stumbled into that luckily is decent and has decent people. I'll be very very busy and rather bored at the same time. I'm bored because there is a constant bombardment of email every day. We have response time rules--within an hour for the Powers that Be, shorter if possible, and within a day for outsiders. That means that at all times I have to interrupt my work to scan for A Really Urgent Matter that Takes Precedence.

Then I'll rush off to daycare and pick up my kids. I will have maybe two and a half hours to spend with them getting them fed, checking homework, getting them read to, bathed, and to bed. If I take the time to go to the gym, I'll have less than an hour (not that the gym is in my future for a few months). In the morning I'll have to move them along like a dictator to get them to daycare on time. By the weekend I'm tired and limp while they have boundless energy.

What can I say? My income is higher than Dear Husband's. He's staying at a job he doesn't like for the free tuition. Then he wants to go to nursing school. Last month I think we paid nearly $300 in prescription medicines alone. This month there will be at least $300 in visits to specialists.

On a positive note, you may remember in a previous post that I complained about DramaQueen's teacher. Well he has mysteriously vanished (been removed or removed himself, the principal can't say for reasons of confidentiality--meaning so no one can sue the school) and someone else is taking over. I told her some of my concerns (SNL skit sneaking into educational video, weird and humiliating nicknames for the kids) and she told me to put it in writing. I really did like him, but after Christmas he seemed to go off his rocker.