Gardens

I happened to drive past a gas station on the way home for lunch today that had some Azaleas for sale in buckets out in front of the station. $1.75 for a 1-gallon bucket with plants that had no blooms, or $5 for a 3-gallon bucket that had a larger plant that had blooms on it. Is that a good price? I have no idea. Like a man, I just buy the crap. I figure it blooms and smells purty and will make the Missus happier than if I buy myself a digital SLR, which is actually what I want to do but don't have the money for.

I stopped and got Mrs. Wiggy a couple of the 3-gallon variety. They're on the front porch right now, waiting for me to dig a hole wherever Mrs. Wiggy might like and shove these things in it. That's what we husbands do, because we love our wives. Azaleas? Hey, flowers is flowers. Gimme a break.

So my boss was giving me a hard time yesterday at work. He says I am always forgetting things, others have noticed, he wonders if there is a problem with my memory that I need to get some help with. I am thinking to myself - no - the problem is that I don't do things I don't really want to do. Which is a problem, I'll admit, but only because he eventually remembers that he asked me to do it and that I said I would, and of course, I haven't. If he'd just forget he asked me, life would be fine.

Anyway, I'm feeling kinda low over being raked over the coals - remarks were made about my permanent record and that never leaves me wearing a huge happy hat. When I get low like that, I tend to get ascerbic, and issue forth sarcastic, black-humor statements that I think are funny as hell, but which tend to get me in even more trouble. And of course, that's what happened. So I'm making smart-ass remarks off the cuff, and he's making those little faire la moue faces that look strange on his German face. He should know about being depressed, for God's sake. He has to be him alles time.

So now he's asking me if I need to see a doctor to like 'talk' about my depression or if there is some problem he can help me with, and I'm thinking...yeah. You wanna help me? Let's bring in a couple gallons of blue paint to work and start painting ever thang. Ever thang, ever buddy, just paint, paint, paint. What a riot that would be, until they dropped a net on us. But he won't go for that, I can just tell. He's that type.

And my coworker, who has been talking non-stop about his upcoming cruise to Alaska? he finally went today. Gone. Two weeks. Whoohoo! Except I still have the gum-popper on the other side of my cube. He's driving me freaking nuts. Pop. Pop. Pop. I'm going to fill his desk drawers with horseshit some weekend, just for fun. There's a lot of it around here.

And I'm doing some command-line stuff in Perl and it's driving me a bit nutty too. So that doesn't help. I've sent off a question to the tech support group of the tool vender (whose tool I'm trying to control in Perl) and I know that a) I won't get a response for a few days. b) Then I'll get a response on my voice-mail, left in the middle of the night, from India, and which I completely will NOT be able to understand. Then finally, I'll get a call during the day, but I won't be able to understand HIM much either, and when I do struggle through that, it will turn out he knows less about the tool than I do. So I'll have to escalate, and then in a week or so, I'll be told that it's a bug and they have reported it and go away now please. So I have THAT to look forward to.

So one of my other coworkers asked me what color Azaleas I bought. I HAVE NO IDEA. I'm color-blind. Really. They're flowers, ok?

Now I have to get back to work. And pretend like I like it. I guess that's the part I hate. I'm ok with hating my job. I never used to have a job I hated, but I do now, and it's kinda cool - I've been so lucky over the years to have jobs I loved, this is strange. And I'm ok with hating it. But my bosses are not. They want me to like my job. And not just paste a "OK, OK, I really like it - NOT!" face on my puss. No, they want a REAL "I love it" face. Which apparently, I don't know how to make.

And now I have two buckets of Azaleas to practice my faire la moue upon. I hope they don't mind that I'm faking it.

Peace Out,

Wiggy