49ers

And I’m not talking football.


Although, there was this really big game that happens at the end of the season. It’s the Great Bowl. No, the Fantastic Bowl. No, the Roman Numeral Bowl. No, the Super Bowl (duh duh duh dun). And I like football. Yet, I did not care at all about who won or lost. The one QB is married to a fricken super model and the other one comes from a seemingly nice family of football players. And I still didn’t really care.

I went to a party, discovered I am a terribly picky eater who doesn’t like football food, watched most of the game, did a Sudoku and a crossword puzzle, watched the commercials and half-time showstravaganza, came home, and had cereal. I don’t care for brats and wings. In my defense, had there been chili, I would have been all over that. I had some bean salad, guacamole, and positioned myself near the cheese tray.

My in-laws celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. Congrats to them. I don’t know whether I will live long enough to see my own 40th, but it’s only 30 years from now. We took the whole family (all of their progeny) out for dinner to celebrate their milestone. All 4.78 of their grandsons were there (our 2.78 boys plus the two boy cousins).   The kids behaved at the fancy restaurant, but we came home for dessert (ice cream cake!) to keep our in-restaurant time down.

Speaking of my 0.78 boy, he’s actually 0.8735 of a kid now. I’m about 33.5 weeks. At my last routine ob appointment, I had only gained a pound in the previous 3 weeks. Considering the baby put on about a pound in that time, I felt pretty good about that. While at the ob, I also confirmed that I do not need to sign any papers in advance to get my tubes tied while they are in there performing their baby-ectomy. It seems awfully permanent, but since we don’t want any more kids and I have yet to find a birth control method that I like for nursing, it’s a go. (For the record, there are several forms of birth control that I LOVE while not nursing.)

I received a gift for Christmas, but I hadn’t felt good enough to use it until last weekend. I went to the spa and received a pre-natal massage. If you ever find yourself knocked up, I highly recommend it. They have a special insert for the table with a hole in it so you can lay on your stomach while they massage your (very tired) back. I would pay good money just to lay on their table let alone have someone massage me. One small problem: I could not figure out how to get up when it was done. I really needed to push myself up on my arms and yet there was no where to put my hands. Eventually, I figured it out and escaped.

I have a variety of mild peculiarities. You could call them little minor OCD things, except they’re so minor, they’re more like quirks.

If you were to overlay my footpath every day from the time I enter the factory on the access road until I sit at my desk, it would be the exact same number of steps and route every single day. I park in the same spot, remove my lunch, purse, and laptop from the car using the same hands in the same way every day, enter the building through the same door, take the same path to my desk, put the computer in the docking station, lay my coat on the chair, grab my tea cup and tea bag (and swish it in the 7/8 hot water the same number of times, then fill it 1/8 of the way with cold water to get the perfect temperature), every day.

I am similarly ritualistic with other aspects of my day. I have had my maternity leave fill-in here as trainee for the last few weeks trying to learn my job. He is throwing me all off of my rhythm. He unstapled papers that I had stapled (at a perfect 45-degree angle, mind you). He did not remove the staple. He just ripped them apart. He does not print documents 2 pages per sheet, double sided. I’m so unmoored listing in the rough waters of person invading my space.

And I realize that my quirks are a little…obsessive. It just bothers me so much when he messes my things up (and I have to come back to this when I return). I mean, I staple things so that they stay together when I put them in my awesome filing system. Do not mess with the filing system. The filing system is the reason if you ask me what happened on August 3rd, I can tell you within a few minutes. Also, I never delete an email with any information in it. I have an elaborate filing system and am just a wee bit neurotic about flushing my inbox. In fact, I only have 282 items in my inbox right now. Considering that I receive in excess of 300 emails per day at work, I would say that’s not too bad. Trainee guy doesn’t save email, doesn’t have any personal folders or rules to handle email. Honestly, I have no idea how he survives. He watched me answer a few questions wherein I went to my 2009 email folder, subfolder corporate policies, and pulled out an edict and answered a question. He was awed. I was ticked that he didn’t see the value in saving and filing things. For the future. So you don’t actually have to remember anything other than I heard about that once back in March of 2009.

Speaking of my quirks…I might as well lay it out there. I’m a rigid person who likes to have a way to handle her life. The illusion of control is comforting. I try to keep the skin on an orange in one piece when I peel it. I succeed about 1/3 of the time. On clementines, it’s closer to 90%.

I also have a weird thing about the visualization of time. I imagine the year as a wheel…almost like a clock. The new year is at the 6 o’clock position (and is very dark), July 1st is at 12 o’clock (and is bright white or yellow). A lot of times when someone is asking a question, I remember that we last discussed this around the 10 o’clock position (forward and to the left) and getting lighter, so I can then go and find the file or email pertaining to this with the items from perhaps early May. I rarely remember what we said, but I can usually find my notes within a 2 week time period of when I remember discussing it. This might be some kind of synesthesia, but it’s not any kind of hindrance and probably makes me the life of the party. I just looked synesthesia up on Wikipedia for the first-time ever. Apparently, clock-face based associations are very common. So, very common. Not special at all.

In other news, Mr. Long-Suffering and I went to a professional society meeting last night. We work in the same industry but in different specialties. Let’s say we both worked in a hospital but one of us was in food service and the other in custodial. We would both work in health care but our professional societies would be different. We went to his society and heard a moving lecture on monetary policy. The laugh line of the night was a potshot at Illinois and its propensity for raising taxes without doing anything to control its spending. If you are not aware, Illinois is practically California or Italy (not as bad as Greece – yet). My college minor was actually in economics, and there was a slight political slant to the presentation, which happened to match pretty well with my politics, so overall, I enjoyed myself greatly. The speech was objectively very good as well. In fact, a banquet hall full of 300+ factory workers gave a standing ovation to a speech on monetary policy. That’s how you know it was a good talk. If the guy giving the speech wanted to run for elected office, he’d have a decent start to a stump speech. And his powerpoint slides were not too busy and the font was (for the most part) large enough to be seen in the cheap seats. I recapped the speech at work today and people were actually disappointed that they had not gone.

We arrived home from the meeting around 9:30 to lightly falling snow. And a still-awake Bobo. I gave him some time to see whether he was going to fall asleep, but eventually, I went and checked on him. “I’m huhn-gurry and I need to go potty.” So, that’s how I was exhausted, dressed up, and feeding Bobo string cheese and strawberries at 10:30 last night. Fortunately, despite years of early sleep troubles, Chuckles is able to sleep through all of this Bobo night-waking, new bed, new room shenanigans.

I just ate a Clementine. And I won when I peeled it! SarcastiCarrie is winning at life!

Oh, and the 49ers reference is a nod to the number of days until my due date when I went for my massage and someone asked my how much longer…49 days!