30 Months Later...

Well, well, well...  My brother's friendly ex-girlfriend reached out this week and mentioned my blog. Or was it last week? I must admit I'd semi-forgotten about the blog so I took a little peek at my last post and thought: Holy SH**! Things have changed.

Yup, quit my job. Yup, out of my 30s. Yup, had a third kid. I'm more A-Day-In-Flip-Flops now than heels. Damn that Dec 2012 blog post.

Okay, to catch you up:  I quit my job immediately after the 2 week vacation mentioned in the last post. I couldn't get back into the swing of things and it seemed it was time to cut the cord after 15 years. There may have been one or two other little factors swirling around there too, but why waste time on details. I quit and then cried about it for three solid weeks. I'm pretty sure that's not supposed to happen. Fast forward three months, two Disney trips and two Louis Vuitton bags later, and my husband was in a state of sheer panic over our finances (hmm). With no other plan or desire to create one, I started a business. When I say "started a business" I mean doctored up a quick website and printed up some business cards. Oh, and let's not forget the $500 I paid to the state to be a "business." I was already $800 in the hole and had no idea what I was planning to sell or to whom, but as far as my husband was concerned, I was consulting. It was genius. Thankfully karma owed me after 15 years in my last job and wouldn't ya know, the damn business caught on. People told me what I was selling and why and here I am consulting and it's awesome. Except for the whole working-from-the-playroom part, which brings me to the kids.

My kiddos are now 5 and 7. Ouch. Oh yea...and 11 months. Little D is tagging along with us for the ride. Despite what I said in December of 2012, D was not planned and my 40-something year old body is VERY tired, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Aside from the massive food allergies, projectile vomiting, severe eczema and no sleep, he's been great. He's got a head of shiny thick hair that any 40 year old man (and some women) would envy. As my mom says, "He's a doll baby" which I think means he's cute and even tempered. Thank god.

My daughter (5) is another story. I like to think of her as my test from God. And I'm SO failing that test.  My son (7) is 98% kind but the aforementioned female brings out his 2% awful. Let's just say I'm totally trained for my third career: WWE referee.

Now back to me. I put the breaks on my career and started up this business and it's been great...but not as easy as working-from-home-in-yoga-pants might seem. I'm trying the whole work-life-balance thing that all of us real working people know is a load of you-know-what. You're either working or your not...and trying to do both (as I'm doing now) is for the birds. It's a constant battle against the clock that sometimes involves a Hersey bar stuffed into someone's mouth so I can do a conference call. I'm doing the best I can but its not surprising that Botox is in my immediate future. The weirdest moment of my business so far: Having lunch with a potential client and stealing his left over salad and then eating it for dinner. This was an unintentional theft that only a too-old-mother of a kinda-newborn can kinda-get-away-with. Lots of kindas in there. You can imagine the awkward email apology that followed. Heaven help me.

Now on to some recent observations:

• Why is everyone at my local Whole Foods so *&%^$#*& miserable?  It's uncanny how pissed off everyone is in that store. Perhaps the Range Rover is acting up. Maybe they're pissed about the gluten free waffles? I'm only there to feed my non-dairy-soy-wheat-rice-barley child. Perhaps they sense an outsider in their midst? I have half a mind to start a competitor chain where only happy people are allowed. Wait...that's Market Basket, isn't it?  
• I promised myself I'd start eating clean today (the recent experience with a 10-turned-7-day clean diet detox is enough fodder for its own post). But there is a burger on the grill at this very moment and I plan to devour it with reckless abandon as soon its done. Sorry clean eating. Maybe tomorrow.
• My daughter's birthday was in mid-February and I never sent thank you notes. It seems a little desperate to pass them out on the last day of school (tomorrow). I'm thinking I should just embrace the too-busy-for-thank-yous this year and move on with life.  Anyone gossiping about this has already had plenty of time to gossip. There's really no need to inconvenience myself at this point, now is there?
• Crap. Tomorrow is the last day of school.
• I've been married for eight years today. I was sensing a good gift coming my way when I totally blew it and told my husband I wouldn't choose him if I could do it all over again. No idea why I said that. Its not really true (though in some moments it is a clear choice between two fantasies: 1) Having never married him, and 2) Being the star on a 48 Hours episode, so I go with #1). What a jerk to say that out loud. Between comments like that and my outstanding culinary skills, (as evidenced by the photo below of last night's dinner), I'll be lucky to get a bouquet of grocery store carnations tonight. And I call myself a strategist...

Smart Little Mice

I nearly knocked out a woman curling her hair in the ladies room last night. I busted in there around 630pm as if I had an axe to grind with the door, only to find a woman holding a hot curling iron to her head on the other side. I've never seen the woman before and I have no idea what she was primping in my office building at night, but I used to know an old lady who lived in the bathroom of my former office building (pre-911 security), so anything is possible. Oh, and then my boot heel slipped and I wound up in splits on the bathroom floor. Awkward.

My coworker gave me a bottle of wine for the holiday. While I am certain there is a prohibition against drinking listed somewhere in my office's Managers Red Guide, I would most certainly be half in the bag right now if I'd received a corkscrew too. Let this be a lesson to people everywhere: When giving wine as office gifts, be sure to include a cheapo corkscrew. It's just the right thing to do.

That same coworker is kindly circulating a Christmas card for the nice woman who cleans our offices every night. The administrative support staff are mad at this for some unknown reason. Not just mad but hostile. I can't understand why giving a nice lady a Christmas card from the office would tick them off so much. I guess the Grinch really did steal Christmas. Or the office mice.

Speaking of mice, we had a mouse inspection last week and I am pleased to report that there was no evidence of mice in my office. That didn't stop the distribution of stick-on pads with black and white pictures of cheese all over my office floor.  Who exactly is the cheese picture trying to please? Because I'm pretty sure that the mice can't see it from their vantage point. The semi-annual inspection inevitably leads to all sorts of office gossip and speculation about who is responsible for attracting the mice, and this year was no different. The rumor mills have narrowed it down to two individuals: one who is never here but has an emergency junk food stash in their drawer in case the world comes to an end one day, and another who feeds the office home baked goodness all year round and apparently keeps a little stash for them self. I'm quite certain neither of these people are the problem, given that it's unlikely for mouse to smell food 21 floors up. Clearly there is a building-wide issue that we in the penthouse have the luxury of experiencing every now and again.

Maybe I should tell the office gossipers what I think. Hmm.  I always have a bout of brutal honesty around New Years. It's a little bit like Tourette Syndrome. I've been known to call people around this time of year to tell them exactly why I dislike them and then try to make up in time for the New Year. As you can guess, this does not work but I've never been known to give up that easily.  Last week I blurted out loud that it was too hard to speak in a meeting because everyone else was blubbering on so much..while in the meeting. Today I bought a turkey club and found it necessary to tell the new young male cafe teller that it weighed 6 lbs and had bacon on it. He had no idea how to respond. Neither did I. So we starred at each other silently for a moment before I hightailed it back to the elevator. Also today I decided to give my office nemesis a Christmas card with a note about "new beginnings in 2013." She hasn't acknowledged the contents of the note, which may mean she's not ready to start fresh...or that she's just a b**** like I originally assessed. Either way, I'm feeling a little bit like RHOBH Brandi Glanville right now, wishing I could take it all back. It's a damn good thing that I start a 2 week vacation today because its only a matter of time before my honesty sets off a firestorm around the office.

As an aside, I registered my son for kindergarten in the fall. This, on top of my daughter starting preschool in January, is making my eggs hurt. Watch out Husband. I'm coming for #3. Oh...and I'm going to quit my job and become a stay at home mom after giving birth, so you might starting thinking about a second job. Ho. Ho. Ho.

Signs

The telltale sign that it's been too long since I blogged is forgetting the password to this account. Whoops.

Speaking of signs, I've noticed a few things lately that I'm struggling to understand. Call them signs. Call them oddities. Call them too-much-time-on-my-hands. Call them whatever the hell you want, but they are weird.  Here's a short list:

• Middle aged men with braces. Really?
• Glove sneakers. Can it possibly be comfortable to wear those rubber soles between your toes? And what happens when you step on a rock or a shard of broken glass?  I cannot be convinced that technology has advanced to the point of rubber being that strong. I rode the elevator into work this morning with a dude in a suit wearing bright blue glove-sneakers. Head scratcher.
• The FBI, CIA or someone weird following me. I met a guy today that I ran into 3 more times in the course of the subsequent few hours. I left my building for lunch (a completely random occurrence) and followed the same man back and forth on my break, which included a one hour sit down in between. Could this be a coincidence? I think not.
• Strictly cheese dinners. Some lady walked by my office, announced she was going in for surgery tomorrow, and offered to unload her snacks from the work fridge so they don't get bad on her leave. Hmph. I noticed that it's 7:30pm and there is no end in sight for this work day, so why the hell not. Before I knew it there was a pile of cheese on my desk and a few carrot sticks serving as garnish. It took 20 minutes to figure out if I was supposed to eat or not eat the red peel on the Babybel. Not eat. I finally figured it out. Now I'm enjoying some small curd cottage cheese. My stomach is going to be angry tomorrow.
• Texas. I was obsessed with the saying "Don't Mess with Texas" for years. That ended Tuesday when Ca major media outlet said they were #1 for business and we were not. After a bitter pity party, I took to Twitter and wound up second only to Iowa in an online popularity contest. At this moment, I swear I will never say DMwT and smile at the same time again. Not even in my head. And if I have to be behind someone, I'm a little bit okay being behind Iowa. It's a smaller, quieter shadow.
• God damn hackers. I learned tonight that some silly group hacked into Yahoo and now I have to change my password and all sorts of other inconvenient junk. I mean, really. If you want to steal, start somewhere more lucrative than my Yahoo account. People who still use Yahoo - I am slightly relieved to learn I'm not the only one left, BTW - are not the type to have boatloads of offshore accounts full of endless streams of cash. We're old, technologically challenged and too lazy to switch. All this means we're probably broke too. There has got to be some pool of more-likely-to-be-rich-folk on gmail or something. Leave us Yahooians alone. Jesus.

Follow me @ADayinHeels if you actually have an interest in the types of silliness that I share on this blog. Otherwise, you will be waiting until August when I will have time to blog again (at least in theory).

Goodnight!