Regarding this, first, yay! Ikea's building in New Haven! And then, no, boo! Ikea wants to tear down the better part of an architectural landmark for, of all things, the parking lot. I Googled, but wasn't able to find the outcome of the controversy.
I have a spherical glass paperweight, the kind with the glass detritus suspended inside, a nature-store give-it-to-anybody sort of gift. I bought the paperweight two years ago, intending to give it to my boss. I had taken some flack from my co-workers for buying gifts in previous years, so that year I baked lots of cookies and made little cookie bags for anyone who had done something nice for me. I wrote little notes thanking each person for whatever specific kindness they had bestowed upon me, like helping me replace the toner in the copier, scraping ice from my windshield one night when they left before I did, bringing me a cake made out of flowers for my birthday, whatever. I was then overwhelmed by the feeling that my coworkers perhaps meant less intimacy by these gestures than I was acknowledging, and that made me throw the little heartfelt notes away, but I gave out the cookie bags anyway.
I bought the paperweight because once you've given your boss a gift, you can't really not give a gift in the subsequent years. Well, I suppose you could, especially if you and your boss had some disagreements in the intermediate year, if your boss wasn't Christian and didn't celebrate the holidays anyway, or if you weren't planning to be in the office on the days before Christmas. Each of these things was true for me, and yet, in the Christmas spirit, I figured I'd better get him something anyway because I knew he would casually drop onto my desk a gift card that his (nouveau-Jewish) wife would insist he bestow upon his employees.
As it turned out, the day I lugged the cookies and the paperweight into work for distribution, my boss was out because the boat he was building had suffered some kind of tragic ding. That was my last scheduled day of working before my vacation began, and so I took the paperweight back home. The week off made me forget about bringing the gift into work after the new year, and so it sat on a shelf, wrapped, for months. Sometime around March I noticed the gold box and decided to deliver the gift in order to gain some mid-year brownie points. I think I was due for a performance review, anyway.
I carried the box into work and left it on my desk. The first time I saw my boss that day was in a meeting, where he belittled me for something stupid. I can't even remember what bothered me so thoroughly, but after the meeting, I marched myself back to my office, closed the door, liberated the gift of its wrapping (and thereby its very giftitude), and placed the paperweight in a prominent location on my desk. I received several comments of admiration for the paperweight, and whenever anyone would ask where it came from, I just explained that it had always been there.
I just unpacked the paperweight again recently, and gave it a prominent position on the megashelves. Each time I notice it there, I smile a little. I left that job and that boss over eight months ago, and I still cringe when I think of his ridiculous anklebiter management technique. This year I baked no cookies, wrote no little notes of gratitude, and certainly didn't shop for an insincere gift for someone for whom I was rapidly losing admiration, and who never really liked me anyway. I've never not given a better holiday gift than that paperweight.
That was the diagnosis after 8 hours in the emergency room. I took 3 bags of NaCl, something for nausea, and 8 mg of Morphine, and then came home and puked some more. Happy holidays, kids. I'm going to take a few days off to recover.
I just spent 30 bucks to have a woman named Suitlana wax my eyebrows. Three weeks ago I abandoned plucking for the first time in over six months, and she yelled at me, and my forehead is now all blotchy. It was worth every penny.
In addition to finishing my Christmas holiday shopping, baking cookies, making candy, making little candy-filled ornament thingies, writing Christmas holiday cards, and generally getting it on with the festive moodiness this week, I'll be guest-hosting for a few days over at Ismat's site, The Text Obscured, along with he of the flippy hair, the inimitable Jason Royal and the object of my most sincere girl-on-girl crush to-date, Miss Sarah B.
Can you guess what I'm most excited about taking care of this week?
Ismat's off to Dubai and the motherland (which is where we've been telling the in-laws we're headed for the holidays, and which is, I'm pretty sure, somewhere far away and near Djibouti) and trusts the three of us to cover for her while she's gone. For a little while I thought it was just going to be me, and you know how often I'm able to come up with something entertaining to say here (still waiting, huh?), so you can see why I would be a little worried. Then I found out it was going to be this wacky houseparty with the two internet lovebirds and I suddenly felt much, much better.
(put the kids to bed now.)
Marc's former boss has fucked us up our collective ass, yet again. What is it with this world? What is it with this ass? What is it with the lack of insidiously successful revenge tactics at my disposal? We may have health insurance. Or, whee! We may not. We are left impotently muttering things like, "Oooh! I'd just like to... I'd like to... Oh, I just want to see him fail miserably!"
I've entered three stores in the last three hours and announced in each, "I'm looking for a screw." And damned if I didn't get the best service ever. One clerk even replied, "Oh, I better get Ed to help." No matches, though. Curse you, Sven!
The new mattress/box-spring set has arrived. The rest of the bed comes tomorrow. I can't help but notice as I languish on the ultra-comfy pillowy top that this mattress set is taller than our old platform bed with its mattress in place. Interesting. I'm wondering what sort of bed-fortress we're going to have once the rest of the arrangement arrives. Better get all the falling-out-of-bed tendencies out of my system tonight.
In any case, we've made significant progress. The 46 box shelving extravaganza has been de-boxed, assembled (with one small exception -- in typical Ikea fashion we are missing one godalmighty screw) and partially loaded. The 46 boxes have found their way to the cardboard recycling dumpster, conveniently located just outside the door and a quarter-mile down the street.
I even found time to make (make!) 120 holiday cards. I say "holiday" because I have a new Jewish grandmother-in-law of whom I am terrified. If anyone asks, that's just a pine tree on the front of the card, no religious sentiment intended, whatsoever. At the Post Office, the only stamps for sale behind the counter featured Mary and Jesus so I figured I'd better hold off until the snowman supply was replenished.
Yep, things are still frantic but the end is in sight. Why do I always move just before major life events and holidays?
clerk: So, are you using all this to stuff the stockings of your crafty friends?
me: Are you joking? No, this is all for me.
Details here. Basically, Mom's here, furniture building continues, I'm constructing Christmas cards from itty bitty pieces of paper, and it's like seventeen below zero outside. We're exploring Southeastern Connecticut shopping, I finally found a rowing club in town, Tony is alive, we're looking forward to some kind of Christmas party the husband's gone and gotten us invited to, and the little RX-7 is proudly running strong, more than I can say for myself.
Recent Photographs
Recent Entries
judging ikea.Search the know
