TGIF

Happy Friday to all.

I'm personally celebrating the week's end with a drink. The recipe was given to me by a friend. It might have a name, if so, I don't know. I call it the Courtney drink after my friend. It tastes like a green apple. It's vodka, diet Mountain Dew and Sour Apple Pucker schnapps. Yippee, now I can be a wide awake drunk. I also like the fact that it uses diet soda. How many drinks can say that? None, because drinks can't talk!

Thank you and good night.

Bad, Bad Blogger (Me)

Shame on me. I haven't blogged in days and do I have an excuse? No. Well, some of it might be from just feeling like I don't have anything worthwhile to say. Of course, there are those who beg to differ with me. Unfortunately, these people only exist in my head.

Ah, but let me discuss Husband. Every day he calls me for ten minutes. No more, no less. It's a free call on the morale phone and every soldier is allocated ten minutes. At nine minutes and thirty seconds in, a woman's pre-recorded voice comes on telling us we have 30 seconds left. I've come to hate that woman, whoever she is.

But imagine if you will, the following. The phone rings. I answer it. There's the inevitable delay before I hear the echo of my voice and then that of my husband's. By the time I hear the delay, I already know who it is. If he calls me in the morning (and lately his timing has been impeccable -- he calls just as I'm about to walk out the door for work) we talk about his day. If he calls me at 11pm (which is already the next morning for him) we talk about my day. So depending on the time of day he calls determines what we'll talk about. But without fail, just as soon as we start getting into a conversational flow, that annoying woman comes on. So yes, we talk everyday but we don't say much. Which leads to e-mail.

I cannot imagine how wives, girlfriends, mothers and others survived WW2 not hearing for weeks from their husbands, boyfriends, sons and others. I can mail a letter or a package to Husband and it will get there in 6 to 8 days but imagine back then, when it might take forever for a letter to travel overseas. Email is a wonderful thing. And in a way, I like email better than the phone calls because I can go back and re-read it several times and feel like he's near and not halfway around the world. It just seems more personal, I guess. I can get more indepth with email so he gets a better picture about my day, an experience, or what's happening with the family. And I must admit to a happy flutter my heart does when I see the email in the inbox that's from him.

So hail internet. Hail email. And if you'd like, give a shout to the Bad, Bad Blogger (me).

This Guy At Work

... is driving me crazy, and everyone knows it. In fact, on my first day there, and into the following week, everyone had something to say about this guy. This is what he does...

He goes around and turns off the lights in any office not occupied. This includes the front desk when the receptionist goes to lunch -- he turns out the light so the place looks closed.

Then there were the two empty soda cans I happened to leave on my desk. NY State has the bottle deposit law so I always save my cans for the 5 cents I'll get back (hey, five cents adds up!). Well, for reasons unbeknowst to me, he felt compelled to remove them. I walked in one day and they were gone. So the next time I had an empty soda can, I placed it by my coffee cup which I do not keep on my desk but on another shelf in my office. That too was gone the following day. Moving along...

He has this habit of (in my mind anyway) of trying to make it look like he hasn't been in my office when I'm not there. For example, if he has paperwork that has to be sent out, he tucks in the middle of the folder I have set aside full of other paperwork to be sent out. Mind you, it's not on top of the pile like most normal people would leave it. He deliberately places it in the middle of all the paperwork.

Then there was the time he removed from said folder all the DHL packing slips I had in there and moved them into another drawer. He never said a word about it, one day they just weren't there. I got so angry with him that I took that folder and tucked it away in the back of another drawer. That was a Friday afternoon. On Monday morning, I opened the drawer to find the folder and God almighty, he'd gone into my drawer to look for it! I could tell because there was his timesheet, tucked inside the folder like he always does.

But the icing on the cake came this week. A magazine arrived in the mail one day. It's a TV magazine called "Emmy" and one of the articles contained in it was a story about the reporters who had covered Hurricane Katrina. I wanted to read it, so I set it aside to read after lunch. I came back from lunch and didn't think about it -- until I found it in the recycle bin. I retrieved it and at the end of the day (because I hadn't had a chance to read the article) I put it away in a desk drawer. Can you guess? Can you guess? It was gone the next day.

Some of my co-workers suggest I talk to him but if I do, about the most civil I could manage to be would be only to rip him a new a$$hole. Who gives him the right to remove objects from desks and turn off lights? He's been told repeatedly not to do it, and still he does. Why is this moron still employed? What has happen for him to become a former employee?

I have tried exacting my own sense of justice for what's it worth. When I walk by his office and he's not in it, I turn off his light.

Tuesdays at 9pm on CBS

I was ready to spit nails Tuesday night and let me tell you why. While I was preparing a Creamy Cucumber Salad for Wednesday's FRG meeting, a new show on CBS called "The Unit" came on. The gist of it is a special ops group that does the types of things special ops does. So while the husband is deployed to aid in some crisis, the wife who is unaware of her husband's real job, is just moving onto base and repeatedly states that she wants to live off-post (Problem #1: Since when do National Guard units live on post anyway?) and doesn't want to take delivery of her furniture. Problem #2: Why is she even in post housing if she didn't want it? Did her husband do this all on his own and not tell her anything? Say what you will about housing, but if you tell the housing office you don't want quarters, in my limited experience, they seem they would be more than happy to not deal with you.

So the story moves along and the other women in the group, after some lame discussion, tell her that her husband is in "the unit" and she's not to tell anybody anything ever about it, due to the secrecy and sensitive nature of the missions. I think most military spouses understand this. You can ask as many questions of your spouse about his job as you want. Not all of them will have answers. There are just some things that can't be answered for security's sake and given the choice between knowing or keeping my husband safe, there's only one obvious answer. Well this wife just isn't happy about anything and of course in a phone call to her sister while at the other woman's house no less, tells her sister to "turn on the news because that's where my husband is" And then the other woman walks in and tells her to hang up the phone because she's just put her (the other woman, not the wife) in danger.

I am annoyed at the portrayal of the wife. I realize I'm new to this whole army wife thing but I cannot imagine any wife being like that. No wife who loves her husband as this woman supposedly does in the story would ever do that. I am going to write CBS and complain. Otherwise, it wasn't too bad but the army's portrayal was a little stereotypical. There was a good line though that I think should become better known. It went, "There's truth in news and there's news in truth" or something like that.

The Hazards of My Job

At my job, I get to watch TV all day. Ordinarily this is not necessarily a bad thing when you can change the channel. But that's the rub, at my job I cannot. So I suffer through some particularly bad programming, most notably the soap operas and Family Feud. I used to be able to watch soap operas but not anymore. Everything is too dramatic. My life has enough drama. I don't need anymore added to it.

But that Family Feud. It makes me want to scream! Those families are so stupid. I even yell at the TV which makes my co-workers wonder about me. It makes me wonder if aliens have taken over their brains. Why else would you subject yourself to the humility of demonstrating to America how stupid you are? The stupidity doesn't always show up when they're feudin' the other family for all the points that will take them to the bonus round but every once in a while some yokel has some stupid answer and even though everybody knows it's stupid, they're compelled to reassure the fool with the infamous words, "Good answer! Good answer!" The sad part is, I think they believe it. But the stupidity really shows itself at the bonus round. Now granted, I'm sitting at my desk and under no pressure but I've always considered myself able to think on my feet. But these people get to the bonus round and their common sense (if they have any) flies out the window. Take, for example, a real gem I heard today:

Host: Name a kind of pit
Contestant: armpit

Huh? What about peach, cherry or plum? My first thought was peach, which by the way was the number one answer. But these people don't think like that. There was another question which further stumped our illustrious contestant:

Host: Name a sport where your weight would be a factor
Contestant: Tennis

Um. Okay. You always see lots of chubby tennis players, right? I thought of wrestling but the number one answer (and you can just see how illogical this one is) was football.

There is something to be said about thinking outside the box but national TV wouldn't be my first choice to demonstrate it. Which is why I will never go on Jeopardy. I'm a very good couch player but I wouldn't want to go on TV and prove it all wrong.

Oscar, Shmoscar

For the record, I do not watch award shows.

Seriously, I hate award shows. They are entirely self serving excuses for people with already inflated egos to pat themselves some more on the back. Isn't it enough, that if we are so inclined, we pay the $8 to see the movie? You need more validation than the money in your bank account that you've done a good job? I get so irritated at the People magazine and the rest of its kind of "journalism" that it makes me want to scream. I don't care about Brad and Jen and Angelina, Nick and Jessica or anybody else for that matter. Why does it matter to me what they do?

That whole culture fosters the "have vs. have nots" in this country. Now granted, to succeed in any profession takes alot of hard work and if you're talented and chosen well, you will be rewarded. We all have a passion for something, something that helps fulfill us, maybe even explain who we are, or why we are the way we are. But my problem with Hollywood is this: You work some long, hard hours on a movie for a month, maybe a year (whatever) and then you take some time off and reap the benefits. In the meantime, a single mother works two jobs trying to make ends meet. She can't afford a nanny, let alone a babysitter. Where's her credit? Where's her reward?

I just don't get it.