Yikes!

It's been a tough week-and-a-half. On Wednesday the 7th, I got paged at work. I answered a floor line, and it was my hubby telling me that our water heater had sprung a leak and there was a quarter inch of water in our utility room. Since I was on the floor, I told him I'd take my break and call him back on my cell. While I was talking to him, I could hear our house phone ringing in the background--that could only be trouble since there's only one reason for someone calling my house at 12:30 in the morning: something was wrong with my mom. And my fears were right: my mom was in the hospital.

She'd had a bronchoscopy earlier in the day to check on her cancer scar tissue (she was diagnosed with lung cancer in April of 2005--by April 2006, the cancer had been reduced to scar tissue and we began the process of just monitoring to make sure the cancer didn't come back). Back when she was first diagnosed, they did a full body scan to see if the cancer had spread--and found that she had several aneurysms in her brain. She underwent surgery to "fix" those, but had to go on Plavix due to strokes (the stints and aneurysm appartuses--apparti--apparently made her prone to blood clots. Anyway, she has to stop the Plavix anytime she has surgery or any procedure that leads to bleeding (and she usually coughs blood for three or four days after the bronchoscopies due to the tube being fed down her throat).

So she had stopped the Plavix and had the brochoscopy. That evening, she lost her vision. In a panic, thinking she was having a stroke, she took her Plavix. And then she started having trouble breathing.

Our thought, of course, was that the loss of vision was due to a stint swelling (one of the aneurysms is close to the optic nerve, and when it swells, it presses on the nerve) and her lungs had filled with blood due to bleeding from the bronchoscopy. And that SEEMED to be confirmed when the docs declared that she had liquid in her lungs (although they later decided it was pneumonia--strange, since she'd had no symptoms before).

Whatever the source of the "liquid", a few days later we found out that her cancer is back, this time in the other lung.

And as if all that wasn't bad enough--a slightly flooded house, buying and installing a new water heater, and recurrence of my mother's cancer--my job took a turn for the worse, too. So now I've got to find a new job on top of everything else.

I could probably still tolerate the job if it weren't for ONE manager. She has no concept of the time it takes to complete a task, and there's no reasoning with her. Here's a sample conversation:

Manager: "Bob. You have 10 hours of freight tonight in your area. After you're done, go help in the freezer, and then zone."
Bob: "Wait. I only have an eight hour shift. And if we're all supposed to stop and zone at 5:30 am, then I only have a six-and-a-half hour shift. Not even time enough for my own freight."
Manager: "Then you'll just have to work faster."

At this point, I should point out that Bob REALLY only has a five-and-a-half hour shift (he loses half an hour due to his two fifteen-minute breaks AND it's going to take him another half hour to clean up his freight--pull back pallets and bale his cardboard). Somehow, Bob is supposed to do ten hours of freight, plus help another department, plus zone, all in five-and-a-half hours.

In my case, I get told I have two hours of freight. I spend fifteen minutes in the nightly meeting, then fifteen minutes hunting down a jack and pulling my freight to the floor. Then I spend another fifteen minutes pulling freight and garment racks up to the processor (which the manager is all aware of). But at the two hour point, she's out there asking why I'm not done (even though she knows I spent forty-five minutes doing other work). But somehow I'm supposed to do all that other stuff in zero minutes with a wave of my magic wand.

And to make matters worse, I started counting my cases as I stocked them: 184. Our time is based on doing one case per minute. If you do the math, you can see that I actually had THREE hours of freight, not two.

The whole point is that I take my work performance seriously, and I come home every night exhausted, with my feet killing me and a general sense of failure. It's not healthy. I used to work in the computer industry as a quality control manager for business software--software that companies used for their financial records and tax submissions--and THAT job wasn't as stressful as this one . . . AND THIS ONE IS RETAIL! How in the hell can making sure green beans and throw pillows are in stock be more stressfull than making sure IRS tax forms and profit-and-loss statements work?

The world's not supposed to work that way. It's obviously time to move on.

Of course, I HATE moving on. My schedule at work right now is PERFECT, and I know I'm not going to be able to have such a perfect schedule anywhere else.

On the up side, I'm encouraged by the quick response to my job search. I decided "enough is enough" on Thursday morning, submitted resumes on Friday, and got my first call-back on Saturday.

Now we'll just have to wait and see what happens next.

Look on the bright side . . .

I guess I should consider today's local headlines a positive thing--the four or five main news stories on the website of our local paper are all about changing the nickname of our local university sports teams. It's certainly better than the top stories being about gangs or murders or both. But I still have to say . . . really?

I've always been behind the nickname change. And I happen to be one of those people that thinks our society has gotten too politically correct. I just don't think that people should be mascots--it doesn't matter if they're Native American tribe names or not. I'm not crazy about the Fighting Irish nickname, either.

AND, there's a little bit of petulance behind my desire to change the nickname, too; namely, the name has stuck around for so long thanks to a rich guy throwing his weight (and cash) around. I think it's wrong that he pretty much bought himself a university. He built a giant hockey rink for the university (a state-run institution) at about the time the nickname debate was really heating up, and he had 3000 logos put inside the arena. Tell me that doesn't sound like a big, "F-U, I've got money and I'll do what I want"); Three thousand logos? Seriously?

And, when the NCAA expressed an opinion about logos, the rich guy said he'd tear the place down before he'd let them remove the logos (the rich guy has since died, so who knows how his estate will handle this thing).

Reminds me of the little guy from the Family Guy series, who's always running around saying, "Wanna fight about it?"

And yeah, I DO want to fight about it. Even if you have no opinion on whether the logos and the nickname are disrespectful, you want to fight about it just to show this Vegas moneyman that he can't buy a state-run university and he can't buy a town. C'mon people! What happened to that frontier spirit? That "we're earthy, hardworking people that cobbled a good life out of a cruel but beautiful land, and we aren't going to take any guff from some rich city folk and kneel down before the almighty buck"?

Sure, hockey's important around here. But so is the country farmer sense of pride, and I can't believe so many locals are kow-towing to some rich guy who didn't even stick around but took off to Vegas.

I understand that the nickname has history. I understand it is important to people (hey, I went to that college--I had the logo on a bumper sticker on my car, too). But it's time to move on to bigger and brighter things. And it's time to show that people in North Dakota can't be bought. And certainly not bought by anyone who left us and moved to Vegas.

Oh, those bean counters and pencil pushers

We homeschooled our kids for quite some time. One daughter went back to school in eighth grade because she wanted to go to public school for high school (so we figured eighth would be a good transition for her). The other tried to follow the same path, but due to some medical issues, it didn’t work out. She started eighth, went back to homeschooling; started ninth, went back to homeschooling. This year, she should have been in tenth grade. A few months ago, she decided to go back to public school again, but this time in an non-traditional public school rather than the regular high school. Right away, I got a call from a school system bean counter asking us to turn over our homeschool records, including attendance records.

Yeah. How about not? Of course, we ended up arguing about it, and the school employee got quite frustrated and snappish. But I’m not going to do anything that’s not required by law or that might set a precedent that the school system will try to push onto other homeschoolers.

I explained all this to the employee, to no avail.

1) The homeschooling laws do not say that records have to be turned over to the school system;
2) When my other daughter went back to public school, and when this daughter tried public school before, these records weren’t requested--why are they suddenly important?;
3) What’s the point? They aren’t going to give her credit for her homeschool hours (ie, she’s basically starting over as a 9th grader), so since they are treating her academic record as if she never homeschooled, then why do they want the homeschool records?
4) Less than one month after the start of the school year, she turned sixteen-- which is the age that ends compulsory attendance. So for most of the school year, she wasn’t required to attend school, anyway;

When I repeated that we’ve never had to hand over the records before, she said that the homeschool monitor usually takes care of that-- funny, we haven’t had a homeschool monitor in YEARS; so if some monitor has been handing over attendance records for us every year, she’s just been pulling the figures out of the air.

So I refused to hand over the records. The employee said, “Fine. I have to send these records to the state. I’ll note here that you refused to comply.” Hmmm, sounds suspiciously like that old public school chestnut of “marking your permanent record,” LOL. I was never intimidated by that AS a student, and I’m sure not worried about it now.

So I laughed when I received a letter from the school system a few days ago (my husband said, “uh oh, you really pissed them off this time").

The letter demands that we contact them immediately about standardized testing for my daughter, as the law requires that homeschooled children be tested in grade 10. The complication of course, is that the school system has already done testing for this year, so I would likely have to pay out-of-pocket for it.

EXCEPT . . . if you read the notes above . . . my daughter is in public school in NINTH grade this year . . . ROFLMAO! So she won’t need testing until next year.

It does piss me off a little, though, because the homeschool monitor never did contact us about testing. But I just assumed it was because my daughter was over 16 (school is not compulsory and therefore neither is testing). But it’s irrelevant at this point.

So I can’t wait until Tuesday, when I can call the school employee again and point out the error in this new “crisis” that they’ve invented.

I get way too much enjoyment out of pissing people off.