Hatefulness

Wow, I am a hate-filled hater today. I need to get something off my chest and this is the only >140 characters forum in which I am anonymous. (Not that I'm anonymous on Twitter, but I have fewer than 40 followers and my tweets are locked.)

I have a co-worker who does the following things that annoy me:
1. When she answers the phone and it is for me (I am also annoyed by the people who have my desk number but call the main office number anyway), she yells all the way across the office to see if I'm at my desk. It's bad enough when my boss, whose office is right next to mine, calls to me at my desk. But there are acres between my office and this co-worker's. And the air conditioning in my office is LOUD. I can barely hear my boss when she calls to me.

2. When she calls to me from her office for other reasons. I get it, really I do, that if our administrative savior isn't at his desk and this coworker is on the phone and someone comes into the office that I'm the next person in line to help the person who has come in. And I'm happy to. But, I don't know, shoot me a quick email. I'll get it. And I'll go help the person. If you yell all the way across the office, I won't hear you.

3. When I vent about something (this morning it was that my email crashed when I tried searching in it), she tries to solve my problem. No really, I don't need to call tech support because my email crashed repeatedly. Actually, I just need to restart my computer.

4. And did I mention when she yells across the office to me? I did? Oh.


(Side note: Sabrina is allowed to be with her dad for up to 30 days--at 30 days it becomes a "placement"--so she's been with him for a week and a half. I miss her but it has been nice to sleep until 7:45 in the mornings!)

This arrangement is not working for me

You might recall that Sabrina spends every weekend with her dad. We're really just waiting for dad's county to get off their fat bottoms and approve placement with him. The back and forth is pretty draining, not good for consistent discipline and expectations, etc., but good for Sabrina since she gets to spend so much time with her dad.

But today is a good example of why this arrangement is not working for me.

On Monday mornings I drive all the way across the city, park near Sabrina's school, and go to work, so that my car will be in the right place to pick her up. This is what I did this morning. (Yes, school is still in session.)

Tomorrow is the last day of school, so I called dad to confirm that he is picking Sabrina up after school tomorrow. (I was working on arranging a job interview for Wednesday and needed to make sure I didn't need to find a baby-sitter.) Imagine my surprise when Sabrina answered the phone.

She was sick this morning so they kept her home. Fine. But, I don't know, maybe CALL ME so that I know not to pick her up at school?

That's inconvenience number 1. (Not really adding in that now my car is on the other side of the city, I have to pay for parking that is ultimately unnecessary, and on top of it I have to drive home during rush hour. Oh well, water under the bridge.)

But I also had this big plan to make sure to tell Sabrina to say good-bye to her friends to prep her for not going to the same school next year. If she lives with her dad, she'll be going to school by him, and if she still lives with me, she is going to my neighborhood school. And I think she should have some warning about this. But I don't know that she's going to get that since now her aunt is taking her to school AND picking her up tomorrow. (Still just assuming; I left a message on dad's cell phone after getting the number from Sabrina's grandpa.)

And I don't know when I will next see her.

On the plus side, I didn't do her laundry over the weekend, nor did I buy milk or apple juice, so her not coming back to me means that I don't have to face the negative natural consequences of those failures to act.

Stress. Oh my G-d Stress.

If only the phone call at 4:40 this afternoon asking us (my boss, me, and our coworker) to ignore our very logically set, long-standing Tuesday at noon deadline had been the end of the stress and not the beginning. See, the Tuesday at noon deadline is so that I have time to track things down and then our editor can get that half of our stuff ready before the other half have a noon at Wednesday deadline. Then our editor has to get everything together--individual files downloaded, page numbers added, PDFed, and then a table of contents manually made--by noon on Thursday.

So when we're asked at 4:40 on Wednesday to add another thing that we haven't seen, that I don't have all of the electronic papers I need to wrangle, etc., and my boss and I both have to leave to pick up kids and...I have a gynecologist appointment first thing tomorrow morning and my boss is leaving for vacation. So, um, do I have to cancel my appointment because someone else sat on a document and then "forgot" about the publication deadline?

Well, that all worked out, thankfully, though not without some unpleasant adrenaline.

I picked up Sabrina and all was well except that she wanted to do the following:
* make a card for her mommy
* go to a warehouse store to buy snacks for her class
* make gift bags for the snacks
* pack the gift bags

Um.

Yeah, so we got home from the warehouse store and it was already 8 pm. We hadn't had dinner. It's summer so Sabrina needed a bath. So, well, nothing else got done.

Then there was a fly in Sabrina's room. Because the ants in the kitchen aren't sufficient to drive me batty. It turns out that Sabrina is TERRIFIED of flies. A few hugs and trying to reassure her that flies only annoy us but don't hurt us later, I successfully swatted it. I didn't think it was possible. But I killed the fly. There's another one that is in her bathroom and I closed the door and told her I'd kill it, but I think I'm just going to let it be.

So now I'm thinking that I just need to manage to wake myself up early enough that I can wake her up a little early so we can at least make the card for her mom, and we'll do the gift bags tomorrow night when she gets home from her visit with her mom.

And then I checked my mail. In between my DVDs, there it was. A business card. "Investigative Social Worker." Because I need that stress.

Overdue

Not our library books. They are due tomorrow and sitting on the floor in my office waiting for me to walk them to the main branch. I keep holding out hope that I will get an email saying that one of the books I have on hold is available. Apparently, if a book is reviewed in the New Yorker, that really makes it soar in popularity. At least, that's my explanation for being 8th on the hold list for one of the two books I have on hold.

No, I just mean I'm long overdue for a post!

This morning was the awards ceremony for the preschool through 1st grades at Sabrina's school. I thought it was tomorrow so I almost missed it! My observations:

1. oh my G-d there was a lot of cuteness in that room.
2. an hour is really too long for kids that age to sit and clap for other kids. Eight classes. After the second, the kids got really restless.
3. At least starting in kindergarten, not every kid got an award.
4. But kindergarten is really too young for not every kid to get an award.
5. What in the world does "honor roll" mean when applied to preschool? (Or pre-K? Or, well, any of those grades?)
6. Nevertheless, I am very proud that Sabrina got an honor roll award. Since we've stopped doing homework, I was nervous that she wasn't going to get honor roll and it would be my fault.
7. Sabrina's aunt came. Yay!
8. I didn't learn "shake with the right, take with the left" until I was in 12th grade. Those pre-schoolers were SO FREAKING ADORABLE trying to get it down.
9. The assistant principal of Sabrina's school is H-O-T HOT. Just sayin'.
10. None of the parents who got the "outstanding volunteer" award were there. Irony much?

So here we are a week away from the end of the school year, and Sabrina's teacher still says her name wrong. It's as if she called her "Stabrina." That is, she adds an extra consonant (not actually a T) between the first and second letters of her name. Grr.

***

Yesterday I picked up Sabrina at school and the first thing she told me about was the cantaloupe she had with her grandma over the weekend. I wish I'd had a video camera to record her describing the cantaloupe. So of course we made a detour on the way home to buy a cantaloupe. (Um, we had to stop at the store to buy milk anyway. My fault. I went to Costco on Sunday for our fruits and veggies and such, and I certainly was not going to buy milk there.)

We walked into the store and the first thing Sabrina saw were blueberries. How can you say no to a four year old who insists that we NEED blueberries? I tried, actually. I bought strawberries at Costco and we were about to buy a melon, and there ARE only two of us. But really, it's fruit. Then it turned out that they didn't have cantaloupes! So sad, but we got a mini watermelon instead.

As we were getting in line, we passed the "impulse-purchase-some-pie!" display. Sabrina asked--not if we could buy a pie--but "can we make a pie?" SO CUTE!

***

Sabrina's dad got a job, hooray! Last Monday he had to report at 6 am (ugh) so he asked if he could bring Sabrina back on Sunday night instead of needing to find someone to take her to school. So I gave him my address and he came by with her, and then... yesterday I got a call from him. He is installing satellite dishes literally across the street from my building. We never would have known if he hadn't had to bring Sabrina back to me last week. Crazy.

***

According to Sabrina's GAL, my post about ICPC was wrong and my city wouldn't remain on the hook financially for Sabrina if dad got custody. The GAL has another kid on her caseload in exactly the same situation. Same county. A birth dad. Money questions. TWO YEARS LATER,. that kid is still not with her dad... Hopefully the fact that Sabrina's dad now has a job will change the situation.

Nevertheless, there is something seriously wrong with kids remaining in care because a parent--not just a family member, but a PARENT--doesn't have a job.

***

Okay, back to work. More cute stories later, I hope!