Big Wheel Keep on Turning

I battled a cold, raged against the system and staved off dramatic antics. 

I spent the greater part of last week anchored to the sofa thanks to a horrible cold. Why not a bed?  They were out of bounds for fear of inevitable cross contamination in such close quarters.  The last thing I needed was to share the bug with my long suffering spouse, P, and our six-year-old offspring, Lanes.

Lanes not only rotates around her bed, at around 3am she migrates to ours, where she continues to make cute snoring noises while she ferociously pummels our backs and vital organs with the vigor of a soccer champ kicking a ball to score the winning goal of a big match. After two days of staying home and leaving a large impression on the couch, I arrived at my temp job to find everything turned upside down.

In general, it had the vibe that was a cross between a Genius Bar and a Starbucks. This day, however, through my rather stuffed ears I thought I could hear that corny Western tune that comes in just as tumbleweeds scoot across the way and two cowboys size each other up before a showdown. I shuddered at the chill and asked for a heads up. Surely, it wasn't because everyone missed me so much.

Turns out that the temp agency that hired the temp agency (yes, we are twice contracted out—no wonder we have only pennies to rub together at the end of the day) that we work for had some sort of meeting with the company that we temp for and the net result was that whereas our contracts were to be renewed, they are now only allowing us to work for five months. From them it’s ‘thank you, have a nice day, don’t come back again’.  

Seriously? When do I get to retire my interview suit? I am getting rather tired of constantly job hunting. Next time round, I think I’ll ditch the temp agencies and try my luck on my own.

I was so annoyed with the entire situation that I decided perhaps I should do practical things like buy lottery tickets and hunt down the end of a rainbow instead of trolling the internet for jobs.

My boss was in a flap about being unable to retain us, coworkers whose contracts were up before mine were making life line calls to find alternate employment, and I got landed doing not only my job but someone else’s as well. That was the icing on the cake at the roundup of a horrendous week. 

Perhaps it was a foolish idea to leave my sickbed, I mean sick sofa, that day. All this happened in an already dramatic week. I was still reeling from the fact that my charming and witty niece, who sadly has the motor skills of a newborn deer, decided to fall off her stool in school and give herself a concussion.

In between bouts of coughing up phlegm that had tentacle like grips on my sinuses, I nearly blew a fuse when I found out she hurt herself. Just two days before that, P and I were remarking on how refreshing it was that she had stopped that whole falling down thing.

My darling niece is rather notorious for suddenly falling backwards off chairs at restaurants and tripping over random inanimate objects. She inevitably pops back up right away, in a flurry of long arms and legs, but we are all rather worse for wear and down several heartbeats each time.

When I was stuck in the hospital after Lanes was born, I lived in fear that she would trip and yank out my catheter or IV, because you know, that’s the kind of thing that would happen to me. Every time she pranced into the room, in my barely lucid state, I would mutter and wave my arms furiously to a clueless P to quickly block any wires that were attached to my person.

Then there was the time at Lanes’ fist birthday, when my niece was about eight, where she decided to go down a covered slide. She proceeded to get gloriously stuck towards the bottom and in the meanwhile, a small child had gone in behind her and now she was stuck as well.

That girl’s father was on all fours, peering in trying to see where his precious child was and my little darling was still stuck up there, clogging up the entire chute. Five minutes later, out comes my niece, all limbs first, looking like a breached baby foal at the moment of birth. 

That other little child flew out of the slide then, hoping to run into her father’s arms, but by that time, he had climbed up in an attempt to rescue her from the top. I was so thunderstruck by the entire episode, I couldn’t help laughing. If it was hysteria or mirth, I still can’t tell.

In other news, Lanes came home from school and as I was trying to spin her into the kitchen to wash her hands, she announced that some boy kissed her on the cheek. Her father froze and I thought I misheard as a result of my ears still being a little clogged up.

She then batted on ‘I don’t know what is wrong with him. I was trying to climb the ladder to go on the slide and he kissed my cheek and then when I came down the slide he was there and he kissed my cheek again!’. 

P, who looked fine, immediately announced that he feels sick and that he caught the cold from me. He left the scene muttering something about needing to rest. That was helpful (not). He spent the rest of the evening in a funk that suddenly cleared up the next morning. 

Meanwhile, I have not been getting the best sleep thanks to pains in my side that come on in the wee hours of the night. I feel like performing and exorcism on my gall bladder.  At this point, I don't want to fight to keep it. It has as much appeal as an unwanted tenant. It's time to secede.

I have been waiting forever to get an appointment with a surgeon. The family doctor scheduled me with one, but it appears that doctor has a lawsuit against him and there are some Steven King quality horror stories in his reviews.

Needless to say, I called in and said I’ll keep the unruly gall bladder until a better surgeon comes my way. Hopefully, I’ll get an appointment for at least the end of next month.

With that I must sign off. P is at the breakfast table, jabbering under his breath because Lanes brought up the topic of her kissing bandit classmate. I think I'll have to give him some booze to survive the teen years.  More musings from BC next week…

HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARLING KR!!