Raincity Mama

At work today the topic of hor­ror movies came up and I was in the minor­ity, being some­one that avoids watch­ing scary movies. I have never liked them. I blame it on see­ing The Shin­ing when I was 7, far too young to see such a scary movie.

I hate how pan­icky I feel after watch­ing a scary movie; I cower in bed when the house creaks. The closet door needs to be shut because y0u know that there are mon­sters in there just wait­ing to leap out and get me. I know it is years away, but what am I going to do when my kids want to watch scary movies?

My co-workers gath­ered around to inter­ro­gate me. They couldn’t believe that I refuse to pay good money to scare myself silly. “What about zom­bie movies?” That was when they all got rather excited. They insisted that I need to see Zom­bieland! “It’s funny/scary!” “Yes, it’s mostly a comedy!”

I asked my co-worker why she liked zom­bie movies and she said because they are usu­ally just kind of silly; except for that one where the zom­bies could run, that one freaked her out.

From there the con­ver­sa­tion moved on to ghosts and I thought it would be funny to sug­gest that there could be a movie about ghost zom­bies, the dead undead, that would be funny! They could fly and float through walls. Once they caught you instead of just eat­ing your brains, they’d eat your soul too! Only they’re ghosts so would they even be able to eat brains? Hmm, I think I need to think this through more before I write the movie script.

I’ve been think­ing a lot about what my “dream home” looks like. It will be jointly designed by my hus­band and me. It will be “eco-friendly”. Some of the must-have ele­ments are:

• four bed­rooms
• an office
• an open plan kitchen over­look­ing the liv­ing room
• a mud room
• heated tile floor in the bathrooms
• a laun­dry sink
• a liv­ing wall
• rain bar­rels
• a veg­etable garden
• a green­house that is attached to the kitchen

I want to start build­ing a file to store ideas so that when the time comes to design our house I can bring it out to show the archi­tect. What ele­ments does your “dream home” have?

I can’t believe that there are six more days left for NaBlo. Not that it has been easy, I’ve just tried not to think about it but I’m feel­ing less enthu­si­as­tic about it tonight. I know that writ­ing fre­quently will engrain the habit of writ­ing, I’m just feel­ing a bit burnt out. I’m strug­gling for con­tent. Per­haps decid­ing to do NaBlo when my blog was just a few days old was a hasty deci­sion. So tonight is yet another post about noth­ing much. I’ll end it with a clip of David Sedaris who always makes me laugh. You’re welcome!

I remem­ber hav­ing the thought “oh I should blog about that” sev­eral times today but I can’t remem­ber any of them. I need write them down. So I’ve got noth­ing but the fol­low­ing snippets:

• My daugh­ter started say­ing my son’s name clear as a bell tonight.
• there was a mouse near my desk today. I hate vermin.
• I fell asleep while putting the kids to bed tonight. That hasn’t hap­pened in a long time.
• I’m look­ing for­ward to hav­ing my par­ents over for din­ner tomor­row so that I can catch up with them. I miss talk­ing to my mom everyday.
• Today while my dad was watch­ing the kids he didn’t real­ize that there were cloth dia­pers already assem­bled in the dresser so he grabbed the empty shells from the laun­dry bas­ket and put a dia­per on them with­out putting inserts inside. When my hus­band got home my son was soaked and had pooped and had to have a com­pete change of clothes. It was pooptastic!

Before I returned to work I emailed the senior HR advi­sor to let her know that I was return­ing early from my leave with­out pay. I wanted to give you a heads-up and find out if there was any­thing that I could do to ensure that things went smoothly. She replied that every­thing appeared to be in order.

Pay­day was last week and no money was deposited into my bank account. I emailed my HR advi­sor and didn’t receive any acknowl­edge­ment of my mes­sage. I called and spoke with my HR advi­sor and she was shocked to hear that I didn’t get paid. She is a trainee and was con­fused as to what the pro­ce­dure was on bring­ing me back from leave. She said that she was wait­ing to speak to the senior advi­sor that I orig­i­nally spoke with to get clar­i­fi­ca­tion and that I should hear back soon.

In my meet­ing with my man­ager today I men­tioned that I didn’t get paid and my man­ager was out­raged. She said that she would deal with it and within a cou­ple of hours I got an email from the senior HR advi­sor explain­ing that there indeed was a mis­take made. She explained that the pro­ce­dure had changed and that they can’t issue my pay via direct deposit for seven days, but she could issue me an emer­gency cheque and then I could pay the money back when the funds are deposited. I declined on the emer­gency cheque, I don’t want to owe them any more money than I already do. She also explained that before I went on mater­nity leave the my pre­vi­ous HR advi­sor didn’t set up my pen­sion deduc­tions prop­erly so I will owe a bunch of money for that.

On the upside, I have received a pay increase and I get another pay increase in the Spring. I am really annoyed that I had to get my man­ager to inter­vene to get a response from HR. There is some­thing fun­da­men­tally bro­ken about the pro­ce­dures that are cur­rently in place. If I didn’t acknowl­edge requests from my clients I’d be rep­ri­manded at best. Is it incom­petance? Is it that these peo­ple don’t care? What ever it is it needs to change.

I’m tired and achy. I went to the chi­ro­prac­tor today and she said that I look pretty good for return­ing to work after being off for so long. I man­aged to make it through the day with­out a headache but I’m done. I feel tired and empty so this pathetic post is all I can offer today. I will do bet­ter tomor­row. Good night!

In August my hus­band bought me a beau­ti­ful pair of sun­glasses as a belated birth­day present. I’d needed new sun­glasses for a while and it was time to get a new pair. I finally found a pair that I *loved* and the old pair was rel­e­gated to the glove box in the car.

In Sep­tem­ber I was in the ER with our daugh­ter when my sun­glasses dis­ap­peared from my dia­per bag. I’m not sure if they were taken out of the bag or if they fell out and then were picked up but I was miss­ing them after that visit. I went back to the hos­pi­tal to see if they had been turned in but alas they were not. I bit­terly wished that whomever found/took my sun­glasses had them go miss­ing too.

I dreaded telling him that the sun­glasses were miss­ing, but he took it in stride. They are just a “thing” and while it sucked that they were gone, they could be replaced. I was mis­er­able because we could not afford to buy those sun­glasses par­tic­u­lar sun­glasses again so I fig­ured that I was stuck wear­ing my old sun­glasses until such a time that we could afford to buy a new pair.

He reminded me that we pur­chases the sun­glasses with our credit card and that card has pur­chase pro­tec­tion insur­ance on it. If the item is lost, stolen or dam­aged with­ing 90 days of pur­chase the credit card insur­ance will pay to replace the item. He assem­bled the required paper­work and sent it in. I said that I wasn’t going to hold my breath but lo and behold I cheque has arrived and my sun­glasses will be replaced.

Check your credit card to see if you have pur­chase pro­tec­tion insur­ance too. Yes, it requires an immense amount of paper­work. I think that they require so many papers and receipts to weed out some of the claims, but then again I may be wrong. My sun­glasses have been ordered and hope­fully I will have my brand new sun­glasses by Monday!