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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

The ice cream edition!

This Wednesday Whining is brought to you from the southern coast, by a redzils who grew up much, much further north. The humidity is 50%, the temperatures are in the high 80s, and I feel like an icecream cone - I am melting.....

My anti-whine? Even though I wasn't signed up in advance, Miranda is letting me host my Very! First! Wednesday! Whine! Thanks, Miranda!

What are your whines, pixies? Any good anti-whines to cancel them out?

Anticipatory ice cream all around!

39 comments:

Miranda said...

Redzils, you reminded me to call my friend in Miami. This will be nice after listening to the beach report all winter.

My whine? Zilla is sick. Again. With puking and temps and I think he gave it to me.

Anti-whine: Spouse is back Out East and no one died this weekend.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Oh, I'm having such a great day!
It's a good thing my last name is pretty common so I'm sure my anonymonity is still fairly safe.
I guess this is what happens when I type my name 8000 times a day.

Is there a way for that to be fixed?

And so yes, my first whine of the week is that Wednesday Whining hasn't even been up for 30 minutes and I've already screwed it up.

Anonymous said...

And now I even forgot to put my first name on that comment!

Sheesh! I'm going to bed!
:)

Anonymous said...

Redzils the mod reposting for d.i.a.ne., minus that whole last name...
-----------------

Wow. When an AW is 'No one died' - I think that pretty much says a lot.
I hope everyone has much better anti whines than that, but that everyone also gets to use that AW.

And, I'm sorry to admit it - but someone needs to bring more ice cream. I ate it all. I mean, the baby ate it all.

kathy a. said...

REDZILS! welcome to hosting! and you already saved the day!

margaritas to miranda. sheesh, a weekend that makes one glad nobody has died is, um, not good. hope zilla feels better soon!

ice cream STAT to diane!!! and lots of it! chocolate mint, along with the vanilla!

Madeleine said...

Ice cream! Want some!

There's a tiny bit of Cherry Garcia knock-off in the freezer, so this might be the night to finish it off. For the sake of the freezer space, you understand.

Whine: Forgot to plan birthday party for summer baby. Only one really good weekend what with soccer and travel plans. First several choices all booked up. Lied about availability of a place I really don't want to go. (Build-an-alliterative stuffed animal. Because she only has 50 zillion stuffed animals already.)

Anti-whine: Visited the art school I picked out for her today and she loved it, very excited. Phew.

Liz Miller said...

AW: My son is truly wonderful. I took him on a whirlwind trip to NYC to visit grandparents and run errands and he was just splendid.

Whine: 5 minutes before we pulled back into our own driveway he puked...

AW:...into a canvas bag I had in the car.

Further AW: Seems like it was just motion-sickness. He has no fever and right after he puked he felt just dandy.

Susan Anne MacKenna said...

Yesterday Mr. Mac started his summer clerkship. It seems like he will really enjoy the firm and the work he's going to be doing. However, he's in a city on the coast that's a good 4 hours away from here. For 11 weeks. My kids are with my parents for this week since the daycare closes Memorial Day for "move up week" BUT they will be in the same center now.

And I'm a single mommy for M-F until mid-August. I don't know how people can do this - I require help. We'll see if I'm sane once they come back and we're into the grind. I'm not very good at the parenting, so this will be quite a challenge - me plus 3 year old Little Miss S (ALMOST potty trained) plus 7 month old Baby MC.

I was yelled at by a prof yesterday because I was unable to produce about 600 pgs of research material for her over the holiday weekend, you know, because I was moving my husband to the coast and taking my little girls to my mom. Oh, and it was a holiday weekend, and I'm striving to balance work and life and actually start taking time "off"? Maybe if you answered my phone calls and e-mails LAST week, you would've had this information on Friday? Call me crazy - I am, you know!

Today is 4 hours of team building. Our team is so solid. Why do we need to build? Gack.

I'm in the midst of launching MS Project for our organization to keep tabs on our resources and manage what we're doing. Because that's generally good for a business that is nothing more than a giant series of projects and relationships to manage. Why hasn't this been done up to this point? Why? Is it really that complex? Why am I, the JD/MBA/BA in history, doing this task?

Happy Wednesday, whiners. Ice cream? Can we get some made from Bailey's? And top it with vodka? With an ativan chaser? EEEK!

Anonymous said...

dmd - you totally get any and all whine awards. There is no way I could single parent 2 kids. Heck, I've been practically doing it for 2 weeks now (yes, it turns out my idiot husband really did hurt his leg and is in crutches) and it totally stinks. How about this? You can have my share of the Vodka if I can have your share of the ice cream.

liz - yay on the containment of bodily fluids!

Madeleine said...

DMD, my sympathy on many things, but most especially "ALMOST potty trained." Because we know that's worse than not at all.

Sue said...

dmd - sympathy, vodka and plenty of ice cream for you! Could we share the ativan chaser?

Whine: Stoopid intake worker who completely messed up my first appointment yesterday at a local "Care Group" (Care, my a**)

This woman phoned me in early April to book an appointment with R, a social worker, who would be my transition person as I switch from one mental health program (as in, free therapy) to another.

Note: I don't want to switch b/c I adore my therapist, but I don't have any choice.

I get to the new place, tell the receptionist who I need to see and I'm told "We don't have anyone named R working here." So, I give her the whole story, tell her who called me about the appointment, and give her tons of info about their team approach that I wouldn't know unless I had been told.

And yet, they asked me to sit and wait while they called half of creation to find out whether I was dillusional, confused, or simply batshit crazy.

The best part: One of my parishioners is working there for the summer and was sitting behind the desk the whole time. Nice.

After half an hour they told me to leave and gave me the phone number of the woman who had originally called me.

Ya, I'll be calling her when fireplacing pigs fly.

Anonymous said...

Liz--hope your son stays not sick. My son vomits pretty easily, not in the car too often thank goodness. But if he doesn't seem sick afterward, you sort of have to take it as an anti-whine.

Much ice cream--well here in Milwaukee, I'd wish you luscious frozen custard--to DevilMacDawg--single parenting scares the hell out of me.

And Sue--can your therapist whom you actually like help? May whatever whine-chaser you need become available soon.

Anti-whine: our addition to our house is going swimmingly. On schedule, on budget.

Whine: My mom (the addition is a bedroom for my parents at our house, so she does get a big vote and is paying for just about all of it) is unhappy with her proposed closet. Nothing has changed in the plan. She isn't an abstract person--the size of the room doesn't make sense to her. We suggested a change to the builder, who says it can be done, but it still cost quite a bit and throw off the schedule.

When we started this project, we said No Change Orders. And I don't want my mom to hate her closet for the next 20 years but...

Whine the petty: the closet in question is already a small walk-in--about 9' by 4.5'. (the change would add about a 3' x 3' square to one end of the closet). I have a 32" closet. (My husband took the 6' wide closet, which is a whine for another day).

Anti-whine: Minor construction woes (we're pretty much sticking with the original plan) are much better than minor or major pregnancy woes.

kathy a. said...

liz, saved by the bag! glad your son is better.

DMD -- oh, such whines! it's possible to survive single-parenting two, even though it seems impossible, but your head might explode with the addition of Stupid Boss Syndrome.

((((((( sue ))))))))) uh, yeah, that whole experience sounds incredibly "helpful" -- NOT. cluesticks to all. and one of those "men in black" memory deprogramming things for your parishioner.

whine: i applied for a new project in february, thinking i'd get it in march, april at the latest. there are lots of projects; i'm qualified; and the process turns out to be the Nightmare Beaurocratic Black Hole of Doom. it might untangle itself by july -- just in time for the Annual State Budget Rodeo and Standoff, wherein no checks get cut until 2/3 of the state legislature does the polka en masse and the governor learns to play the accordian. [i'm pretty sure that's the traditional finale, usually performed about august.]

i'm clearing a retirement account to keep us in kibble for the duration, and some other work will pick up soon. but i'll take some of what DMD's serving, thank you.

AW: daughter's coming home in a couple of weeks! son got his old bike working again.

kathy a. said...

sarah, sorry about the closet angst. i think that is a universal problem, even without construction going on. although you deferred your 32" closet whine, that is solidly old skool, and you get my vote.

BroccoliEater said...

kathy- i know what you mean by the annual budget rodeo. My office is all on sponsored funds, and the ones from the state invariably wind up entangled in that rodeo, leading to months-long delays to begin work that we contracted to do. Hope the accordion plays your request for the audience!

My whine: My boss is back from 3 weeks away. Out of the country, mostly out of contact. It was blissful. now she's feeling out of touch and is getting back into the swim of things by diving headfirst into Lake Project wearing her Micromanagment goggles. "Why did you call this file by that name? You should rename all these files to reflect the original project date....." WTF?

Miranda said...

Well, Fireplace it.

Teen Son came home and said that he may have to go to court. Nothing for him, he assured me, but there was a football player in his gym class who urinated on another student in the locker room.

As bad as all that is, I am furious with Teen Son who thinks that *I* in the wrong for expecting locker rooms to be safe places free from malicious pranks.

I'm not stupid. I know teens like risky behavior and flirt with all kinds of "counter-cultural" ideas and norms in their individuation process. This is insane and I resent having to convince my son that the "nice" football player is not nice at all.

esperanza said...

W: Went to the (new) doctor for myself yesterday. After waiting TWO hours, here is the response: "It's just like having a hickey on your nipple."

AW: At least it's not thrush like I was afraid it was.

W: He also says I'm too skinny. Yes, this is a whine. I eat ALL the time, more often than the Sweet Baboo. I'd lost three more pounds in the last couple of months, total of about ten pounds less than my pre-pregnancy weight.

AW: pass the ice cream. (Or does anyone else have any ideas?)

Jenevieve said...

Nah, esperanza, I'll feed you enough cake and ice cream that your uber-lactating self can settle right in!

Whine: Final worth 80% of semester is Friday. Desire/motivation? 0. Amount of material left to cover? At least 35%.

AW: I'm relatively certain that if you asked me to place an oesophagostomy tube into your sick dog, I now could. Maybe.

Whine: We move out of our flat on the 3rd of June. A week from yesterday. We're moving all our stuff into storage since we'll be back in the States for 3 months this summer. According to my calculations, I have from Saturday afternoon until Tuesday morning to pack up and move our flat.

Whine: The husband is an emotional wreck and unable to complete basic packing tasks.

AW: This summer is going to rock! Real vet work! Diagnostics! Exams! Treatments! Surgery! Watch out world, here I come!

Courtney said...

Mullet award for kathy for "Annual State Budget Rodeo and Standoff," which, as a state employee, totally made my day and caused me to groan at the same time.

I've just got the typicals (whine the petty? I like that phrase too!) these days, so I'll grab some ice cream and wish everyone the best.

Anonymous said...

Sara - I totally get you with the micromanagement. I think my boss got a degree in that. He 100% rides that train whenever he is feeling a loss of control. I hope he doesn't know your boss though, he would think that re-labeling of files thing is a great idea.

Unknown said...

Pictures of my daughter on Facebook smoking a bong. Priceless!

My son going thru an "unpleasant" phase where he yells at me all day long. Delightful!

Financial ruin and once again, nothing in the house to eat. Fabulous!

Bad generic Lasix from my local CVS causes me to go into congestive heart failure. Inspiring!

Twitter down more than it's up, and when it's up, most of the features don't work. Wicked!

Gas over $4.00/gal. Fantastic!

New clothes that I just bought a month ago? Too big. WAY too big. Pants falling off. Impressive!

Huge T accident in our town. Exciting!

Not working at all. Sucky!

Fabulous Mem. Day Weekend with free concert (English Beat and BoDeans) on Esplanade, then crafts fair and beach. Lucious!

Trying hard to be positive amid suckage.... difficult!

KLee said...

So far, (knocking on wood furiously) I'm pretty good this week.

Our first weekend of performances went fairly well, and that's now five less performances that I have to give up my weekends for.

However, a whine -- due to the performance-heavy rotation this weekend, the family could not go through with our plans to see Indiana Jones.

Anti-whine, though -- husband refused to go without me. :)

Twelve days left of school. God, I hope I make it.

Liz Miller said...

Whine: MM has broken out in a mild colorless rash (left wrist, hips and both sides of lower abdomen, both sides of his lower back and both shoulder blades).

Rash does NOT look like:
Poison Ivy/Poison Oak/Poison Sumac; Chicken Pox; Coxsackie; rubella; strep; or other dread disease.

Rash has no redness at all (except where MM has scratched at it), the bumps are all regular and even in size and shape. If it weren't for the fact that he threw up yesterday, I wouldn't even be thinking about it being something to be concerned about.

He's feeling fine. No fever. No throwing up today.

Question: Do I send him to school tomorrow (they're going on a field trip!) or do I keep him home and take him to the doctor?

kathy a. said...

oy, liz. that sounds like wait and see. lots of fluids. is he itchy?

Anonymous said...

style votes to margalit, as well as a "what fresh hell is this" prize for the facebook pics of daughter.

as for me, don't pass the ice cream unless it's sugar-free. i'm staring down the insulin-syringe barrel of gestational diabetes.

i think i kinda hate being pregnant, except for the prize at the end. there had better be a freakin' prize at the end.

purple_kangaroo said...

I have an Old Skool whine today. In fact, it is the extremely insignificant, ungrateful, nitpicky, whiny whine of the privileged.

We have cleaners that come to clean our house once every two weeks. DH saved money all year last year so he could afford to hire them as a birthday/Christmas gift for me.

The cleaners are very nice people. They are licensed and bonded. They clean. But they also:

*burn holes in the carpeting on the stairs with their vaccuum cleaner

*use cleaning products that I am apparently allergic to, and which smell bad and leave sticky/powdery/slippery/smelly residue behind

*scratch up the sinks

*put the trash can where the recycling container goes, and the recycling container where the trash can goes--every single time

*move the trash can to the opposite side of the toilet where we had it--every single time

*leave thick layers of highly toxic-smelling cleaner residue on the burners, where it smokes and sends off oxious chemicals when I turn the burners on

*neglect to rinse the floors, so that my shoes go "squidge, squidge" with every step on the sticky residue from their cleaning products

*neglect to clean the insides of the toilets

*give milk chocolate to my lactose-intolerant, sugar-intolerant children

And, they don't speak English well enough and I don't speak Spanish well enough for me to be able to reliably get across to them anything I want them to do differently or not do at all.

*sigh*

Now let me go complain that my Egyptian serving-boy isn't waving the fan fast enough for me while I sip my imported coconut milk and complain that it's not cold enough.

Sue said...

Good whines abound!

votes for margalit (oh.my.goodness.) and amy and all body fluid whines. I'm feeling especially sympathetic to vomiting whines this week because last week I spent 16 hours in a car. I'm prone to motion sickness. Blech.

Liz - I would go with the wait and see. did you give him any children's benadryl or anything? I hope the rash is gone by morning.

Susan Anne MacKenna said...

Oh, P_K - YUCK! I had similar (though not as severe) issues with my cleaning crew (also available via my husband saving his lunch money all fall), and I called the service. What I ended up doing was changing the day they come to clean, and also providing the cleaning products that I needed them to be using. Also, you can go on babelfish and translate what you need to say to them into Spanish. Maybe that will help? The not cleaning the inside of toilets is particularly egregious!

Liz Miller said...

I gave MM a dose of Zyrtec and the rash is all gone this morning!!

Hooray!

P-K, those issues are the reason we no longer have a cleaning company come in...it drove MS up the wall to have them here and they broke some things. But I'm hating how dirty the house is and I _HATE_ cleaning. I do it. But I hate it. And even cleaning for days, I never get the house as clean as the cleaners got it in hours.

purple_kangaroo said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
purple_kangaroo said...

Esperanza, a hickey on the nipple means there's something wrong with the latch. Do you have access to a lactation consulutant?

It wasn't until my third baby that somebody finally helped me figure out what was wrong with my latch so that it was much less uncomfortable to nurse. And, yes, I talked to lactation consultants in the hospital with my first two.

What I learned is that if nursing is still painful or causing trauma to the nipple, you need more help fixing the problem, even if the first lactation consultant told you your latch was fine. :)

Liz, I'm glad Zyrtec did the trick.

Vote for margalit.

Hugs to everyone.

DMD, I can't "call the cleaning service" and get someone different to talk to. The cleaning service consists of one man who owns the business, and a helper that he brings along. I don't know if they'd be willing to use my cleaning products, and I suspect that I'd also have to provide and launder the rags because mixing cleaning products=bad idea.

Judging from the amount of fuzz and bits of dirt left behind in the bathtubs, I suspect they use the same rags for everything and that they clean my bathtub last--which wigs me out a bit thinking of the rag swiping the toilet and then the floors and then my bathtub, and not getting rinsed. I do rinse it before they use it.

But why can't they rinse the bathtub and other stuff after they clean it? I do, when I clean them. Which I don't.

I suppose I could get out the Spanish/English dictionary, but it seems that it would be wisest to stick to the things that are really important, like the melting of black holes in my carpet. A long list of things that they consider minor is just likely to confuse and frustrate everybody in the communication attempts.

Last time they came, they kept asking me for ah-haks, because they forgot theirs. I could not for the life of me figure out what they were talking about, and they couldn't figure out how to get me to understand. I finally realized that they were trying to say Ajax--as in cleaning product I don't keep in the house because it's so abrasive and toxic. I gave them baking soda, but they were back to the Ajax this week.

They have some kind of cleaning spray that they spray on the floors and other flat surfaces, and then wipe without rinsing. Otherwise large quantities of Ajax, abrasive cleaning pads and lots of elbow grease seems to be their approach of choice.

Which may be why my sinks are getting more scratched up each time they clean them. (Well that, and the fact that the last person I hired--a friend, not a cleaning service--used a screwdriver to try to scrape off hard water deposits on the upstairs sink plugs. That person also used my cleaning products and appliances--and broke my vaccuum.)

Liz, I'm thinking that I'm getting more and more motivated to somehow figure out a way to do the cleaning myself. Or find someone who will do it my way. But these people are nice and they work hard, so I hate to say anything to them or stop using them. I don't know.

purple_kangaroo said...

Uh, I rinse the tubs before I use them, not before they use them. I don't *think* my cleaners are taking baths in my bathtubs.

Cannot type this morning. Probably because of no sleep.

Went to bed at 1, was asleep (more like sort-of-restlessly-dozing) by 3, awake at 3:30, 4:00, 4:30, 5:30, 6AM and finally gave up and got out of bed at 6. And I'm having respiratory issues and itchy feet from the cleaning products still lingering in the air and on the floors.

I'm really tired of being tired all day and not being able to sleep at night. And of being in pain and sick. But that's nothing new, and makes a boring whine.

purple_kangaroo said...

Oh, and I'm not tired because of not going to bed early enough, mostly. Most nights I'm in bed by 11, but not sleeping. Last night I attempted to go to bed at 7, but still didn't sleep much or well.

purple_kangaroo said...

Man, that P_K is whiny. Good thing I don't know her.

Liz Miller said...

P_K, try to find a different cleaning service. There are several national companies who are good (and I would use them if we had any money! Because did I mention I hate cleaning and I'm no good at it?)

purple_kangaroo said...

Liz, I'm guessing the national companies are more expensive, and therefore out of our price range? Would you mind e-mailing me the names of the ones you think are good?

esperanza said...

P_K, sorry I wasn't clear. I pump all the time for the Sweet Baboo, due to preemie and other issues. I've adjusted everything that is adjustable on the @*$%# thing, to no avail. They don't really hurt, just look bad. But it's not like I'm showing them off to anyone.

Sue said...

Oh PK, that is awful!! The same cloth for everthing??? Um, ick.

We had cleaners for awhile this past winter. Hubby hated it. They moved our waste baskets - every time. What's up with that? You empty it, you put it back. Not brain surgery.

At least they cleaned the toilet though.

Excellent old-skool whineage.