Co-Birthday Party

Both my girls have June birthdays so we doubled up on their party this year. Hannah was feeling pretty good after her surgery (she even went to school for the last day so that she could have all of her friends sign her yearbook) so the day went off smashingly. We had about a dozen girls in all rangng in age from 11 to 14. I was very surprised how well the two groups got along. They’d do activities together for a while, split, then come back together again for another activity.

Here are some pictures:

Sammie @ 12

 

Irene, almost 14

I had the girls color icing and decorate cupcakes. Interesting that the 8th graders were very meticulous with their decorations and the 7th graders were all about eating in volume.

Just Good Friends!

 

Pigs in a Blanket for dinner

 

Hannah’s Follow-up Surgery – Getting the Plates Out of Her Legs

Whoo-hoo! Hannah had her follow-up surgery on Friday to get the plates taken out of her legs. We’re hoping she’s done with surgery for a very, very, very long time (forever works for me).

I went back to the recovery area to see her once I got the go-ahead. She was still asleep. The anesthesiologist came by and said she’d be asleep for another hour, but with all the ruckus  going on with the other patients, alarms and traffic, she was awakened a lot sooner.

Actually, it took less than an hour to get her up, dressed and out. Our surgeon, Dr. Conway, was very surprised to find Hannah in a chair rather than a bed when she came by to follow-up.  She walked in while I was helping Hannah to get dressed. She did let us keep Hannah’s hardware. Here are some shots from the day of surgery:

Still Waking Up - Half Dressed, Dozing Off & Stil Hooked Up To Tubes

Vitals Are Good!

It’s pretty cool that we got to keepHannah’s hardware.

Titanium 8-Plates & Screws from Hannah's Bones

The only thing we need to figure out now is how to make jewelry out of it. The screws and plates represent two years of Hannah healing, plus the titanium is sort of pretty. I’ll let you know if we come up with anything!

And Now For a Datsun 810 Misadventure

That poor car! I really did put it through hell for those few years that I drove it, but for all the smack I’ve talked about it over the years, it was a pretty reliable car.

When I was getting close to the end of junior college I started thinking about finding a “real” job in an office somewhere. You know, where grown ups work and wear suits and go out for happy hour on Friday nights and talk about other grown up things. I knew my career path was not going to be in retail (though The Gap corporate offices sounded very slick out there in San Bruno, CA) and after doing all the work to finish my degree I didn’t want to keep working for $3.80 an hour.

It was time to start job hunting and interviewing.

I visited the guidance center at school and made some selections from the job descriptions they had available and even set up some interviews. The only thing left to do was shop for a serious interview suit.

I drove the old Datsun over to a mall near home and shopped around until I found a navy skirt suit and a couple of blouses to wear with it. I’m pretty sure I only wore that hideous polyester suit once since I got the first job I applied for, but I was pleased with it at the time and was feeling very adult as I walked back to my car with my bag of grown up duds.

….that was until I saw the little red Toyota parked in the side of my Datsun.

At that point I reverted back to my 2 year-old-tantrum-throwing self.

I was in complete shock that someone would not only swing wide into their parking space (thus wedging their car into the side of mine) but then to just leave it there like some terrible joke.

As I flung my ¾ full soda at the windshield of the offending vehicle, I knew I was making a mistake, but the satisfying splash it made as it hit the car was too satisfying to resist. Looking back, I believe my outrage was based more upon someone ruining my adult right-of-passage moment than any deep feelings I had for the car.

Seriously though, who leaves a Toyota parked in a Datsun???

Anyway, a park policeman witnessed my little hissy-fit and walked over to see what all the fuss was about. Being a bona fide lawman, he confirmed the vehicular contact and that it would indeed impede my ability to actually leave the parking lot. Whew! I’m glad he straightened that out!

The park policeman was off duty but said he’d get mall security (Gasp!) out to my location to see what they could do to help me out. They too confirmed my predicament however, they were also perplexed as to how they could help me so they called in local police for back up.

Long story short, I wound up with about 12 men with varying degrees of law enforcement background picking up the Toyota and moving it away from my car. One of city cops slim jim’d the offending car open in order to access the registration information.

The asshole driver’s name was Damien and it turns out he was a county judge’s son. Soon, the obvious infraction was turned into a case of a “phantom driver”.

Apparently Damien claimed that someone had broken into his car, driven it into the side of mine and threw soda on the windshield. When your daddy’s a judge, any bullshit story you can come up with becomes plausible even with witnesses.

Even my insurance company bought that bogus story (can’t remember who I was insured by at the time or I would totally out them as well).

So Damien got off, my insurance paid for the damage, and the car started failing about 6 months later (cracked head gasket). I drove it in a billowing cloud of white steam until it stopped running entirely.

R.I.P,

I would be curious to find out what other vehicular antics old Damien got up to after he weaseled his way out of his trouble with me, but those are other people’s stories and I’m sure I’ll never hear about them. I wound up buying a Toyota myself after things calmed down. I never did run it into anybody though.

Another Gap Adventure – Stuck on the Beltway

I was talking to my mom about yesterday’s post (she’s a fan, bless her heart) and reminded me of another memorable Gap related snafu – breaking down on the beltway at night at a point in time before cell phones were commonly used.

Since I was still in junior college when I was employed by The Gap, I worked more during nights and weekends. That’s pretty typical. Because I was my mother’s only child (and a girl), she insisted that I call her when I was leaving work so she’d know when to expect me to come home. I’d let the phone ring once at home, head to the car and make the thirty minute drive home.

One mild evening after we’d straightened up and counted out, I had just gotten onto the beltway when the elderly Datsun 810 station wagon (Ooooooo! Sexy!!!) I was driving began to loose power. I was already in the slow lane because I’d just gotten onto the highway so as soon as I felt the waning momentum, I drifted over to the shoulder.

After fiddling with the ignition and lights, I figured out that 1) I wasn’t going anywhere any time soon and 2) the power was limited so I could only use the headlights or the hazard lights, but not both at the same time. I decided the hazards made more sense and hoped that I wouldn’t have to sit there too long before someone from law enforcement came along to help.

I sat there for an hour before my “savior” rolled up to offer assistance. The first thing he said was that he’d seen me sitting there about an hour ago and had driven around his entire route before stopping to check out what was going on with the little blue station wagon. I bit my tongue about him letting me cool my heels for so long. I was just glad he had finally stopped.

The only thing he could do to help me, however, was to drop me at the closest police station (back towards the mall where I worked) so that I could at least use the phone to call home.

By this time my mother had realized that something was wrong and gotten on the road to see if she could find me. Down the beltway in the pre-midnight gloom she drove with her eyes peeled looking for the distinctive shape of my car. When she finally found it, I was gone and she had no idea where. I’m sure her heart dropped more than a little. In hind sight, I should have left a note on the windshield, but as with all our foibles, a series of missteps was SOP (standard operating procedure).

Anyway, I was at the police station trying repeatedly to call my mom. She was on the road worrying herself to death. Finally I called a neighbor of ours who was a good friend and a night owl to see if she could get a message to my mom when she got home. She promised to do so and was as good as her word.

My mom was finally able to call me at the police station and I gave her directions to pick me up. It turned out to be the distributor cap that was the issue with my car. We had it towed and fixed and I had the car back in no time. I learned a few lessons about what to do when stuck on the side of the road, though mobile phones have made life a whole lot easier, especially in emergency situations.

In the end, everything worked out and things could have been a whole lot worse. At least it wasn’t raining.

Retail Days – One of My Many Misadventures at The Gap

I think if you took a poll, you would find that a pretty large percentage of people in this country have at some point worked for The Gap or one of it’s sister companies (Banana Republic, Old Navy, Pottery Barn or PiperLime). I am one of those people – I started right around the time I was attending community college and wound up working at three different stores during my time there. That’s the nice thing about working for a chain; you can request a transfer or communicate a desire to move into management and you can still have a job within a distance you are willing to drive.

At my third posting (where I was a junior assistant manager), I worked with a store manager who had trained in a store where I worked before and I liked her so I was pleased to be placed in her store (even though it was in sort of a dodgy area).

I had gotten settled in as a manager and liked the other managers and staff, so I was happy that I had asked for and received my promotion. Our store was sort of the district’s outlet store so we got an interesting variety of merchandise from all over the area which had been marked down (not good for me since I was never good at saying no to a great deal, especially with a 30% discount on top of the low price). Needless to say, much of my take home pay went right back into the store’s profit margin.

Of the holidays I worked at The Gap, the Christmas season of ’95 was the most memorable. Our store manager started to have pain in her back starting right after Thanksgiving prompting several doctors appointments and a trip to the emergency room when the pain became excruciating. She had painful steroid shots to help ease the pain but it did nothing to ease her discomfort. It took almost a month for her doctors to determine that she had a severe bladder infection (which was causing all the pain) instead of muscle pain in her back. The delay in treatment kept her at home and in bed for much of the holiday rush leaving the other assistant manager and me in charge of the store during the busiest shopping season of the year.

Of course this meant a lot of overtime for both of us and the constant need to shift inventory around the store as new shipments came in and older stock was sold. We would have been busy anyway, but being short our store manager made it especially challenging. I logged 83 hours for the week before Christmas.

Finding time to do my own holiday shopping was almost impossible and I did what I could at the mall where I worked during my breaks, but finally I got an evening off and went to a larger mall where I knew I could find everything I needed which was also closer to home. I was so fatigued from all of my hours at work and wanted nothing more than to finish my shopping and get home to rest.

As I pulled up to an intersection at the mall, I was preparing to turn right when I saw a car coming. In my exhausted state, I hit the gas instead of the brake and wound up hitting a Volkswagen. I was mortified at what my bonehead move, and even more so because a group of punks had witnessed my stupidity and were laughing loudly at my expense. It was horrible.

Hmmm, This might be the actual car I hit. The rust is in the right spot anyway!!!

I exchanged information with the driver whose car I had hit and went about finishing my shopping. It was not a joyous experience (okay, it never really is, but I was bummed about the accident) and I drove home in the dark with my bags of presents feeling pretty low.

I barely noticed the small shadow in the road in front of my car before I heard the thud of a small body under my tires. I looked back into the rearview mirror to see that I’d run over and killed a possum just a couple miles away from my home.

It was too much and I began to cry. I walked into the house sobbing. My mother poor mother had no idea what was wrong with me. Through the tears I told her that I’d had a horrible day and had just killed a possum on the way home. “That’s terrible sweetheart.” she said consolingly.

“That’s not the worst part.” I said. “I also hit a rabbit.”

“Oh, no. Honey, I’m so sorry!”

“Me too. It was a Volkswagen Rabbit!”

As it turns out, the cost to repair the man’s car came out almost to the penny what my paycheck for the 83 hour workweek was. All that work and overtime was lost because in my exhausted state I hit the gas instead of the brake.

8th Grade Dance

Here are a few pictures of Hannah the afternoon before her dance. She had a wonderful time and spent much of it chasing her friends around and taking pictures. I’m glad she got this fun event in before her surgery.

Lovely

 

Facebook, Friending & Paula Behaving Badly

I got a Facebook friend request via e-mail last week.

This in itself is not an unusual thing. I started getting periodic requests from folks I worked with at my last office and I have friends and family who have Facebook accounts who don’t understand why I don’t have one.

“It’s the only way I can keep up with what my kids are up to.” I hear this from a lot of parents I know. Well, maybe I don’t know everything my older kids are up to, but I prefer to have actual conversations with them rather than tracking a news feed. Maybe I’m just weird, but I like having a more verbal connection with my kids rather than following them via a Facebook broadcast of their various activities.

“It’s a great way to get back in touch with old friends.” Frankly, I’m happy to wait for the next high school reunion to catch up with people. I’ve stayed in touch with the friends that I have for a reason and lost touch with others for valid reasons as well. I happy with the number of people I have in my life and how often I see them and am hesitant to bring on a deluge of e-mails with blasts from the past when what’s really important to me is spending time with my family.

I have to admit that I did cave in and joined Facebook for exactly one week. It was sort of peer pressure…and from my mom of all people! She was on e-mail before me, then eBay, so when she kept going on and on about how much she liked Facebook, I gave in.

 

All I can say is that it was a really annoying week.

I got friend requests from some family members out of state. I friended my husband and my mom and my precocious 11 year old who signed on without my consent. Since I purposely used my married name, I was not tracked down by old school chums and co-workers from my retail days. Whew! Relief!

It’s just as well because the news-feeds just about drove me crazy. There were many words coming through, but not a whole lot was being said, but it was constant and I’m sorry to say, really annoying to read. Do you suppose there’s some sort of word counter on there that earns you points or something???

Anyway, after a week, I couldn’t take it anymore. I apologized to mom. She was okay with it since she enjoys what her friends write and we talk and e-mail regularly anyway.

My other more personal reason for not wanting to jump on the Facebook bandwagon is the simple fact that I am extremely boring. I work. I go home and do the mom/wife thing. I read, watch movies and shop way too much on Amazon. I can’t imagine anyone wants to hear about my daily routine. If I actually typed it in, I would probably fall asleep in the middle of it. I really don’t want to advertise just how boring I am to people. Most of the people I know are smart enough to figure it out for themselves.

My friend request last week came from a surprisingly unexpected source:

One of our neighbors.

One of a group of our neighbors who have formed a unified front to freeze us out of all their parties and social events.

Do you want to know what our terrible transgression was to merit this shunning?

We had adopted a dog from the shelter and one day a little over a month after we got her (during the general six month adjustment period) she jumped up and bit one of the members of our neighborhood’s In group.

It was totally unexpected. We apologized profusely. I called her a number of occasions to see how she was (the bite did not break the skin). And, my downfall, I promised that I would always have the dog muzzled when walking her in the neighborhood.

I violated this rule by the third day. It was really hard getting the muzzle on her and the only ones they sell in the pet store are closed mouth muzzles. Our dog is an avid panter and by forcing her to walk close-mouthed, we were in effect keeping her from being able to cool herself.

My phone rang five minutes after I got back from our morning walk and my response as to why she was not muzzled was not well received.

During all of this, my bruised and pissed off neighbor went on the warpath to warn all of the other people she knew in our development that we had a vicious dog. Obviously I don’t know all that was said, but she got people worked up enough that we started getting calls about the dog; calls from people who had not been harmed in any way by anyone in our family including the dog.

Then we got the citation from the county.

Awesome.

A $100 fine for an unexpected, unintentional accident for which I felt terrible.

The questions that kept going through my mind when we got that notice from the county were: “What does this solve?” and “How does this make anything any better?” Well, there was that one other one: “Are we now going to be sued?” After a year, the answer to that one is still no, thank goodness.

Anyway, the brouhaha has finally settled down to shunning, which is not ideal, but better than dealing directly with angry people who we have not wronged.

So, when the e-mail came through for the friend request, I had planned to ignore it, knowing that it had been sent mistakenly and probably from an old distribution list from when we were acceptable people with whom to associate.

But of course this past weekend was Memorial Day, the traditional weekend which is the opening of summer and also the customary start of party season. The party in question was held right across the street with many of the guests parked right in front of our house.

We were out working on the garden bed on one side of our house trying to make it look nice after we’d taken out some bushes a couple of years ago. We had a birds eye view of all the guests arriving as we sweated our way through digging up clay and roots.

I told myself that I was glad to not have to make small talk with all those people. I no longer had to smile politely as the conversation turned to American Idol and Dancing with the Stars (which I don’t watch and think are really stupid shows). I didn’t have to worry about hearing about plastic surgery, boob jobs or anal bleaching (yeah, it’s a real thing and for some reason, our neighbors like to talk about it). It was a relief not to have to mingle with the shallow Stepford Wives.

But seriously, being shunned really sucks and you can’t help but feel it when you’re smack dab in the middle of it. And it did bother me.

So on Tuesday morning as I was drinking my morning cup of tea and checking e-mail, my eyes fell on that errant message. And then I began to type.

I wrote that I would be declining their friend request and could they please let our other “friends” know about the sliding holiday schedule for trash pick-up so people wouldn’t have their trash sitting out on the street for an extra day. I even went so far as to wish her a pleasant week, though I knew in the meanness of my heart, that I wished no such thing.

I just wanted to dish out a small helping of rejection to balm my feelings.

The satisfaction of doing so gave me a dark sense of pleasure and really, what more can they do to us at this point? Start a really annoying home owners association and tell us we have to change the color of our siding?

Yeah, I know I should have left it alone; taken the high road; risen above the pettiness of it all. I’ll add that to my long list of things that I need to do to improve myself.

We’ll see how I do around this time next year.

Not Me