If it Weren’t for Good Luck . . .

My horoscope today:

You’ll come across special offerings from life the likes of which other people don’t realize exist.
It’s as though the forces that be are reserving a bit of magic intended just for you.

Sounds kind of cool, doesn’t it?

Problem is, it wasn’t specific enough.

At one o’clock this afternoon, my department was hopping: if the phone didn’t ring, someone came up to the desk to ask for help, and every time I moved more than three feet from the desk, the phone would ring. There were forms and complicated explanations and requests that had to be recorded and letters that had to be written, and printers that jammed up for no reason.

It was one of those days where you just hang on, do triage best you can, and try not to mind the inbox-outbox ratio.

At two o’clock, every supervisor in the building went to the weekly Admin meeting.

That was okay, since we were covered for the desk.

At two-thirty, the switchboard put a call through specifically to me—my SIL, telling me that my husband was in the emergency room with a seriously screwed up back, and while my MIL was able to pick up Sunny from pre-kindergarten, it was looking like no one would be able to pick up Janie from school at 3:30.

Not so okay.

I couldn’t interrupt the Admin meeting to have a supervisor sign my slip and I couldn’t just walk off the job. So I called Janie’s school and left a message that she needed to go to After Care, and someone would be there as soon as possible, then called my SIL to tell her that the first one on her way to Janie should call the other one, and I’d be out as soon as I could then called the school again until I reached a Real Human Being.

And all the while, my co-workers and I were fielding questions and problems in phone and in person for patrons.

So I waited for an hour, guilty and busy and wondering if I could get to Janie in time to get her home and changed and snacked in time for her very first softball game at five—until I received the text from her coach that reminded everyone to assemble at four-thirty— and worried to death that my non-salaried husband would be incapacitated for more than a few days and how I was going to get everyone everywhere until he was up and about . . . If, my stress whispered, he ever was.

At four, my desk shift was over, so I ran upstairs to catch my boss coming out of the meeting, took the signed form to our HR person and explained that I was sure if it was sick or comp time and I was too late to mind either, and high-tailed it to the parking lot, where I caught a message from my SIL saying she had the kids and what now?

We decided that since I was going to pass the hospital, I’d take care of my husband and the meds and she and my MIL and Sunny would go to Janie’s game.   So I drove to the hospital, behind a series of people who didn’t believe in a minimum speed limit.

I found Emergency, parked, and sent him a text asking where he was.

He told me to turn around, because I’d just driven right past him.

I did and was told not to help as he levered himself into the car.  Turns out, he has a bad muscle sprain—maybe even a small tear.

The man is  in serious pain and loopy from the meds and frustrated and upset with missing so much work—he’s down flat at least until Friday—and Janie’s game.

And that’s when I remembered . . . my husband is also a Gemini.

Talk about your special offerings.  Thanks, forces that be.  Can’t tell you how much we appreciate it.

But, you know . . . we’re insured and the meds are covered.

My SIL was there to pick up the considerable slack, and I have plenty of sick time to cover my hours today and maybe tomorrow, if I’m needed here instead of there.

My husband is napping on the couch in a position that feels okay to him.  Janie walked on her first bat and then stole second and third—my SIL has been sending me a play-by-play—while her little sister and grandmother cheer her on.

And dinner—spaghetti and meatballs and garlic breadsticks—is cooking away while I take the opportunity to type up a post that took a few turns since I’d first read that horoscope.

I guess those are special life offerings, too.

Don’t get me wrong—it still sucks and the next few days won’t be fun.  And there may still be orthopedic surgery in our future.But maybe the magical part is that it all could have been much, much worse.

Terrifying thought . . . but under the circumstances, I’ll take it.

For my next trick . . .

This is what I think happened yesterday afternoon.

I think I hooked my right foot in a loop of old carton strap and stepped on part of it with my left.  So when I tried to take another right step, my foot didn’t move and I hit the asphalt in what, I’m told, would have been a perfect pratful if I’d been wearing kneeguards.

I wasn’t.

What’s worse, I was holding hands with Janie at the time and took her down with me.  We did let go on the way, so all the fall did was skin her elbow and scare the hell out of her.

My husband saw to her, while I sat up and assessed the damage as best I could without taking my pants off in the parking lot: two stinging knees and two scuffed palms.  I didn’t mind so much about the palms, since they kept the pratfall from turning into a face plant, but I was worried about the knees, since they weren’t in the best of shape before I decided to test the theory that walking is just unsuccessful falling.*

Sunny pulled the strap off my foot and put it on the curb, “So you won’t trip on it again, Mommy.”  Thanks, kid.

I decided I was fine and after I figured out how to get up, we proceeded to the grocery store, a tear-streaked Janie glued to my side.  Halfway through, I was hobbling and trying not to show Janie how much it hurt.

When we arrived home, I checked both knees and discovered a spectacular abrasion on my right knee and a rainbow** contusion on my left.

Luckily, nothing is broken, though my right knee doesn’t care to bend or straighten .  And my upper arms, which apparently absorbed most of the impact, ache.  

But I have to say, the kids were very good the rest of the day—they even uncovered most of the carpet in their playroom*** without complaining. For forty minutes.

Plus, I got a blog entry out of it . . .  and a chance to practice my First Aid skills with Wonderwoman sterile pads and Spiderman medical tape.

So while I can’t recommend the experience, it could have been a lot worse—I could have the Bat Signal on my nose.

_____________________________________________________

*And succeeded.

**If rainbows favored tones of mustard and prune and were given to clinical depression.

*** Which looked like the sales floor of FAO Schwartz after an 6.2 earthquake.

Random Thursday: bragging, backs, blood, and birthdays

Random Thursday (ˈrandəm ˈTHərzdā):  the day on which Sarah plunks down all the odd bits and pieces she’d put on Twitter if she could tweet at work and if tweets could be over 900 characters long and if she had twelve hours a day to spend tweeting and following, which is why she doesn’t have a Twitter account in the first place.  Or a phone that does more than make phone calls.   Being responsible is boring . . .

 ______________________________________

First order of business, bragging on my kid:

This past weekend, my husband took Janie and Sunny to this enormous Health Fair near the riverfront.  One of the activities they had for the kids was the NFL Pass, Punt & Kick Program, in which kids in different age groups compete against each other by, as one might expect, passing, punting and kicking a football.

Yesterday, Jane received a huge envelope in the mail.  Inside was a certificate for participating in the NFL-PPK . . . and a blue ribbon.  She won her division and has been invited to the sectional competition next month!

 Janie was beside herself—she would have nailed a free-jumping competition for sure—my husband immediately set up a practice schedule, and I was floored.

 My kid—mine—coming in first in a football contest.  Seriously?

I mean, sure, she’s the image of my mother, who was a gym teacher once upon a lifetime ago and never misses a Miami University home game* . . . but surely nurture would overcome whatever recessive genes skipped a generation to land on my daughter?

Upon reflection, I hope not.

But however she managed it, I’m very proud of her!

—————————————oooooOOOOOooooo—————————————

Part of my job is indexing the city newspaper for our in-house database, and I had a week’s worth waiting for me when I returned to work yesterday.  My fingers are black and I’m pretty sure I have a stripe of red ink on my cheek from my pen, but I’m all caught up.

I concentrate on items of local interest, but one of the perks is reading the celebrity birthday list in each issue.  Call me shallow, but it’s somehow comforting to know that I’m younger than Scott Baio and Joan Jett and that Sophia Loren and Adam West are still with us.

Lauren Bacall is, too—she turned 87 today, and she’s still got the look that made her famous:

—————————————oooooOOOOOooooo—————————————

I managed to wrench my upper back, for a change, on Monday,**and ignoring it didn’t work.  It rarely does, but I remain hopeful.

The pain has died down a bit— I’m still wearing a shrug made of sore muscles,*** but at least it no longer feels as though someone is trying to yank out my shoulder blades with a pair of plumbing wrenches every time I do something stupid, like get out of bed.

The difference, I’ve found, between a strained lower back and a strained upper back is that with the latter it actually feels better when I hunch over a keyboard.

So I don’t even have an excuse to avoid working on that one misfit chapter that’s been driving me up a tree. . . . Why do I even bother being accident prone any more?

—————————————oooooOOOOOooooo—————————————

David McCallum turned 80 on Monday.  I first fell in love with his Man From U.N.C.L.E. persona,  Illya Kuryakin, and was delighted when he returned to television on NCIS.

Yeah, still in love with him.  I’m shallow, not fickle.

—————————————oooooOOOOOooooo—————————————

I’m halfway through Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth,  and it’s the finest political vampire thriller I’ve ever read—and I believe  it  would still be the best if there were several other political vampire thrillers out there and I’d read them all.

There’s weight to this story–the backstory is beautifully done.  And the characters are so well drawn that I can’t help but be frightened for my favorites and hope that they stop their enemies before something happens to them.

I’ll write a better—or longer, anyway—review after I finish it, but if all political thrillers were as well written as this one, I would read more of them, vampires or not.

 —————————————oooooOOOOOooooo—————————————

And finally, Aldis Hodge, aka superhacker Alec Hardison on Leverage, celebrated his 25^th birthday on Tuesday.

Yes, I’m old enough to be his . . . aunt, but I forgive him.

_____________

*Though that’s for the marching band, not the football team.

**We have a front loading washer, and all the socks like to clump up at the back where I can’t . . quite . . . reach them . . . SNAP.  I usually just whack the back of my head on the edge of the  drum, but my pain center apparently felt the need for something new.

**Oh, ugh, sorry—sounds like something Lady Gaga would wear to the Tonys.

Playing (RFID) Book Tag

I spent the morning tagging books, which didn’t involve chasing them down the aisles and vice-versa, but I almost wish it had.

Instead, a coworker and I stuck Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags into each book in the L-M shelves of the Adult fiction section in one of our branch libraries.

Why bother?

Because that branch is going to get one of these soon (not quite the same, but this is the general idea):

It’s an automatic sorter. A patron puts an item through a slot in the wall, and a conveyor belt carries the book to the tag reader, which checks in the item and sends it, via another conveyor, to the appropriate bin to be shelved.  And there’s a screen on the patron side so they can see where their item goes.

This is a truly nifty machine and it saves our Customer Service staff a lot of time at our newest library, which not only included the sorter in its blueprints, but had its entire collection tagged by the company hired to assemble it.*

However, a few of us are starting to suspect that most of the time saved by the planned sorter at this older branch library  will already have been spent programming tags for every single blessed item in the pre-RFID collection before the thing is even installed.

Or perhaps I just have the ouchie feet grumpies.  It happens.

For those of you who are curious, here’s the basic procedure we followed:

• Take an untagged book—check first—off the shelf or cart and pull an RFID sticker off the huge roll.
• Place the sticker—sticky side up, for Pete’s sake— on the special tag reader console, which is connected to a dedicated netbook and a handheld barcode scanner.
• With your free hand, scan the book’s barcode into the netbook with the handheld, which is extremely picky about angle and distance.
• Wait until the tag reader flashes the barcode of the book.
• Pick up the sticker and attach it to the inside back cover in a different place along the spine as the previous book, so if they’re stacked, the tags will be less likely to interfere with each other.
• If you had to pry off the book cover flap to attach the sticker, tape it up again with the fiber book tape from that vicious, saw-toothed dispenser that craves human blood.
• Repeat all steps until your legs stiffen into numb posts because you’ve been standing up for three hours in inappropriate shoes, as you neglected to look at the schedule and see that you were on the tagging crew this morning.  Don’t worry—that numbness will wear off soon.

My co-worker and I had a friendly race to keep things interesting, which worked because we both cheated.***   I was winning, until I hit a pocket of Louis L’Amour paperbacks—there were forty of them on one shelf—and I fell woefully behind.

But we managed to get from Tim LaHaye all the way to Richard Marcinko in the time allotted, so I feel pretty good, except for my feet, which won’t be forgiving me easily.

Libraries are like swans—they may look quiet and serene as the glide on top of the water, but there’s a hell of a lot of activity going on underneath.

But it will be worth it . . . eventually.

____

*We chose each item, but the company cataloged, labeled, and tagged ‘em.  Worth every penny.

**Don’t get me started on tagging CDs or DVDs—those things are circular and reflective.

***There may also  have been some hip checking, but as she weighs about eighty pounds sopping wet wearing combat boots and a backpack loaded with lead ingots  and I . . . don’t . . . I didn’t mind much.

Monday, Monday

Warning: this post contains a whiny rant written by someone who has only herself to blame. Enabler discretion is advised.

Reflections of  gardening appear to be the theme today.  I myself am reflecting that bending over to weed a memorial garden for a couple hours is a fine reason to wake up the next morning in excruciating pain.  It feels like someone took a baseball bat to the backs of my thighs.  Anything I drop today is gonna stay there.  I’m also somewhat sunburned—I remembered to sunscreen the back of my neck and ears, but I figured the rest of me would be sufficiently in my own shadow.  Obviously, I’m neither a gardener* nor someone who understands how UV works.

It’s my husband’s birthday today, and it totally slipped my mind that it’s my late Monday at the library, which means he’ll have to broil the salmon I started marinating in soy sauce and maple syrup last night, and I can’t even buy him lunch, since I start work at eleven.

I also forgot that his gift—a case for his laptop stuffed full of the kids’ Ode to Daddy artwork, cards, and a few other things**—is in the back of my car.  He says we’ll celebrate with gifts and cake when I get home, but that only exacerbates the guilt.  The man is putting off  his birthday for me.  Then again, it’s his forty-third, so maybe the delay is part of his gift?  Probably shouldn’t ask.

The bridge is down to one lane over the river, and will be until November—Janie took some photos of the traffic and the construction as I cursed under my breath in the front seat.  She kept telling me to slow down and I kept asking if she was joking.   We were about halfway across when she announced that she hadn’t had breakfast.

I was too busy eyeballing the concrete dividers they’d run up the yellow line and trying to remember the weight limit of the bridge to give her the standard lecture, plus it was my fault I’d dragged her out of the house so early—I’d been trying to beat the bridge traffic—so once we reached our off-ramp, I stopped at Starbucks, ordered a venti chai tea latte,  and waited for her to decide, already.  Ten minutes later, in the interests of world peace, my blood pressure, and getting her to school today, I let her have a couple of cake balls on sticks for breakfast.  I know—Mother of the Year, me.***

I just fumbled my cup and am now wearing a considerable amount of chai tea latte down my front.  Luckily, I’m wearing my chai tea-colored top, so it should dry well, but it’s only nine am and the day is stretching out before me like a looooooong, painful, guilty, late, cake-balled, fumbly, damp, lightly-stained thing.

Go, Monday.  Hip, hip, meh.

____

Image courtesy of You Know Who.

*Told another volunteer that I had an anti-green thumb for anything but weeds, and then asked her which plants were the weeds and which plants were intentional (in my defense, it was a native wildflower garden, so it was genuinely difficult to tell).  She grinned and said, “Well, if it’s healthy, pull it, and if it looks sick or frightened, leave it alone.”    I like these people.

**Thanks to everyone for all the great suggestions.   I was hoping to use MSB’s tonight, but that would depend on the power of Advil . . .

***I didn’t let her touch the coconut Mai Tai espresso sampler shots, though, so I deserve a point for that.  My child on caffeine  . . . holy cow.