For the past two years I dreaded this time of year.  Dreaded is even a gross understatement. I dreaded girlie appointments a helluva lot less than coming to work this time of year. But that was the past.

Today is the first day of school for the teachers and usually that means PeopleAcrossTheHall flip out. For the most part this year, its been calm. For the most part this year, they’re just annoying. For the most part this year, I can just laugh it off.  There are still moments that I want to choke them because they make things harder than they have to be. Fortunately, those moments are few and far between. Fortunately, those moments are usually limited to days when I have to deal with their flipouts before I had my morning coffee. Fortunately, those moments are nothing like they were in the past because we learned how to co-exist.

I wasn’t looking forward to coming to work today because of the past but I put on my best happy face and told myself it won’t be all that bad. Thank goodness for the attitude self-adjustment.  My biggest bitches so far today is that someone stopped me to complain about someone else while I was carrying something heavy and that PeopleAcrossTheHall can’t close my office door on their way out so I’m not distracted by noise when I’m working on scripts. That’s not all that bad.

Warning: MushMeter on this post is about a 12.

Boyfriend has this thing where he likes to give me random pet names. Sometimes they’ll stick around for a day or a week. Sometimes they’re recurring and I’ll hear them again after a couple months.  Sometimes they’re a one-timer and sometimes he’ll make up little songs around them. No matter what, they always make me laugh.

Well, yesterday I got a new one. I had a super busy day yesterday so I didn’t have the opportunity until mid-afternoon to text him to say “hi! how ya doin?” and to let him know he hadn’t heard from me yet because I was super busy. His reply back started with “Hello lollipop!” *giggle*

It appears that this was just a one-timer but I think it’s going to be rolling around in my head for days.  After I shut off my alarm this morning I started singing, “Lollipop, lollipop! Oh lolli, lolli, lolli! Lollipop!” *pop* “bah-bum, bum, bum!”

Fantastic. I dug up the video on YouTube for ya’ll to watch. Enjoy!

I’ve been living in this house for two and a half years. I love the house, the yard, the neighborhood… everything. However, it never felt like “home” to me. All the walls and flooring are a shade of white or beige so everything seems so sterile. When I first moved from Michigan to Wisconsin in 2001, I had some big, beautiful plants.  Unfortunately, only two of them survived the move into my new apartment. Only one of those survived the move from my apartment to my duplex. The last didn’t survive my move back to Michigan in 2004 and I’ve been plantless ever since.  After I made up my mind that I was going to move my desk yesterday, I went to Wal-Mart and bought two plants and two clay pots.

My Plants & Pots - Home from the store

I chose two vine plants I was very successful at growing in my old house - an ivy and a nephthytis (I just learned the name of that one).  Those suckas had vines that stretched across across the length of my old living room. It was awesome!  I wanted to start with small plants - but not from slips because I those seem to take forever to grow and almost always die on me.  I also decided to get cheap clay pots because I knew I’d be repotting the plants again in a couple months. I hate putting tiny plants in bigger pots then (im)patiently wait for the plants to grow into them.  I’d rather deal with the dirty mess of repotting again.  Anyway, with that in mind, I knew I had plenty of craft paint at home to make the ugly clay pots pretty so instead of paying $5-$15 per pot they cost about $1 each.  I painted the pots yesterday evening before I started TheBigDeskMove so they’d have plenty of time to dry before they became homes to my new plants.

I’m going to learn to make frybread before the end of the month, dammit.

Perhaps I should have waited. I was asking for help for a reason. The task just seemed far too overwhelming for me to do on my own but last night I decided to do it anyway. I moved my pine corner desk last night. Moving it required me to completely take it apart and haul it piece by piece from my old office to the living room then reassemble it. Wanna take a guess at how much fun that was to do without a cordless screwdriver? Better yet, wanna take a guess at how easy it was to “slide” it into place on carpet when the bottom is still bare plywood. Sliding into place was more like lifting and moving each side 1/4” at a time. I had to wait until it was fully assembled to put it in the corner because each shelf was screwed in from the back and the bottom.

Honestly, I’m not complaining about the construction of the desk. I love my desk. That’s why I’ve been trying to get it moved into my living room for the past year. It was custom made it for me by ExH and he wanted to make sure it would withhold the stress of any weight I’d put on it.

Whining aside, I’m very happy my desk is finally in my living room. It matches the oak bookshelf ExH made for me.  (Yes, I realize they are two different types of wood…. I stained them to match each other.) The two pieces are my favorite and add life to what was a somewhat blah room.