Oh my goodness, Capt. UberHusband and I had the best weekend.  Spent a lot of time at the pool, ran up exhorbitant bar/food bills at said pool…and we slept in.  Well, we didn’t really sleep in…but we were able to wake up without being forced out of bed by the dogs to tend to their increasingly growing needs.  That was nice. Sometimes it’s nice to send the dogs to doggie camp.  Don’t tell Cookie I said that, though.

Tragically however, all good things must come to an end…and I had to go back to work this morning.  What a downer.  I mean, seriously.  I’ll just leave it at that.

This was one of those days when I stop at random intervals and say, “Is there a full moon tonight?  Everyone is acting so completely insane.”  It was so completely insane of a day, that the high point was successfully creating a new Twitter avatar.  That’s setting sights pretty low, folks.  I shouldn’t find this surprising, though.  Things like this seem to happen between semesters for me.  It’s like as soon as one high-stress part of my life goes on hiatus…fifteen more are in the wings ready and waiting for their close-ups.

Here’s an insanity example, though…one that won’t get me into trouble with anyone.  Last week, I called the guy we’re renting our villa from in September.  I gave him our credit card number so he could finish billing the charge, and our address so he could mail us the keys.  Then I emailed him the address, too.  He called on Thursday and left a voice mail confirming he had all our info, and we were paid in full and ready to go.  Mahalo.

At about 4:30 this afternoon while I was on the phone with CU, Villa Guy called and left a message asking me to call him back.  I did…about twenty minutes later.  Keep this in mind.  Twenty minutes later.  When he answers, I tell him who I am, and that I’m returning his call.  He says, “Ah, yes.  Give me a minute to remember why I called you.” Twenty. Minutes.

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Sometimes, the actions of people completely baffle me. Now, I expect a certain level of stupidity and moronicity (like that?) out of the Average Person, me included; but, oh my God, have I got a whopper of a story. And this time, it wasn’t What Would Snarkwife Do? It was, What Did Stacy Actually Do?

Ya’ll know I’m a stickler for service. I praise the good, but I will also let the complaints flow if I’ve received lousy service. I’m particularly astute to the art of customer service management since I finished my services marketing class…two hours ago. Heh.

So. I needed a pedicure. The last one I got was about a month ago, and with everything…well, that just fell off the list of Things To Do. I’ve been going to the same place down in Plano for ten years (and had the same pedicure chick for nine), but didn’t feel like making the 20-minute drive. Now of course, I’m kicking myself…but…coulda, woulda, shoulda.

Around here, you can’t turn around without bumping into at least three nail salons. They’re in every strip mall at every intersection, and I can think of…six nail places that are within a five-minute drive of my house. So, I take an early lunch and swing by one for a pedicure. I walk in and the place seems nice enough, except they don’t have their A/C turned on…just lots of fans running. Well, I need a pedicure, and don’t have time to go interviewing every nearby nail establishment today.

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So, check this out. Turns out we here in the DFW area are being paid back for last year’s mild (well, by comparison) summer. Our big plans of hanging out by the pool this weekend have now been modified to hanging out by the pool just long enough to get a cocktail delivered, then I guess we’ll hide someplace air-conditioned the rest of the time.

Before we can get to the fun weekend though, I need to take my Financial Management final. Since I woke up bright and early at 5:30 AM (anxious much, Stacy?), it would behoove me to just take the durn thing so I can get on with my life.

More later.

Update: Got an A on my final (19/20 – score!), and I can now hold my own in a conversation about target capital structures, why NPV is superior to IRR, and the difference between the stable and residual dividend policies. That is of course, if I fail to shift these conversations to the topic of television.

Turns out, the Dallas Morning News is good for more than simply providing space for parents to blatantly dodge responsibility, yessireebob.  It will also provide a primer on how to call in sick!

My favorite?

Don’t give your supervisor all the gory details of your illness, pain and suffering. It smacks of exaggeration. Make the call short and to the point.

The only exception to this rule is if your name happens to be Ferris Bueller. The epilogue to this one is the story someone will tell you when he/she comes back after aforementioned illness. If they go into great detail about how they threw up all day, slept for nine hours, couldn’t eat anything except chicken broth…yadda, yadda, yadda…you can be pretty sure they were sitting at home, happy as a lark, watching The Price is Right.

One good thing about working from home is…I never get sick anymore. In the last 4+ years, I think I’ve only called in sick (as in, too sick to even sit upright to at least type)…maybe…twice? The job I had before this one though, we had that great thing called PTO time. Or rather, it’s great for HR and payroll administrators because without “sick time,” that’s one less thing to take care of and/or manage.

The other side of that though, is people won’t ever call in sick. I know I didn’t. I wanted to use my precious PTO time for fun things…like vacation. So, I’d go into work…sick as a dog. So did everyone else. I think that’s the only time your average “drug-free workplace” becomes a “drug haven.” You’re either hopped up on amphetamines decongestants or in an antihistimine-fueled fog. Ah, those were good days.

Back in college, a group of my friends decided to go up to Lake Tahoe for a few days over New Year’s. I was bad…I called in sick, even though I wasn’t sick. I was also a fan of the “leave a voicemail for your boss at 7 AM, so he/she knows you at least got up and tried to pull it together” tactic. You don’t call when he/she is actually in the office…that would be just…silly!

And…I have to mention this…Capt. UberHusband has never called in sick to work. Ever.

What about ya’ll? Any good “calling in sick” stories?

Well, I have been up for a whopping six minutes, and have already downloaded the WordPress for iPhone app from the iTunes store.

Just think of the possibilities…rather than needing to wait to get home to talk about the weird things I see while out and about, now I can create posts on the fly. Take yesterday, for example…I was at the Girl Part Doctor, and there was a limo out front. Huh?

Or, I could tell you about the conversation I had with a woman (started when she saw my financial management text) which ended with her saying, “I had an MBA, and then I became a mom.” I’m sorry, that befuddles me. Did you have to give it back?

So you see, I am now officially mobile. I also am now officially in need of a remedial iPhone keyboard typing class. This post took way longer to tap out than it needed to.

Here’s my horoscope for today:

They say if you do what you love, the money will follow.  They don’t say how long it will take to get here.  It could be awhile.  Do what you love anyway.

Well…if my horoscope says to do it, then I guess I should.

CU and I have this routine in the morning.  The alarm goes off, we roll around and grumble a bit, scratch the dogs, and take the dogs outside.  Then, depending on who is more awake (and has more front yard-appropriate clothing on), one of us will go out and grab the paper while the other gives Cookie her morning meds.

I’ll fix a cup of coffee, then sit down to read all of the advice columns and of course, Dilbert.  CU got to the “Collin County Opinions” page in the Metro section before I did today.  Here’s the thing about the Collin County Opinions section – generally the “editorials” are written by average folk…presumably like you and me, assuming you live in Collin County and are an unappreciated stay-at-home-mom, an overworked and underpaid teacher, a self-employed “telecom executive” who was laid off during the Telecom Bust of ’01, or a local high school student who wants to get a jump-start on his/her journalism career. 

These “opinion” pieces are supposedly also written with a decidedly “folksy” spin so that average folk…presumably like you and me, can engage in watercooler talk about how our lives are just like theirs.  We’re all in this crazy wacky life together, you know?

But.  This is what we read this morning, and then…well…I got angry.  I know, it’s tough to believe someone can get angry when they’ve only been awake for fifteen minutes, but I managed to do it.  I got angry about one-quarter of the way into the story, and then CU calmly told me to read the rest of it, so I could put it all into its proper disturbing context.  I’ll wait while you read the whole thing.  Don’t want anyone Google-ing themselves this morning to claim I took anything out of context.

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From an email just sent to me by a colleague:

Due to recent budget cuts and the spiraling cost of energy, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

There was this running joke I proliferated throughout Twitterville last month, about how it seemed to unexpectedly pour down rain here shortly after we’d run a round of the sprinklers.  While it was merely annoying at the time, it only took one look at our $130 City of Allen bill yesterday and the fact that our water consumption increased three hundred percent from the month of May to the month of June…to know something was up.

I called the City of Allen utility billing department and after saying, “Our bill is really, really high…there’s no way two people go through 800 gallons of water a day,” the very cordial customer service rep immediately went to page 3 of The Script and replied, “Have you been using your irrigation system more?”  Well, her slight Texas drawl led me to believe she was asking me if we had been using our air conditioning system more.  Uh, yeah.  It’s freaking hot outside.  Of course we have.  And, what does that have to do with our water usage?  Oh…irrigation.  Got it.  No, not using that any more than we did three months ago.  If anything we’ve been using it less since now that we’ve stopped running it so much…and funny thing, the rain has stopped, too.  Go figure.

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Well, CU and I went to see George Michael last night, which was a replacement concert for the Obnoxious Billy Joel Birthday Fiasco of ’07.

The tickets said the show would begin promptly at 8 PM. Wow, cool. That would be a first! And, it would have been a first had it actually happened. GM didn’t manage to make it on stage until close to 9 PM, and I suspect that only happened because once the crowd started doing the wave (10,000 strong), it’s only a short hop to rushing the stage and riots at the concession stands…and who wants to be responsible for that?

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram seemed to have better overall things to say about the show than the Dallas Morning News did, which I found interesting since GM became Dallas’s Darling after he moved here (part-time, anyway) to live with partner Kenny Goss awhile back. Last week I also perused the internets checking out reviews of other concerts and the reviews were not very good. The light show was tacky, there wasn’t anyone at the concert…past his prime, blah blah blah. I was a little worried we’d get there and would be two of about a hundred people in attendance. I was so blessedly wrong.

I’ve never done a concert review…not sure where to start.

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Fast & Fresh!

Originally uploaded by snarkwife

And we thought $2.89 was expensive last July.

So, for those of you who watch The Bachelorette, do you treat the final episode like an episode of Lost, micro-analyzing every little detail? You know, like how if you take the first letter of all of the types of foods on each person’s dinner plate during the Final Dates, it ultimately spells out who the Last Man Standing is?

“Wow, Deanna’s dad is being a total tool to Jesse…that must mean Jesse wins.”

“Jason definitely got the better Final Date…wow, sharks!  She totally picks him, I can tell.”

“Holy crap!  Deanna got out of the limo first!  Wait, she’s going home?”

“Jesse picked the better ring.  As Samantha Jones said, ‘Wrong ring, wrong guy.’”

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