Bear and I love a good meal. Discovering a great little hole in the wall is one of our greatest pleasures. I don’t think we’ve eaten at Chili’s or Applebee’s since we’ve been married, and only very rarely at the Olive Garden because Bear has a weakness for the salad and breadsticks.

Not drinking alcohol slightly complicates this love affair. As part of our religion we don’t drink any alcohol of any kind. The only time I’ve ever been tempted to break this rule is over wine though, just because of the way it’s written about it relation to the food. So instead of having just the right lovingly grown wine to bring out the flavors in our meal, we get a coke. At best. Frequently we’ll get a waiter who gives us truly lousy service once he realizes the bill will be about half the size as someone who orders a bottle or two.

I’ve started explaining my dilemma to the waiters in hopes that we’ll get one familiar enough with their bar that they can offer an interesting solution. I’ll say that I don’t drink alcohol, but I don’t want to drink soda or water with my meal, what would they suggest? Normally, I just end up with lemonade.

I’ve kept at it though, because I figure that unlike when I was in high school and a total freak for not drinking, now that I’m an adult I know that there are a million reasons why someone wouldn’t want to. People are allergic to alcohol, they could be driving, they could want to preserve some inhibitions, they might be an alcoholic, etc. etc. etc. Surely one day restaurants will realize how many of us are out there and offer some kind of a solution.

Last Friday, a colleague of Bear’s took us out to a very nice Italian restaurant. I went through my spiel with the waiter and he suggested a Virgin Cosmo. Finally! I thought, someone who can be creative and help me out! He explained that it would be cranberry juice, lime juice, and a splash or two of triple sec. I’ve heard of triple sec from my time waiting tables, and back then somebody told me it was like lemonade, so I thought I was cool. Surely the waiter wouldn’t steer me wrong after I specifically told him I didn’t want alcohol, right? I mean, why would someone go to the trouble of taking the vodka out of their drink and leave in something else? Is anyone out there only allergic to vodka?

I started growing a little concerned by a couple of mumbly comments the waiter made. He said something about triple sec having a splash…did he mean a splash of alcohol? But the way he phrased it, maybe he meant the drink would only have a splash of triple sec? I was confused and wary, but hardly panicked. I have worked in bars and spent plenty of time around beer and wine, so I thought that if there were a mistake I’d just take a sip and send it back if necessary.

My drink came and it was absolutely delicious. I was in heaven. I thought I’d finally found the drink to request at every fancy meal. I even had Bear take a sip just to make doubly sure there was no funny business going on and he thought it tasted great. There was no sharpness, no sour fermentedness, just fruity deliciousness so I drained my glass.

When our hosts picked up the check I even joked with them that they should make sure they were only charged for cranberry juice. They just kind of avoided the issue. Looking back, I’m sure they just didn’t want to be the ones to tell me that I had just tasted sin.

Bear beelined to the computer when we got home to look up triple sec, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s a triple distilled orange liquor. I honestly didn’t taste a thing. It really just tasted like juice. And meanwhile I’m innocently breaking my lifelong ban against the stuff.

I’m home sick today with a wicked bad sore throat and bodyaches that seem to be making the rounds. I have no immune system at all, so anything that goes around usually finds it’s way to me eventually.

This is about my third day sick, but I’ve been working through it. One of the many joys of being a temp is that I get no sick time, so I have to sit back and ask myself just exactly how sick I am. Am I $ sick? Or $$ sick? Would I rather work through the discomfort and infect the whole office or buy that great mirror I saw on Craigslist?

This is an issue that comes up nearly every day at my new job. The work flow is arranged around the yearly quarters, and we just finished Q1 before I got there. The start of the new quarter is always very slow, and then it picks up for a mad dash to the end. So I had the perfect timing of coming on board right for the slowdown and I’ll be leaving just before it gets busy. Great.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s totally dead right now. I spend most of my days begging for work to do, even if that means reorganizing filing cabinets and spending hours knee deep in data entry. I made a point in the interview of stressing that I work best in a high volume environment, and they promised me that they had one. They lied. When we finish up every task we can possibly come up with, the sweetheart I work with always tells me I can just go home, and every time I have to do the complicated algebra in my head:
How bored I am now x how much longer I have to work – amount of money left to make = n
Is n <> than the gorgeous Italian dining table?

I spend a lot of time on the internet, which I always feel is dangerous. My computer screen is in a very public area, so everyone can see exactly what I’m looking at. Which is why I can’t blog from work. I tried one day. And just as I was typing my boss came up behind me and totally acted like I was busted. I wasn’t writing anything special, but he’s the boss and supposed to disapprove of that sort of thing. So now I stick to websites that no one’s ever gotten fired over. And I make it abundantly clear that I am chomping at the bit for productive work to do.

I’ve also spent a lot of time creating seemingly appropriate office documents to keep track of things that entertain me. I have a complicated Excel spreadsheet telling me exactly how much money I need to buy all the furniture I need, and exactly how many days and hours I’ll need to work to get there. I also have a plethora of calendars I’ve created for the sole purpose of crossing the days off. I’ve actually collected so many that I get to cross one off every hour. I have a serious sickness.

I do feel really guilty for hating this job so much. If I had to work, this would actually be a great job. I’m surrounded by awesome people and the atmosphere is totally casual. In fact, I absolutely adore the sweetheart I work with. Last Friday the company celebrated earth day with a speaker and some booths and a lot of free beer. I gave my beer tickets away to a guy in my cubicle and sweetheart and I walked around looking at booths trying to sign up volunteers for environmental causes. I actually found one I was really interested in, and I’ve really been anxious to dive in to my new community and get involved now that I know I’m going to be here for a little while. Sweetheart and I had a great time, and I thought that she would be the only thing I’d miss from this job. I have about five weeks left, I’ll have to see if it’s possible to cement a friendship in that time.

I got a new job and even before I started I was pretty ambivalent about it. Now I’m downright hating life. I took it because we’re buying a house that costs a lot of money, we have zero furniture and I am way too OCD to live in an empty house for a few years. I want to have this house decorated by Thanksgiving. And the longer I work, the closer I get to the sectional I want.

On the other hand, I really loved my life. I loved making a home and creating stuff every day. I loved not having to wake up at 7am every day and being too exhausted to cook or clean when I came home. I loved being out in the sunshine sewing on my porch while the kitties kept looking for ways they could climb the nearby trees. And I loved playing the dutiful wife and doing laundry while planning the weeks menus.

On the other other hand, I really liked being a fancy businesswoman. I liked wearing suits and attending lunch meetings and throwing around fancy words about market research and strategy. If I was single, I would absolutely be a professional of one stripe or another. And I like having money, who doesn’t. I like feeling like there is a set purpose to my day, that I have a specific agenda and my having a productive and virtuous day relies solely on whether or not I accomplished a bunch of predetermined tasks. I like not feeling guilty for sleeping in and going out to lunch while Bear works.

I’ve committed to working here for at the very very least, two weeks. At the least, two months. If I can gut it out until October, I will have all the furniture I could want. But right now, it’s hard to imagine that. I work as a temp for a biotech firm, and I’m in that horrible brand new phase, so new I have neither a phone or a computer and since everyone is on vacation, it looks like it’s going to be quite some time without either. I don’t know anyone or anything and yet I have to try to look busy before they decide they don’t need a temp after all and I’m out on my ear. I don’t have my own desk, so I’m sitting at someone else’s and I have to be careful not to change anything. No internet favorites, no saving things on the desktop, nothing that would make this place not hers.

I totally forgot how exhausting it is to try to find work all day. By the time I get home I just want sleep. Without anything to keep me busy I’m just bored and yawning and the effort it takes to avoid falling asleep in my chair just seems like more energy than I have. At the end of the day I’m sapped and grumpy and have no momentum to accomplish anything. It’s seriously cutting in to my creative time. After typing and clicking for eight hours, my wrists and hands don’t really ache to work the knitting needles. I find myself just sitting there, watching T.V., without doing anything else at the same time. That’s just not me.

On the bright side, the girl I work with is super sweet and that’s always a plus. Also, I’m not in danger of being fired if I surf the internet as long as I’m not neglecting any duties. And I can listen to my iPod at my desk and wear jeans and flip flops as long as they’re cute.

By the end of two weeks, if there’s still nothing to do than I’m jumping ship, but everyone swears to me that this is just an abnormally slow time and things will pick up. Every day I’m hoping that the next one will be when it does, and re-evaluating just exactly how much I want that set of art deco nesting tables.

I went to the grocery store yesterday after my mani/pedi to pick up batteries and some moleskin for the shoes that always, always give me blisters.

I got up to the cashier who was a young guy, maybe 24 or so, with a faux-haux and a smirk he kept plastered to his face because it brought out his dimples.

This guy could only have hit on me harder if he licked his lips and asked me what we wanted to name our children. He waggled his eyebrows at me, gave me the brooding eyes, flashed that dimple, winked, WINKED I tell you. It went so far beyond reasonable behavior that I wasn’t even flattered. I just ended up grabbing my bag and splitting before I laughed in his face.

I realized that I couldn’t be the first person he tried that on. I manage to walk around all day every day without strange men throwing themselves at me, so he must just behave that way as policy. Like every time he sees a reasonably attractive woman at the right age range he casts his net, hoping to score with some lonely neglected housewife who is so thrilled at the thought of attention that she will cast all sense aside and meet up with him in the dairy cooler.

You know, I bet it works.

I feel like I have a hangover. Not that I would really know what that feels like. And not that I was doing anything that would bring on a hangover the old fashioned way. I just feel run over and headachey and residually drugged.

We’d been meaning to go back to Modesto for weeks now. When we rented the truck we stupidly followed the rental companies suggestions for the size of truck we needed and ended up way short. Apparently Penske trucks doesn’t understand that a crafter owns a little more stuff than the average person. We had to stash a bunch of our junk in our friends Coyotehunter and the Shutterbug’s* garage on the condition that we’d pick it up within the month.

Then life intervened, we had one crisis after another, and we finally got around to going back just this past weekend in part to claim our leftover stuff, and partly because Coyotehunter and the Shutterbug were blessing their new baby.

We left Friday night and drove to Bear’s parents house to spend the night and to pick up their Nissan Xterra to house all our boxes. We took off from there Saturday morning at about 11, and as we were pulling out of the driveway, Bear’s dad mentions that his air conditioner doesn’t work. By that point we didn’t have much of a choice, it was the only vehicle we could use that was big enough to carry all the stuff we had, and it was too late to rent something, so we figured we’d take a chance. It’s March after all, how bad could it get?

Driving through the desert at 1 in the afternoon, even in March, was absolutely awful. There were four accidents on the way out of LA, and by the time we got to Bakersfield we were melted sacks with sticky backs. We rolled down both windows until we were somewhat cool, and then we rolled the windows up to watch 24 on the DVD player until we couldn’t stand the heat anymore. Even a great show like 24 loses a little of the suspense when it’s only watched in 20 minute increments.

We finally got to Modesto, sunburnt, overheated and windblown, at 5:40. A drive that normally takes us 4 1/2 hours took us 6 1/2 hours. With no air. We realized that there was absolutely no way we could repeat this trip the next day. The baby blessing was at 9am, which would mean we wouldn’t leave before 11, and then we’d be right back where we were, driving through the desert in the hottest part of the day. So we decided to miss the baby blessing, scratch the time with our friends, and climb back in the car for a return trip that same night.

The other half of this hellish trip was the fact that my sciatica nerve was acting up. Ever since I got pregnant it flares up now and then. And before we even left I was hurting. Bear’s dad gave me a couple slow release pain pills to make it through the trip without clawing off the roof of the car.

By the time we got there, we only had 10 minutes with Canadian girl before she had to go to work, we stopped by the hardware store to visit Canadian boy while he was working, we had about an hour with Coyotehunter and the Shutterbug, and then we had a late dessert with another set of friends before we got back on the road to make the return trip. We got back to Bear’s parents house at about two in the morning, and by that time I was on my third pain pill. They weren’t doing much for me.

The next morning we woke to find Bear’s parents violently ill with the stomach flu, so we ended up taking care of them and running errands for them all day, including dealing with a guy who came to buy the car they’ve had in their driveway collecting spiders for three years. It was then, as I was running around town buying Bear new pants to replace the ones that got soaked in bleach unloading the car and picking up medications and diet coke, that my pain pills finally decided to kick in. All at once. I got shakey and nauseous, and I had to find a way back to the inlaws before driving another two hours to my house, while my sciatica is still throbbing and now so is my head and my stomach.

We finally crawled up the stairs to our house at 9 last night. Completely sick and spent and exhausted and headachy and bitter that we got so little time with the people we love.

*I really suck at the making up of internet handles. This girl deserves a way better name that “the shutterbug,” but I like how it sounds with her husbands nickname. Doesn’t Coyotehunter and the Shutterbug sound like a couple of morning ride DJ’s? I think a revision is pending for this nickname.