And yet again.

For the last two weeks I've had Thursday and Friday off because of the holidays and this morning I was lamenting that today wasn't my last work day of the week.

Except that it is because, once again, I was laid off.

Laid off! As in, I'm unemployed AGAIN!

I'm going to kick this crummy economy in the shins. And possibly call it names.

We lost a really big client a month ago and then we're losing another really big client in about a month and there have been rumors of more contracts going down the drain in the near future so Chiquita can't afford to keep me on full time and instead of making me part time she decided, and I agreed, that it would be better if she lay me off so I can collect unemployment. She paid me my two weeks vacation and said she would definitely bring me back if things got better so that's a bonus, but Knights of Columbus, I hate being unemployed.

The last time this happened I went home, prayed, paid my tithing, sent out 20 resumes and got a job in a week. This time I went home on my lunch break, prayed, paid my tithing, and then came back to show Chiquita how to work the scanner and the vertical blinds. What will she do without me?! She just barely learned how to cut and paste on the computer. Everyone needs to pray hard that the County of San Bernardino wins the Lotto, or finds a long lost rich uncle, or discovers oil in their backyard so that they can give us back the contract so Chiquita won't have to call me everytime she needs to change an Excel spreadsheet.

But hey, until that happens, I'm free for lunch dates. If you're paying.

Stocking Stuffers

1.) Until someone tells me that Avatar is an incredible story with amazing acting I'm not going to see it. Whiz-bang special effects will not carry me through nearly 3 hours of James Cameron's ego.

2.) Today is the official moving day for our office and Chiquita's brother Chuck is helping out. He brought along his friend Mr. Rick. That is what everyone calls him. Mr. Rick. He is sixty if he's a day and every time he comes back up the stairs he huffs and puffs and says, "Boy, I'm tired." Mr. Rick calls Chuck Charles. Chiquita calls him Chuckie or Chuck-a-luck. Chuck calls Chiquita Chi Chi, which I find kind of disturbing. Gary the CPA and Chiquita's ex-husband Phillip are also coming in to help. Chiquita looses patience with all of them if they spend longer than 10 minutes talking to her. She mentioned that we may go out for a two hour taco break while they do the heavy lifting.

3.) Heather and I went to the Mission Inn last night to see the Christmas lights and it was lovely. However, along with the lights were lots of animatronic carolers and scary elves tucked up in the balconies and bell towers. There was one in particular who looked like he was waiting to jump down on your head and gouge your eyes out with his pointy hat. I was disappointed that I couldn't look around the hotel to find and have my picture taken in the Taft Chair which was specially made for President Taft's visit once the original owner of the hotel heard that he got stuck in the White House bathtub due to his girth. My high school history teacher, Mrs. Baker, use to tell this story at least once a week. She would refer to him as Taft the Rotund.

4.) Speaking of former presidents - I am calling 2010 the Year of the Presidents, which mostly means I'm going to learn what order they came in and humorous facts about them that I can bring up at parties to bore all of my friends.

5.) A few people have asked about buying the funny stockings and I think I have enough in my arsenal to start putting them up on Etsy. However, I have no idea what to charge for them. They cost me practically nothing to make. Maybe $2. But they are very labor intensive. They're all hand cut and hand stitched. Most with metallic thread that Satan created. So, if you were in the market for a stocking that had a b-list celebrity on it how much would you be willing to pay?

6.) Holy Cats, this is getting long.

7.) Last one, I promise. But I wanted to show you the other stocking I made this season. I was commissioned by Laura (I will refrain from making Michelangelo/Medici Family comparisons here) to make one for her boyfriend, who loves the old video game Galaga and monkeys.



8.) Okay, I totally lied to you. Because I've just decided to have a Christmas drawing. If you leave a comment before Christmas you will be entered to win a stocking to be delivered sometime before next Christmas. You can choose from any of the ones I've done before (Dwight, the Hoff, Michael Flatly - Lord of the Dance, Mr. T (although not a stocking yet, easily transferable) or Richard Simmons) or you can choose a new one, if I think it's funny enough. Enter now before I make you pay more than $2 for them.

9.) That is all. Merry Christmas.

Pros and Cons

The benefits of being one gal in a two-gal business operation during the holidays are:

1.) No awkward holiday parties where the local high school performing group comes and puts on a show and sings Santa Baby to the highest ranking male administrator. Usually the superintendent. Ew. (Every year at the school district.)

2.) No awkward holiday luncheons at a restaurant you would never pick because the food tastes like 3 day old scrabbled eggs, with people who only seem to be able to talk about 1.) their husbands/ex-husbands/lack of husbands, 2.) their cats, 3.) their hatred of the incoming president. (Last year's party with the Doc.)

3.) No holiday luncheons involving the food being spread out on top of the table where dogs are prepped to be spayed or neutered. This site being chosen because the surgery room needs to remain sterile and the top of the freezer where the euthanized animals are kept before pick-up seems slightly inappropriate. (The one Christmas I worked for the vet.)

4.) No obligatory gift giving to every single person you work with, even those you would never socialize with outside of work so you end up giving them a cheap plastic ornament of Santa on a surf board or a CD sampler of synthesized Christmas music you picked up in the discount bin at the gas station for $1.99.

Drawbacks to being one gal in a two-gal business operation during the holidays are:

1.) No office treats brought in my co-workers or clients/patients.

2.) I can't think of anything else.

I came home last night and Katie was, once again, buried in baked goods. She's been baking since October. Okay, no, that's not true. But definitely since Saturday. She's made fancy flavored olive oils and caramels and brownies and cookies and chocolate covered popcorn and seven-layer bars. And she's been wrapping presents and making up goodie plates and for the last three mornings she's hauled off boxes and bags filled with food. And it has made me slightly nostalgic for those days when you could go into work and know that if you wanted some peppermint bark you could probably find some. At the school district we would freeze most of the treats people would bring us and snack on them clear until spring break.

So there are no Christmas goodies in the office. There's no one to bring them in. I suppose I could bring some in but Chiquita is freaked out about her cholesterol (classic Chiquita quote: "I've been eating like two wild dogs and my blood work came back looking like a funeral program.") so I would be the only one eating them and that's just pathetic.

But, on the flip side, I haven't purchased or made a single obligatory gift and there will be no awkward holiday parties as we will probably just go out for tacos or something and Chiquita has too much class to bring up her ex-husband, her cats or politics when we're trying to enjoy some good Mexican food. I'm considering it a Christmas Miracle.

Gone the Way of the Corset

What are your thoughts on panty hose?

I haven't owned a pair in years. And I consider them more of a cold weather accessory rather than a required item for modest dressing.

Chiquita, on the other hand, thinks they are a necessary article of underclothes and that if you are in a business setting or church and are wearing a skirt or dress you must wear nylons. In fact, if you're not wearing them she things you're loose. She thinks you're fast. She thinks you're on the prowl for rich men. Bare legs = Woman of Easy Virtue.

I'm sure it's a generational thing. There had to have been a time when pettycoats were going out of fashion and women of a certain age were gasping over the vulgarity of it all and women of another certain age were all, "Chill out. No one wears pettycoats anymore."

Which makes me wonder what more can we get rid of? If for generations women have been ditching their superfluous underthings, which is the next one to go? I'm pretty sure we're down to the essentials. However, I'm prepared to be scandalized.

Somebody High-Five Me!

WOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

(Insert fist pump, disco fingers, running split kick, the worm, followed by a very elaborate soft-shoe dance routine with jazz hands!)

Chiquita has finally given the approval on the website!!!!!!!

(I just did the moonwalk! And now I'm strutting. I'm TOTALLY STRUTTING!!)

You didn't know I was a web designer, right? Well, I'm not. I have no skills. I have no eye. I have no imagination. I am the designer equivalent of eggshell walls and generic floral prints that they sell at whole-sale art fairs at the airport Marriott. I am the last person on the planet you want to design your web site. And yet, I was the only person who could do it so I was stuck.

So for the last 4 months (FOUR MONTHS!) I've been working on our company's website and Chiquita and I would have had meeting after meeting after meeting about lines and colors and blocking and content and wording and links and pricing and after every meeting I would spend days and days and days implementing the changes and then I would show Chiquita the new site and she would say, "Meh. Let's change it all."

At one point she decided that she didn't want the menu. She said it looked "cheap". I told her it would probably look cheaper if our customers couldn't leave the home page. She wouldn't budge. So I look the lines out of the menu and suddenly she said it looked a million times better and we could keep it in.

She's leaving for a conference in San Diego tomorrow and I convinced her that maybe we should have the web-site up since she would be handing out a lot of business cards, so she went into her office and had a look and then shouted out, "I'm in LOVE WITH IT!" I wanted to cry. I wanted to put my head down on my desk and weep for joy.

But instead I'm shimmying!

Miracle Cures

We all have our own medical remedies. Things we swear by when the ague hits. Like, for instance, I firmly believe in the medicinal powers of 7-Up. I get this from my Grandma Knecht. She swore by it. So much so that once when Gina fell out of a moving car (this was before the days of mandatory seat belts and, apparently, car doors that stayed shut) she rushed over with a 2-liter bottle of it.*

And how can we forget the beloved Doc, who, among other things, told me to put raw bacon on my chest when I had a cough and to take 21 allergy pills a day when I had the sniffles. She was a gem.

Well, I have discovered Chiquita's miracle cure. I have a bit of a cold but I came into work yesterday because it's not that bad and Chiquita has a little cold as well, but by about 3pm I was fading and she could see this and told me to go home. (This was about 30 minutes after she got a phone call from her son saying that Michael Jackson was dead but it was before any official announcement was made and she yelled out of her office, "Rachel! We're going to stop what we're doing and get to the bottom of this rumor!") As I was cleaning my desk up for the night she came out of her office with an aerosol can of what I assumed was Lysol and said, "I'm going to take care of these germs so we don't keep getting sick," and then she went to town. By the time I made it to the door the office was socked in. I could make out through the haze that Chiquita had placed the can on the bookcase. So this morning I walked by it and noticed that it wasn't Lysol. It was a can of Glade Jasmine and White Rose Air Freshener. I thought about telling her that unless the stuff killed germs by asphyxiation, it wasn't going to be that productive. But it tickles me so much that she does it that I think I'm going to keep quiet.

*This happened maybe 30 years ago and some of my siblings weren't even born yet but the story is LEGEND. Mostly because along with the 7-Up she also brought a hand mirror for Gina to check out the wounds on her face. This cracks my family up. Anytime anyone is injured someone will inevitably say, "Would you like me to get you some 7-Up and a mirror?" And then we laugh like loons.

It pays to know how to turn my computer on and off

Well, this is turning out to be the BEST (day before) VALENTINE'S DAY EVER. Why? Because I got into work and there were roses on my desk from Chiquita to thank me for not being slightly retarded like the girl who worked here before me, and making her feel comfortable enough to be able to leave the office for 5 hours yesterday to get her hair done. And there was a Valentine card with it and inside was a $50 bonus. Who needs a boyfriend when I have Chiquita to shower me with presents?

It's nice that Chiquita loves me for my phone answering skills, because based on the appearance of my hair today I should start looking into a Home for Sad and Tragic Spinsters. It is more tumbleweedy than normal. We're having another beatnik poetry reading tonight and the theme is "scary" in honor of Friday the 13th. I'm thinking of not even bringing a poem and instead just show up with this hair.

She works hard for her money

A few observations on the new job:

1.) Chiquita is wonderful. She's helpful and patient and she gets the joke. And she loves me. How do I know? Because every time I do something right she says, "Ooooh! I just love you!" Which makes me feel great, but also makes me wonder if she had retarded chimps working here before me because it's not rocket science.

2.) This place is a field of landmines for my allergies. Where the Doc had air filters and a strict fragrance-free policy, Chiquita has stock in the Yankee Candle Company. The pillows on the couch in the breakroom are covered in what looks like white muppet fur and the building is surrounded by eucalyptus trees. The skin around my mouth and nose have been tingling for 2 days.

3.) Speaking of landmines - do not ask Gary the CPA about his ex-wife! It's just me and Chiquita in the business but Gary the CPA rents out one of our offices. He is very much a CPA. I asked him what he does for fun and he said "I work." But Chiquita asked him if his ex was excited about their daughter's upcoming wedding and he said, "Why would I talk to that woman?" And then he went off about how he spent 30 years of his life making her happy and now she has everything and "If you think that I'm ever going to speaking to her after she took my RENTAL PROPERTY...!!!" And then his head exploded.

4.) The break room - minus the muppet pillows - is the nicest I've ever been in. Considering that my previous break room was my desk and the one at the school district was a kitchen with sticky chairs and a fridge that perpetually smelled like sour milk and rotten carrots, my expectations were not high. But Knights of Columbus, this one is like a Fortress of Solitude. There's a new, comfy couch with a foot rest, a tv, a nice table and cushy chairs. And I can shut the door. I have to say that it is very fitting for a Woman of Elegant Leisure forced to work hard for her money.