A Break in the Seasons
One more month of probation at work, then I get codes to the copier and postage machine. Yay? My supervisor is more disturbing than she was when I started: inside-out clothes (with random stains and holes), leaves morsels of food on her desk--not on a plate or paper towel, but on the unclean desk surface--and eats little pinches of cake or whatever, and has really dirty fingers. She licks her fingers before handling stacks of paper and leaves her fingerprints on the reports... Yuck. I wash my hands more frequently and clean my keyboard with Clorox wipes, since she sometimes sits at my workstation. Yuuuuuuuuck. The other two women working out of the office daily are really kind and fun, so they make up for it, but it sucks that one person holds the office hostage. I'm glad to have a job, if only for the income. I'm also glad that I have weekends free and that I'm home before dark. I'm fortunate to get a ride in the mornings from The Hub, so I can sleep later. We also get to chat in the morning, which is nice.
A couple of weeks ago, one of my Borders-Friends was let go from her job at one of those for-profit colleges that advertises during morning programming. She didn't realize it was going to be exploitative and crappy. :( We ended up getting together for a late vegetarian lunch and coffee, caught up on stuff. It was nice to have a hangout time without pressure, even though we had this common history with all this stress in it. We always liked each other, but it's hard sometimes to tell if your bond is a sisterhood-in-arms vs. a real friendship one. We're going to try and keep in touch more often.
I also got to spend some time with The Hub's sister before she left for Saudi. She'll be back for the holidays, but her husband's still working over there, so they've been flying her out every few months. I can never quite tell if she and her husband are doing okay, or putting a brave face on. It's a strange feeling, having lunch and getting a sense that something's not quite right. They peck at each other a lot, like they're each trying to get the other one to leave first. We were sitting with The Hub and one of the other sibs, talking about stuff, and it turned out that the sib's marriage was wobbly for a while, too. They're better now, but they were seriously on the verge of splitting. When The Hub's brother and sister asked if The Hub and I had troubles, we had to say, "Not really." Not because we're perfect or anything, but because we just don't have the big-level pressures on our relationship they do/did. We don't have children, neither of us has been married before, we don't have a mortgage or other big debts, we both live and work in the same town and The Hub doesn't work with his father. My sis-in-law sometimes works for Dad, which is difficult because he can be a hard-ass when he's running a sale, and my brother-in-law is on the road all the time. They both deal with home ownership and big money issues. The oldest sib has 3 kids and an ex-wife, so his life is complicated, too.
The hardest things on our relationship are my depression and The Hub's music career. When he was considering selling his equipment and giving up music, we honestly had a hard time. He went to school for music and has played drums since he was in his teens. When he doesn't play, he's not right in the world. So, he's got to play. He's also always been good about making sure money's coming in. He's never been one to sit around and live off my check, like some bad story. We've gotten better at dealing with my depression, and make sure our life has as much of a chance of working out okay as we can give it. Things wouldn't have worked out if he hadn't been sober for such a span of time, either.
The hot weather finally broke, so the mushrooms are starting to show up every now and again. The cat's managed to contract fleas somehow, so I treated her with some stuff. The neighbors are relatively quiet, and a pot dispensary's opened in the next block. Los Angeles in October. Maybe I'll be able to get more reading done. No air conditioning+sweatiness= no fun reading. I have a load from the library, but I've been too uncomfortable to read much. I think being on a computer all day doesn't help.
Time for bed. Been a long week of teary, pathological supervisors (well, the one), PMS (and its forgone conclusion, the M),and not enough art/poetry/nifty stuff.