Mental Day Off

After submitting my pre-resignation warning red-flag, I now need a mental day off from work. I'm way overdue. Weekends are no longer enough to keep me sane. Nor are the holidays thrown in for good measure at the end of a weekend or prior to it once in three months.

I admit being a recovering workaholic. I think I'm cured now. But no guarantee. I'm the type who went to school whether I was sick or not. Never missed a day if I could help it. Same with work. Besides the mandatory vacations ("take it or you lose it") I never took days off without reason ("doctor appts").

Well, that's history now. I need time off. So I'm taking a sick day. And if someone doesn't like it that I'm faking sickness to take time off that should be signed off on vacation - tough! I'm sick of work, I'm sick of dealing with the thought of my career going nowhere. I'm sick of my dream job being shattered.

Yes, you guessed it, I don't like construction all that much. So today I'm taking my final exam in Programming (the computer language 'C'). Let me be more accurate - I like construction, but I love computers and programming. I'm also better at the programming, for the simple fact that this is one of the fields that doesn't require much memory. With construction you have to remember all the technical terms for each piece of material that goes up, and I'll be damned if I can communicate with a subcontractor while holding a dictionary. To me, everything is a "thing" followed by some adjectives, finger-pointing and when frustrated - expletives.

Anyway, I can't go to work today because our trailer has become unbearable to sit in. At 95 farenheit and 105% humidity (I kid you not!), with a frozen air-conditioner and a technician that's not due on site for another day - it only makes sense that I stay home. WL has his own fans, and I refuse to buy fans for one day. I hate fans. I hate wind in my face. I hate Jeeps.

Meanwhile, my role at the jobsite has been slightly expanded. I finally figured out what went wrong and why they put me in charge of the wall. They misunderstood my accent. I said I wanted to be in charge of the world!

So anyway, now I'm also in charge of a bus stop. There's a cute owl on top of it. WL had a good laugh when he revealed to me that it's not real and is just there to scare birds off. For those of you who are as clueless as I am about asphalt, I recommend you start checking the state of asphalt near bus stops. Apparently, the heat from the brakes of the bus, pushes the fluid form of the asphalt and causes cracks and all kinds of strange shapes. I'll take a picture one day and post it here to explain this. So we're replacing it with concrete.

I love concrete. When we first looked for a new house, my real estate agent who's also my best friend asked me what I was looking for in the front yard (bushes, trees, flowers). I told her, "Concrete! It should be paved all the way to the car. Nice patterns in good taste, but pure concrete!" I hate flowers, I hate bushes, I hate trees. They die. They look ugly. They're a nuisance to take care of. Concrete is constant. Never changing. And I never have to water it, cut it, or talk about it with neighbours.

For those of you wondering what the inside of my house looks like - there's nothing green in it. We tried. They died. It seems silly to me that people who like nature would want to kill it and bring it inside. A house is an artificial human made structure. Nature is outside. No reason to mix the two. Take pride in the individual existence of both and quit trying to mix them. If you want to enjoy nature, go outside. If you want to enjoy the beauty of human creation - stay inside. Surf the internet.
Oh, and yes, I have a clock embedded in concrete. It was my birthday present and I absolutely love it! This was a six month purchase. I saw it in the store and fell in love with it at first sight. The price was a bit high, so we left it. We checked on it every other week, until it was sold. But a month later a new one came in, and again the price was high. This went on for six months, before finally we got lucky and it was on sale. After six months of going to this strip mall only to check on the concrete clock, my husband figured it needs to come home with us.

Now that I think about it, we have quite a few artwork pieces that have a story behind them. There was this beautiful piece of metal artwork that we saw at a store and fell in love with. Same strip mall, too! We checked on it for three months, before I had gone to the store two days before Christmas and bought it for my husband as a surprise. It's quite large and after it was wrapped it hardly fit into the backseat of my car. When I came home I had to ask my husband to go take his Christmas present out of my car. He brought it in and while it was still wrapped started getting frustrated and kept on repeating, "But they told me they were sold out!" He knew what it was... He opened it up and you could see in his eyes that he was in love. Then he proceeded to tell me that he went to the store a week earlier because he wanted to get it for me for Channukah, but they had already sold it. Apparently, this was a second copy. Funny thing is that I asked the store owner, "So has this been hanging here all this time, or have you been selling it and bringing in a replacement every time?" And straight faced she said, "No, it's been hanging here. People looked at it and wanted to buy it, but they never come back." Well, I don't care if other people have this. It's cool anyway.

Somehow I managed to start this post about work and get to artwork. Amazing how my mind works on a mental day off. Or maybe that's why I needed one to begin with? It's time I get more serious about studying for my final exam. Maybe tomorrow I'll have something interesting to talk about. This class was definitely an interesting one to talk about. I'll have to tell you about Polyanna.