Possumblog

The Weekend?

Just like last weekend, I have no idea what's supposed to be going on, aside from the usual domestic cleaning chores, and going to church, and trying my best to get some sleep.

Every night this week has been something different when it comes to sleep disturbance--there was the Tiny Earache Child (who seems to be doing better now, although you can tell her ears are still stopped up, or that she's deliberately ignoring me), and there were not one but TWO brochures for TWO classes.

There was the Middle Girl one Tuesday and Wednesday for Bahrain, and then last night Oldest had one for her Anatomy class to be done, on the rather icky subject of xeroderma pigmentosa. And she was quite adamant about not wanting to get started on it, because it would require effort on her part.

And for some reason, my injunction--my plea--my desperate begging plea--that she simply type up her information and not worry about formatting it, and making it pretty colored, and attempting to make every single letter a different font (I exaggerate--slightly) was met with a most profound indifference.

"HOW DO I MAKE IT A BROCHURE!?"

"Look, I already said don't worry about that--just type it and we'll get if formatted later."

"HOW DO YOU MAKE THE WORDS A DIFFERENT COLOR!?"

"Just type it and we can do that later. But you have to start typing it, or else it won't get done."

"DAAAD! HOW DO I MAKE IT LOOK LIKE A BROCHURE!?"

"Just type it up and don't worry about font size, or font color, or paragraphs, or bullets, or borders, or columns--just type the words."

::sigh::

She finally finished sometime toward 9:00 last night. "Here!"

She handed me the disk, and I pulled it up on our computer upstairs. Probably about a hundred words. And a like number of colors. All centered on the page. And with the words separated by a wide range of spaces, tabs, indents, margin shifts, and more spaces.

::sigh::

That took forever to fix.

But it turned out looking okay, aside from having to use a picture glued onto it instead of being able to steal one from the Internet. For some reason, when I download pictures, they don't save in any sort of usable format. They can be printed, but not saved. Very odd.

But, anyway, that took as long to format as it did to type with all the extraneous frippery added in, and so by the time I finally did get to bed last night, I was very very tired, and was very very tired when I woke up this morning.

The only bright spot of such fatigue is that the dreams produced by it are pretty interesting. Last night I was in an office--a real one, not like the dump where I work now--with quiet music and professional-looking sorts doing Important Things. And we had a fire drill. It was nice, because the drill alarm was a pleasant beeping tone instead of the actual fire alarm--I keep wondering what ambient noise it really was, if it was the microwave, or the answering machine, beeping back to life after having the power cut off. In any event, a nice pleasant beep, and all the nice professionals eased down the corridor and for some reason we all sat down on the floor of a small lobby. I really don't think that's right. I think you're supposed to leave a burning building, even when it's just a drill.

ANYway, I sat down and then this gorgeous tall Chinese girl came around the corner, stood in front of me, and in mock seriousness asked, "Can you see me!?" I think we were supposed to be joking about something we saw on that stupid Jennifer Love Hewitt ghost show, but I was so taken aback by this incredible Sino-Amazon that I was momentarily deprived of my usual gift of stupid repartee. When I finally realized that in this dream I actually KNEW her, and we were COWORKERS, well, everything was fine!

I said, "No, you're invisible, and I don't know why I'm talking to you," and then she laughed and sat down on the floor beside me and we discussed, in rather vague terms, the general health of the company over the past 12 month period, and then the clock went off.

GRR! Stupid clock!

ANYwho, speaking of the clock, I am just about off of it, and so I'll tell all of you to have a good evening, and wish you all a wonderful weekend, and ask you to come back again next week and let's see what happens.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at February 3, 2006 04:32 PM