Leelanau Whippersnapper

The Northwoods Is No Place For A Pink Flamingo

As most of you reading this already know, I’ve spent the last week or so feeling downright lousy.  Thank god it wasn’t the flu but a bad head cold is certainly no better.  Tonight I’m finally feeling a little better although my head is still rather inflated (as if it wasn’t bad enough already right???) and I figured I would post something here as we get closer to Christmas.

Today I went out to the cottage and loafed around.  Not much going on out there (which is fine by me) and it’s nice to be able to just sit around and do nothing.  I let Gavin play outside with his doggie friends which he seems to enjoy greatly and he’s now sprawled out on my bed snoring and twitching as he dreams of who knows what.  I got back to town tonight around 6 and decided I needed to go out and finish up my Christmas shopping.  I’ve done 90% of my shopping this year on-line because there is nothing I hate more than standing in line at stores.  People smell, their children are loud and completely out of control, folks are generally just oblivious to everyone around them and most could care less if they ram you with their shopping carts.  Working in retail, I have to deal with crowds like that every day and honestly I just get sick of seeing it so this year, rather than waste hours of my time and my life in stores, I did my shopping on line.  There are always a few things though that you have to go to the store to get.  Toothpaste and shaving cream aside, I made a trip tonight to Walmart and Boarders Books.  As usual, Walmart was a zoo and the store was just trashed.  Screaming children running around everywhere, frantic parents at their wits end hollering at them, people on their cell phones yelling at the person on the other end…you get the picture.  I hate this Walmart because it is just such a trashy store and it generally follows that the store reflects the clientele.  Right, where I work is the same dam thing.  So I got a couple things, ran into a few co-workers (all out doing the same thing as me, looking for the quickest way out of the store) and then I stood in line for 45 minutes.  Blah.  Thank god I don’t have to go shopping every day.  I think I’d kill someone.  Then I went over to Boarders Books.  Slightly less insane there but still packed to the gill with last minute shoppers (like me) looking for stuff they don’t carry (like me).  Traverse City is nice in a lot of ways but it really sucks in a lot of other ways.  This town lacks a store with a decent music section.  Boarders has cut in half their CD offerings from what it was just a couple years ago and I’ve yet to find anywhere else in town that has a really broad selection of music!  Again, this is why I shop on-line.  Anyhow, I got what I needed and left.

Now the fun part.  There is one thing I just hate about Christmas and that is wrapping presents.  This was a skill I failed to pick up successfully from my mother who, being smarter than me, skips the paper all together and uses bags and tissue paper.  I should have followed her example.  I spent the better part of 2 hours tonight trying to wrap presents and managed to plow through 3/4 of a roll of wrapping paper doing so (a good wrapper might have used 1/4).  Gavin was amused and laid on his back watching me most of the time until he got some ribbon stuck to his fur which kind of freaked him out.  So, those of you getting presents from me this year, watch out for the tape.  I had to use a fair amount of it to make the packages look decent.

Tonight we are due for yet another big snow storm.  This has been a crazy winter so far for snow.  My hope is that this means we will get an early spring and a nice long summer.  Wishful thinking I know but I can dream right?  Sarah and Brain made it to Michigan without incident and are down state right now with Brian’s family.  They’ll be up here on Christmas day.  I’ll leave you with the following advice:

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Well, going on 7 days now without a day off.  Seems my assistant has come down with the flu.  How convenient.  I don’t really have issues with my team members who are sick or claim to be sick.  If you really are sick, stay home and get better, you won’t be very productive at work if you can’t see straight.  If you aren’t really sick, I’d rather you stay home too since in order to pretend you are sick, you’ve already created a negative aura around yourself just to play that game so I’d rather you not contaminate the rest of my team by bringing it to work with you.  Meanwhile, I get to pick up your slack either way and make a mental note of how you will eventually re-pay the favor.  I’ve flexible as long as it doesn’t get out of hand such as it did this past summer.  I won’t work 80 hour weeks with no days off again in the near future unless I do so voluntarily.  Fortunately the store manager who “expected” that from me because I am the manager who needs to run the department because in his view my team members were all ignorant is no longer at my store.  Any one of my team members could run my department.  I’ve trained them all to do it and do it correctly.  There is NO need for me to work that hard when I have people to do it for me.

Just an update on Jirar and me.  After a 3 hour phone conversation we were able to meet on some common ground with each other and things will be continuing on as normal for now.  We are still  not in the same place as we were 6 months ago but I’m not sure how we really could be, things are different now.  We both have adjusting to do and in the same breath, we both have decisions about life in general we need to make.  Some of those decisions are individualistic decisions, some of them are us as a couple decisions.  Nobody needs to freak out right now.

Thought I would leave you with a picture I found in the archive.  The sun was out yesterday for the first time in quite a while here.  This photo was not taken yesterday but I was reminded of how much blue sky’s and sun can play a HUGE part in my mood.  I’m much happier when the sun is out.  This is from the tall grasses in my yard, this is how they look at the end of the season and into winter.  Really pretty to look at.  Enjoy.

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