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Moving has begun in earnest at our office this week... we have until next Tuesday to pack everything up for the movers, who are coming on Wednesday. During that time, I have to get our phone service transferred to the new address, send in change-of-address forms to all of our accounts and to the post office, order new office-furniture to accomodate our larger premises as well as replace the telephones which needed replacing anyway, arrange for our leased equipment (namely the photocopier) to be moved by the lessors as is required by our contracts, order new stationery with the new address, and pack up not only my own desk but also the storage room, mail room, and the center office... as well as conducting the regular business of the union, which doesn't show any signs of letting up.Mostly I'm just throwing things away and making phone-calls at this point. I cleared out my desk-drawers yesterday, which was like an archeological dig... I hadn't realized how long I've been at that desk until I started pulling out the drawers. I mean, I know I've been working at this job for nearly six years, and that I've been occupying that desk for five years, but to actually see five-year-old check stubs and photographs and correspondence really put those five years into a new and much longer perspective. It made me feel ineffably old. And out of six drawers, I only filled one banker's box with stuff to keep, and a whole garbage can with stuff to throw away. God knows what I'm going to find in the rest of the office.
All of this unaccustomed activity, coming on top of the accustomed activity, is unravelling my sanity. And then yesterday we went and looked at the new office space again, and I discovered that the arrangement of furniture that I spent six solid hours figuring out on Friday (using my 3-D Home Designer program to create a simulation of the office and all of our furniture) is not going to be possible because of the locations of light-switches, which I hadn't noted in our first walk-through, and because the contractors made the handicapped-access door in a different part of the main room than I had been told... so now I have to completely rethink the arrangement of several different areas.
On the other hand, I am actually enjoying the challenge of this move... the creation of the simulated environment and the arrangement and planning of furniture has been an immensely satisfying project, and arranging for the move of services has been kind of fun, too... but the actual grunt-work of packing, not to mention the extreme pressure of a looming deadline, these I could do without thankyouverymuch.
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The fabulous and wildly expensive gown I ordered last week, and whose arrival I have been anticipating with great pleasure, finally came yesterday. And it didn't fucking FIT... not only was it way too small in the bust, which I expected but thought I could handle (breathing is highly overrated), but the hips and waist were too small, too. And the eBay vendor has a no-return policy. I was so upset I actually wept a little.But then I got out my measuring tape and measured the gown... I could understand that my waist might be a bit bigger than it should be, but I know my hips haven't grown, so I wanted to see how the dress conformed to the size chart on the vendor's pages. And it did not, it was four inches smaller in the bust, two inches smaller in the waist and three in the hips, which pissed me off completely. I mean, the vendor cautioned that the chest-measurement just under the bust was smaller than usual, and cautioned to allow some "ease" in measuring, and so I erred on the side of caution and rounded my sizes up to a sixteen; but two or three inches is not "ease," it's a whole size difference. The dress was labeled a 16 but measured as a 13/14 by the manufacturer's own size chart.
I wrote to the vendor, explaining the measurement difference between the dress and the chart; and they are willing to exchange it for a larger size, which eases my mind somewhat... but they probably don't have that same dress in another size, and I really had my heart set on that dress. The disappointment is almost unbearable.
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On top of these two really big deals (yes, I know, a dissapointing mail-order dress isn't really that big of a deal, but it's more upsetting to me because I was so looking forward to it... moving my office was expected to be a bore, but this dress was expected to be a dream-come-true... and while I know that expectations are just disappointments under construction, I have to allow myself to dream a little), there have been a host of minor irritations — two chipped nails, a wallet "lost" and frantically hunted for (making me almost an hour late for work) and which turned up in plain sight the next day, various inept service personnel behind sundry cash-registers, sandwich-shops that close right when I'm getting hungry for lunch, printer jams and recalcitrant fax-machines and stupid errors while writing checks for the office that made me waste three sheets of checks (which then had to be voided), technical difficulty with both of our phones at home, a minor but infuriating argument with the Grandmother — and one major disappointment with a person that I can't talk about here, in respect to the other person's privacy. And then, all of this is underscored by a crushingly unpleasant heat-wave — which people who live in other parts of the world would pooh-pooh as standard summer weather (Ninety degrees in September? Big freakin' deal, they'll say in Arizona or Georgia or Wisconsin) — but which we in the Bay Area simply cannot handle, accustomed as we are to a more temperate clime.
So enough already, sez I. Enough with the irritations, enough with the disappointments, enough with the goddamned heat. I'm done.
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In other, more pleasant, news: though my scheduled depression is here with me, and coloring my ability to handle the pressures and disappointments I am experiencing, it is not sapping my strength and my will quite as severely as it has in the past. It has, in fact, responded quite well to the simple expedient of One-A-Day vitamins (Active Formula with ginseng and extra B-Complex). My energy levels are up, and though I feel unaccountably sad or unexpectedly giddy every now and again, and though I do certainly feel spiritually lethargic and mentally uncreative much of the time, it's currently quite manageable.Nevertheless, this is a stopgap measure until I can get my finances under control and can afford to spend money on homeopathy and/or psychotherapy. I can use simpler, cheaper tools to keep the depression at bay, but I know that it has to be addressed more aggressively in the near future. Still, it's nice to have a handle on a solution, even if only a temporary one... it's progress, and progress is good.
So, on that note, I wish you a lovely day, and am determined to have one myself.
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