Painting, Pain and Veronica

Its back. Its standing at Amy's desk. Right now. Fawning over itself. Ignoring me.

I'm kind of OK with that. I really have no energy left to fawn over anyone, let alone someone that gets paid enough to take a once in a lifetime trip to South Africa for the World Cup, someone that didn't even know about Robben Island. Or Apartheid. I wonder if she learned anything.

Probably not.

So instead of dedicating a post to its return, how about we run through a Monday morning injury report?

Let's start with that time this morning when Anna was enjoying a healthy snack of carrots and dip. And I snuck up beside her and almost made her choke on it. That was good fun. She made a little tiny squealing noise right before she choked too. It was awesome.

This presented Anna with the opportunity to show me her bruised and broken-looking toe. Its pretty graphic. Apparently she was playing some game with a child and there was a door and a patio and running and she smashed her toe into the wall. I assume that there was drinking involved. If there wasn't, according to the new story, there was. This is what comes of trying to scare a child, Anna. Pain.

My injuries are two-fold.

I spent the weekend painting my pretty new apartment. I've painted before, many times, but never a whole apartment (more or less). Turns out I wasn't made for hard labour. I'm dainty. After the first day of painting my hands were swollen from holding the rollers, I couldn't grip anything and my legs! My legs! Were so stiff and sore, moving off the couch long enough to make some KD for dinner (which never tasted so good) was agony. The worst part was we still had to do a second coat.

The next day...oh the next day was hard. At first. Once we really got started we forgot about the pain. But we felt it when we finished. The pain was slightly less when we looked around at our new, freshly painted apartment. But still, it was there.

So then last night I went to go see The Lion King. Which was amazing. There are not enough superlatives to describe the mind-blowing awesomeness that is The Lion King on stage. Anyway, I wore heels. I wore heels, not understanding that there would be some walking around before the show. You know how you have fancy shoes for dancing and fancy shoes for dinner things where you will mostly be sitting? I wore mostly sitting kind of shoes.

And then was forced to walk. I think I held up pretty well. But this morning my battered, crippled feet disagree with me.

Naturally I put on heels for work too.

Naturally.

This morning I'm still really sore from the painting (its all the convoluted positions you find yourself in to reach those corners). On the bus down the hill, when the bus was shaking like mad, my thighs were crying.

Pathetic aren't I?

So now you know the physical state I'm in and why I can't bring myself to act like I care that Veronica's back.

We got another email sometime late last week about dress code. About how just because its summer doesn't mean that we can relax on the business casual dress code. How we're lucky we even got that since the new company had wanted us all to be full business.

Which brings me to a F*ck You . I'm not sure if the executive team realizes this but you're laying pretty much all of us off. Which means that thanks to you we will not have jobs. Sure, most of us don't like our jobs, but you have taken away the opportunity to leave on our own terms. So how about you take your dress code and shove it up your a$$? I'm sure that Amy was forced to send the email because of something the executive team said to her- God knows that Veronica loves to lord around the place in flip flops- but that she still doesn't have the backbone to stand up to them and say "You know what? Its summer, the air conditioning barely works, and they will only be here for another 2 months, can we cut them some slack?" really gets to me.

I wish that you all could be here to witness all the fawning over Veronica. Its like the prodigal son has returned. I'm hearing things like "On a scale of 1 to 10 how awesome was it?" "15 million!" and "OMG you're baaaaaaaaack! How was it!?" and "They use elephants to find the fruits" or "They don't wear dashikis there". I thought that I had mentally prepared myself for all the story-telling and the falling all over each other to get to her first, but I so wasn't. Its so much worse than I ever could have imagined it would be.

It fancies itself an expert on South Africa now. Probably celebrated Nelson Mandela Day yesterday. Watched Louis Oosthuizen win the British Open yesterday (although seriously, how fantastic was it that he won on Nelson Mandela Day? Pretty good time to be South African! Especially now that Veronica has left the country).

She does sound like she has a cold, which is great. Probably caught it from stale, recycled airplane air. But it doesn't sound like malaria...

I could drown this out if only I had my ipod back.