Incident Report, 8.26.2011

1. Snark Control

Things have been a bit, um,…at work lately. I can’t think of the word. But basically, there have been lots of things dumped on me that are not my job. And I don’t mean that in a “that’s beneath me, therefore I will say it is not my job” way. I mean “not by job” because it’s already someone else’s job. Either it’s an existing task that already is someone else’s job, or it’s a new task that clearly falls within the purview of someone else. For example, the meeting we were invited to attend that has to do with pollution from stormwater runoff. One might think that the person to attend the meeting should be someone from the department responsible for overseeing our stormwater program, but one would be wrong, apparently. That department can’t be bothered with attending meetings. Or, you know, doing any actual work. So it falls to me. And that makes me snarky. I just sent a snarky email to three of my co-workers that probably shouldn’t have been sent until after I stepped away for a while and took some deep breaths. I'm sure there will be repurcussions.

2. Dropped my banana on the floor this morning.

3. And then knocked the dish towel to the floor.

4. Yesterday, I was very happy to have removed the stain from my one my favorite shirts and wore said newly-cleaned shirt to work. Before the day was half over, spilled something on the shirt. I’m not sure what it was.

5. May have alienated a co-worker by telling her she was being kind of selfish with the way she parks her overly-large truck.

*Sigh.*

***UPDATE*****

This afternoon, I wasn't able to go to a meeting I wanted to attend because I hadn't had a chance to put out some signs I was required to post for work. And I couldn't put out the signs earlier because, well, it just worked out that way (it's been one of those days), bother, and when my co-worker and I went out to post the sign, on a vacant lot across from the house where we posted the sign was a dead horse. Yes, that's right. A dead horse.

It's been one of those days.

A bitter butter pill

Don't make me take the pill, okay? Okay?

Wally has health problems. If you’ve read this blog before (and the fact that you’re reading it now indicates you have, since we don’t get a lot of visitors around here), you know he has a special diet and a sensitive tummy. Well, now the little guy has taken to eating plastic—plastic—and the vet thinks he may have pica. He’s part Oriental and is easily frightened, I mean, upset (in a very manly feline way, of course), and the vet thinks he’s finding comfort in eating non-food substances. To be specific, he’s been eating bubble wrap. Thank God we *finally* found his stash. Now that the bubble wrap has been thrown out and we’ve Wally-proofed the house as best we can, we have to deal with the aftermath. That is to say, we have to give Wally bitter-tasting pills, and we have to make him swallow them. I don’t know how the vet tech knows they taste bitter, but I do know that Wally drools rather badly after ingesting some of it. I say “some of it” because we’ve never succeeded in getting him to swallow a whole pill. I know, I know, good pet owners would have it figured out by now. No need to say it.



By now, we’re about a week into it, and we think we’ve figured out a system that will work. Our vet tech suggested coating the pill in butter to help it go down. That didn’t work. Instead, Wally wound up with butter all over his face, and the greasy coating made it easier for him to spit the pill out. Someone online suggested putting the medicine inside a small gelatin capsule, so we gave that a try tonight. Only, once the pill was in his mouth, we realized that it wasn’t going to go down easily, it being a dry capsule and Wally not being inclined to take a swig of water to wash it down. All that was going to happen was that the gelatin would slowly dissolve, and then the nasty pill would slowly dissolve, while we all sat there, JLR and I holding Wally's mouth closed and Wally trying to kills us with his eyes. We ought to have coated the gelatin capsule in butter, yes? So that’s the plan for tomorrow night.

*Sigh*.

And that’s about the most excitement we’ve had around here lately.

Incident Report, Today
1. Knocked over my cup of water at work, which spilled all over my floor but not, thank God, on my keyboard or on the white shirt I wore to work today.
2. Five minutes later, knocked bottle of lotion onto the floor.
3. This morning, asked potential intern if I could call him this afternoon to discuss potential internship, and then forgot to call him.
4. Spent all day today and yesterday making a map for each of the 8 parts of the city we’ll be discussing during a meeting on Thursday, then realized at about 9 o’clock tonight that I could have just made one map showing all 8 locations instead of 8 individual maps and would have saved myself about, oh, a day and a half worth of time.

But in other news, it rained on Saturday. Hurray!