Salvage

Yesterday I had a panic attack and mini-breakdown at work. Actually it was a series of panic attacks.....which lasted about an hour and a half.

What caused this you might say?
In a word......

TAXES

We recently switched from using an accountant to handle our accounts to doing it all in-house. Now if I mess up on some of the bookkeeping, it can be fixed. If I mess up on our taxes there are much heavier penalties. I was under the impression that our accountant would still be doing them....she was under the impression that I am perfectly capable of handling it. I am glad that someone had more confidence in me than I had.....but, I wasn't able to overcome my fears of messing up.

And so I cracked at work.

I have a wonderfully understanding boss, but this could have been avoided. I should have been able to say sooner that I was overloaded and not capable of doing it. I'm so stubborn though that I kept trying to do it myself until I imploded in my boss's office.

I'm a little embarrassed. Breaking down into tears makes me feel awful, horrifically weak, and incredibly unprofessional. I think that it is the professionalism aspect that is getting to me most. Ugh....I cried...in the office....I frickin' cried. How more negatively female could I have been in an office setting? Even though I am now in an environment where it is a bit more acceptable to be emotional, and even encouraged in a therapeutic sense, the old carry-overs of being dominated in my old office and being accused of not being mature enough to be competent because I let my emotions take over still linger. There is bitterness there (and for once it is not about the last MEC director there but other professors in my past who used it to their advantage).

What to do? How do I salvage what happened yesterday?
I can only hope that my co-workers don't feel like they need to tip-toe around me today. That will make the embarrassment much worse. For me, I think that the only other thing I can do is to work that much harder, get done what I need to do, and get my productivity levels back up. Let the automatron take over.

Adventure, Ample Breasts and WHAM! Amazing Gunfights!

Each week on my Nook, Barnes and Nobles offers a free book download. Whoever wrote this week's book must also write for those silly Saturday night Syfy channel zero star movies that you end up watching because there is absolutely nothing else on TV. This book has been hilarious. I'm only 80 pages in and the main character has been in no less than 5 gunfights. He's also been in New York, Florida, Mexico City and Guatemala in less than three days.

Here's the basic storyline (you'll have to imagine the added sound effects and arm movements that would be added if you were listening to me tell this story in person):

Ruggedly handsome and overly wealthy man is stuffed into a tux for yet another "society fundraiser". A strikingly beautiful woman (with "ample breasts") spots him from across the room and begins to walk towards him. But before she can get there WHAM! the waiters at the event aren't real waiters but professional killers who beat up Mister Ruggedly Handsome and kidnap the beautiful woman. She left behind a flag and an empty whiskey bottle. Mister Ruggedly Handsome, with his unlimited funds, decides to track down the source of the bottle (in the hopes of also rescuing the girl). His search takes him to Florida, but on his way to the airport..... WHAM! He is ambushed by an armored car with the same professional killer waiters from the night before. He manages to evade them.....causing minimal traffic congestion by the way.... and get to the airport to fly his own personal plane down to Florida.

He spent most of the flight in the back of his airplane with it flying on autopilot. Little troublesome there.

He arrives in Florida and of course the only way to get to this civil war battlefield (the source of the flag) is by airboat. And as they are skimming their way through the swamp WHAM! A second airboat accompanied with two jetskis start to chase him and shoot up the boat. After a game of chicken where the other airboat flips, allowing him to travel to the battlefield museum in question. While there he is confronted again by one of the men in the overturned boat. He escaped by BAYONETING the man with an exhibit from the museum.


The next leg of the journey takes him to a museum in Mexico City where he meets the extraordinarily hot curator. As they are flirting in a highbrow and academic sort of way.....WHAM! they are ambushed yet again by several gunmen. I don't remember exactly how they escaped....but that was because the gun fight was pretty similar to the one some Dan Brown novel I read and I had started to skim. Anyway, they escape and Mister Ruggedly Handsome accompanies Miss Hot Curator to a black tie function at the museum benefactor's house.

And....you'll never believe this one....the benefactor is none other than the man who has been hiring these henchmen to kill Mister Ruggedly Handsome in the first place. I know! I was just as surprised (*tap* *tap* is the sarcasm font still working?)!

Mister Ruggedly Handsome and Miss Hot Curator try to leave the party but then WHAM! they are pursued by four----count them---FOUR motorcyclists shooting at them. She surves and ones of them falls off the road. Mister Ruggedly Handsome finds a can of gasoline, tears off a bit of his shirt to make a wick, lights it, and creates a fireball that covers the road and takes out two more motorcyclists. One more motorcyclists rides through the wall of fire (I swear I've seen this somewhere before) but he is taken out by a bullet to his front wheel.

The pair then get a hotel room where Miss Hot Curator takes a shower and walks around holding her towel around her very very loosely. Eventually the towel comes off. I just wish that the author was as forthcoming with the sex scene details as he is with the gun fights.

Last I left the book they were driving through Guatemala being pursued by the local lawless bandits. I believe that the book might eventually have some sort of archaeology component and deal with some mystery surrounding the myth of the fountain of youth. Oh, did I mention that Mister Ruggedly Handsome was an archaeologist? I know....that was a bit of a surprise for me as well. (*Ugh, it hurts to type that with a straight face*) It will be interesting to see how many more gunfights they can fit in within the next 90 pages or so.

I Knew It!

As I was waiting for the Comcast repairman---yet again--- this morning, I came to the realization that I have been reading other people's blogs a hell of a lot more than I have been writing in my own. And while it is a good thing that I am patronizing other people's blogs, I really need to be writing here....its my outlet. It is just strange that I have noticed this today, especially as Libby has been dropping hints about needing to spend my free time writing. Sometimes I am surprised at how well she knows me....and when those times that I need someone else to remind me to do what I like and what makes me happy.

This past week I have been trying to work Job 1 at home for a few hours a week. I am supposed to be writing the newsletter but when I am at the office, I am so focused on dealing whatever the immediate crisis is that I can't seem to focus on the writing that I need to do. Mostly the crises have been focuses on getting the accounting handled here....which has been going well. And after I discovered that setting up a tv tray next to the computer (which gives me more space to spread out my materials to work on) I really like writing on my home computer. It feels less transitory. I guess that has been some of the issues I've been facing with trying to have the most minimalist computer setup ever conceived.

So what have I been reading about? Mostly about Fat Acceptance. One thing that I am continually surprised at working at UCASA is that for things or ways of thinking that I have, there are actual terms for. For the most part, when someone is basically acting like a total jerk, they are exercising their "privilege". Even though I've been told that recognizing you have privilege is a good thing, we never seem to praise people for that....just condemn them when they act on their privilege in a way that negatively affects us. There might be a term for that....I just don't know what that is yet. When it comes to Fat Acceptance....all of that "I just want to feel healthy" and "I am happy with my size and I've come to terms with how I look and I still love myself" stuff that I have been spouting for years apparently has its own political movement. Who knew? I've got alot of reading to catch up on.

Getting back to this morning. I've been having some major issues with Comcast. The cable feed digitizes alot and the internet connectivity has been awful. For Job 3 I need to have constant internet connectivity and when the internet modem keeps going down every 20 minutes and then takes 20 minutes to come back....dear debbie here can not work. The problem has been only for the past 4 months or so....but it is really annoying. A couple of months ago I had a tech come out. He clearly didn't want to be working and was convinced that nothing was wrong. For this they charged me $30. I had to call for two months to get it taken off of my bill. Last month I just paid the $30 and then this month they finally got it off of my bill. This morning the tech seemed more disposed to talk to me. It could have been that I was giving him some very specific and targeted information.

Guess what he found? That someone had tampered with the cable line to split it and it was causing the interference. He didn't want to out right say that the guy upstairs was trying to steal my cable, but he did say that it was a pretty obvious case of tampering and interference. He also said that the lady upstairs should be having problems too.....which I clarified with her this morning. She's been calling Comcast to.....and they keep trying to tell her that it is a problem with her computer. All I can say about this is.....

I knew it!!!

It only took four months and god know how many calls.
I hope that this fixes the problem.
Please, please, please.