This is the last week I'll be in the test lab. I'll keep telling myself that when the creep tries to strike up conversations with me or the smokers lean over me fresh from their smoke breaks and make my eyes water and I'm huddling under my jacket because it's freezing in the lab...
Last week. Next Monday I'll be at my own desk all day. I may insist on eating at my desk, in celebration.
I'd like to say I had a good weekend. Looking back on it, it seems like I did - got together with KT, and eventually Carl and Colleen, on Friday, and laughed a lot. (I took pictures. Check out the photo album!) Saturday we lazed around most of the day, then went back over to KT's to game and watch The Matrix on DVD. Sunday was spent being lazy and reading.
Sounds like a good weekend. But I don't really feel like it was a good weekend. For one thing, I spent most of Friday fighting with allergies. Back in March or so, I took this cold medicine that kept me up all night, and I wound up scaring Matt by deciding to go to work at 3AM or something. I took that before we went to KT's, figuring that I didn't really need to be especially rational to sit around and talk or watch a movie (the screening of Matrix was supposed to be on Friday, but got postponed). So, naturally, the stuff knocked me out. Driving home, my vision kept blurring and doubling and I kept chanting the distance to go in the back of my head. I couldn't even sing along with the radio, which is what I usually do to try to stay awake driving. If Matt had had any idea of how hard it was for me to keep my eyes open, he'd probably have insisted that we stop at my parents' house for the night. If I hadn't known that my aunt and uncle and another couple who are friends of theirs were already staying at my parents' so they could go to the PGA Kingsmill golf tournament, I might have suggested it myself.
The only other time I've driven in that condition was my one and only experience with driving drunk - and that had only been a 1/2 mile trip down a side road home from a party when I was in college.
Then, Saturday evening, I had to do something I absolutely hate doing - I had to ask KT to clean out her litter box. I had hoped that the smell was getting to me on Friday because the decongestants were making my sense of smell a little overacute (which happens sometimes). But no. I walked in on Saturday, took two breaths normally, and then was smacked in the face.
KT's place almost always smells a bit like cat piss. I want to make it clear here that I'm not blaming KT for this. The younger of her two cats, Sandi, lost about half of her litterbox training when her legs were broken, and both of her cats pee on the floor when they want to show their displeasure. I have a cat who does that as well, so I know how futile it is to try to train them out of it - you punish them, and they just punish you right back by peeing on the floor some more. It's a terrible circle. But Diamond has had the decency so far to pee on things on the floor, rather than the floor itself. It's irritating, but you can toss laundry and throw rugs in the washer. Sandi and Bear pee on the floor direct, and that's a lot harder to clean. So there's almost always this faint smell in the air. Most of the time, I wrinkle my nose a bit and breathe a little shallow for about half an hour, and then I acclimate.
I didn't acclimate Friday night, and after only five minutes on Saturday my eyes were starting to tear up. It was like breathing into a bucket of bleach. I thought about keeping my mouth shut anyway. I hate telling someone that their place, or any part of their place, isn't "clean enough" for me. It makes me feel like some sort of inspector-general or overly-picky mother-in-law.
But I didn't think I could stay in there, as strong as it was. So I asked her to clean it out. I offered to do it myself, and did help carry the full trashbag down to the dumpster for her (and threw up a bit on my way back).
She asked me to go with her to the grocery store, and I agreed. Wizard makes some air fresheners that do a very good job of cleaning pet smells out of the air and carpet (at least, they work well for us), so I thought I'd pick one up. KT told me that Kevin is allergic to those fake scents, so I promised I wouldn't use it until after he'd gone back to work after his dinner, and just to be safe, I picked up one that said it was unscented.
Wow. For an unscented spray, it sure smelled awful. I'd have done better to get a scented one. It was so bad, I didn't spray it around as much as I'd have liked to, and wound up still smelling the piss in the carpet (I think one of the cats have peed behind the couch where I usually sit, actually) for the rest of the night anyway. It wasn't as strong - cleaning the litterbox had helped enormously - but I still felt like an ogre for having to ask KT to clean it.
When KT and I got back from the grocery store, Richard had called to beg someone to come pick him up. Since Kevin had just gotten home to have dinner and would have to go back to work in fifteen minutes, KT couldn't use her car to do it (they have just the one car). Since Greg was still there, obviously he wasn't going to do it. So I "volunteered". Not that I mind too much; I like Richard a lot, and enjoy talking to him. So I drove over to his place - a fifteen minute drive or so - to pick him up.
When I got back, we started talking about getting some dinner. I asked, "So, who's going to drive?" (Read: HINT! I've been out twice already, so I think it's someone else's turn!) KT looked at me, surprised: "You are!"
I explained that five people wouldn't fit in my car. KT thought that I could just go pick up food for everyone. (I hate doing this, because when the stupid fast food people screw up someone's order, it's my fault.) I said I certainly wasn't going to go by myself, and Richard offered to come along to help. Sigh.
So we took orders, and Richard and I went to the McDonald's and picked up dinner for everyone, including making sure that Greg got his fussy wedges of lemon, and KT's Arch Deluxe didn't have bacon. (I asked three times, "That Deluxe is without bacon, right?" because when the cashier had called it back, no one at the grill acknowledged it. I was still figuring KT would have to grumble and pick bacon off her sandwich when she got it.) We got a tray to balance the five drinks, and I helped Richard get in and out of the car with the tray and three bags of food.
We got home and astonishingly, KT's Arch Deluxe was sans bacon. It was also sans lettuce, tomato, onion, and cheese. She grumbled and asked me to get a slice of cheese from her refrigerator.
Eventually, Colleen and Carl showed up with Colleen's cousin in tow, and then Colleen and the cousin left again, and we gamed for a while. Around 11, I suggested that we stop gaming and watch The Matrix, which I'd been wanting to see since KT had picked it up the night before.
That was a blast, and I took a couple of pictures of Carl's eyes bugging out, and Colleen and her cousin came back so we had to show them the lobby destruction scene. Of course, that close to the end of the movie, Colleen and her cousin were pretty confused about what was going on (I don't blame them - It's a pretty confusing damn plot) but we had fun anyway.
It ended (after the various replays) around 2 in the morning. Now, Carl is Richard's roommate, so I thought Richard would catch a ride home with Carl and Colleen. But Colleen whined and complained and said she was going to her place in Williamsburg, not back to Richard and Carl's (which is the other direction).
Um... Where the hell did she think I was going? But I took Richard back home anyway.
Not one person bothered to say thank you for one thing I did for them. No "Thanks for keeping me company," no "Thanks for picking me up and dropping me off," and no "Thanks for picking up the food." I don't know whether Greg and Matt got thanked for picking Kevin up from work for dinner. Sometimes I wonder.
Right. So. Sunday morning I was a little short on sleep, so I spent the whole day being alternately supremely lazy and grumpy. Matt and I had an argument over whether it was worth our time to put down any more grass seed. He got into a foul mood because it started raining just before he'd been planning on mowing the lawn. I got irritable at him at one point because we said we'd go to the grocery store as soon as he checked his e-mail and after forty-five minutes I discovered he'd gotten into an AIM chat with KT and forgotten about the store. Getting into the car, my door swung shut on my and banged into my arm. It was more surprising than painful, but still irritating. Backing out of the driveway, the car hiccupped, and it was like every minor irritation for the whole last month just sortof swelled up and exploded into a gigantic mess in my brain. What I wanted to do was shriek like a fishwife, throw something breakable and hugely expensive for the satisfaction of watching it smash into a million pieces, get into a no-holds-barred fight so I could punch and kick and bite and claw and hurt someone. But the last tiny corner of my brain that remained logical insisted that it would be bad form to start gnawing on my husband without any warning, so instead I revved my car's motor like I was lining up at the speedway, then raced down the street at an entirely unsafe speed until Matt recovered from his shock enough to yell at me.
I snapped at him in the grocery store, but knew that it wasn't his fault, so it didn't help. My mood didn't really improve, though I pretended it had for Matt's sake. This morning, he gave me a hug while I was brushing my teeth and my hair spilled over my shoulder and I managed to spit toothpaste all over it, and I yelled at him for hugging me, which just made me feel guilty, because it wasn't his fault, and it wasn't catharsis enough.
I'm still feeling prickly and irritable and grouchy. Stupid idiot things are setting off red flags in my brain, and I'm holding onto control with fingernails that are slowly ripping away from my fingers. I'm at work, and so I'm smiling with a face that isn't mine and asking people how their weekends were, and answering their return queries with a cheerful, "Oh, not bad..." when what I'd really like to do is fly into their faces screaming and clawing and biting...
I'm hoping it's a lack of sleep. Or a hormonal thing, though it's nowhere near PMS time. Or added frustration from being stuck in testing for the past two and a half weeks, testing a product I'd never use myself.
Whatever it is, I'm hoping I recover soon.
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