My trip approaches so fast. So excited!

Kiwi land bound

My trip is booked. Unless something comes up that causes me to use my cancellation insurance (which I decided in the end to purchase since it is a leisure trip after all - may as well take all the stress out of it if possible), I'm heading for the South Pacific in the New Year. Because of the way Christmas and New Year holidays fall, I will be away from the office for 7 weeks. It's going to be fantastic. And last minute, a friend decided to purchase a ticket as well so now I've got company. Most excellent.

I buy mine from Safeway

I just had the most sexist comment made toward me that I didn't even realise what the guy meant at first. I am still feeling a little incredulous. I was speaking with a client about some air monitoring at his site and asked if he wanted full time inspection or if he'd prefer we make several trips per day to collect the samples. His response was that I could just come out for the samples and spend the rest of my day doing something else - liking baking bread. More often than I'd like to admit, I do not get a joke. At first I thought he must be making a joke and my slow sense of humour was not picking up on it so I kind of did a half laugh, said goodbye and hung up. But no, he wasn't really making a joke - he was taking a dig at my gender. How does one respond when it is to an important client? I can't really tell him to make his own swear word bread (which was my boss's response when I told her). I mean, we are trying to get him to hire us.

Oh well, if we get the job and his attitude continues, I'll deal with it then. If we don't get the job, we won't be dealing with him. I just didn't think professional men said crap like that anymore.

And I guess the best revenge would be to actually bake him a loaf of bread. One bite and he'd realise that I am much more capable at providing him with the professional skills at his job site to make sure everything runs smoothly for the next several months than I am at baking bread.

So I have a new roomate! I've given up the spare bedroom for a new friend and her extremely well behaved border collie. So far it has totally been worth it. I came home from work at lunch today and played catch. Plus it has also caused me to clean out the garage (which I love so much now that I almost wanted to just go sit in it today because it's so clean. Isn't that weird?) and organize the kitchen. Next, I have to work on my bedroom. I'm going to do another purge of clothing and this time, having less room to store them, I will be brutal. It will feel so good to have less stuff. I really aspire to be a minimalist but have all the tendancies of a packrat. The war within myself is constant.

Ahhh, autumn. The time of the year when the leaves become really good boundaries for fantastic games in the park. What?

I saw the coolest thing yesterday. There was a bunch of kids at the park down the street from my house. They must have spent an hour raking all the leaves in one half of the park and then they spread them out in numerous lines and made a game of it. It must have taken them ages - it was quite intricate. I applauded them from my car and wished I'd had my camera.

I had a good day. I spent an hour in the office helping one of the techs finish a report and then myself and the other two project managers took a drive to North Battleford to check out the site where we may have our Christmas Party.

The first year I worked for this company we were a small office (just 3 of us) and we were invited to Calgary's party which happened to be at a beautiful resort out in the mountains. It was pretty much one of the best weekends ever and, as I told my boss today, "It covered a multitude of sins." A free flight and rental car and hotel room and fancy dinner in a beautiful mountain town really help a person get over those extra weekends she had to work all of October and November for instance. Anyway, since then we've been crap at putting together a Christmas party. Last year we went out for a nice dinner (in February because we couldn't get our act together in December) and then everyone went home after. Boring. So this year we decided to start our planning early and have found a fantastic hotel and caterer and afternoon winter adventure centre to keep us entertained. I'm really looking forward to helping plan it. The techs are going to be so surprised!

Anyway, so I got to skip out of the office pretty much as soon as we got back for my final physiotherapy session. I've been officially discharged. Hooray! And since I got back on a horse two weekends ago, I think I have conquered the injury.

Then I went downtown to buy a ticket to a seminar with Jane Goodall (and killed an hour at the mall while waiting and found a perfectly fitting pair of pants). Jane's wicked cool. I am glad I went. She arrived in Tanzania for the first time to spend a year alone in the jungle with the chimpanzees when she was 26. She is officially my hero. I'm sure she didn't know what her life would come to. She was just doing something she'd wanted to ever since she was 4 and snuck off to hide under the straw in the hen house to find out where the eggs come from (none of the adults would give her a satisfactory answer). I want to find something that I can be that passionate about. I need my own jungle.

Sick

I don't consider myself overly tough. But I also don't consider myself to be a girly girl or a fraidy cat. Even with my intense fear of spiders, I still don't usually react like I did today. Yet here I was putting away some packing materials and a large brown spider was all of the sudden on our kitchen table less than a centimetre away from my hand. Without thinking I screamed and ran about 15 feet away. I screamed. Everyone in the office could hear me scream. Not a yelp or a quick intake of breath. An actual scream. I've seen way bigger spiders than that before. I've seen gynormous wolf spiders in Florida washrooms. I've seen scary gross huge spiders in crawlspaces province wide. I've seen good size spiders in my own bathtub. And while all of them freaked me out, I usually tremble in silence and deal with it (unless someone else is around who will kill them for me). To scream and run while at my place of employment was so embarrassing.

Turns out, according to a knowledgeable staff mate, it was a brown recluse spider - which is poisonous. They aren't supposed to be in this province, but I was unloading shipping materials that could have come from anywhere.

I'm totally not doing the shipping next time.