Annoyed...

Oh, HONESTLY!

In the interests of getting Joshua the hell out of here, I gave in and said I would wrap and pack the stupid books he's just sold, for which, I may add, he's paying me.

Well, it now comes to pass that I am not only wrapping (plastic wrappers around the books to protect their dear little dust jackets) and packing the sold items, but I'm also doing it for Joshua's own books.

Given that he's paying me for this little job (involving some 300 books on top of the 397 of them that have been sold), I suppose that's all right, but it would have been nice to have had this mentioned at some point or another - BEFORE I heaved a sigh of relief at beginning to come to the end of the original 397 volumes. Growl.

I must say that while it's dull work, there is a sort of nice rhythm into which one can get while doing this sort of thing - I've noticed it on some temp jobs involving envelope stuffing. Your hands begin to move independently of the brain and you can just sail happily off into space. Of course, considering that I'm looking at a monstrous upheaval of the whole house a week from Monday for semi-renovation projects, my mind tends to jump frantically about from room to room thinking of everything I could be accomplishing ahead of the renovations if I WEREN'T SITTING THERE WRAPPING BOOKS. Once again - growl. (But then, unless I MAKE him move, he won't. So...)

Oh, and did I mention that the labels for the book boxes being sent to the client are ALSO my responsibility? Oh, all right - I'm buying a new printer on Wednesday so that's frankly the easiest part of the job. But when do I get time to do MY cleaning and organizing? And I'm going to have to be on hand for the renovation work, because otherwise Joshua will try to "help," which needs to be avoided at all costs. He has no conception of how to deal with people. He had some problem with his dentist (something about his insurance), and after he got off the phone, he was telling me that they were all incompetent. Well, frankly, if someone had been speaking to me the way he was speaking to whomever in that dentist's office, I wouldn't help him either. He kept calling them stupid, incapable of running an office, etc., etc., etc. This is NOT the way to get anything done.

He did manage to crack me up the other day. He came upstairs to tell me (in the voice of doom) that the cat had had an accident in the living room, and that the smell was horrible, it was terrible, it was awful... So I came downstairs to solve the problem for him. First of all, I had trouble finding what he was talking about. I have an extremely good sense of smell, and I couldn't smell a thing. I finally found it...a small spot of cat shit about the size of a silver dollar. While I was hunting around for this terrible transgression, Joshua emerged from the den with a bandanna tied over his mouth and nose like a bandit to inquire if I'd fixed the problem. I about died. I've never seen anything sillier in my life. So I took precisely one square of paper towel, scooped up the offender, and put it in the garbage. Now I ask you. How silly can you get?

Love, Wendy