post feast

I am happy to have the day off today, it's off because I have to work tomorrow (I also got Thursday off because it was a holiday). I plan to relax, do laundry, and possibly go out for a friend/coworker's birthday.

Here is how Thanksgiving happened at our house...
On Wednesday I had to work, but before work I wrote a list of chores to get done in the hour between when I got home and when my sister arrived from Duluth. I got home, started in on the chores, found out I had a little more time to finish them because Alex was coming later than expected, Dave came home and asked me about the mess on the kitchen counter - explosion from me about expectations and a crappy workday (I had many nice people come in, but also a few impatient people who thought I wasn't doing much to help them, more on this later), finally with Dave's help I calmed down and finished up the list of chores. Alex showed up ready to party so she and Dave hung out while I worked on cooking Thanksgiving dessert (pumpkin cake/bars), making a bread mix, and baking bacon. Dave made us some delicious burgers for dinner. When I was finished with stage one of the baking extravaganza I joined Dave and Alex playing Rock Band and later another game called "Little Big Planet."
The next morning I got up and worked on the stuffing, cutting up bread, measuring out dried fruit, chopping celery and onion (had to switch to contacts at this point because the burn was too much from the onions and the contacts filter out the fumes). I finally got around to a slow shower before going to pick up my grandma. Alex and Dave said hi to grandma when I got her home and Alex continued to talk to grandma for a while. I had thrown the turkey in just before the shower and was now working on the sweet potatoes and green beans. Once Alex went back to her laptop grandma started helping with the sweet potatoes. At first this was nice, but soon she was trying to take over on the potatoes. I love my grandma to death, but she is 93 years old and isn't as spry as she used to be - let's just say that a potato got dropped, fingers almost got burned, and she may or may not have been close to starting a small fire. She won't relax, I'm sure I'll be the same way if I still have the energy that she does. I tried enlisting the help of Dave who had retreated to his computer. Apparently no one can hold grandma's interest if there is cooking happening. In the end everything turned out, I was just over-stressed because I was worried about grandma, over-controlling about "my" Thanksgiving dinner, and pissed that the other two weren't being sociable. At dinner everyone was happy and enjoyed the food. Sadly grandma was already tired out (4 hours later) and Alex brought her home. I then felt really bad about being crabby with her trying to help. I'm hoping that it wasn't very obvious to her that I was crabby. I sent dessert home with her and some salad since she never gets any at the assisted living place.
That evening was pretty low key, watched some hulu/tv and went to bed. Alex left this morning around 8:30 to start a crazy day of work at the mall.

As for the work comment (people not thinking I'm doing my best to help them, etc), I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Dave thinks that I'm pessimistic. I prefer to think I'm more of a realist in that regard. Related to work I realized that I am optimistic about people, I think that people are essentially good. When their actions don't match up with my idea that they are good it is extremely disappointing to me. I take it way too personally when people get mad at me at work, I really am trying to efficiently get them what they want, but sometimes it's not ready, or sometimes insurance won't cover it. Many times these circumstances put the customers in a bad mood. Since I don't have control of the problem it makes me feel helpless and inadequate. The example that stands out from Wednesday has to do with a person that came in for a rare item. The item was ordered because it's not something we carry in the store. The item was expensive (almost $200) and the person wanted to try to bill it to insurance. I went to our billing person to ask if the item would be covered and to find out if I needed to retrieve any extra paperwork (basically paperwork that would ensure the customer's responsibility to pay for what insurance would not). She told me that she was 90% sure that it was not covered and let me know which paperwork I needed to go over with the customer. When I came back and let the customer know everything I had found out he wanted to know if it was our policy to either have customers pay upfront OR be unwilling to fill out a bunch of paperwork. I know that didn't make a lot of sense the way I wrote it, but he made it sound like he only had two options, pay up front, or not do paperwork because salesperson is being a jerk and still have to pay up front. He basically stormed out after paying. I repeatedly explained that I was plenty willing to go through the paperwork (there were about 14 pages of it), but he acted really disgusted about it. I just wish that people knew that I want them to leave happy and satisfied, but I can only do so much. I'm not going to risk my job so that they can get free medical equipment. sigh. People may be good, but the world isn't always fair or gentle.

coming soon... introduction to foxkitty