A tough nut to crack

Ahhhh….autumn. It’s my favorite time of year. It’s sunny and breezy and the sky is the perfect color of blue. The leaves are changing from green to an array of golds and reds. It’s just a beautiful time of year.

Every time I smell wood smoke it mentally takes me back to when my father used to burn leaves and limbs in the backyard. Yeah, it was illegal but he did it anyway. Single gal’s dad laughed in the face of the law….or a forest fire.

Autumn also reminds me of something else….harvesting black walnuts. I still cringe even thinking about it. What a tremendous pain in the ass for something I didn’t even like!!

We owned some land that had three huge black walnut trees on it. Every autumn we would go over in my father’s pickup truck, don super thick gloves, and toss them into the back of the truck them up. See black walnuts have this really thick hull that rots and if you get that stuff on you you’re basically marked for life...or at least for a couple days. Your hands or any part of your skin that touches the hull will turn a lovely shade of shit brown and it has to wear off.

In their hulls, black walnuts are roughly the size and weight of baseballs and my brother and cousins were known to throw them at each other and at me like they really were baseballs. You get hit by one of those bastards and it would hurt like hell. Oh top of that, if the hull had already started to rot it would splatter all over you. Many, many times I would end up screaming like a little bitch at the top of my lungs. Of course, screaming did no good. It just aggravated the adults, got you a dirty look, and a “get back to work…we ain’t got all day”. There was no escaping the wrath of the black walnut.

After we loaded them all up we would go back home. Once there, my father would spread these disgusting things in the far end of the back yard for a few weeks to let the hull completely rot. Then he would drive back and forth over them to break the hulls off.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You thinking you would crack them by driving over them? I laugh at your naïveté! On the Mohs scale of hardness, black walnuts are on par with a diamond….I’m not exaggerating. They H-A-R-D!

The tools of the trade for cracking black walnuts are not those dainty little nut crackers you put on your table at Christmas. You know the kind…the little metal nut cracker that fits into the little wooden holder? Hell no!!! To get these sons-of-bitches open you need a cinder block, a hammer, and a pair of work gloves. If you’re lucky you have 2 cinder blocks…one to sit on and one to hammer walnuts on.

You sit there for hammering on these things for hours and hours and after you crack open a couple hundred nuts you can be proud of the fruits of your labor. You end up with maybe 2 cups worth of black walnuts. WTF….all that work for 2 cups? Yep, and they don’t even taste good.

My mother has ruined many batches of fudge with these nasty little morsels. Of course, she and my father always loved them. To me they always tasted the way old, damp basements smell…moldy. If I were to ever eat mold I would bet my bottom dollar it would taste exactly like a black walnut.

Even after all that I still remember those times fondly because we this is something we did as a family. Since my father has passed, it’s an even more dear remembrance for me.

I still hate black walnuts though. They taste like shit…

Chick out...

When pigs fly....

Has anyone else noticed that it seems like everyone is sick right now? Anytime I hear a sneeze or cough I always ask, “Do you have a fever??!!?? If you do, you better stay away from me!!!”

Now, it’s not that I’m really concerned about their health. I’m more concerned about my health. Hey, I can be honest!! I DO NOT want the flu and my doctor’s office won’t have flu shots available for another week. At this point, all I can do is avoid sick people and wash my hands incessantly while singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”. Yes, I know I’m not five years old but I still do it!

The thought of getting the flu is enough to make me want to call in sick to work. On top of that we now have to contend with H1N1…I can get flu that orginated from a damned pig…a hog…a porcine princess!! My God someone up there really hates us.

There are so many people these days that still come to work sick and it’s utterly ridiculous. I know some individuals don’t have sympathetic bosses or work places but my office is over-the-top sympathetic. They will roll out the red carpet for us to stay home!! However, there are still people around here who think the office would have to close without them. I refer to them and those people who have an over exaggerated sense of themselves…either that or their a bunch of damned martyrs. They would drag themselves in here in the middle of the apocalypse! Fools!!

Here is a simple test to see if your job can do without you for a few days:

(1) Will the sun burn out if you don’t go to work?
(2) Will the infrastructure of the world collapse if you don’t go to work?
(3) Will mass flooding occur if you don’t go to work?
(4) Will huge balls of flame shoot from outer space and collide with the earth if you don’t go to work?

If you can answer yes to any of these questions then, by all means, go to work. If you can’t….keep you ass at home! You’re not that friggin’ important!

Good Lord, I’ve been known to stay home with a sunburn. Will I come into work if I have the flu? When pigs fly….

Chick out…

Bunch of weenies....

I work in a relatively new office building that is super duper nice. The one downfall is that there is nowhere nearby where we can grab lunch. That all changed this week.

My goodness you’ve never seen such excitement. I was off on Monday but WH2 emailed me and told me I was not going to believe what was going on but he couldn’t even tell me what it was….told me I had to see it myself. He eluded to the fact that it was an eating establishment so I got excited too.

I was having visions of granduer because they’re building a shopping center that will be anchored by a fantabulous Wegman’s grocery store that will be within jumping distance of us. I had heard there will be restuarants too so I was envisioning Chili’s, Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesday….not great restaurants but something better than the WaWa gas station at the corner. When I drove in this morning I was looking for signs to announce exactly what was coming. My palms were literally sweaty with anticipation. What did I see?? Nothing!

When WH2 finally dragged his butt into work he made a beeline for my cube. He was all excited and his eyes were twinkling. He couldn’t wait to tell me.

Here it is…the reason for all the excitement…we now have a “That’s My Dawg” hot dog cart that sets up in our park. WTF? They’re all excited about a damned hot dog cart?? They go on and on about those “dawgs”. Some grab a “dawg” for lunch but the guys in my department wait until around 2:00 and have what they call “second lunch”. What a bunch of weenies…..a damned hot dog cart. Arrrrggggggg….

Chick out…

My work husbands and I: a weird little triangle

Work husband; noun; a man with whom a woman has a platonic intimacy at work

Hello my name is singlegal and I…am…a…work…wife. There I said it. Whew that wasn't too painful.

I am not alone in my venture into the world of work wifedom. There are thousands of us out there who’s goal it is to keep menfolk in check for 8-10 hours per day while at work so that they get no real taste of freedom before they get shipped back home to their real wives. You know that if they have too many “free” hours they can get rambunctious and mouthy. It’s sort of like an 8 year old boy that’s not been under his mother’s watchful eye for a few hours. He gets wild an unruly…grown ass men are the same way.

I’m pretty sure that I would absolutely suck at being a real wife. I mean I don’t really want a man messing up my house or having big, stinky poops in my bathrooms. Having a real husband might end my days of standing in my pantry and eating a entire meal from the shelves, endlessly shopping for 10 pairs of black high heels (you really need at least 10 pair of black high heels….believe me!!!!), watching The Real Housewives of the OC (or New Jersey or Atlanta) while eating coffee flavored ice cream covered in hot fudge, watching 300 with the sound muted just so I can look at Gerard Butler and all his muscles, or taking an hour long bubble bath almost every night. All the things that make me blissful.

On the other hand, I’m a fantabulous work wife. So good, in fact, that I juggle two work husbands. Scary, huh? How do I juggle two of these mythical creatures? Work husband polygamy is difficult but I’ve adapted. For starters I try to keep them separated because I fear they’ll start peeing on me to try to mark me. Golden showers…not my “thang”. I commonly refer to them as work husband one (WH1) and work husband two (WH2). One I have been “married” to for probably 7 years and the other for about 3 years. It really wasn’t my intention to accumulate two because one was quite enough. I just…happened.

Work spouse courtships are nothing like those of the real world. There is no awkward first date and no meeting the parents. The male member of the relationship doesn’t get down on his knee and ask for the female’s hand in work-marriage nor is there a work engagement ring. (Although, a couple weeks ago WH2 did give me a pack of hot sauce from Taco Bell that had the question “Will you marry me” on it…so workmantic.) You don’t have to plan a work wedding or run off to Vegas for a quickie work marriage ceremony performed by an Elvis look-alike. It much less stressful and costs absolutely nothing.

Sometimes you fall into a work marriage. My primary work husband (WH1 as I call him) and I did not start off as friends. In fact, I despised him…he made my blood boil. We would go to the same meetings and I would always think, “Who is this asshole??” I would get a call from him and think, “Great! What does this asshole want?” Then I had to go to Colorado with him. Shit! I dreaded it for 2 weeks…Colorado with an asshole…on a plane with an asshole…in a rental car with an asshole….breakfast, lunch, and dinner with an asshole. Could it get any worse??? Amazingly, we got along fine. By the end of the trip I had my very first work husband. I was no longer a virgin to the work spouse experience….I had a thriving work marriage…to as asshole.

On the flip side, sometimes you’re wooed into a work marriage. My secondary work husband (WH2) wooed me endlessly. He didn’t woo me because he needed a work wife. No. He wooed me because he wanted to work in my department….becoming his work wife was an added bonus for him.

We ended up on travel to the same site at the same time so he saw it as his chance to make his move. He started by telling me that had sat through one of my training courses and said, “Yeah, I asked you a question and you didn’t know the answer at the time but you got back to me later that day with the answer. I really appreciated that.” The look on my face said “And you are who?” I had absolutely no idea who he was…didn’t remember him at all. The next day he went in for the kill. He asked if he could ride back to the hotel with me so we could stop at Sonic. Love of Sonic? A good thing….a very good thing. We stopped there and devoured banana cream milkshakes. That was the beginning of our work spouse courtship.

That night the entire group of about 10-12 people went to dinner together. We were all meeting in the hotel lobby and he was tapped to call one of the female government employees that hadn’t made it down yet. He hung up the phone and tells us in his best 50+ year-old-woman’s voice, “I’ll be down as soon as I get my stockings on.” Then he throws in, “Not an image I want in my head!!” Right then I knew…he was to be my WH2.

That prophesy came true a few months later when he joined my department. Even better…he’s sort of my subordinate so I can tell him what to do all the time. Hooray!!!

Like in all marriages, my WHs and I have had our ups and downs. We’ve been through trial separations and I’ve threated to serve them both with divorce papers but we’ve stuck it out. We don’t do it for the sake of the kids…we do it for the sake of our projects. Besides we don’t have a Judge Mablean (original judge from Divorce Court) to help divvie up our belongings and decide on alimony payments. What would belongings and alimony in a work divorce consists of? Pens, pencils, lunch punch cards for various restaurants? I’m not really sure.

So that’s it in a nutshell. We have a weird little “family”. We’re not the Brady Bunch but we’re happy.

Chick out…