My masterpiece

Last night I read Hannah's post and found out that November is a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Basically, one has to write a 175 page novel in 30 days, with quantity, not quality being the prime objective. Since I spend most days wondering how to keep myself busy, I got very excited at the prospect of actually doing this. They (the organizers and I wonder who they are) even expect you to do a bad job, so what's there to lose?

The excitement was very short lived, and very soon I became preoccupied. I was thinking about my future novel all night and the whole day today.

Novel

by

SubWife

I told you, got nothing better to do.

And now, 24 hours later, I came to a sad realization - I have nothing to say to the world. I just don't know how I can possibly fill those 175 pages. I am too young for memoirs and too blah to write anything else. I would love to write something - anything - just for the heck of it, but - goodness gracious - 175 pages??? Even if I write pure cr4p (I am using the words from the introduction letter), I still can't fill up 175 pages with it unless I introduce a lot of beans to my diet . Of course, I could go the Tolstoy path and describe my breakfast in four pages, lunch in two, afternoon hunger pangs in seven, all in excruciating details, but I might die of boredom doing this, I am just too young to die.

This is a sad day in the life of SubWife. Those organizers (really, who are they?) weren't lying - one will find out something about oneself at the end of the process, even if one doesn't get to finish the novel or write full 175 pages. Only the end of the process for me came on October 26 and I discovered that I just ain't no writer. (Something all of you already realized, and I am the last to know...) So you can all breathe a sigh of relief - my 175 page novel will not be on the summer reading for your kids. And I am going back to my beans.

Captain Noah Morgan's table

Once again, all that effort DS's teachers are putting into his education is paying off. When I got into the car today, DS proudly announced that he had made a pirate ship as part of his pre-school project. That seemed a bit suspect, and I could barely contain my laughter when I realized that the pirate ship was actually Noah's Ark.

In related news, DD refuses to accept the harsh reality that Noah is not known for building furniture or that she could be wrong, and persistently continues singing "Noah built a table, a table, a table" (instead of teva, "ark" in Hebrew).

In other related news, DS actually knows that Noah built a teva, not a table, and continues correcting DD. His negligent parents, however, refuse to cooperate with the educational process and set him straight about the true nature of the ship DS has built. With persistence, matched only by DD, they continue believing that having a happy with his pirate ship 3 yr old is more important than having a 3 yr old who knows about Noah and his Ark.

In even more related news, not out of principle or because of their views on child rearing and education, both parents would love to be there when DS refers to his Ark as a pirate ship in front of his teacher. We would love to have the picture of her face as well. We are even willing to pay for that, but not much.

With a little help from my neighbors...

I just shocked my neighbor, profoundly. No, I did not run around the neighborhood in my birthday suit, set anyone on fire or robbed a local grocery store. I had done something much, much stranger. I decided to be nice.

About two years ago the house next door to ours was sold and new neighbors moved in. According to my husband there are at least three families living there. Whatever, they don't disturb us and we don't disturb them. As a matter of fact, they seem to be of the rare species in our neighborhood - the ones that actually use their garage and driveway and don't take up precious parking space on the street. And that seems to be about all we know about them. They could be some cult leaders, practicing polygamists, a band of psychopaths or the latest most popular reality family on TV - and we would be the last to know. Well, turns out that they know about us even less than we know about them.

I was taking out garbage tonight when I saw neighbor's daughter pulling into the driveway. As good manners dictate, I made my way to open the gate and save the girl trouble of getting in and out of her car. All of a sudden I heard honking, then again. I stopped opening the gate and heard the girl telling me, "Hey, I live here!" I asked her if she wanted me to open her gate. She repeated about what she and I and now you already know - that she lived here. Finally I said, "I KNOW. I am your neighbor! I just wanted to help."

It finally dawned on the girl that she was not heroically stopping the robbery of her house. She started thanking me, still rather surprised that anyone would actually do something nice for people she doesn't know well. Then she said something that shocked me even more than my good will gesture shocked her. She said that she had never seen me around, but she probably had seen my daughter. She went on and on and turned out she wasn't referring to either DD or the baby, but my college age daughter. In a nutshell, she was mistaking me for my landlady, who is 1)the mother of TWO college age and still living at home daughters, 2)is 5 inches shorter and 3) is at least 20 years older than me.

Once again, SubHub found the whole age thing quite amusing, but left me wondering whether marriage had aged me THAT much.

We are family

I have this huge rant post about loyalty to one's employer hovering in my head for the past two years, and I can't quite capture it on this blog. This unfortunate circumstance is mainly due to the lack of time at home since I don't blog/write posts from work out of loyalty to my employer, and not because I have been drowning in work and Blogger is now filtered out anyway .

So this is a shorter version/preview of the rant brought on by the staff meeting that took place today. Every time we have a staff meeting, our boss takes out our department's mission statement, makes someone read it aloud and reminds us about all the reasons why good G-d put our accounting department on this Earth. This mission statement is a product of a brainstorming session, which took place before I came on board. So today, in addition to reviewing, the boss reiterated that teamwork is a major part of our mission statement and how it is so important, how we all are one team, work for the same department and agency, we all have the same goals - to serve and protect, how we are all judged as one department and not individually (thought at different pay rates, obviously), blah, blah, blah - in essense, we are all one happy family and should strive to help each other.

And while all this political correctness was dumped on me, I couldn't chase away one thought: that out of the ten or so people who came up with this mission statement, three were let go, of which two were let go within six months of coming up with this magnum opus.

Yep, oooooone happy family...

This is a joke, right?

Once again the Nobel Prize for Peace shows how meaningless it is. I am neither pro nor anti-Obama, but Nobel Prize for Peace???? You have got to be kidding me. Then again, he is in the company of Yasir Arafat, so I am not sure whether it is such a complement after all.

Happy birthday to me!

I got a real birthday gift today, somewhat belated, but from a complete stranger. So it all kind of evens out. Ready? I was carded when trying to buy beer. I ran out without my purse and only had a credit card and old expired driver's permit on me. (Why I had an expired permit in the pocket of my coat is the whole different story not worth mentioning. Unless you click on the link.) I presented my expired ID to the check out girl, and she asked, "Do you have any other form of ID? This one is expired." To my, "But it's still me, same face, same name, and I can assure you that I did not become any younger simply because my ID expired!" she simply said that she couldn't accept that as proof of my age.

When I got back to the car and retold hubby the story, he laughed, for a rather long time might I add, at the thought that someone could have mistaken me for a 20 year old. Well, I still got the last laugh because he didn't get his beer.