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.