California Anger. What? You've never heard of this?

So this really weird thing happens to me when I go back to California. All the ease of living in Minnesota, where things are a tad slower, where people aren't so oblivious of each other (well, okay, I think the less crowdedness of Minnesota makes the oblivion a bit easier to deal with because oblivion still happens), where there is just more...SPACE...to breath and walk and not worry about things so much, all that ease tends to dissipate once I enter California.

I lived in California for 35 years and so, based on seniority alone, I am allowed to be mean to the state. While it's a beautiful place (in certain areas), it's also a very crowded place with way too many cars and buildings and people...and well, it's pretty much the opposite of where I live now. It makes me tense. It makes me glad I moved. It makes me want to pick a fight with anyone who is acting a fool...and in California, since there are way more people per square mile than in Minnesota, that means there are way more fools to pick fights with.

I just came back from California, and I'm glad to report that I didn't have any incidents of California Anger this trip.

But today? Today my California Anger reared its ugly head.

I shop at Super Target (take that, mom) for my weekly groceries and other sundry items I need. Usually my husband and son come with me since Super T is my son's most favorite store on this earth because he's only four and he always thinks he's going to get a toy each time he steps inside a Target store. I'm not sure why my husband goes - moral support? to buy random things I would never think of buying? to buy the kid a toy? (They are often in cahoots, those two.)

I love me some Super T. Inexpensive organic foods, sundry items, kitty litter...Super T has it all.

Tonight I plan to make veggie fajitas for dinner, so I picked out two yellow squash, two zucchinis, cilantro, and a red onion. After reconvening (the boy and the husband ran off to pick out a new lightsaber, light bulbs, gum...sundry items! Super T! Weeee!), I picked the one checkout aisle with the youngest kid running the cash register.

The first problem? My organic cauliflower heads wouldn't scan, and he went into some weird fluster mode and I was going to put them back and get regular cauliflower (i.e. nonorganic, less expensive, but possible sprayed with pesticides and who knows what else) but he convinced me he would get them scanned and I believed him, so when I looked up and saw he rang up our cilantro as "green onions" and our zucchini as "cucumber" and our yellow squash as "manzanilla" (which, if you click through, CLEARLY does NOT look like a yellow squash), and our organic lemon as a "large lemon," I realized I was never going to buy my organic cauliflower or any other kind of cauliflower that day. Not unless I stayed at Super T a lot longer than I wanted to stay.

The second problem? He got super flustered at the end of ringing our stuff up and tried to charge me for some random (sundry!) Star Wars items the lady behind me was buying even though she told him very clearly that they were hers and not ours. Then I had to tell him it wasn't ours. So he was flustered and pushed our transaction through while completely ignoring my organic cauliflower heads. So I pointed, and said, "What about those? Do you want me to just put them back?"

He looked at me and said, "Oh, I can ring those up for you right now."

I looked at him and told myself, he's a teenager...be nice...We are NICE here in Minnesota. NICE, people, NICE. "Um, okay, but I'm not sure why you couldn't ring it up before then?" (To be nice when you want to be mean means stating things like they are questions.)

He woke up then and remembered that he couldn't scan them, so he scanned one to show me that he couldn't scan them (the screen turned red and yelled at him to get a manager or something).

"Okay, just forget it, it's okay," I said. See? NICE. I am nice.

As we were walking away, I said to my husband, he was ringing up stuff wrong.

Uh oh.

"What stuff? Where? What, show me!" my husband, ever the problem solver in our relationship, said.

"Oh, he rung this up as that, blah blah blah manzanilla," I said.

"What the heck is a manzanilla?" he asked?

"I don't know, but he thought that was the yellow squash."

My husband took the receipt and declared that there was no way yellow squash (a single one) costs $1.99. He thrusted two dollars in my hand and told me to go buy our boy a slushy while he takes care of this little "problem."

See, I was going to let it go. Sure, he might have overcharged us, but who cares. If it was 3 bucks for one squash or double charged us or something, then yes, I can see trudging over to the customer service counter and complaining. But since my husband was so sure that we were overcharged, I let it go and took the boy to buy a slushy.

When the boy and I went over to the customer service counter, my husband was standing there with bags all over the place, trying to explain to the lady what had happened. I won't go into all the details, but basically she wasn't listening to us and was more concerned with trying to explain to us that manzanilla must be weighed or something so there is no way we have manzanilla and we kept saying we don't have that, that's the point, and it went in circles and an older man next in line kept looking at me like he wanted to punch one of us for making his wait so long, so what happened? That's right. California Anger came out and I pulled the "Can we talk to someone else about this?" which implied I felt she was a stupid idiot who cannot help us further and we needed someone smarter to come take care of the situation.

At first she said no. The she said yes and called a manager. The manager suggested that she refund the wrong items and then she will re-ring them up, and was that okay with us? HELLO? I said that a few times already! So yes, yes, that was just fine.

At that point we were treated like loose canons, and the manager kept asking me who rung us up (which was not the point -- I didn't want the kid to get in trouble, but he should really learn his veggies) and I said I didn't remember and really, I couldn't see him from where I was standing because it's a Super T and those stores are really big (in case you haven't been in one). I didn't even mention the cauliflower incident. I had no ill will towards the teenager because I am a Minnesotan now and we are NICE. Anyway, she was walking me through everything she was doing, and I was being nice to her, and really, there was no need to apologize at this point, I just wanted my veggies and to get out of there.

She handed me the original receipt, the refund receipt, and the new receipt that has the veggies on it. I thanked her. We started to leave, and it dawned on me....so, really....did he overcharge us? Or did we just make a huge stink about something that really didn't matter?

I got the receipts out and look at the refund one - we were refunded $5.36. I look at the new one for the veggies -- we were charged $5.74.

I'm not good at math, but yeah, I could see we just made assholes out of ourselves for no reason.

I told my husband we are stupid and it's all his fault. He told me I should have known how much everything was supposed to cost (vegetables get weighed, by the way, so not only does he think I remember all prices but also he thinks I have a scale in my hands that is linked to my brain). I said he was the one that was all "THESE SQUASH DO NOT COST $1.99 AND I WILL NOT LET THE MAN MAKE ME PAY SO MUCH FOR THEM, CURSES TO YOU, SUPER T!!!" (By the way, they do cost $1.99, go figure.) And then I threw in that he forced me to figure out how to buy a slushy since I was really confused that there were no cups available. And then he said something about me, and me about him, and so forth and so on.

When we got in the car, it dawned on me even more what an ass I just made out of myself and I decided (temporarily) that I can never go to the Super T again, and that I felt like an idiot (our son heard me say "idiot," which is a bad word to him, but he told me since I didn't call anyone that word, it was okay and I didn't have to say I was sorry) and I wanted to curl up and die. I really wanted to go back there and apologize to everyone for being an ass. But then, I rationalized that he could have overcharged us, what do we really know...but then I felt like an ass again and declared I was going to take it out on our bathroom by cleaning it like it's never been cleaned before (not really sure how that was related to making an ass out of myself, but nonetheless I didn't clean the bathroom any better than I normally do).

Finally I told my husband he made my California Anger come back and I did not appreciate it. AT ALL.

Too much time and a stool.

I took my son to the doctor today because for the past 5 nights he's been hacking up a lung and sometimes throwing up parts of it (okay, maybe that's just curdled milk, who knows), and, well, enough is enough.

But this isn't about that. This is about my son becoming a...MAN (or trying to become one).

So after waiting 50 minutes in the room with only four books (I read that, read this one, read that one, I DON'T LIKE THAT ONE!), a chalk board, and an exam table, my kid was about ready to explode with impatience. After chalking up my pants, I refused to let him suck up the last 30 minutes of my phone's battery so he could play games (fair punishment), and I proceeded to send angry texts to my husband about being fed up and ready to blow up on someone.

All the while, a little voice from the other side of the room was saying, over and over, "Momma? Can I get up here? Momma, can I get up here?" 'Here' being the exam table, which I already told him to have at it as long as he doesn't try to stand up and walk around on it. So I continued to send angry texts to my husband while brushing aside the small voice from the other side of the room until I saw legs and arms waving about and a loud thump and a bit of a cry.

Ooops. Great parenting.

I rushed over, picked up the stool (hey, appearances first in case someone comes in -- oh no, no, he wasn't trying to climb up there with that, noooo), and then picked him up and snuggled him on my lap.

And then, well, he proceeded to bunch up his little face and hold back every single tear in his head.

"It's okay, you can cry," I told him while having flashbacks from another recent incident where he hurt himself but refused to cry...oddly enough my husband was there at the time....I started to become suspicious of all the daddy and son time and envisioned my husband drilling into my four-year-old's head that it's not manly to cry.

Instead of crying, his hurt and pain and frustration turned into furious anger.

"I WANT TO LEAVE RIGHT NOW, MOMMY! I WANT TO GO HOME!" he told me in short bursts

"I know, baby, but we need to wait."

"NO, YOU WAIT! I'M GOING TO TAKE YOUR KEYS AND DRIVE HOME AND LEAVE YOU HERE!"

"Oh, baby boy," I said. "You're just mad, and that's okay."

"I'M GONNA LEAVE!"

And then...

"YOU NEED TO MAKE ME LAUGH!!!!"

See, that's our thing. He's sad, I make him laugh. He's upset, I make him laugh. He's mad, I make him laugh. He's happy, I make him laugh. It's what we do.

"Oh, I need to make you laugh, huh?" I asked. "I can do that."

"No.You.Can't.Mom-my," he told me.

"What's this thing here? A....butt?" and I gently poked his butt.

And instead of crying or being mad and threatening to take my car keys and leave me at the doctor's office, he burst into his normal, joyous laughter.

You better believe I mentioned this incident to the husband (minus that part about me not paying attention while sending him angry texts about being trapped in a doctor's office for 50 minutes with our child who was on the verge of losing it) and you better believe I insinuated that my husband has been feeding our soon this crap about not crying.

He didn't deny it.

But I have a feeling no one really fed this load of crap about 'not crying when hurt' to my son. I think he's just growing up. And now I know to hide my car keys.

I do stupid things so you don't have to. You're welcome.

So there I was on Monday, working my butt off trying to get a million things done in one day, when my work cell phone rings. I looked at the number quickly, answered it, and listened to a female robot telling me my ATM card was disabled due to some system error and blahblahblah and I was going to be transferred to the security team of my bank. Oh, let's just call my bank "Home Town Bank" or "HTB" for short.

(Note: It is now Friday, and, as I stated, I was super busy on Monday, so I wasn't fully listening to everything the robot was saying to me, so the following is a mere paraphrase of real events. Or something like that. Just take my word for it, and, as you will see, I'm too simple to make things up.)

Robot: Before you can speak to a security specialist, you will need to answer four questions so we can verify your identity.

Me: Ugh, just get on with it.

Robot: Please enter the last four digits of your social security number.

Me: Hmm, that's weird. Usually it's the last five digits. Oh well, what the hey. (I proceed to enter the last four digits of my social security number, which, I must tell you, is not easy to do on a BlackBerry with its teeny tiny little keys that are so unlike an iPhone I feel like a giant when trying to enter anything into my phone.)

Robot: Now enter your [some random number I barely heard] account number for [something else I wasn't paying attention to].

Me: Frickin' frackin, I got work to do. (I get up and get my wallet, pull out my ATM card, and slowly and very painfully begin to type in my ATM card number.)

Robot: Now enter your [some random number I barely heard] account number for your ATM card.

Me: Huh? What was the previous prompt for if it wasn't for my ATM card? Waaaaaaaiiiitttt a minute. (Dawns on my how incredibly fishy this whole scenario is...I pull up my email to see if I received an email from HTB about my account - nothing. I access my account online -- nothing there either (and luckily I have money in my account still.) I IM my husband and ask him if he used the card this morning -- he did but only for a small amount and with no issues.)

Robot: Now enter your [some random number I barely heard] account number for your ATM card.

Me: Um.....

Robot: Now enter your [some random number I barely heard] account number for your ATM card.

Me: Waaaaaiiiittt a minute...most robot phone things will send you off to the land of the real people if you don't follow the directions correctly after the third time.

Robot: Now enter your [some random number I barely heard] account number for your ATM card.

Me: OMGWHID. (Oh my goodness what have I done.)

Robot: Now enter your [some random number I barely heard] account number for your ATM card.

Me: Uh oh.

Robot: Now enter your [some random number I barely heard] account number for your ATM card.

Me: (Click.)

I immediately call HTB, wield through HTB's robot voice command system to finally get to a real person.

Customer service rep (CSR): Blahblahblah, niceties, how can I help you?

Me: Uh, well...I just received a call about my ATM card being disabled or something due to some hardware issues or something...honestly I wasn't really listening, and now I think it was a fake call and I want to know if something really is happening to my ATM card.

CSR: Ohhhhh....well....we've had a lot of people calling about emails and phone calls lately, and this and that and ... long story short ... I think you should cancel your card.

Me: Do it! Do it now! SAVE ME SUPER NICE CSR LADY WITH THE SOUTHERN ACCENT.

She questioned me further about giving the last four digits of my social security number, and I admitted AGAIN that I was a big dummy and yes, I did punch the numbers into the phone, and, well, that's how I ended up with a nice new "Enhanced Identity Theft Protection" account for only $15.99 a month. Seriously, I need this. I'm not fit to be an adult or take care of my family. Perhaps I should hire a secret agent spy man to stealthily follow me about to ensure I don't fall into a hole or leave my kid in a shopping cart in the parking lot? Perhaps.

And the kicker? I work for HTB. I've worked for HTB for over 10 years. I SHOULD KNOW BETTER, PEOPLE! So this just proves even someone who works for a bank can be fooled by some random phone call from a robot. Learn from me. Learn.from.me.

Rat-sized cockroaches.

When I was 23, my now husband and I lived in an old Victorian house split up into apartments and studios. We lived in a studio apartment on the first floor that was fairly large, but when we had to share the space with cockroaches the size of rats, well, space became less and less limited.

My husband worked about 30 or so minutes away from where we were living, and I was going to school and working, but typically, I was alone most of the time in the apartment (well, if you call 'alone' me and the 3-4 gigantic cockroaches and our cat, who could care less about them and would much rather attack me at a moment's notice). He would come home after 8 or 9 most nights, sometimes later. I just locked myself in and hoped for the best.

See, we were completely fooled by the neighborhood we moved into the day we went to look at the apartment. It was a beautiful day full of promises and chirping birds. A slight wind blew a warm breeze around us, and the smells of flowers in abundance surrounded us and made us believe that this was the neighborhood in which we had to live. The sky was blue, the houses were old with fantastic history, and nary a person was to be seen slumming up the streets.

And then we moved in and soon found out the neighborhood was a playground for the homeless, the drug addicted, and big rigs using the street next to the window where we slept as a thoroughfare between freeways. At 6am in the morning.

Our next door neighbor was some drunk guy. He was nice enough, but not really my kind of people. The guy across from us dressed like a hobo professor and we never really did know what he did for a living. He tried to help me break into our apartment one day when I locked myself out and my husband wasn't going to be home anytime soon. This was well before the days of cell phones, so I just sat on the porch for a good 3 or 4 hours. There were a few young professionals living upstairs, but we never really talked to them besides saying "hi" in passing. There was an elderly man living upstairs as well, but we never really talked to him either outside of friendly waves and 'hellos' and 'how are you doings?'.

The first time I noticed the cockroaches, I was sitting on our bed, watching TV in the dark, when I noticed something run really fast across the living room floor. The reflection of the TV shone off its back. My cat, bless her frozen heart, tried to pounce on it, but then gave up and left me alone with the creature. My husband came home, and I was still sitting on the bed, having a silent panic attack because I'd never seen anything that big and shiny in my life until that night. I couldn't fathom what it was.

"KILL IT!" I screamed at him.

While he was used to me being slightly melodramatic about things, that was not something he wanted yelled at him as soon as he came home. After convincing him that I wasn't making it up about the creature's size, he finally went to investigate.

When he came back, he said words I never wanted to hear again, "I....I don't know what that is."

But, you're supposed to take care of ME! I thought. I didn't sign up for this. I didn't agree to live in an apartment with a creature much less a fiance who couldn't identify said creature! God dammit, I'm from the suburbs!

"Oh my god. Don't say that. KILL IT!" I yelled while shaking my arms around and squealing.

"Would you stop!" he said. He's always hated it when I shake and squeal about the unknown.

"What IS IT?" I said with my volume increasing to squeal again.

"I think it's a cockroach. But I've never seen a cockroach that big, so I don't really know."

"OH.MY.GOD.KILL.IT!!!!" I think I was crying at this point.

It's worth mentioning that the cat was missing at this point because she was a lot smarter than we were and wasn't going to stick around trying to figure out what the hell that thing was.

My husband did the bravest thing any human could do outside of squashing a tarantula with paper towels (a thought that gives me the willies as I imagine it now), and he killed that creature good and dead, and then removed the carcass to the outside, which was fine by me because who knows if it was really dead and not just stunned. If I were that creature, and someone tried to squish me and throw me in the garbage but I wasn't really dead and just stunned? I would get revenge. Just saying.

From that point on, until we moved, we were being constantly surprised by rat-sized cockroaches here and there, and sometimes even in the corner where the 20 foot wall met ceiling. Like a bat. Out of hell.

As you can imagine, being alone a lot while fearing the appearance of a rat-sized cockroach does wonders for the imagination.

One night as I was waiting for my husband to come home from work, I heard a lot of commotion going on in the hallway. I, being the nosy person that I am, stuck my head to the door to listen and tried to figure out what was going on outside.

I heard someone say, "He's upstairs." I heard walkie talkies. I heard bits and pieces of things that never added up. I was freaked out yet intrigued. I called my husband to tell him something was going on, and he told me to open the door and just look. So I did, and there was a car with lights flashing outside, and I could hear people upstairs, and I was no closer to the truth of what was going on.

My husband came home an hour or so later, and when he was coming in from the back parking area, he ran into the male "young professional." In cases where something dramatic happens, "hi" goes right out the door and two strangers will gossip like elderly ladies sitting on a porch. And so this was how we found out what happened.

He told my husband that he had called the cops because he hadn't seen the elderly man in almost a week, and since the elderly man was, well, elderly and lived in a studio apartment and looked like he was going to blow away in the wind if the wind blew too hard, it wasn't like he was going to just pick up and take a trip to Hawaii. He tried to get the management to do something, but they said it wasn't their place, and to call the cops. So he did. What I was hearing was the cops going upstairs to try to get the old man to open his door.

The building management eventually had to open the elderly man's door because it was either that or the cops knocking the door down, and come to find out, the elderly man had died a few days prior and was just beginning to rot away in his apartment.

Oh, did I mention the smell? Apparently some funky smell was coming from the elderly man's apartment too. Which was another reason to raise suspicions. Since we were on the first floor, we never smelled a thing, but, my husband later said that he realized he hadn't seen the elderly man for a few days before the 'incident.'

Later we found out his apartment was a huge mess, full of papers, money and trash and whatnot.

And, come to find out, full of rat-sized cockroaches.

Which, as you can imagine, explains a lot.

Candy cane candles and how I wanted to blow up (in) Pier One.

I've gotten better at going out in public and being nice, especially at stores. I really have. It's a bit easier doing so now that I live in a less hectic state. I don't head off shopping with complete dread of being ignored and talked to like I'm the one bothering the sales person. While other shoppers still annoy me (especially where I live, which, as I've been told, is where the "cake eaters" live) because I'm still invisible girl on many occasions and I have had to forcibly move many a shopping cart just so I can get by because the person who is manning the cart is talking on the phone or just completely ignoring those around her (yes HER, as most frequently these people are HERS).

So yesterday I had a few hours in the morning to do some shopping before I had to pick up my husband from the airport. Admittedly, I spent a good 20 minutes that morning deciding on whether I really should go out in public because I was feeling rather...well...like I could bite off someone's head for just walking by me and making air waves that were too hard for my liking. Then something happened and I was like, "Dammit, I am going out into the world regardless of what could possibly happen to me and I will buy some stuff and it will be okay!"

I went to the post office first because I had to mail off a package to my sister for one of my cute little nephews. I had to suffer through some lady with an oxygen machine crowding my space, and no matter what I did to get away from her, she kept inching forward and mechanically breathing on my back. Okay. Fine. She has some condition making it hard for her to breath, I get that, but why don't people understand the concept of personal space? Especially when I was reading texts from people and looking at Facebook? Privacy, people!

Next I went to Target and dealt with many a shopping cart in my way whose drivers completely ignored.

Then off to a store to buy something for my son's "teacher" at daycare. My previous experience at the store was a few nights ago when I was with my three-year old whom I was desperately afraid would start knocking things over. For some reason the salesperson tasked with attacking shoppers as soon as they walked in the store thought I was the perfect target even though I spent more time trying to get my son to stop using the tables as a play surface (tables laden with bottles and bottles of colorful liquid that could easily become dominoes at the touch of a small, wily, three-year-old's hands). Or maybe she thought I was about to steal something based on how I looked, which was like a homeless person with my stained sweatshirt (I didn't plan on taking off my jacket, but gosh darn it, it was hot in the mall), I really don't know.

Anyway, digression, the bane of my existence. I was only approached once during my second trip, so that was fine. (I also didn't look homeless nor did I have that three-year-old wily one with me.)

I've been wanting to pick up a few Christmasy things for the house because we don't have much outside of a tree and we skipped Thanksgiving this year due to all of us being sick, and I.am.going.to.have.a.nice.Christmas.if.it.kills.me. So I headed to Pier One.

I walked in and made the rounds, noticed some cute albeit unoriginal candy cane candles, and headed in their direction. As I was was looking at the candles, a sales lady approached me. And when I write "approached" I liken it to being bum rushed by excessive gleefulness and maybe a hope for commission (if they do, in fact, get one, and if they don't get one at that store, then this lady was just plain happy to be working in retail).

"HI! How are you doing today!!!!????" she asked me.

Me thinking, let's see, I'm seriously PMSing, just that question alone makes me cringe and walk out the door, and my husband has been gone for four full days, leaving me to be Mr. and Mrs. Mom. My house is a mess, I can't get anything done, and I work full time, except for today, and here I am, deciding to spend the little freedom I have here, at the store you work at, and you're asking me how I am? How dare you.

"I'm fine, thanks."

"Oh great! So what brings you in here today? Buying something for yourself? A gift? Looking for something in particular? Like a gift?"

Me thinking, oh crap. Mother of all sales people. Let's see how monotone works on this one.

"I'm just looking." (In monotone.)

"Oh! Just looking! Okay, well! As you can see, we have a lot of nice candles here and there and there and over there! [Author's note: This is Pier One, of course they have a lot of gosh darn candles. Gah!]

"Okay."

"And we have a lot of stuff on clearance! Look for the red tags that say 'clearance'!"

"Okay, great."

"So you're not here for a gift?"

"No. I'm just looking."

It was then I noticed I had some change in my jacket pocket, and, well, since she was going to hold me hostage and felt I was up for a game of 20 questions, I decided to make my hostage time well-spent. I grabbed all the money out of pocket, then pulled out my wallet and placed said money in wallet, and then put my wallet back into my purse.

Didn't faze her.

Of course it didn't.

"Oh! Great! Well, we have a lot of nice gifts here, for someone else, or even for yourself!"

"Okay."

"Have you been here before?"

It was then that I made the fatal mistake. I'm honest to a fault. While yes, I've been IN a Pier One before, I have not been in THAT Pier One before.

"No, this is my first time."

"OH! Really!? Okay, then let me give you the layout....."

She then droned on and on about cocktail glasses and pillows and candles and ornaments and and and....

Even though my blood was boiling because all I wanted to do was look at the stupid Christmas stuff and had been eyeballing that silly candy cane candle, I was also trying to think of something to throw her off her crazy sales person spiel as I was memorizing everything she was saying to me because I knew it would be fun to write about.

When she was finally finished, I said, "Okay."

In monotone.

Again.

"Okay, then, well, I guess I'll leave you to look for something to buy!"

And she walked away.

Walked away about two steps. I had already grabbed my phone to text my friend about how I wanted to blow up Pier One because of this lady.

And then she turned around and came back.

"OH! I forgot to mention! If you have a Pier One holder's card..." and it was then I think she remembered I said I had never been there before... "...oh, well let me tell you about the Pier One holders card first."

"I don't have one and I.am.not.interested," I said while looking at my phone.

"Oh. Okay. Something customer servicey.." And off she went to find her next victim.

I started texting my friend about the whole thing while hiding in the corner like a crazy person, and then I just decided I better leave before something bad happened. Like I either spend too much money on useless candy cane candles or open my PMSing mouth and say something I would later reflect on and think, Dang, crazy me is still here regardless of which state I live in!

So that, my friends, is when excess customer service can break a person. And leave them candy cane candle-less.

(I went to Costco after Pier One, and only had to move someone's shopping cart once. A success? I'm stilling wondering.)

Technology can bite my big toe.

I had to call into a meeting today. I get stuck in work mode when I'm at home and working, so I've gotten into the habit of dialing "9" to get an outside line. And yes, I full well know I don't need to do that at home, but sometimes I do and yes, sometimes it's really confusing, and even more so yes, sometimes I end up talking to nice people.

Today I called the conference line number and someone answered "bueno." At least that's what I think this person said. And while I normally say I have the wrong number or act totally confused (usually the later), this time I just hung up. Because darn it, "bueno" means nothing to me and I needed to get into my meeting.

As soon as I hung up, the phone rang. Jesus Cruz was calling me. So I pushed the "talk" button, waited a few seconds, and hung up again. Because I needed the phone free so I could call into my everloving meeting. I pushed "talk" again, and it was just breathy silence on the other end. I hung up. Waited. Pushed "talk" again. Breathy silence AGAIN. I hung up. Waiiiiit. Tried again. Finally this Jesus Cruz had hung up and freed up my line.

As I was just ready to dial in the pass code to get into the meeting, Jesus Cruz called me back. For whatever reason, instead letting the voicemail kick in, my phone decided Jesus Cruz was more important and answered him.

Gah!

I hung up AGAIN. I tried the line, he was still on it, breathing. I hung up again. Waaaait. Now I'm officially late for my meeting, which, if anyone really knows me, means I'm steps away from the crazy house because I cannot be late to anything even if it's something I don't want to do.

Finally Jesus Cruz gave up and I dialed back into my meeting.

The kicker? My meeting wasn't worth dialing into and I probably should have just chatted with Jesus for a bit.

I've been warned of this....

The boy and I went to Target today to pick up his dad's medicine from the pharmacy and then to buy some things we needed. The boy loves Target because they have food and toys and pretzels. Yes, yes, pretzels are food, I know, but pretzels are the special treat he usually gets after shopping is done. Target is awesome.

So there we were, he in the top part of the shopping cart, me standing in front of him, both of us waiting for the pharmacy people to find my husband's meds.

When I picked the boy up from daycare, I reminded him that we were going to Target (I received many "yaaas!" about that), and that we needed to buy daddy an umbrella. The boy has been after me for the past few months to buy him a 'brella (as the boy calls it). So I told him this to get him excited about the possibility of me buying him a 'brella...in lieu of a toy.

The kid is spoiled.

While we were waiting, the boy looked at me and asked, "WHY DID SOMEONE TAKE DADDY'S 'BRELLA, MOOOOMMMMA?"

I quickly shushed him and said to stop talking so loudly.

"BUT MOOOOOMMMMMAAAA, WHY'D SOMEONE TAKE DADDY'S 'BRELLA?"

I shushed him again and told him no one took it.

"DADDY LOST HIS 'BRELLA!!!???" he asked, like this was the stupidest thing any person could possibly do, especially since he has wanted his own 'brella for months now. I think it was particularly stupid because it was a very expensive umbrella that doesn't fall apart under harsh conditions. Some lucky person on the bus got a very nice 'brella. So yes, I could understand his dismay, disgust, and bewilderment.

I shushed him again.

There we were, me trying to keep him occupied, him trying to yell out anything that popped into his head.

He had a sticker on his shirt, so I asked, "Why did you get that sticker?"

His eyes got huge. He sucked in his breath.

"I GOT THAT STICKER FROM SCHOOOOOOL!" he yelled.

I shushed him again and said he didn't need to be so loud, I could hear him just fine.

His eyes got even bigger.

"I GOT THIS STICKER FOR PEEIN-- in the potty," he told me. As he was saying "peeing," I clasped my hand over his mouth, which lowered his volume.

He glowed with pride. I laughed. The lady sitting on the bench near us turned away from us and bent over so she could hear the person on her cellphone. People in line looked over at us.

So now I know that nothing is sacred with that boy, and if I tell him anything about anything or anyone, he's likely to yell it out in public. He's lucky he's really cute and gives good hugs.