Sunday, August 17, 2008

Back To Work

I love not having to go to work. It doesn't matter that we didn't travel on this vacation; it was just nice to not have to work. We were able to get a lot of the stuff done I'd wanted to (the bedroom is painted except for the trim). Unfortunately, that little dreamland known as vacation came to an end today. I had to go back to work today because, for some strange reason, I'm required to show up in order to get paid. "You sure that's what we agreed to when you hired me? I'm pretty sure I remember it differently."

It's not that my job is horrible. It's not very strenuous or challenging. I can't even say the people I work with are bastards, mostly because I don't want to take a chance on one of them reading this. Going to work just is not quite as much fun as staying home. I don't like going back after a long weekend, let alone after two weeks off. No matter how hard I tried though it was inevitable. If you believe Freud's view that there are no accidents then on Saturday I stubbed my pinkie toe in an attempt to avoid having to go back. Personally, I don't much attention to a lot of what he said. All I know is I tried to hop over the baby gate instead of taking the time to open it. I cleared it easily but slammed my toe into the handrail that sticks out from the wall. I contend that's proof positive that we don't need either a handrail or baby gate downstairs. I don't recall either preventing more injuries than they've caused. My wife just thinks that we should just keep them and I should just do less stupid jumping on the stairs. Either way my pinkie toe and surrounding foot area being swollen and purple wasn't enough of an injury to warrant an extended vacation.

It's a shame though since our oldest had some big plans. We went to a local zoo the other day. It's not a big one but has enough animals to keep the kids happy. They had some lions, some tigers, and a couple bears. So did you all say "Oh my" after the lions, tigers, and bears line? Good times. Anyways, they had animals like that and several different kinds of monkeys. The monkeys actually put on a good show. Lots of swinging and jumping as well as some running around. Monkeys running looks like some oddly proportioned little hairy fella running around which in and of itself would make a pretty good zoo exhibit, in my opinion. There were no big animals like giraffes or elephants though. A point my daughter would later bring up.

That night we put them to bed and she wanted me to lie down with her for a bit. Since I'm a big pushover I did. We were chatting about the fun we'd had that day. I was asking her what she thought about the zoo and which animals she liked the most. That's when she told me that her favourite animal was a giraffe. "I like giraffes but there weren't any giraffes there. Tomorrow we got to the giraffe zoo?" She has three terms for referencing time, today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Today is obvious. Yesterday is anything that's happened in the past and tomorrow is anything in the future. We just have to be careful with the tomorrow thing because she'll often play the "you said we'd do that tomorrow" card the day after we agree to something.

So she's telling me about how we're going to go to the "giraffe zoo". "We go to the giraffe zoo tomorrow. They have big giraffes with long necks and baby giraffes with little bit short necks. And there'll be elephants. And the baby elephant will lick me."

"What?"

"The baby elephant. The baby elephant is going to come over and lick me like this." And then she licked my arm to demonstrate.

And that's why I have to keep going to work. We're going to have to set aside some money for a trip to the giraffe zoo at some point. On top of that I'm going to need a few extra bucks to bribe a zookeeper into bringing over a baby elephant to lick the girls. Good thing they're worth it.

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