On Furlough Again

I’m on furlough again this week. The company made all of the IT employees take vacation this week so all of the contract workers get a week off with no pay. I’m enjoying the time off even though I haven’t done much of anything.

Tonight we’re going to dinner at Tom and Sheila’s house. The main course is barbeque from Whole Foods. Sheila and Tom are fixin’ (a little bit of Texas just slipped out) all of the sides. I’m sure it will be a fun evening. An added bonus is that we can walk home since they live behind our house.

K will soon be heading back to Missouri for three months. The customer is finally signing the $20 million contract that he has been working on for almost two years. K needs to find a project manager with nuclear decommissioning experience. Post a comment if you know anyone who is qualified who is willing to work in Missouri for the next two years. The sooner he finds a project manger the sooner he can come home. I expect all of my ten readers to beat the bushes to help find a project manager. It’s been nice having him home for the last few months.

K ordered a new Audi A3. It should arrive when he’s away so I’ll get to drive his new car for a while. It’s a cool car and handles really well so it should be fun to drive to work. An added plus is that the car will have all wheel drive so it should be great on snowy roads.

There’s a new manager at the gym who has been busting balls about people not restacking their weights. He’s even threatened to revoke memberships. It’s about time somebody got on the lazy fucks that leave the gym looking like a tornado touched down. I told him I appreciated his efforts.

K and I recently saw the new Tom Ford movie “A Single Man”. It’s an excellent film about a man who is struggling to find meaning to life after the death of his long time partner. Ford was spot on with the wardrobe and hairstyles of the early sixties. Ford is the designer that took Gucci from a dying brand and transformed it into an international design powerhouse. I thought Colin Firth and Julianne Moore gave stellar performances. I highly recommend this film if it shows in your local art house cinema.

Have a safe and happy new year’s eve!!!

Read Full Post »

Be Thankful You Never Married

I called my parents on Christmas to wish them a happy holiday. I talked with my mother for a while and then she handed the phone off to my sister. I really didn’t want to talk to my sister because I knew she would ramble on and on, which she did. My sister handed the phone off to my father. I could not under stand what he said when he answered the phone because he was chewing on a piece of candy. That’s right; my diabetic father was eating candy. When I cautioned him about eating candy he went into a story about a nurse in the hospital who told him he probably wasn’t diabetic. He’s disregarding all the medical tests and the conclusion of all the other medical professionals and accepting the word of one nurse. He then asked me if I watched the show Hoarders. I confirmed that I have seen the show but didn’t tell him that I thought my parents may be on the show one day. My father told me how much my mother loved the show and how ironic it is because she will not stop buying “things”. My mother continues to hoard food and other household items. He then recounted a recent argument they had over gift wrap. My mother asked my father to get her a roll of wrapping paper from the basement. My father brought her one of the eight unopened rolls of paper from the basement. It turned out she used a role of that particular paper four years ago and was afraid gift recipients would remember the paper. Thus another fight erupted. My father told me that he can’t do anything right and that nothing please my mother. Then my father told me “Be thankful you never married”. I was stunned. The only thing I could say was “That’s why people get divorced”. He countered with something about not being able to afford a divorce. I really don’t remember the rest of the conversation. I know it lasted a few more minutes but I kept hearing the words “be thankful you never married” in my head and everything else was blur. It was like a moment out of movie.

Despite the fact that K and I have been together for seventeen years my father doesn’t see our union as a marriage. I guess we’re not legitimate because we never walked down the aisle with an official pronouncing us man and man. Being “married” to a lawyer has provided me with all the legal documents I need for protection as a spouse in Colorado. I just don’t have equal rights or the tax benefits of being married. Despite owning property together and having joint bank accounts and an extremely large line of credit I’m still not married in my father’s eyes or the government’s. Knowing my father I shouldn’t have been stunned by his comment. But for some reason it hurt. I guess he has no idea what my life is like. It’s a shame but it’s his loss.

Read Full Post »

Holiday Greetings

I hope everyone has a happy holiday season!

Read Full Post »

Cindi’s Holiday Drama

Cindi and the boyfriend had planned on going to Seattle to see his daughter and new granddaughter for Christmas. The daughter tells her father, Cindi’s boyfriend, on Monday that she is spending Christmas Eve with her mother and that she will only be able to see her father on Christmas day. Cindi was dumbfounded when the boyfriend told her this. That was the first bump in the road. Then the boyfriend calls his parole officer to get permission to travel to Seattle. The boyfriend is still on parole for the felony menacing incident. The parole agent turned down the travel request. Cindi was pissed because they bought non-refundable tickets. Now the boyfriend can’t leave Colorado. That was the second bump in the road. Cindi recovers from the news that the Seattle trip is off and asks the boyfriend to find a place in Colorado to stay for a few days. Yesterday the boyfriend called Cindi to tell her he didn’t think they could afford to go away for a few days. He never bothered to look for a place to stay. This was the third bump in the road. Cindi and the boyfriend had a huge fight. She went home packed a bad and left for Winter Park. Cindi called me last night as she was braving the icy highways on her way to a friend’s house in Winter Park to tell me this tale. She told me that it’s over. She’s had it with him. I was cheering inside. I couldn’t help myself. I was ashamed that I was happy because of her misfortune. I only hope she sticks to her word this time. She called it quits before but they have always gotten back together. Will this be the final fight? I hope so.

Read Full Post »

I Wasn’t Dreaming Of A White Christmas

But we’re getting one anyway:

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY includes Denver, Fort Collins, Greeley, the entire Interstate 25 corridor and Eastern Plains locations out to Deer Trail and Limon for a storm total of 4 to 8 inches of snowfall by 5 a.m. Thursday when the Advisory expires.

The snow will come in fits and starts, even ending for a while during the middle of the day Wednesday. The first wave of snow brought 1 to 3 inches in the metro area by Wednesday morning and 3 to 6 inches in the foothills. The storm could drop another 2 to 5 inches of snow by Thursday morning.

Read Full Post »

The Good Wife – Chapter 2

I talked with my sil last night and she filled me in on a visit to my parent’s house on Sunday afternoon. My mother started a huge fight with my father over his eating habits. My sil said this one was probably the worst fight she ever witnessed in the twenty years she has been married to my brother. My sil was horrified at severity of the argument and that it happened in front of one of my nephews. My sil doesn’t want my nephew’s memories of his grandparents to be dominated by their fighting. It may be too late for that.

The fight doesn’t surprise me at all. I watched my parents fight for twenty years before I moved out of their house. It’s the main reason I don’t want to go back to St. Louis for a visit. I can’t imagine living with someone you don’t like for as long as they have. It’s a waste of two lives. There’s nothing I can, or, will do about it. They created their unhappiness so until they decide to do something about it they will just have to endure their woes.

Read Full Post »

Topless Gift Wrapping

One of titty bars gentlemen’s clubs over in the nearby suburb of Glendale had a sign up the other day offering topless gift wrapping. Go in for a lap dance and get your wife’s presents wrapped. I guess that’s one way of drumming up business in a down economy.

Read Full Post »

Entertaining The Boss

K’s boss and his wife came over for dinner last night. Tom and Sheila, our neighbors, also joined us. I felt like I was in one of the episodes of Bewitched when Darrin invited Mr. Tate over for dinner. I’ve never invited any boss over to dinner. I’ve never felt the need to entertain my boss. Things seem to be different at K’s company. It’s not a large Fortune 500 company so things are a little more intimate.

I was nervous at first but the evening turned out to be a lot fun. Tom and Sheila always have the most entertaining stories from their many years in the theater and world travels. K cooked a great meal. The dinner started off with a salad of arugula, orange, grapefruit and pomegranate seeds topped with pan roasted scallops and shrimp. The main course was rack of lamb with roasted cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and Jerusalem artichokes, and sautéed haricot verts. Dessert was a vanilla cardamom pound cake topped with brandied peaches and whipped cream. I’m not of fan of cauliflower or Brussels sprouts but they were roasted which really changed their flavor. Everyone seemed to enjoy the dinner and the guests stayed until almost midnight.

A, the company president, has asked K why he has never been invited over for dinner when he has been in town. He knows other people from the company have been to our house and I guess he feels left out. Thankfully, he will be in Afghanistan or Iraq for the next several months. But the next time he’s here we’ll be hosting him. That gives me a while to come up with a guest list. Helena, our cougar friend, would probably scare the pants off him. Helena is big flirt so it would be fun to watch her flirt him up. I can’t wait.

Read Full Post »

Patty Has A New Man

K and I had lunch with Patty on Sunday at Houston’s in Cherry Creek. We had a very nice and relaxing time. Houston’s is a very beautifully designed restaurant with a staff that looks like they were hired off the roster of a modeling agency. The staff is all white, tall and beautiful. Even the men are beautiful. It’s so typical of Cherry Creek.

Over lunch K and I decided to host a holiday dinner on Christmas day. We invited Patty to come. Then she dropped what she thought was a bomb. She’s been seeing a man she met in her bereavement group. He’s about ten years younger than Patty and has two sons from his first marriage. He second wife died from breast cancer around the same time that Steve died. Patty almost seemed afraid to tell us. Both K and I thought it was great new and told Patty how happy we were for her. I reminded Patty of the conversation we had after Steve died when she told me she would spend the rest of her time alone because she lost her soul mate. We all had a good laugh about that.

It’s good to see Patty in better spirits. This may not be the man she spends the rest of her life with but at least she has some straight male companionship.

Read Full Post »

The Good Wife

I’ve been tipped off that my mother is being nominated for a Tony award for best actress in the week long drama called “My Husband Had A Heart Attack”.

My brother filled me in on the drama today. My mother insisted on being at the hospital every day so she could play the part of the loving wife by holding a bedside vigil during visiting hours. My parents got along incredibly well. Both were amazingly polite cordial to all of the doctors, nurses and other assorted hospital workers. One nurse joked that my father should be nominated for patient of the year since he obeyed all orders, ate every meal and didn’t complain about anything. I’m guessing that my father will get a nomination as well. As I was hearing the recap of events I started to wonder if my parent’s bodies had been inhabited by some uber friendly and caring alien being.

When my brother and sil brought my parents home everything changed. They were not home more than five minutes when a heated argument broke out filled with god dammits, son of a bitches and go to hells. The only thing missing was a fuck you. Oddly, I’ve never heard my parents utter this phrase. My brother and sil were in another room so they didn’t even know the cause of the argument. About a half hour later another intense argument erupted with another course of cussing. At this point my brother and sil went home.

The caring and loving façade that my parents erected during the week long hospital drama was reduced to ruins in a matter of minutes after arriving home. This behavior is so puzzling to me. Why put on the act in public? My mother was so nice on the phone this past week. I almost fell for the act. I thought for minute that my parents would be able to put aside their differences and live out the rest of their lives together in peace. But then the act fell apart once my parents were at home. I guess some things will never change.

Read Full Post »