Festivus is early this year!

It's not even December, but it's already Festivus for the rest of us!



How else can I explain this Airing of Grievances? Get out the aluminum pole and limber up for the Feats of Strength, people, 'cause here it comes.

First of all, Gmail is spying on me.

Stop looking at me like that! I know it sounds paranoid, but Gmail is freaking me out lately. You know how they have those keyword generated ads along the right column of the page? I find them so intrusive, don't you? Just now, for instance, I was tapping out an email in which I called something or someone a pain in the neck. Next time I glanced over Gmail had helpfully suggested several cures for neck pain and a few chiropractors in and around my city. On occasion I've been known to pen a dirty email or ten (shut up) and you would not believe the smut Gmail slams me with during those instances. Buncha pervs! Gmail needs to mind their beeswax, I say.

My kid got sent home sick today. Again.

Yet he doesn't act sick at all. In fact, he's quite energetic and annoying. He doesn't lie around, glassy-eyed with fever, quietly sipping juice and calling me "Mother Dear," he bounces around touching everything and making constant, irritating, grate-on-your-nerves noise! He's not one of these kids who loses his appetite either; nope, he's asking me for things to eat every 5 minutes only to eat two bites of it and say he's full. For this, I keep missing work! Not that I'm missing it, but that's beside the point. I'm bored at home, simple as that.

I still don't know what I'm allergic to.

Sure, the rash is gone, and I'm reallyreallyreally glad about that. But why must my left eye keep swelling?! It's like all of the mystery whatever-it-was has all landed there in one eye. This morning I woke up feeling pretty darn good; after all, I was home with my kid all day yesterday and managed to sneak in a 2 hour nap while he played Wii! It wasn't until I glanced at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw that I resembled Rocky Balboa after going a few rounds with Apollo Creed that my spirits took a nosedive. Also, I think I'm developing some sort of dependency on Benedryl and Zyrtec.

On a related note, the Google image search results for "swollen eye" are terrifying.

Daycare centers suck.

There's this woman at the daycare whom we privately refer to as the Chicken Lady. She has yellow hair and bulgy, bloodshot eyes, she's skinny and has a prominent Adam's Apple and a beak-like nose. She clearly earned the nickname by virtue of her looks alone, but we'd never have started calling her that had she not also been a raging biotch as well. She's one of these drill Sargent types who takes no guff and has the children marching in little lines. Our oldest son toughed out a year under her reign last year for Kindergarten and we thought that would be the extent of it now that he goes to the public elementary school. As it turns out, he still has to deal with her in the after school program.

Lately she has been nitpicking every little thing the kid does and making a federal case out of it when my husband goes in to pick him up in the afternoons. Jim started to dread pick-ups because it was always something: D stood up before the bus came to a complete stop and angered the driver! D and his friends licked their hands and laughed about it! D and his little friend were talking about *gasp* their weiners! Sounds like typical 6 year-old-boy stuff, right? That's what we thought too! But no, everything is a huuuuuuge deal to the Chicken Lady.

Well, yesterday the shit hit the fan and she managed to anger my mild mannered professor/hey-man-it's-cool hippy of a husband so much that he actually yelled back at her. Yeah, The Jim yelled back! Definitely a first. So now we have to go have a conference with the owner of the daycare and the Chicken Lady, but the long & the short of it is that Jim told her to stop treating him like a child and she told him to stop blowing her off when she tells him all about what is "wrong" with our kid. Really productive. The good news is she kissed my ass thoroughly this morning, so now I get to be the sensible, reasonable parent in the equation instead of the one who is usually overly-sensitive to the fall-out caused by their banal little microcosmic existence.

So there they are, my grievances. You'd think I would feel better, but not so much. Maybe after the Feats of Strength? Come on, who's gonna try to pin me first? I'm all kinds of irritated right now, so I'm pretty sure I can take all y'all! ;)