highly caffeinated

It's about 12 degrees in my office.

At times, various handy-looking men in blue coveralls will walk by outside, poke their heads in my door, and say, "'Izzit steel cawld in heh?"

I think they're asking me if I'm still blue and numb or if I've thawed yet, but my teeth are chattering too loud for me to understand them.

So, it's the middle of June, it's so muggy outside that your clothes stick to your skin the VERY SECOND you step out of the air conditioning, but I'm having to drink scalding hot coffee to stay warm.

Nobody in this office drinks decaf - because decaf is for wusses and girly-men - so therefore only caffeinated coffee gets made. We HAVE decaf available; just nobody ever brews it. I suppose I could, but that would take five whole minutes, and I'm cold RIGHT NOW.

So, forgive me if I skip around a lot during this post. Certain synapses are firing way too fast.

My word of the day today is chipotle.

Chipotle chipotle chipotle.

This is because I got to eat at my favorite Mexican restaurant for lunch, even though Charles wanted cheap-and-easy Mexican - I convinced him to scale it up a notch and go for trendy Mexican.

So I got to have a veggie burrito with chipotle sour cream.

Then I proceeded to drive Charles crazy by using the word chipotle in as many sentences as I could:

"She's really pissing me off. She'd better have the chipotles to back that up if she keeps talking that way."

"Do we have enough chipotles to buy me some new shorts?"

"Wasn't Drew cute as a little chipotle this morning?"

Finally, Charles asked me what the hell a 'chipotle' was, exactly. And I regret to say that, while I think it's a great word and it just sounds marvelous rolling off the tongue and it makes even a horrifying sentence sound funny -(i.e. "your chipotles are on fire") - I have absolutely no idea what a chipotle is.

Now, I'm an educated woman, so I broke out my dictionary. (OK, I Googled it.)

And I discovered that a chipotle is a ripe jalapeño pepper that has been dried and smoked for use in cooking.

I thought it was something like that.

So, after the chipotle lunch, we had about 20 minutes left, so we decided to go shopping.

OK.

I decided to go shopping. Charles just tagged along for the ride, and to make me feel really guilty about actually wanting to spend any money.

He's really good at this, listen: he never tells me we can't buy something or that something is too expensive. Instead, he simply shrugs his shoulders and says, "Well, you're the CFO."

The hidden meaning here is, "You're the chief financial officer of this household, so if you buy that $60 pair of pajamas and then we don't have enough money to get an oil change and the car breaks down and we lose our jobs because we can't get to work and we end up broke, foreclosing on our house and living on the streets diving into dumpsters to find food, well, then it's all your fault and I absolve myself of any responsibility."

He's appealing to my sense of fiscal responsibility, which really sucks when I see a cute pair of pajamas with little green horses on them and I want them so badly that I can taste it but I just can't force myself to spend $60 on a pair of PJs that hardly anyone will ever get to see me wearing when we still need to buy groceries, get a tuneup for the car and other equally boring things.

I'm a sucker for pajamas, by the way.

I absolutely LOVE pajamas. The first thing I do when I get home from work is rip off all my work clothes and put on a pair of soft, cuddly, cottony pajamas.

I saw this pair at the store downtown today that was SO CUTE - as I mentioned, it had little green horses, and little green cowboys riding the little green horses - like a rodeo of Martians or something. It was precious. And cottony soft.

And they wanted $60 for the pants and the tank top. Sixty. S I X T Y.

Yes, that's American dollars.

I think that's just craziness. For lounge pants and a tank top? I mean, come on. Have a heart, people. How can I keep feeding my pajama addiction with these kinds of prices?

Drew had his nine-month well-baby checkup this week. Here's the rundown:

1. He weighs 20.5 pounds, which is in the 60th percentile. This means he weighs more than 60 percent of baby boys his age.
2. He is 29.5 inches long, which is in the 85th percentile. This means he is taller than 85 percent of baby boys his age.
3. He is recovering well from a recent ear infection.
4. He can say "Dada", "Mama" and "Baba", so he's on track vocabulary-wise. (so sayeth the doctor, even though I told her I don't think he knows what he's saying half the time because he'll look at me, grin and screech, "Dada!")
5. He has a recurring rash on his chin that's caused by him drooling and puking all the time. This is perfectly normal and I should just keep using the ointment they gave me the last time I complained about this.
6. He's just as cute as a little button. The doctor informed me of this, and, well, she is a doctor,  and a pediatrician to boot, so I figure she's well-educated in degrees of cuteness. I'm sure she doesn't say this to every baby she sees. Probably just mine, actually.

So, that's it for now, because I've run out of coffee.

Comments

[Sam]

Yeah that coffee thing can be a killer. You can tell I drink too much because I talk waaaay too fast...which is FAST because I'm a fast talker anyway...but you wouldn't know this since we've never spoken voice-to-ear...and can you tell I had coffee tonight too? On an empty stomach?
Give Drew big hugs for me, Ms. CFO!