The Grumps

I am so effin grumpy today!!  I need to vent somewhere before the Moose comes home so I don't unload my grumps at him.  And I'll try to find the bright side to each grumpy thing.

Yesterday was spent working with a combined crew of people, most of whom I would never choose to associate with.  My co-workers are ok people, generally speaking, but oh my god...all that frustration and grump I felt towards them when I was working with them 5 months ago??  Still here.  The same conversations.  No person on the planet can do any job as well as this team can and the other teams just bollocks stuff up, the client is wrong about how something should be done, oh, and my personal pet-peeve conversation: Muslims are the source of all the world's evil (this is not explicitly said, but rather implied by banging on about anything negative that comes up in the news every single day of the week).  Followed by complaints of "do-gooders" and "PC gone wild".  Arg.  And non-stop talk about minutia (they once spent half a day talking about different types of wood and the various building applications of it, not because their hobbies are carpentry or anything, but because two of them were building houses...Half a day...about wood...). 

• Best part of the day:  Conversation with M (the insensitive miscarriage girl) in which M complained of another crew doing something wrong, and I replied "oh, the same thing was done at vineyard x" knowing full well that it had been her crew that had done it!!  

I have been up since 4am on account of a big ginger tom (Big Ginge).  He has been coming into our house to eat our cats food, which generally draws Cleo into a fight with him, or gets Toffs growling and hissing.  I have put away their food the past few nights, but he is determined, and seems intent on searching the house.  He is bold too, and doesn't shy away from us much.  In all honesty, he would probably be happy to be on good terms with Toffee and Cleo, he doesn't seem to be looking for a fight.  But neither of the girls is happy with him coming into their territory and locking our cats in at night is not an option in the summer.  So...after chasing him out of the house at 4am I spent the next two hours trying to come up with some plan to keep him away for good. 

• Plan for dealing with Big Ginge, as formulated when trying desperately to get back to sleep for a few hours before the alarm:  place a bowl with a small amount of food in the shower (he will find it), stay awake waiting for him to come, beat Cleo to him, lock him in the shower and turn it on (with strings attached to the tap...gotta remember to attach them earlier), and drench the bugger.  I will have to open the door to turn the shower off, which will drench me and let a soaked angry MASSIVE tom cat free into the laundry, but I should be able to chase him out the window then spend at least half an hour cleaning up the mess.  Or I will lock the cat flap and pin him with the broom and dump water on him.  Simpler, but could end even worse when Cleo joins the fray.

 Being unable to get back to sleep, but still having some sexy lucid dreams, I thought I would wake the Moose up for a bonk just before the alarm was to go off...but it turns out that Mooses are too tired at 6am for sexy times, and the cuddle didn't lead to a happy ending so much as me starting work 10 minutes later than I had planned. 

• Typically the Moose likes morning bonks (on weekends, at 8 or 9 am), and I hate them with a passion.  I am not human in the morning.  I need to brush my teeth and be awake at least a few hours first.  So...naturally I will remind him of this every time he cuddles close on a weekend to try his luck.

I worked on my own today, which is awesome when grumpy.  I was even stomping on field mushrooms which usually makes me feel better (sort of like bubble wrap), but most of them were old and soggy, and didn't really cheer me up much.  And I did have to make an uncomfortable dash to the long drop (outhouse) with an emergency bout of crooked guts.  On the bright side, the prunes I ate all week have more than solved the constipation issue.  And thankfully I didn't see the spiders that were no doubt everywhere around me.  But as I left work (I finished at lunch time!!  Yay for early finish!), I found that the rabbiter (guy who shoots rabbits) had locked the gate on me, which meant I had to climb a fence and wade through long prickly grasses to get the key, shove my hands up some spider infested lock box, and without seeing what I was doing and with more or less one hand, open a padlock. 

• The big boss, who I need to talk to, was in one of the vineyards I was at this morning, clearly to make his bees angry since I was going to have to get a bit closer to the hives.  He didn't stop to talk, and I didn't bother to chase him down, and best of all the bees were still dozy.  But I did think briefly about asking him if he was keeping busy as a bee, or if he had heard the buzz, and those corny lines cheered me up where stomping on mushrooms failed.  

The break lights in our 4wd have gone out, and since the Moose had to drive farther than I was going to have to, I sent him out in the starlet (or the Tardis) and I took Roger (the Rav4).  It also happens to be Chinese New Year, which has brought a ton of tourists to the area, and some of these tourists have perhaps never driven a car before.  There is also a motorcycle rally in town.  Not an ideal time to have the break lights go out.  But the only incident on the way home was when the car travelling only 80km/h in front of the glass truck in front of me decided that the right turn lane into the busy fruit stall would never do, and felt the need to come to a complete stop in the middle of the highway for about 10 seconds while waiting to cross traffic which wasn't there to turn into the fruit stall.  At least with a big ass glass truck in front of me, the truck travelling behind me had to see us slow suddenly and stop.  But now I don't want to go out on the roads again. 

• I don't mean to sound like it is one group of people and they are all bad drivers.  That is not true.  Bad drivers come from all over the world.  Lately it has been European backpackers and old people who don't know how to drive and seem out to do me in.  In this region, especially in the summer, it really is a problem.  There is no bright side to this perennial grump of mine.

I went to the supermarket after a tahini-Moose issue (the reason why we don't send the men to the grocery store...will I never learn?), and of course caught a glimpse of my arch nemesis the Bush Pig and her daughter the Princess (I did not give them these nicknames).  I don't think I have written about them before.  I used to work with them.  In fact, the Bush Pig and I were friends, once upon a dark age.  The Bush Pig and her family are the reasons why nearly half of the permanent staff at that particular vineyard have quit, and why they can't keep casual staff.  One day I will write up the saga...and probably prove that I am not very mature at all and can hold a grudge like nothing.  Anyhoodle, Bush Pig and Princess were in the beer aisle, and I needed the adjacent aisle (dips and cheeses and things), so I figured I could pop down and be out before they left the beer aisle.  Wrong.  I ran into someone else from work who has been stood down until harvest.  I didn't talk to him long, but instead of going back up the aisle and across the back of the store, I stuck to the original plan and had an encounter.  She was surprisingly polite (which I didn't expect) and I wasn't polite at all.  She said congrats and I said thanks and ran away.  As you do.  Shudder.  Last time I ran into her at the grocery store we just ignored each other, which I prefer.  So now I feel a bit guilty for not being very nice.  But mostly I just feel all the rotten luck of a grumpy day.

•  There is no positive spin for this.  The Bush Pig is the world's biggest bully. 

To top that off, I am looking particularly fat today.  My bump is not really a bump yet, but just looks like a bad beer gut.  I cannot wait until I have a proper bump!!  One that cannot be partially concealed by my usual levis and a loose shirt.  I am sick of people asking where the baby is too.  I thought I was getting a bump...but the new kilo I had gained came off when the prunes took effect, and I think today I am just bloated and gassy.  I have felt some flutters and bubbles, but it is hard to tell them apart from all this digestive upheaval at the moment.  

• On the bright side, the Moose and I have Monday off!!  It is Scan Day, and if this little bubs isn't too modest, we might find out if it is a boy or a girl!  And even if we don't find out, at least we get a peek at what it is up to.  Hopefully all goes well and everything appears healthy!

Ok...that was a long post, and while I am sure I can grump about a million other things, I should probably go do the dishes that the Moose didn't do last night, and hang the laundry, maybe cut the grass and tidy up the house for the weekend.  Burn off the last of the grumpy energy.