Head for Rent

I’m feeling a bit…well…not here. Not anywhere, really.

Here I went and asked the talented Karmic Jay to do the Poetry Friday Word last week, and it was a delicious one, and I never got to posting, so I feel like ten thousands kinds of terrible. Sorry Jay, maybe I can give you one of my secret family recipes to atone for my sin. Cheesecake?

Sergei’s surgery Thursday went well, took longer than we thought as the doctor was late, and there was much rushing around to get the kids from school during the actual operation and return to the hospital to pick up my patient and listen closely to instructions from the doctor, oh and dinner and bedtime and drugs and pillows propped and ice fetched and the cat shooed and pulling out the sleeping bag to crash on Girl-child’s bedroom floor so I’d be close if Sergei needed me. He’s bruised and swollen and walking/sleeping/sitting tentatively. No one slept much those first few days. We’re all of us exhausted.

My own eye surgery is this Thursday, and I’ll be out of the office from then til at least next Monday. (Poetry Friday? Not sure.) I just got the FMLA forms faxed back by my ophthalmologist, so my HR lady can kiss my big white heiney. (She’s known to ‘favoritism’, letting some employees use FMLA for anything…even a cold…while the rest of us have to jump through a billion jillion blazing hoops of razor studded death-wire.) Meanwhile my eye is leaking and sore, and this morning the surgical consultant said next Monday I “could” return to work, but I’d have sutures and a black eye. Instant Sympathy!

And now for the freak-out part. I found out this morning that a co-worker of mine, a really truly sweet guy with a wife and kids, this co-worker’s mother was murdered over the weekend. I’m just in shock. We don’t know what to do, those of us here at work. The company will send flowers, but what do WE do? We’re kicking around getting him a memorial plant or tree, definitely getting some food to his house so feeding his brood doesn’t have to be a chore, but what else? We’re walking around here like zombies today, not getting too much done really, other than shaking our heads and searching for the on-line obit to send funerary flowers.

And on THAT happy note, I give you this.