Last night there was a company dinner that the husband had to attend. The Boss's wife decided to organize a wive's dinner for the left out wives. (Note to readers: I have no issue about being left out of company dinners. The less picky eaters I have to feed the happier I am. Non family inviting company dinners can very happily happen every day in my book)
My reaction to the invite: WHAT? THEY WANT TO FORCE ME TO LEAVE UTOPIA???? THE SUNSET! THEY WANT ME TO MISS THE SUNSET????? NOOO!!!! Which pretty much means, I put on some make up and my monkey suit, pasted a smile to my face, and drove an hour and half to have dinner with the Boss's wife and two other wives. One weird thing that happened was an email the day before changing the venue, which didn't matter to me at all since I have no opinion or experience about the restaurants in this unknown to me town we were going to eat in, The husband thought it may have been because the Boss didn't like the first restaurant, where they had recently neglected to treat him like the King of The World, a treatment the Boss has come to expect from the service industry in general.
During the wives dinner, the subject of my dietary needs came up. The husband had mentioned "The Big Four" (gluten, dairy, corn and tomatoes) to the Boss's wife. In an unprecedented move of total and complete thoughtfulness the Boss's wife had, upon hearing of my dietary restrictions, called the first restaurant to make sure they could safely accommodate me, and when the first restaurant had not politely reassured her that I would be walking out of their place unscathed, she called her second choice place, which seemed much more well educated in the world of "there are certain things I can't eatedness" so the Boss's wife changed the venue for the wives dinner.
And that my internet friends, is one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. I am humbled by the Boss's wife's kindness and consideration.
And now for a completely unrelated story: Yesterday I woke up, stumbled bleary eyed downstairs to release the devil from her nightly night time jail sentence crate confinement and turned towards the kitchen to feed her bottomless hungry retriever soul, when I heard a strange scrambling sound to my left. I turned to see a squirrel silhouette splayed out across the window. I instantly prayed to any and every evil and pure power thought "let the squirrel be on the outside of that window", but my prayers were not answered when the squirrel then twisted around and ran across all three of the windows, down to the floor and right past me into the basement. The devil took chase, there was some chaos, and ultimately I lost sight of the quick little critter and decided that the way to go was to open all the doors and the little grey nut thief (who incidentally, ate one thing in my kitchen- some gluten free bread!) would make a run for it. So I opened all of the doors, propped open the screens, and took the devil over to the neighbor's for an hour or so. When I got back Josh and Evan were staring mindlessly at the damned TV screen and had no idea if the rodent du jour had left or not. I decided to be optimistic about it and enjoy a day of swimming and play with the kids. We didn't see the squirrel again yesterday.
This morning, however, much to my deep sleeping shock, Josh woke up, saw the squirrel make a dash across our living room and high tailed it into my bed for safety. Right now, at this very second the squirrel is sitting on our fireplace ledge, a mere 20 feet from the wide open double doors, not moving an inch. At least he had the common courtesy to allow me to get off a couple of shots of him (photos people! put your guns away!) before he exits for good. Which could be on his terms or mine, either way works for me, because his stay at the utopian hotel is over. Guess who is on her way to the hardware store for a squirrel trap?
More or less unrelated to the rest of this post: I told this story to the other wives last night: A million years ago, when Josh was a baby our congregation had a visiting cantor for the high holidays. Since we were one of two families which lived within reasonable walking distance the synagogue we were asked if we would put the visiting cantor up in our house. I'm pretty sure she didn't eat with us because she keeps kosher. She was super observant and needed to walk to services. We said YES. And naturally, one of the first things I did was back into her (beat up ancient) mini van because I forgot there was an extra vehicle in our driveway. And naturally again, we offered to pay for the damages. And naturally (recalling there is a great big "sucker" sign illuminated across my forehead) the visiting cantor went home and began sending us bills and more bills. Not only was it astonishingly pricey to repair an ancient mini van, but this was an orthodox lesbian cantor with a long term life partner, and they happened to have a handful of disabled adopted children, so they had to rent a full sized van while their clunker mini van was languishing/sitting around not getting more mileage put on it being repaired. We just wrote the check.
Also, I once backed into the husband's brand spanking 2 weeks old still completely new Benz causing 10G worth of damage at driveway speed. The husband was in his car at the moment of collision, but I swear it was an accident! When the insurance dude came to verify the claim he couldn't figure out why the claim said Our Name vs Our Name. He thought what I did was knee slappingly hilarious.
Squirrels are a problem.If you catch one in a have-a-heart trap, you can't just let it loose in your neighborhood, it will find its way home from as far away as three miles....and back into your house.
Driveway accidents are quite common - ask an insurance agent. We all "know" what and where something is parked and shift into automatic (thinking) when we hop into the car.
Your cantor story, now that's unique in so many ways!
As for the restaurant switch - she sounds like a keeper to me.
Happy weekend!
Posted by: The Editor | July 30, 2010 at 07:12 AM