[NOTE: this entry was made private until now, Sept. 15th.]


I feel really bad complaining about my relatively cushy life in light of what's going on in Louisiana and Mississippi and other points south nowadays, but I've had a lousy week. I did contribute money to the Red Cross on Amazon.com, for whatever that's worth, and if you haven't done so yet, you should, too.

Anyway, I still feel like whining, so here's my selfish little bitch-fest.

First, on Wednesday, my husband lost his job. And I don't mean to say he was fired, or he was laid off, because we're really not sure what happened. It's just lost. His asshole, cowardly, pathetically petty boss came into his office 9am and said merely, "It's not working out." No reason, no explanation, no nothing. He was offered less severance than his other co-workers who were canned without warning or reason, so now he's fighting with HR to find out exactly why he was given the axe and why exactly he received less compensation than everyone else after running his department and saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of 7 years. Of course, the main reason is that his oozing boil of a boss hates him for some unrealistic reason and has been out to get him for months now. I wrote a whole long diatribe about how I wished this pustule would suffer two debilitating brain aneurisms, but I won't talk about that because I’m a lady. But he can go fuck himself with a +3 vibrating mace.

Break from bitching: Thursday and Friday we had our friends' rehearsal dinner and wedding to attend. Borrowed my folks' car and drove all around the Bronx. I only got lost a few times! The ceremony was lovely, and then we had 3 hours to kill while the bridal party (including my husband, the Best Man (no matter what the groom's brother says)) took pictures at the reception hall. So the rest of our crew went to Sizzler. Yes, Sizzler. We got lost again on the way to the reception, but it all worked out okay. We watched the bride and groom emerge from a glass elevator that rose from the middle of the dance floor, and feasted on desserts surrounded by ice sculptures, sparklers and laser lights. Quite an evening. Spent all day Saturday recuperating.

Back to bad news: Sunday, we got a call that my sister-in-law was on the way to the hospital. So we drove up to White Plains to meet her there. Turns out she has strep throat on top of influenza. So we spent Sunday in the emergency room waiting to hear what the doctors and nurses had to say while she sat in agony with an IV drip and lots of tissues. After about 5 hours, we took her back home (thank god her boyfriend was around, because her parents are in Ireland this week) and tried to feed her juice and ice pops and a bagel. We drove back home late that night.

Monday, Labor Day, we ran errands, returned my parents' car, and sat by the pool on their roof for a total of 3 hours, the most time I've spent outdoors all summer.

And now I'm back at the job I hate, swamped with work because practically our entire staff is new and doesn't know what's going on, and the staff that isn't new is full of morons so they also don’t know what's going on.
Meanwhile, my husband doesn't even HAVE the job that HE hates.
Instead, he has to take my sister-in-law's cat to a special kitty ophthalmologist in Connecticut because she's still too sick to drive anywhere and the cat may be going blind because of recurring conjunctivitis. So today he took the subway to the train to Scarsdale, then is driving the cat to CT and back, then taking the train back to Manhattan and the subway back home.

And while none of my belongings are under water and we have electricity and a roof and food and each other, it's been a pretty aggravating few days.

So while I'm bitching and moaning, I'm also sending my sympathies and hopes to the people affected by Katrina. May they see better days soon.