Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Aren't Pregnant Women Supposed to Rest?

Well, what a week and a half. I don't know why I take time off (two days), because I am only swamped with work and catch-up when I return. We have a huge project going live at work, and it has slowly unraveled into a disaster through today, it's launch date. Since I feel like I haven't left my desk in about 1,000 hours, I am writing in the blog to relax me for 15 minutes while IMs and emails of stress, fatigue, and frustration come in for me to conquer. Thankfully, I have a great PM working with me on this with me, but when things aren't going well, we all wanna take a poop in the shower (for those of you who watch the Sopranos). I never take lunch, leave my desk, or do much else but multi-task during my work day, but this, combined with my decreased pain threshold have worn me out. I feel like I'm 85. My back aches, my ankles are stiff and swelling, my nose bleeds every day, and I have the beginning stages of carpal tunnel.

In addition to my full-time job, my other full-time job Fold Invites has offered me additional back breaking work. In typical fashion, my printers have all screwed me, and left me to do the bulk of work myself for address labels. After four hours of normalizing address data, I had to create a comma delimited file for the printer, which took another four or so hours. After all this, my jacko printer tells me they don't think they can print the label properly. It took her two weeks to let me know this. So, this Saturday I had to copy/paste 200 addresses into Illustrator, print them, and cut each one by hand. The bending over to leverage the blade for so many hours killed me. I walked, talked, and looked like Lotney 'Sloth' Fratelli from the Goonies until Sunday.

Sunday night, I allowed Trent to join in the fun and put the labels on the 200 envelopes. I went to the post office Monday to ask if they could meter the envelopes, so I wouldn't have to stamp them, and they simply told me no. Three stamps were required for both the outer and RSVP envelope! So, we had to stamp 400 envelopes with three stamps each last night. I was already delirious by the time I got the the first envelope (at around 10:00 after working on the godforsaken project from above)!
I put the first 10 stamps on upside down. After the stamping, we had to stuff them all. I had the privilege of sealing them all this morning before starting work. Then, I had the intern take them to USPS where the woman tried to jive talk her way out of hand canceling them. She put a big sign on them "Hand Cancel" for the night crew. I can just see that staff of night crawlers carefully hand canceling them this evening with kid gloves.

Other than staying up all hours, flying every other weekend, working my gnarled fingers to a pulp, and suffering excruciating back pain, I think I'm doing pretty well. I'm really trying to take care of myself during pregnancy.

Speaking of which, and this will be my last rant for this post, I went to my prenatal yoga class last Thursday (where I hate everyone), and I have to tell you, it sucks taking yoga with every slob that signs up at the hospital. First of all, yoga is literally my only time to truly relax, breathe, and go inside myself. It may sound all yogied out, but it is true. Typically things like showing up 15-30 minutes late, barging into class and making a raucous, making loud comments about how hard postures are, and wearing nude pantyhose under jeans as your workout outfit are looked upon negatively in yoga studios. But when you take yoga at GBMC, anything goes.

I walked in last week to two girls talking about how miserable it is to have a girl, and how disappointed the one is that she's having one. I ignore them, but they go on to say how difficult girls are as babies, and what a drag it will be. I turned around, and looked the speaker right in her disgusting face, and gave her the worst crook eye I could give. Then I slammed my mat on the floor and sat quietly in my space like good students do. The class was hard, and the teacher warned us she would be pushing our bodies to a place that would prepare us for labor (going past your threshold). We had to do a sort of stationary jumping jack thing that got quicker over each minute (three mins total). It was tough, but not that tough. None of these girls even tried. They gave up, even after the teacher was like, whatever you do don't stop. All but me and one other stopped. They were hootin and hollerin about the burn, the pain, etc. and they're all about 16 weeks. Whatever. I hate them all. To add insult to injury, another girl complained for about ten minutes how late the class is offered. That she has to come home from work at 5:00 (on the dot no doubt), eat dinner, digest, then motivate herself to go back out to class at 7:15. (Many girls complain how full they are when they arrive at class too, because they've eaten dinner right before. I'm usually refluxing the 1 oz. package of almonds I eat on my way up there throughout the entire class).
She was going on and on how inconvenient it is, and how much it impedes her schedule. Meanwhile, I had to drive 90 miles an hour up 695 from work to make it there on time. I "try" to leave work early on Thursdays to just make it on time. It's truly the only class I have ever been able to take for this reason. I'm sorry to say I didn't feel so bad for the ingrates who's digestive schedules are interrupted by class.

Rant over. Seacrest out.

1 comment:

  1. Oh Jen, you are the best...you have me in stitches over my desktop lunch! But what a schedule you have. OyeVey! as they say here in the big apple.
    Just to counteract the ingrates from yoga...Girls are the best best best !!!! From one who truly knows!
    xxxGinger

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