The Promise of the Weekend (and the escape from Eau d'egg)

It's finally Friday and it's shaping up to be a beautiful weekend. For the first time since June, we're supposed to have temperatures in the 90's. I think it's going to feel like summer. Though I noticed that my grass needed to be mowed this morning, I have the luxury of ignoring it since I'm heading to my parent's this weekend for some much-needed family time and relaxation.

I love the drive to my parent's house. I haven't done it in so long, I'm looking forward to it. I especially love it on days like this, days when the green glow of the Midwest will be on display and enhanced by the sunlight. Then again, I actually like driving. As long as I have good music or company, I find driving to be relaxing.

I never do anything terribly exciting when I'm at my parent's house, nothing I normally wouldn't do if I were home. Yet it's a way of recharging. I love to walk around my mum's garden. She's done an amazing job this year with it, the blending of the flowers perfect in their vivid colours. I love to see if there's anything ripe that I can eat. Earlier in the year there are cherries and strawberries. At the moment, it's tomatoes. There's little better to eat in the world than a fresh-picked tomato, warm from the sun.

All I have to do is get through work today and the weekend is mine. I'm glad. Lately, work has been better. I feel like I'm no longer an invisible entity, bored out of my skull. Don't get me wrong, having been the Mistress of Multi-tasking at my last job, this job is a lot slower-paced. Yet I finally feel like I'm doing something that actually has some merit, even if it is a little dull.

That's another reason why I have to get my writing back on track. I can deal with dull work if I have something to escape to and writing a new story or novel will allow me to do that. Sometimes I need to escape; my physical location not only is in close proximity to the men's bathroom but also near the breakroom. This means whatever someone makes for breakfast or lunch, I smell it. I don't mind normal food smells that come from heating up leftovers or frozen meals. Those smells are harmless, smells like cheese, garlic and even cumin from Mexican food. It's the other smells that drive me crazy; someone inevitably makes eggs which, to me, smells revolting. I like the taste of eggs but the smell of them is disgusing. There are times when people make food on the George Forman grill. I have one of those at home. I'm actually amazed that people go to the trouble of actually cooking at work. I come from a former working environment where we lost our microwaves because the smell of people's lunches overwhelmed the building.

So, having someone make a grilled cheese on the George Foreman is...interesting. It seems like a lot of work to do that at lunch but who am I to judge? I just wish I couldn't always smell the odor of heating metal as it gets warm. Sadly, for some reason, it doesn't fill the air with the aroma of melting cheese and toasting bread; all I can smell is that vaguely metallic heat and I'm not sure why.

At the moment, I'm smelling Eau d'Egg with a hint of Warm Vanilla Sugar. This means that our faithful air-scenter still hasn't given up her quest to make the men's room smell less...manly. She kindly made it her mission to rid the air of the eggy-smell by enthusiastically squirting her Warm Vanilla Sugar Room Spray into my area, that of the breakroom and, of course, the men's bathroom. Unfortunately, it didn't help and the smells are sort of....layered. I keep hoping she's going to run out of that room spray but it seems to be holding up quite well. I wonder what would happen if it accidentally went....missing. Of course, then I'm sure we'd get a replacement and I'd be afraid of what might replace it.

Still, I do admire her vigilence. It takes a lot of dedication to keep trying to change a man's habits.

Thankfully, both smells are fading, slowly but surely. I'll have a couple of hours' break before the lunch rush begins and the smell of Lean Cuisines fill the air.

In the meantime, I'm content to be happy it's Friday. The weekend lies ahead, within grasping distance. The sun is shining and it's a lovely summer day. Even with the aroma of Egg Beaters and Warm Vanilla Sugar pervading my nostrils, I can be glad about those things. I hope the weekend is a good one for you all.

Happy Friday.

Scents of Smell...

I hate humidity. I've always suspected this but I'm finally going to just come right and affirm it. I hate how when you're inside an air-conditioned place, you think it's cool outside. Then, when you step out, it's like hitting a brick wall of moisture. It hits you, creeping both under and over your recently cooled skin until you're suddenly feeling sticky and damp. Your hair begins to frizz quickly and breathing becomes just a little harder. I hate that if I leave my car windows cracked to let the fresh air in overnight, I get in the next morning and it smells like a nasty wet dog.

Actually, I'm sure that's all the humidity's fault. If my car gets remotely damp, it smells like a wet dog. I'm not sure why since it's a fairly new car and as far as I know, nothing has died in there. I haven't even had a wet dog in there, not even Sausage. The sad thing is that nothing removes that smell. Air fresheners only end up mixing with the wet-dog smell so that it smells like a lavender scented wet dog. I've officially crawled around in the trunk of my car to try and find out if there's a culprit for the smell but, alas, to no avail.

So...long story short, unless I'm telling it because then it's long story...long...it's humid outside and my car smells like a wet dog. Also, my rubbish bin by my desk smells like parmesan cheese. I've just discovered that even though our janitorial staff does actually empty the trash cans, they don't...empty them. They clearly just shake the bin into a trash bag to get out the rubbish out without having to change the bag. This is a great way of saving rubbish bags but, well, if you have three day old parmesan cheese that might have been part of your arugula-salad-with-lemon-juice-and-parmesan lunch on Monday, it's not necessarily good that they saved the bag. Also, I noticed there are a lot of cherry pits stuck to the bag. This means chances are my desk will also smell a bit cherry-like only not so fresh very soon. Exciting. Or...you know...not.

I suppose given that I sit quite near the "men's" bathroom, there could be (and have been) far worse smells drifting out. This is where I find it endearing that our new HR manager has been trying now for over two months to remedy that. She's one of these optimistic people who came into our company thinking she could get everyone to immediately do things her way. She clearly doesn't know our company. People here are...set in their ways. They know what they like, how they like it and that's that. It's not a bad thing but it's something you learn after a little observation. Our HR person didn't seem to quite get that just as she didn't seem to accept that the bathroom was really the "men's" bathroom.

I'm using the quotes around the word "men's" because we work in a converted house. There are four bathrooms in the building but unlike in a commercial building, they're not designated Men or Women's; they're just normal little bathrooms like you see in a house. However, it's understood that two of them are more 'male oriented' and two of them are girly, given away by the presence of lotions and other nice feminine smelly products in them. For some reason, our HR person doesn't like to climb the flight of stairs to get to the nice "women's" bathroom the way the rest of us females do. She uses the "men's" bathroom. Of the two "men's" bathrooms, this is most clearly a male one. It's sparse, the seat is always up and, frankly, as a woman, I would rather not use it at all unless it was an extreme emergency. I'm not sexist, I just prefer not to use this bathroom because it's a little...nasty.

HR Lady, bless her optimistic heart, hasn't given up though. She has this Bath and Body Works room spray in a "Warm Vanilla Sugar" scent that she has put in the men's bathroom in hopes that it makes it a little...uh...'friendlier'. The men, being 99% of the population that uses this bathroom, naturally, ignore the spray. I don't think they're doing it to be rude; I just think that in the masculine mind, things like that don't exist and thus they have a small cloak of invisibility that masks them from the men's awareness level. Nascar does that for me as does a lot of more "male" type stuff. Golf, for example. I know there's golf and Nascar races on the TV but when I'm scrolling through the Direct-TV guide, my mind slips straight over them in favour of something I want to watch, not really aware that it's doing so.

Same thing for our office men and Warm Vanilla Sugar room spray. Periodically, HR Lady will come through with her spray and say, "no one uses this!" as though she's shocked! Then she will inevitably squirt it into our cubicle area because we're close to the bathroom just to prove that it does, in fact, smell nice.

Thing is, it doesn't smell that nice. It's never been on of my favourite Bath and Body Works' scents because it's cloying and makes me want to drink a lot of water. It's not hideous but it tends to give me the start of one of those headaches that exposure to heady scents gives a lot of people. My cubicle-neighbour, on the other hand, is extremely sensitive to smells and will get a headache if I or her neighbour on the other side of her cubicle wears perfume. So when that spray is spritzed into our air...well, it's never pretty.

Yet it hasn't deterred HR lady from her quest of trying to get the men to use it. She's tried to coerce them into using it by teasing. They politely chuckle at her and go on to their bathroom business, conveniently forgetting to use the Warm Vanilla Sugar Room Spray. The only time this causes an issue is if they leave the bathroom door open which almost never happens.

I feel bad for HR lady. She's very sweet and really wants to fit in. She's not particularly adept at HR since she was an accountant before she came here but by carrying her copy of Human Resources for Dummies into the office in the morning, I know she's trying to learn. I commend her efforts to learn. Of course, it would probably help her out a little if she didn't carry that book around in front of us since, you know, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence. She can read it but it might be better if we don't know she's reading it, if you know what I mean.

Still, I'm enjoying her try to fight her uphill battle with her room spray. Most of us quitters would give up and just start using the women's bathroom upstairs but not our HR lady. She's determined to win over those men. Maybe if she tried another scent?

Happy Thursday...