Are you curious about what I was doing at 3:30 a.m. last night? Hmmmm?

It figures. The one time I actually plan ahead and buy a friggen present for a kid's birthday party in advance, Junior decides to spend the night barking like a seal, and we miss the party.

According to the nurse in the emergency room of the Mulletville hospital, it's croup. (I told you we should get frequent flyer miles from them.)

If you're unfamiliar with croup, it doesn't like rain forest-like conditions, which is what Chuck and I did to Junior's room pre-emergency room visit (crank the heat! blast the humidifier on "hot"!).

It likes cold air.

Junior got plenty of that on the way to the ER. By the time we'd arrived, he was almost fine. Don't you love that?

By the time we left the hospital, it was 4 a.m. We managed to get a steroid-injected Junior back to bed without having to suffer through a middle-of-the-night viewing of Curious George's A Very Monkey Christmas (wow, pukefest flashbacks), which is a good thing. A friend recently offered to place the DVD by my tire and cheer as I ran over it; all I needed was one more night of that damn monkey and I was there.

But back to the kid's present. Have you been to Target lately? Have you seen this line*?



It's called Battat, and the box wraps itself, like this:



All I have to say is, finally. There's nothing worse than birthday party waste—or any party waste. And this gift was only $9.99. They get it.

Know who else gets it?
Cute as a Buggy gets to go to Starbucks on me.



Congrats.

* No one paid me to write this post. But they should have. I'm writing with my eyes half-closed for frick's sake. Four a.m.!

For once I'm not talking about George the monkey

George—the man who has been missing from my company all week—is still missing, so I sat in his stinky manspace all morning trying to help his team streamline their workload. Our company is broken into teams, which are really catty little bitchhoods comprised of a whiner, a slacker, a token hot person, a token weird person, and someone obsessed with finding or providing snacks.

To spearhead someone else’s team is not only impossible, it sucks monkey balls sprinkled with cow dung.

Where the fuck is George?

Some of George’s friends have called his house and cell phone. No answer. Someone else did a drive-by. Nothing. I don’t know George well, but his team doesn’t seem too concerned so either:

a) He is dead and no one cares or

b) His team killed him and they’re doing a bad job of hiding their ambivalence

Sitting at someone else’s cubicle is weird, especially when you are used to having an office with a door that closes and locks—and especially when the person whose workspace you are inhabiting may have been eaten by an alligator or engulfed by an oversized mullet. I may have actually befriended the mold; in a sea of gray boxes, it’s a nice reminder that the natural world still exists.

Where the fuck is George?

Although…

Don't tell anyone: George’s cubicle is carpeted in gray, well, carpet and being around all the carpet has actually made me kind of randy. I think it’s the subliminal reminder that at any moment I could be lying on the ground, you know, doing it. Or it’s the 3.3 pounds I’ve lost. Or maybe the mold spores have infiltrated my hypothalamus.

Or, most likely, it’s the token hot person three cubes over.

Speaking of lying down without clothes on, I realize I made a major faux pas. According to the "Should Mrs. Mullet get negged [for Portrait Painter Man]?" poll, there are still two days left to vote. Since I said I’d make my decision based on the results, I can't possibly jump the gun and make a decision now.

Whatever was I thinking?