I aten't ded.

I'm finally recovering from the respiratory crud of the past three weeks. All hail antibiotics!

I'm also back at work. Bleah.

Due to sickness and weather, we ended up staying home the entire week of my vacation. We went out a couple of times early in the week, but didn't go to either Downwood's mom's house or my sister's house. This made me really sad, for obvious reasons. My sister's planning a visit on 1/17, though, so that means we'll have Baby Bash at OUR house! Glee!

Otherwise, xmas was really low-key this year. Santa dropped off a couple of presents for each kid and we had some presents to open. Downwood's folks FedExed their gifts to us, so the kids got to open them over the phone.

But I'm not dead. I'm still here.

And I'm at work, so I should probably get back to it. I'm still tired and not really awake, but it'll do.

Hm. Lunch.

werk and art

Got my year-end bonus today. It was more generous than I thought. All hail making extra payments on the mortgage and paying down some credit card debt from the holidays! Hail!

I'm still not really wanting to be at work. I feel a little adrift with my current responsibilities. As in, there are a METRIC FUCKTON of them and any time I spend on one thing means 5 other things are hitting the ground. And now they're wanting us to "really focus on customer happiness".

Actually, I don't have much problem with that. I'm good at getting customers to a good, happy place. I'm at the point where I can be Zen about a lot of things, not get too excited, not get angry, and get them through whatever difficulties they have. There are times I have to take deep cleansing breaths between calls or go on a walk to calm down, but I try to never let customers see that I'm upset with them.

Since I went and got a shellac manicure (fire engine red with gold glitter) for the holidays, I didn't have my usual nail polish outlet for de-stressing on really bad calls. So I got out my tubes of henna and a book of mehndi art and have been drawing on myself. I did some really cute designs today during a call that is usually painful (they DON'T LISTEN), but there's only so much of me I can reach with any sort of angle to make sure that what I'm doing is right. I also have no control with my left hand, so my right is totally empty. Oh well. Such is life.

Emi dearly wants me to draw henna flowers on her. I doubt her ability to leave the paste alone while it dries. As in, she wouldn't let it be and there would be henna stains EVERYWHERE. And then Ox would want in on that action, and that's a BIG NEGATORY.

Maybe my sister will let me draw on her when they're up in a couple weeks. Maybe I can convince some other friends to hold still and let me practice on them, too. Hm. I've always said that I'm no good at 2D art, but maybe I just haven't found my medium yet. It figures that my medium is henna. That just seems...appropriate.

Now if only I could get the same wine red/purple henna for tattoo art that I have for my hair. That would be totally boss.