Getting caught up in you

Oy, the blog is suffering from my schedule.  It seems any spare time at work is now spent looking for new jobs or staring at the window imagining life outside of the office.  It’s sort of a sad state of affairs, really.  In a nutshell, our tax manager resigned to open his own practice back in April, and while we have hired 2 replacements (one to handle tax, one to handle audit), no one feels able or is willing to step into the leadership position, creating a healthy stew of chaos.  My boss is promising the world to clients, in attempts to retain their business, without realizing the strain “the world” puts on his employees (who will actually have to do the work).  All the signs that illustrate my readiness to leave have been accounted for: I don’t care if I’m late anymore – I get there when I get there; if the boss is gone (which is often), I find excuses to leave early; the thought of dealing with a particularly troublesome client makes me think it would be ok to just walk out and not come back.  I know it’s selfish of me to want things back the way they were before our staffing shake-up, but seriously, this environment is slowly killing me.   And that’s all I have to say about that right now.

Work issues aside, life continues to barrel along at full speed.  My baby sister got married yesterday.  If she had provided much notice, I might’ve actually been able to attend the wedding, but I didn’t find out until this Wednesday past.  It all sort of harkens me back to my days as a young twenty-something (how sad is it that I can now wax-philosophic on my 20s), when I too had a briefly planned, albeit somewhat fated wedding.  Of course her situation is completely different – she and my new brother-in-law have been together for seven years.  So in addition to it being 7-7-7 (July, 7, 2007), they had also been together for 7 years.  It’s all supposed to be lucky or something.  I’m very happy for them – BIL is a great guy and takes good care of my sister.  So who knows, in a few years, Quinten might have some first cousins from his Mama’s side of the family.

We just recently returned from Cleveland, where we attended Andrew’s cousin’s wedding and visited with lots of the family.  With as little as we were expecting from Cleveland, we were both pleasantly surprised by how cool a city it is.  The wedding was at the Cleveland Botanical Garden, which was absolutely beautiful.  The family was delighted to finally meet its new addition, and Quinten served up brimming doses of charm and smiles for everyone.  Aside from family gatherings, we also checked out the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.  It was everything I expected it to be (tres cool), but as with any museum, I tend to hit overload capacity after about 2 hours.  I suppose there is just so much memorabilia that I can take in before needing to veg out.

In other Quinten news, he just recently turned 7 months old (on Friday).  It’s sort of surreal to think it’s already been that long.  Because it has been that long, but also felt significantly shorter and longer.  Time is sort of a stretchy thing that knows no bounds sometimes.  While we still have no official crawling, he creeps like a pro, and can slowly but surely make his way wherever his little baby heart desires.  Most of the time, this means he is ardently staking out a way to grab double fistfuls of the Ellie-cat’s fur, or bang thoughtfully on Mama’s laptop.  Oh!  And he has 2 teeth coming in.  One broke through on July 3rd, and the other on July 4th.  Which makes nursing a bit more of a cautionary tale, but we seem to be managing alright.  He is also starting to making word-type sounds these days, including an indiscriminate Ma-Ma, and also Ab-Ba, and Ba-Ba, and something that sort of sounds like Hi.  He has just about the sweetest voice I’ve ever heard, not that I’m biased or anything.