Friday, March 29, 2013

Unbirthday present

In some ways, this week has been pretty difficult. I've just really been feeling a lot of the stress that surrounds me at any given point, and it has been bringing me down more than usual. But today has been pretty good.

Today was my husband's 26th birthday. I thought about doing a lame, sappy post like "26 Things I Love About My Husband", but we are SO not like that. Mostly we sit on the couch and watch TV and tease each other. And I love that. Anyway, I started the day off on the wrong foot by misreading his schedule and accidentally setting my alarm for pretty early (way earlier than I have woken up almost every day since my surgery, but still around the time that he's usually headed to work in the morning.) He wasn't particularly happy with me for waking him up, asking "why are you still here??" panicking about him being late to work (he wasn't.) But the day did get better after that.

For the past few months, I have been lobbying for us to get a pet rabbit. I have wanted one for a long time- I even read a bunch of books about them several years ago, before we even got married. But then we had the guinea pig and the rats, and then more rats. Pig passed away last fall, and I lost one of my ratties two weeks after that. I have been pretty sad since then. I love the rats that are still with me, but my girl Monster has a big (though benign) tumor, that is eventually going to take her life. It's so sad that such sweet and intelligent pets have such short lives. It's really unfair, actually. But I digress. I started really pushing for the bunny acquisition maybe a little before I found Monster's tumor. Inspired by all the viral posts like "if we get a million likes, we can get a puppy", I decided to post a cute or funny picture of rabbits every day, with a witty caption (always a reason "Why I Need a Bunny") and then I'd tag my husband in the photo so he'd get a notification about it. The series of pictures has been pretty popular, for the most part. About a week ago we hit reason 41 or something like that, and I finally got Brandon to say "You'd better take care of it" instead of a flat-out "no" when discussing bunnies. So I stopped my campaign, and started looking for a rabbit. My mammaw said she would get one for me for my birthday (which is in May), and she would even go ahead and get it for me if I found one early. Yesterday I went to the pet store a few doors down from the library where I work, and they happened to have two rabbits that had just arrived from a lady who decided they needed better homes than she could provide. One was super friendly and was very happy to see me. I asked about him, and the folks working yesterday said they were new arrivals and most of the employees didn't know anything about them- they didn't even have any info listed on their enclosure yet. They said to call tomorrow (which is now today) and speak with the manager. Well, the manager was in my cousin's class in like, middle school, and she still sort of remembers my mammaw from her teaching art classes and stuff at our old school, so mammaw was open to the possibility of getting me this bunny. I called this morning and found out that this bunny was a good price, pretty young (about 10 months old), and was indeed a "he" (no one else that worked there really knew when I asked  yesterday!) So this morning I dragged Guinea Pig's old cage in from the garage, cleaned it up, and my grandparents and my uncle came to get me and we went and got my bunny! I got a birthday present on Brandon's birthday.  : )


His name is Gimli and he is very awesome. He's super soft and very playful. He is extremely friendly and doesn't mind the rats. He has been running laps around their cage off and on today, and until about 20 minutes ago, they seemed pretty interested in him. He must have sniffed a little too closely, though, because I heard Glitter bop the cage and saw Gimli run back to his cage and he laid down flat in this little trench he created for himself in the bedding- Glitter scared him and he had to run to his safe place! He feels much more confident now. It's kind of funny thinking about him being scared of them- he is small for a bunny (he is a Holland Lop) but he is enormous compared to the rats. 

Anyway, very shortly after getting Gimli settled in, the mail came, and I got my advocate welcome packet from Compassion! It was so exciting! I can't wait to really dig into the material some this weekend. I got a t-shirt (which I will wear at least twice a week, I'm sure) and Wess Stafford's book and all kinds of other cool stuff. I also got a child packet for a precious girl in Bangladesh that I am advocating for (I will post her info on here tomorrow!)

And THEN, this afternoon, I got a call from my boss saying I had been cleared to come back to work next week! This is a huge answered prayer because this week was my last full week of paid leave. This whole process of trying to get back to work after my surgery has been incredibly stressful, particularly over the past week, when the fact that I'm  not working currently has kind of been getting to Brandon. It was frustrating because I really have done everything within my power to get back, even to the point of being a real pest to the powers that be in HR and other departments trying to find out just what the heck was going on. A week ago I found out that it would probably be May or June before I could come back, unless the library decided to be merciful and gracious and work out some very special stuff for me (I wasn't asking for much, but the procedure takes months to approve. And we had no idea about that part going into all this.) The prospect of going a month or more without pay was terrifying. Anyway, I'm very glad it all got worked out today, I got the accommodation I needed, and my boss even worked it out so I'll be off work next Wednesday (which I requested because my mom is having outpatient surgery) and I'll work those hours on Thursday instead. 

I also had a nice evening with my family. They came over for pizza and ice cream cake for Brandon's birthday. We had a good time laughing about stupid stuff. Brandon spent most of the time finishing up a video game. Dinner was late (thanks, Papa John's) but good. The cake was extra big because Dairy Queen (Brandon's favorite) LOST the ice cream cake I ordered yesterday. Oddly enough, they actually called me at 4:00 this afternoon, making sure I still wanted the cake (I said yes, we'd pick it up between 5 and 5:30- when I ordered it I just said "afternoon", and they wrote down "noon.") When my dad showed up 40 minutes later to pick it up, no one could find it. They ended up getting a sheet cake from the deep freeze and scribbling on it. I appreciate the fact that we got more cake for our money, but it's extremely frustrated that I didn't get what I ordered. Oh well. Cake is cake, I guess. 

So all in all it's been a pretty good day. I guess I'd better go to bed before anything can go wrong and mess that up. : )

1 comment:

  1. Christs told me today..."did you see Jessi got a bunny?" ...I said "yes ! I was so excited!" Haha. You worked hard for that bunny!

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