Things I didn't know about babies and did know about getting paid.

Yesterday I took Baby Apollo to the megastore for babies, as he has grown out of all his clothing again. This happens about once a week: he gets clothes and then immediately grows out of them. (Also, baby clothes shrink, which is something I didn't know. None of my clothes shrink.) Baby Apollo is a huge baby. If I had to guess I would say he weighs about 40 pounds and that most of that is his head, but fortunately I do not have to guess, because the doctor told me he is up around 16 pounds, and the process of buying him sunhats told me his head is actually rather small compared to the rest of him. This is because Baby Apollo is apparently composed of some substance that expands to fit whatever it is put into, and I never make him wear hats. (I am sure there is some such substance, and that it has a name, but I am not in the sciences, so I don't know what it is. )

By the way, when an academic says "I am not in *insert field of study*" it usually translates to "this crap isn't important enough for me to worry about" or the more benign "Ask me what my field is. Pleeeeeeease ask me!" In this case it's the latter, but I don't want to give too much away at once, so I will just say it involves things dead people used to think and write about before they were dead. The manifest irrelevance of my field of study to the modern world of online banking is probably what led my supervisor to suppose I was incapable of reading my paystubs yesterday. Of course, I spend most of my brainpower either 1. reading old ideas out of musty books or 2. trying to think of an appropriate rejoinder to "aaahgahou." But I have been receiving the same paystubs for six years now and I think I have gotten pretty good about asking my husband what they mean. In this case, my check was short three hundred dollars. Boss man decided I must be reading the post-tax amount instead of the pretax amount and let me know, in the gentlest of terms, what an idiot I am.

You might guess that it's difficult for me to take such insults lightly, so I emailed a couple of people, including Husband, about what an arrogant ass my boss can be--a potential he means to live up to as fully as he can. Husband was particularly annoyed, since he noticed the discrepancy. This was all done to make sure boss didn't hear me sneering over the interwebz when I wrote him back, but I think I might have accidentally emailed him the whole conversation about his arrogant assness--damn Gmail and its "conversations"--and I have not heard back from him. I could get fired for this--if I were not a government employee on contract.

To be honest, I kind of like the guy. My supervisor. I am just really sensitive to being treated like I am stupid. I don't quite know where this comes from. Maybe not being put in the gifted and talented class when I was 8. I am still fuming about that one; Those little bastards got to learn Russian in fourth grade and the rest of us had to wait until seventh, and Russian wasn't even an option. Only the dull triumvirate: Spanish, Italian, French. By that time it was too late. My self-esteem had taken a blow. Besides, most of the time I am pretty stupid. Like when I told the neighbor lady we were paying 200k for a house we were paying 300k for (I bet she called her broker after that); and when I got poop in Apollo's hair after changing his diaper and couldn't get it out with shampoo or a comb, and had to cut it out with scissors; and when he peed into my ear twice within ten seconds and both times I screamed like I didn't know where the water was coming from. And that was just yesterday.

Anyway, what this all amounts to is that I had three hundred fewer bucks to spend at the baby megastore and I am going to need those bucks, 'cause Apollo needs nursery furniture and, by next week, bigger clothes.
So, I learned:
Baby scissors work really well for cutting baby hair, and may even be meant for the purpose;
Apollo has an unlimited supply of pee and really good aim;
Baby poop looks like peanut butter but works like gum;
NAK is fine for blogging but, combined with baby brain, a bad idea when emailing with/about your boss;
I am dumber than I thought, but not as dumb as some people want to think I am.

All good things..
Asteria.