The Smackdown

I'm usually not a confrontational person. My motto is "can't we all just get along?!" I can handle confrontation but absolutely dread them, I get this huge knot in my stomach and just want to throw up. Luckily no one else can tell! Jeremy on the other hand thrives on this crap. I have watched him put people in their place so brutally and effectively he may as well have cut them off at the knees and left them bleeding in the street. Then he walks away with a smile on their face. (I actually admire this at times and its one of the reasons we are so good together-opposites and all that.) But a few things happened this week that made me forget about my hatred of confrontations and want to put the smackdown on several folks Jeremy style.

First was an incident at daycare. Emma's normal teacher (who we LOVE) was in and out for a week or so following the sudden death of her husband. In the meantime a part time girl was filling in for Emma's class. I will refer to her from here on out as Little Miss Thing. Well, I had noticed that Emma was acting a little strange-more cranky and upset at night, a little harder to leave at school in the morning. But nothing I attributed to any problems, just a normal toddler thing. Well, LMT ran up to me one afternoon when I was picking up Emma and went on and on about how terrible she had been, kicking and punching, sitting in time out all afternoon, etc. I thought about it all weekend and talked to her normal teacher on Monday who said she didn't know of any problems and Emma was good as gold for her. I tried talking to LMT again and she had no answers for why Emma was in time out and when I tried to dig a little deeper, like "what prompted her to kick b/c it's not normal for her" she still didn't have an answer and TURNED HER BACK ON ME AND WALKED AWAY! Argh! Long story short, I pieced together a few things and comments from Emma's teacher and I think LMT and Emma just don't click. I'll be damned if my baby gets stuck in time out all the time b/c LMT has some issues. So, I've got a call out for the director of the daycare and Smackdown 1 will be underway. In the meantime I've made sure she is never alone with LMT and I'm going to make sure and sic the director on LMT. She will be sorry to have messed with my baby when all is said and done.

If you see posters like this hanging all over town just ignore them. One of my customers is to blame.

Their company is not pleased about the awesome new contact and customer I am bringing on board at the RR (they think it will be competition and apparently I am not allowed to work with any customers other than them) and decided to call me everything but a white person to my boss. My ethics were called into question and a few other things that were just way too personal and offensive for me to sit back and ignore. So, I channeled my inner Jeremy and set up an appointment for Smackdown 2. My boss was so worried about how this meeting would play out that he flew in from Florida with only 12 hours advance notice to attend with me and have my back. Unfortunately, they backed down considerably in person so I had to reign myself in and the Smackdown was very disappointing. My archnemesis at the company was not present so while I was all geared up for blood I had to settle for only a small skirmish instead. Argh! And yes, I seriously have an archnemesis. You. Have. No. Idea. After the meeting I was joking with my boss that he should get a refund on his ticket because he really didn't get to see a show. Which I guess was a good thing. What's wrong with me that I still would have preferred the Smackdown!?

Our 4th of July holiday weekend can be summed up in a few pictures: