Happy Groundhog Day!

Remember how I was happy that I only had two doctor's appointments scheduled next week, instead of three?

BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

When I arrived to pick Penny up from daycare yesterday, the teacher plopped her on the changing table and pulled off her pants to show me the splotches all over her legs and stomach.

Now, I knew something was there, already. Penny's been scratching at her stomach for a week. But I thought it was a dry skin thing. But yesterday, the splotches on her legs were beginning to look like a rash. Like excema, maybe.

(You know, they swear, up down and sideways, that excema isn't contagious. But I never had any until I dated a guy who had it, and now Penny's got it... Maybe they need to rethink that stand.)

So anyway, it looks like I'll be another doctor's appointment for next week, which will bring next week's total up to three! Whee!

At least it's not an urgent matter, so I can afford to wait until they can give me the very first appointment of the day, so hopefully I won't have to spend two hours sitting in the waiting room.

Matt's trip is not going what you might call smoothly.

The guy who brought him up there expressed surprise that Matt would need to know what the daily meals-and-incidentals rate was. Wasn't Matt going to pay for all his own meals, out of pocket?

They spent most of yesterday trying to figure out how to hamstring his network access so that he could only see the project he's up there to work on, and none of their other stuff.

The office is actually an old convent that's been converted into office space. It's not heated very efficiently, and there are bats living in it. (Of course, everyone else up there had to put up with that as well, but it adds to the aura of doom.)

The "apartment" they found for him, so he wouldn't have to live in a hotel for two months, is an efficiency room over some woman's garage. It doesn't have a television in it, and the phone line isn't connected. Matt is mostly willing to live without TV for two months, but the company is dragging its feet over agreeing to pay the setup fees and bill for the phone.

Matt is staying in the hotel until they either agree to pay the phone bill or find him somewhere else to live. This means that he has to check out every morning, and then check back in when he gets off work. Last night, they didn't have any more internet-enabled rooms handy, so he had to camp out in the "internet lounge" so he could talk to me.

He's getting the impression that when they asked to borrow a programmer for a couple of months, they didn't expect to be taken seriously. Maybe they were just hoping to make a statement with the corporate office about needing to hire someone, I dunno. But he thinks that now they're just trying to figure out how to make this work without completely losing face to their bosses -- but since they refuse to trust him enough to tell him the whole story, that's pretty well guesswork.

Matt is faced with the extremely unenviable chore of having to decide exactly where to draw the hard line. If he walks off now, he's pretty likely to get laid off. So he has to decide how much shit he's willing to put up with in order to stay employed. (I might clarify: In order to stay employed long enough to find another job on his own terms. Job hunting is already high on his list of things to do when he gets home. Being unemployed would just add urgency to the search.)

Yesterday was very much like the day before, for Penny and I. I was having leftovers for dinner, though, so I got to sit and relax for almost half of Sesame Street. She was a little whiney, but not overly so, and she was also very funny and cute a lot of the time. So, pretty typical.

This morning's daycare dropoff went much smoother. Penny was in good spirits as we walked up to the school, she gleefully told everyone she knew that I was her mommy, and she wasn't too clingy when I tried to leave. She only went to the window to watch me walk out to the car because the teacher suggested it; otherwise I think she might've already been playing.

I'm hoping for a smoother, more productive day all around. I don't have any appointments today, and that alone will help make the day roll a little easier.

Also, my parents are going to come over this evening. They're going to have dinner with us, and help keep an eye on Penny so I can, say, do some laundry, or run up to the store without having to drag her along.

So, hopefully it'll be a good day. And hopefully the people in Matt's office up in New York will either get their acts together and give him someplace decent to live and some work that makes sense, or else confess to him that it was all a mistake and let him come home.

--Liz