gardening, continued

I’m noticing a disturbing trend that has developed.

Every day after work this week, SO’s got home, got changed into work gear, and headed out into the garden.  I’ve ended up a part of this, as he really doesn’t like to be out there alone (he works better with company), and I don’t want to discourage this unprecedented interest in doing stuff around the house.  So for the last three afternoons after work, we’ve been weeding.  Our house is starting to look better than presentable – it’s looking cared-for.  I don’t think it’s looked like this since we bought it, nearly three years ago.

I’m not quite sure where this newfound interest has come from.  Maybe it’s a result of starting the cleanup process over the weekend - he does like it to be neat.  Perhaps it’s because he’s used to doing stuff, from the renovations we’ve done over the last twelve months or so (on all three units we’ve had to do work).  Who knows?  In any case, I’m liking it.  It’s actually pretty relaxing, and it does look nice. 

We’re currently working on the backyard, so every morning when we eat breakfast, we can see how neat it’s starting to look.  I’ve been scraping out the weeds in the paving, and SO has been weeding the garden beds.  Overall, the difference is impressive.  And the good thing is, a friend of ours will be over this weekend, and she hasn’t seen it for ages, so it’ll be nice to have it looking decent while she’s visiting.

In other news, I’m finding a coworker very difficult to put up with.  She’s only been with the organisation about a year, and she gets 12 weeks’ holidays per year (and a correspondingly lower salary as a trade-off, but still).  She has all the school holidays off, to care for her brood of spawn.  She does very little work, and has an unpleasant habit of passing others’ work off as her own.  On top of all this, she wanders around making comments that are designed to piss off the rest of us. 

For example, she was back yesterday after two weeks off work.  I poked my head around her door and asked how her leave was.  Her reply? ‘Good.  I wish I wasn’t here though.’  Well, with an attitude like that, I wish you weren’t, too. 

Later in the day, she said to my friend and coworker P, ‘Only nine weeks ’til school holidays!’ (when she is next on leave).  I said to P, ‘Did you deck her?!’

And she’s grumpy at the moment, because she’s come back and is actually expected to do some work.  The indignity!  This afternoon she plunked herself down next to my desk and announced (in relation to a due date for some work), ‘I don’t care, that’s not til December.  I’ll have left here by then’.  She actually said this twice, in case I hadn’t heard her the first time.  I just responded, ‘Mm-hmm’, nodding my head sagely.  I suspect the desired response was more along the lines of, ‘Noooo! You can’t leave!!!’ but I’m a crap liar.  Plus, I just don’t care enough.