Holiday Weekend of a Single* Working Girl

*and by single I mean not married.  I essentially function as a single person, who happens to have a boyfriend.

This was a four day weekend for me.  I got back from my first week of field work and had enough hours to take Friday off, so I did.  But it wasn’t exactly all fun and games.

The reason I took Friday off in the first place was because of a doctor’s appointment.  In addition to getting a shot, a pap test, and having a lovely conversation with my male doctor about sex and birth control (extra fun), I also figured out how much I weigh.  I don’t own a scale so I haven’t actually weighed myself since Christmastime at my parents’ house.  So it’s been a while.  And let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty.  Kinda depressing, actually.  I hiked around a lot and did quite a bit of hard labor in the field last week, and plan to continue doing so for the rest of the summer.  Hopefully this will help.  Unfortunately, I do not think my pedometer is giving me an accurate measure of how much I am walking.  At the end of a day in the field, it was only calculating about 3000 steps per day.  This does not seem right, since I get about 1000 just waking up and walking around my apartment in the morning before I take a shower.  Odd.   Also, my office is being dumb and not letting me count the steps I took in Lincoln because I wasn’t there to report them.  Boo. I guess I will not be winning the competition at work, but I still may have a chance to win the competition against myself.  We shall see.

In addition the doctor’s appointment, I also had to switch the title for my car from my dad to me and get it registered in New Mexico.  NM has this awesome thing called MVD Express, so this would have been super easy if it weren’t for one minor detail: the emissions test.  Is this a common thing?  I never even heard of it until I moved to Vegas, and I didn’t register my car there so I never had to do it.  Here in New Mexico, I live in the only county where the emissions test is required to get a registration.

Anyway, I went to get the test and my car FAILED.  Why?  Because of the gas cap.  I had no idea that even counted as part of it.  I knew my gas cap was loose and I had gotten a new one but had never actually put it on, so I put it on and went to take the test again.  Still failed.  But the guy at the Jiffy Lube was super nice and helpful (much nicer than at the previous one near the MVD) and told me I could still get the car title, just not register it, and get the problems checked out at Autozone for free.  So I got the title and then headed over to check out the problems.  The guy over there told me that as long as my check engine light was on, I would always fail the test, even though I already fixed the problem.  They don’t tell you this so you have to keep coming back to take the test and pay more money (duh).  He showed me how to erase the problem codes and said to drive it around for a day to see if the light came back on.  It didn’t.  Hooray!

That was Friday and Saturday.  On Sunday I went clothes shopping (I needed some new field pants and had to buy –gasp– a size 12.  Oh the shame!), took a long walk, dropped off my recycling, picked up some stuff I needed at the store for packing my vacuum to send back (if you haven’t heard, electrolux is doing a recall on certain models of their vacuums due to exploding batteries or something like that, and mine is one of them.  lucky me!), and finally managed to squeeze in a little time with Matt.  We had seen each other for about an hour the previous evening before he had to go to work.  I tried to make dinner but was in a hurry, so it was a total mess.  Plus I was annoyed with him for being cranky and watching the basketball game on tv instead of listening to me when I was talking to him.  I was so upset I just started crying then and there and couldn’t stop.  This made him feel bad, so he took me to dinner on Sunday, and he got me ice cream too, even though we both know I don’t need it.

Today I was hoping to just relax and maybe take a look at my maps for this week, but that didn’t happen.  I needed clean clothes so I went down to the laundry room, poured in the soap and dirty clothes and realized I didn’t have enough money on my card (we went to the card system a little while ago, no more quarters).  So I went over to the lobby where there USED TO BE a machine to put money on the laundry cards, but it is NO LONGER THERE.  Where did it go?  I don’t know.  But I couldn’t do anything about it because the office was closed for the holiday.  What was I going to do?  I had a bunch of soapy unwashed clothes in the laundry room just sitting there and no way to get them clean.  I did the only thing I could think to do.  I called my mom for advice.  My sister answered the phone.  She relayed the message to the family (and friends who were also with them celebrating the holiday).  After laughing at me, they finally came to the consensus that this was not an emergency and I should therefore not call the apartment emergency number, and the only thing to do was to go to a laundromat.  I wasn’t really sure which, if any, would be open so I started calling around.  No one picked up, except for one place.  The conversation went as follows.

Lady on phone: Bueno?

Me: (Oh great, they speak Spanish. maybe they’re bilingual…) Are you open today?

Lady: No ingles

Me: (nope) Um ok, esta abierto hoy?

Lady: Si

Me: (yay I got it right) gracias

To make an even longer story short, I ended up not being able to find the place, and I did not really want to look around for it, because it was in the barrio, as the Mexicans say.  Fortunately, the laundromat near my house ended up being open, so I went to that one instead.  After that I got groceries, came home, folded laundry, made dinner, saw Matt for about an hour, and that was the end of the day.  So while many others were celebrating Memorial Day weekend with their friends and family, I was doing all that.

It would be nice to have another weekend to recover from this one.  I’m completely exhausted.