My head rises at the familiar sound of honking.

Shielding my eyes, I squint to spot the flock of Canada geese returning after a long cold winter.

And I smile as they swiftly pass low overhead.

They swerve and coast with ease, long necks swaying left and right searching for a suitable place to land.

Ah Spring!

But enough lollygagging.

I must return to my job at hand. So I trudge through the knee-deep drifts, feet wet and frozen and return to shovelling out my van from under the heavy blanket of new snow.


Ah Spring!

You Suck.

Okay, maybe "hate" is too strong a descriptor.

They are vile like lima-bean disgusting time-wasters.

Well whaddya know, perhaps "hate" IS the perfect descriptor after all.

I've actually been forced to attend meetings to discuss what meetings should be set up next. After nearly 30 years of this nonsense, it's not surprising that I now spend the majority of them mentally calculating what else I could possibly be doing; mostly daydreaming about activities of the non-work variety.

The worst of all are those get-togethers sneakily set up while I am away, ambushing me upon my return as I unsuspectingly open The Evil Email Inbox.

Which is what happened again this week. After a single vacation day, the top item to greet me on my email list - a meeting request with the Big Wigs for 10 am.

Crap. There goes my morning to catch up.

Thank the Gods I dressed up today. Instead of the usual jeans and casual top, luckily I had time this morning to don a blazer, accessorize with a new tie-dye scarf and cool new boots-boots.

So I rushed through the morning Must-Be-Done-Or-The-World-Will-End pile and dashed off to the opposite wing in the hospital for The Meeting. I make it just on time and surprise, surprise, no one else is there.

Well, that's happened before. I am typically the first to arrive; too OCD to be fashionably late like the upper management types.

But then after 15 minutes playing on my Blackberry and finding myself still alone in the conference room, I begin to get pissed. Wandering down the hallway to the Admin offices I discover no one is around. Nada. The place is deserted.

Well, dammit. If they don't even have the courtesy to be on time, I am NOT hanging around.

I return to my office fuming.

What a waste!

What a discourtesy!

What a rude treatment!

I open my calendar to confirm that I was in the right room. Yup it was, and at 10 am alright.

10 am next Monday.

What an idiot.

Every time the dog whines to be let out, we exit the kitchen door, through the attached garage and out the back door to the yard. Most mornings this is a fairly uneventful process, but today as I waited inside the garage for the canine to finish her business, I was startled by a metalic crashing outside on the front driveway. At least I thought it was outside. The neighbor perhaps? Nope. No one was there.

Aw, crap. One of the cats must have scooted out the door without me seeing again. I performed an Official Feline Count by peeking back inside the kitchen.

One. Two. Three. Nope the OFC was correct. All whiskers present and accounted for.

Aw, crap. It WASN'T a cat.

Then I saw hubby's extensive collection of empty beer cans move. Move a lot. Inside the garage. Inside with me.

I shooed the dog back into the kitchen, left the back door to the yard open in case "Whatever It Was" needed an exit and ran inside the house as quick as I could.

For my camera.

Now properly armed as a dedicated blogger should be, I returned, stood and waited.

More scuffling and cans banging.

"Hello?" (Erm, right. As if "Whatever It Was" was going to answer.)

A shadow passed under the rider mower. A skunk perhaps?

Mommie.

I kept watch, camera at the ready as more tiny crashes emanate from the pile of Kokanee empties. But nothing emerges, so I decide to carefully clean up the mess and bag the cans, discovering one that's still partially full but frozen.

Ahhh... I now theorize the noise was likely a thirsty mouse with a taste for beersicles, and in a fit of drunken stupor was ricochetting like a pinball off the empty beer cans in a panic to escape.

I just wish I could have taken photographic evidence of it.

Dammit. That woulda been so cool!

Oh, well.

I guess we'll just have to make do with the following tres accurate "artist's rendering" of the scary and highly dangerous animal instead:

My office is right next door to the Staff Room. Handy yes, but the only time I go in there is when I need to wash out my coffee cup or heat up some lunch. I prefer to eat in calm of my office, because it's just too damn noisy in there.

Most times it's packed with people yakking about union politics, work frustrations or the latest fad diet. The only down side to my self-imposed seclusion is that I miss the odd great story from nurses who used to work on the wards. Often I'll arrive in the middle of tragedies, successes or purely hilarious tales.

I recently caught this narrative already in progress, whilst microwaving a frozen muffin:



So, the lady was dying and the son had accepted the fact. He approved the visit of a few of his mother's churchmates who showed up as a group late one evening. They stormed across the ward without checking in to the nursing desk and burst into her room. Unfortunately, they were minutes too late.

But that didn't matter to them. At full volume, waking the rest of the patients in the wing, we could hear:

"Clara! Clara Fisher! We command you to return to your body!"

"Clara!!!!"

Lights snapped on all over the ward as they continued for some time, ordering the poor woman who was now in the Great Beyond.

The son, who had had enough, stayed out of their way at the nursing desk. After some time, the elderly ladies finally resigned themselves that she was not in fact, returning and began to pack up their religous accoutrements.

"I'm sorry, I guess it didn't work" the nurse sympathetically told the son.

"I'm not surprised" he sighed.

"Her name is Barbara."



* Of course, I changed the real name of the patient

Yes, one might call me a Domestic Diva. I can do laundry, dishes, feed the zoo and whip up a mean banana bread all at once. Well, the bread isn't mean, per se, but I digress...

This weekend I thought I'd experiment with a regular muffin recipe and create some Mega-Cranberry-Orange Mini Muffins®*. Packing in as many cranberries as possible (hence the "Mega" in the Mega-Cranberry-Orange Mini Muffins monniker), adding orange zest and juice... mmmm. I must admit they were delish.

I was feeling very "Martha".


Later that same day I had a craving for some Buttery Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn.

Remove bag from cellophane cover. Check.

Place in microwave the Proper Side Up. Check.

Push "Popcorn" button. Beep!

Push "Start" button. Beep!

Wait.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Remove burnt popcorn from microwave.



I swiftly returned from my "Martha" state back to being plain old "Maureen" again.

* Yes, I may just Register that name, because I am positive no-one has ever come up with THIS recipe before...

If I haven't proven to you what an Ultimate-Uber-Geek I am by now, this will clinch it.

Cause this U.U.G. she loves her comics.

Daily comics, color comics, even stand-up comics.

But the best of all are old comic books, like this musty-scented acquisition hailing from MY childhood. Over 35 years ago some U.U.G. youngling grabbed this October, 1973 issue of Bullwinkle and Rocky off the shelf and pried it open for the first time.

Today, waves of nostalgia sweep over me when carefully flipping through the yellowed pages; but I don't just read the stories.

Oh no.

Some of the best memories are from old advertisements that in those days, didn't outnumber the pages of actual storylines.

So it was a blast to read again offers from the Lucky Products Inc. for a 100 piece set of "durable plastic" green soldiers for $ 1.25. Or ads for child labour "Sales Leadership" schemes to hawk greeting cards for a chance to win valuable prizes like Dacron sleeping bags or Jumbo AM/FM Radios.

But I don't recall this one:


Yep. Apparently back in the Seventies, all you needed for a snowstorm was a lit cigarette and a "nearly invisible" tablet...

Let the drug-related jokes commence.