... don't bother reading this post; just say "monkey"...

A modern day ant and grasshopper saga which I should add a spoiler alert *this is a fussy post full of complaining with no resolution so you should just stop reading now and go find pictures of puppies on Facebook*.

Ernest Griset. "The Grasshopper and the Ant," 1869.

If you know the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, you’ll understand when I write that I’ve pretty much always been an Ant aka workaholic/ saver/ worrier-about-tomorrow. I was raised in an Ant household and as my family story goes, my first sentence was “Me do!” Aside from my ability to form more complete sentences using the correct pronoun, not much has changed. I’m still independent and I still have the attitude that work comes before play. Prepare for tomorrow first; the opposite of Scarlett O’Hara’s “I'll think about that tomorrow.”

It isn’t like I don’t have any fun; it’s just that work and responsibility take priority. Most faculty positions are 9-month contracts but many of us have special assignments and *other duties* during summer months because that’s just how the economy is these days and work needs to get done. I have two weeks of vacation that I can take in the summer so this week I decided to take some time for some local day trips. As an Ant, I thought it was a pretty big deal that I only checked my email three times :-/ Yeah, I’m working on that… not bragging. Anyhow, what I hoped would not happen actually happened. My vacation was hijacked.

Gustave Doré. "The Grasshopper and the Ant," 1867.

I won’t bore you with the list of all the unfortunate events and things that have been going wrong with contractors working on my fella’s house for the last year. It isn’t like an asteroid fell on his house either; there was some basic contracting and updating to be done and it took them FOREVER! We’re in the final phase before we can put the house on the market. Yesterday I felt totally defeated when the folks arrived to hang blinds only to discover that they weren’t cut correctly and were two inches too long. Sigh. Of course this was after the dishwasher install cancelled two planned fun outings including one on Friday night because apparently a dishwasher install requires a plumber and an electrician who complain about the other’s work and force you to listen to their personal lives. I guess that’s just a Southern thing but Sigh. But it took six hours of my time on one day and eight on the next day. In the big picture that really isn’t a big deal but it all seems to add up… and today I woke up at 3 am to my toilet running non-stop. I’ll have to fix that too. It’s just a bunch of little things… and the fact that I took off a week’s vacation to end up being a contractor-babysitter on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Somehow that erases all my happy-cemetery-gallivanting. Alright, it doesn’t really erase that but it is super frustrating when Life happens and you have to be the kind of adult who deals with stuff… which brings me to some of my Grasshopper friends who have been to the beach a few times because they don’t have jobs and in-between their vacations (emphasis on the plural!) they get fussy with me because well, I’m being an Ant. I’m really envious that they get to go to the beach and I don’t even like the beach that much unless it’s at night and I would never ever swim in the ocean because I don’t want to be eaten by a shark or an unidentified sea creature that many folks refuse to believe in.

I don’t have a way to end this post and I have work that needs to be done. I’m poopy so I’m just going to end by saying Monkey Monkey Monkey because if you say it aloud, you smile. Plus, you look really silly saying monkey for no real reason. Of course just be careful that you don’t say “Monkey” and smile in front of a monkey because that’s a sign of aggression in monkey-language and they’ll probably try to bite your face off.