I was sent a grumpy email and two nice texts today by the same person.

1. I was at an Easter Seals fundraiser tonight and all I thought about was getting out of there. I have so busy lately and have been craving downtime.

1 a. This morning I think I gave my husband a dirty look and told him to go fly a kite.

2. Sometimes I'll run on the treadmill on my lunch break. Today a guy told me I run "a gazelle" and last week another guy (90-year-old) said I was "beauty in motion". It means nothing but I tend to eat compliments like this up.

Without diminishing the seriousness of your reported meanness, LoriFLA, I must admit that "go fly a kite" cracks me up.

Mean: The mean thing is too mean. I don't want to revisit it. Wah.

Instead, I'll post two nice things, which will be better for my mood.

Nice: My sister gave me a vaseful of clippings from the flowering trees in her yard, because she knows that I love flowering trees and live in a yardless apartment.

Nice: Cheese-shop lady (I know her name, but I think of her as 'cheese-shop lady') got all excited whebn I came in to ask about ordering ten pounds of cheese for a cheese tray. She said, "This sounds like fun!"

Mean: Witnessed an OH SNAP-esque moment in class today on the part of two students. Even the OH SNAP victim was laughing at the zinginess!

Nice: I was lovely to our new colleagues all week and they've paid it forward by being gracious and kind too! Yay mutual niceness!

Nice: offers of in-kind donations for the charity Gala I am on the sponsorship committee for.

Mean: As I was waiting for my bus, I was watching people pile onto the other bus which stops at my stop. The doors had closed, but the light hadn't changed yet, so when an older woman walked up to the door, the driver let her on. I watched as this woman struggled to get up the step onto the bus. As the bus drove off, this poor woman was clinging tightly to the rail near the door because no-one in the "please reserve this seat for those who need it" seats stood up to let her sit down.

Nice: My boss called me amazing this morning after I was able to get the title of an article that was given to us in transliterated Yiddish back into Hebrew characters so we could attempt to identify what article a patron actually wanted from a newspaper. From the 1930s. Written entirely in Yiddish.

Mean: My mother is quite unhappy with my father and keeps telling me about how unhappy she is and how much of a jackass he is and I just kinda snapped at her that she should get a divorce and be done with it if she's so fucking unhappy. I stand by my outburst, but I don't think that was what she wanted to hear.

Mean: I am on stay-cation this week, and honestly, if life was like this all the time, I'd never have a mean thing to say about anything. We are, however, almost out of beer and it's before midnight, so that kinda sucks. Also, yeah, my job has royally pissed me off and I want to quit, but I really can't. So, there, I said a mean thing about my job which I usually love except for the HR assholes that are eventually going to make me leave it.

Nice: My partner managed to trim the magnolia and pear trees in the front yard and get their branches untangled, de-weeded the flowerbed under the bedroom window, AND about a dozen other outside projects this afternoon and I am both impressed and overjoyed that our house looks cool and not like an abandoned heap now. w00t!

Mean: our admin assistant gave me a going away present today. It was a big picture of her and my horrid boss and a small picture of the whole office. It was a nice gesture, but I mocked it anyway, because why would I want to remember my horrid boss and her mean flunky? Feel really bad for mocking it, although it wasn't to her face.

Nice: a coworker I really hate sang a goodbye song to our boss today at her retirement party, and it was actually...pretty good. So I told him he did a good job, because I could tell he was really nervous about performing.

Mean: spent an hour tonight wading through this complete clusterfuck of a Federal job site to apply for a Fed position, only to find that I am not eligible, that the job is reserved for people recently laid off from the Feddle Gummint and veterans with three or more years of service. Fuckity fuck fuck.

Nice: Jan is coming to visit. Yay!

Mean: I ranted about my mother for about an hour about something mean she said in an email to my sister. And now I'm mentioning it here. I won't go into any details, but let me just say ARGH.

Nice: I smiled and was extra-friendly to the very nice but weary, over-worked, on-the-verge-of-a-meltdown cashier at the grocery store who was getting shit from the jerkface customer in front of me for something that was totally the customer's fault and not the cashier's. He gave me a big smile back, so I hope it helped him get things back on a good note for the rest of the evening.

Mean: Well, um... so you ever have that thing? That thing where you know somebody is basically fine, and they aren't a bad person, and maybe you even kind of like them, but they just have this innate ability to get on your last gottdamn fucking nerve pretty much every single time they open their mouth? This. I'm surprised and unsettled about my frequent uncharitable and mocking feelings about this person, because I have this (obviously totally false) idea that that's not the kind of person I am.

PS: things are somewhat better with this person since that time I made her cry... yeah. I made her cry. She started with me when I was in a vewy bad mood. Not smart. So now she's kind of afraid of me, and that has helped our relationship quite a bit. Yes, people are weird, and I'm one of them.

Nice: There's been this huge half-dead yucca tree in our courtyard since we've been here. About 12 feet tall, far too overgrown for its pot, weighing a ton, and ugly as sin with most of it consisting of dead or dying leaves... and we finally tackled it. V. had to start sawing it off into manageable pieces from the top, because it was too big to even lay over on its side. Anyway, gone! What a relief.

But the best part is, somebody else apparently was trimming their giant Yuccas too, because we found two really nice, tall, healthy trees on the street that had been cut off... at their bases? If they were branches of one tree, then that is one monstrous-huge Yucca somewhere in our hood. Anyway, we took them home and planted them in big pots, and they look great and definitely seem to be "taking". This is excellent, because it would cost around 150-200 euros to get a couple of trees that big. Along with various other garden work we've done down there, this is making the courtyard look very lovely these days. Maybe I make piccy later.

maybe you even kind of like them, but they just have this innate ability to get on your last gottdamn fucking nerve pretty much every single time they open their mouth?

OMG yes. I say a mental 'fuck you' whenever I get an email from my local irritant. - mean

nice - I'm pretending it's Saturday and I'm here by myself doing stuff - cleaning my desk and organizing email and ignoring everybody else here.

PS: things are somewhat better with this person since that time I made her cry... yeah. I made her cry. She started with me when I was in a vewy bad mood. Not smart. So now she's kind of afraid of me, and that has helped our relationship quite a bit. Yes, people are weird, and I'm one of them. Oh gosh, I did that to someone in college once and I really regretted it and we didn't talk for like, 2 years after that. But she was kind of being a brat.