Stormie and Amber-i like to give their workspace a personal touch.
When you are creative and colorful and you are forced to work in a beige-windowless-cube-filled work space with a bunch of odds and ends people, it is no wonder you look for any and all reasons to cheer up the ol’ cubicle during Christmas! The lighting is bad, but you can see that Amber and Stormie had their fun being decorative and merry!
There is Stormie’s modèrne garland.
This is where Stormie spends lots of hours making sure the billboards you see all over the country are quite attractive and high-quality in color!
Stormie made a mobile from scraps using a snowflake as the topper. And has a big paper star over her desk.
There’s Amber-i’s fancy snowflakes! And her room-view.
They are so sweet, Stormie and Amber. They keep mini-candy canes and lots of chocoltae candy around for visitors who drop by. They are sweet hostesses. Right there in the windowless cubicle.
The tree is festooned with finger-knitted string garland (which is what Stephanie Kelley, my other uber-creative daughter put all over her large tree at home: finger knitting! It is all the rage!)
But the pièce-de-résistance? The merriest part of it all? Oh yeah, baby~
Edward, ready for Christmas! Q: Edward looking at you from his spot between the keyboard and the monitor? Or Edward on a bed of tinsel garland??
The O-2 is where we have had Heaven Fest offices the past couple of years. It is down the hall and around the corner past the elevator from the main church offices. It is painted charcoal on dark gray to be very cool. But I affectionately call our cubicles (not low enough to be seen over, but too high to know when some one is about to pop over and scare the heck out of you) “The Bat Cave.”
Fast Forward.
I am knocking frantically on Sebastian’s office door Friday night. I can tell by his understated, “Yeeeees?” that I am interrupting his dinner. But it is like 10 o’clock and he should really be eating earlier than that! For his health.
Anyway, I say:
“Sebastian?!? I walked into the O-2 and there was this animal. I don’t think it was a mouse, but it kind of looked like a mouse, but way cuter. Because you know-mice are tiny and dart around and are gray or brown, right – like field mice and very nervous and annoying. But when I opened the door, it was there and maybe it is a gerbil or hamster or something because it was very big – like maybe like 2 or 3 pounds, not mouse-tiny. I mean it was just sitting there looking at me and it was white with a really cute face and very delicate whiskers. It had brown coloring on it. Well, maybe more like honey-gold colored spots, actually. And it was very fat with short-looking legs, but I think it was about to have babies and couldn’t seem to move very fast. And I think it had a long tail, but basically I was looking at it and it was looking back and I told it to run, but it could only sort of waddle into the back cubicle. Do you think it was a mouse? It was soooo big, but I don’t think it was a rat because rats aren’t cute and this clearly had a cute face.”
There may or may not have actually been punctuation or periods of any sort in that entire monologue. It could have been one, long run-on sentence.
I took a breath. Sebastian got a word in edge-wise.
“So you’re saying you got a good look at it, then?”
Me, ignoring his apparent mockery:
“What? Oh, yes. It was cute, but do you have any D-Con?”
And then I did it. I opened the box of D-Con and said, “Here, little pregnant animal, come and get it.” Because I really wasn’t sure what it was and since there was a Cub Scout meeting going on in the building it clearly could have been smuggled in by some little boy, but regardless, there is just not room in the Bat Cave for anyone else. We need the space.
What do you think? Am I cruel?
I searched Google for images. It looked a lot like these. Very cute like the one on the left, but the spots were lighter, and the face was very white like the one on the right. And fat. Mice. Just a mouse. It turns out. And maybe less than 2 or 3 pounds?
Here is Sebastian-the-Poison-Provider with his gorgeous and amazingly wonderful wife, Denise, with their two cutie-patootie boys!
