a long day and wanderlust

so today i'm scheduled to work 10:30-7 instead of my usual 8-4:30 to cover for our trusty late-shift supervisor, who is out today. my morning was pretty hectic; i let myself sleep in a little as an indulgence (last night was a relatively late one), and i got myself out the door about 10 minutes later than i wanted. but it's all good: i got to work at exactly 8:00. my manager came to the front door to let me in, and he greeted me with "What are you doing here?" which was not nearly as pleasant as the "Good morning!" i had just given him. and then i realized i was 2 1/2 hours early!! oh well, i'll be working 8-7 today, but i'm taking an hour lunch now and a half-hour dinner break later in the afternoon. now that's what i call balance. ugh.
in other news, it's that time again. i'm wanderlusty, grasping for anything that might add spice to my otherwise stable (aka BORING) routine of a life. i've been living in the same apartment for 2 years now; i've had the same job for coming on 2 years; and i think the most interesting new thing in my life is my parents' new dog, chap (so named for charlie chaplin, who also never speaks) -- but even that newness is wearing off (it's been 2 months since they got him). i'm so ready for december, when thane graduates and we start doing something else.

you can visually see when i need variety because i change the layout of this blog. (btw, what do you think?)

yesterday was a minor holiday, so of course my husband had classes. i absolutely love martin luther king jr. day, labor day and columbus day because i get off and he doesn't. so i get to be a student for those days. i'm not even joking that yesterday was the most fun i'd had since thane's birthday party. i got to learn about early irish society, the military strategy of joshua's conquest of the Promised Land (paradoxical-sounding, i know), and i got a lot of reading time. it was wonderful, and i would love to go to school again. but, you know, the grass is always greener and all that.

one of my favorite things

last night, thane had a night class. my sister brought her roommates over for dinner (we had this amazing thai red curry) and had some girl time. it was cute.

The Finer Things Club meets on wednesday to discuss To Kill a Mockingbird, so after the girls left, i read for a couple of hours. it was wonderful. i think this pre-appointed reading time might be reason enough for me to bring thursdays back.

in case you didn't know, we did away with thursdays a few months ago, when my boss realized that fridays were so much more fun. so, instead of having a thursday and then a friday, we decided that there would be two fridays instead. so, yesterday was actually friday, and today is friday 2.0. i'm serious, it's improved morale by at least 5%. (but that's a lie, because i don't even know what that means. i mean, i know what it means, in theory, but how in the world would you measure morale? how many laughs occur in the department each day? or maybe the average of the sum of smiles + laughs + jokes equals the average morale... i feel like this should be in a chart format. maybe next post, because this is getting far too long to be a side comment in parenthesis.)

BRILLIANT IDEA! so, my manager has been bored all morning. seriously, he's asked me if it's 4:00 yet at least 5 times in the last 2 hours. i'm going to take that as him not having enough to do (don't care if it's true or not) and now every time he steps into my office, i'm going to ask him to do something. at the ready, i have 3 pieces of paper that need to be shredded, so i'm set for at least 3 visits. i'm sure i can think of more tasks if it comes to it. this will keep me entertained for the rest of the day. i think it might become a friday 2.0 tradition.

Gossip

fridays are usually slow days in the office. it's understandable - people would rather procrastinate their work until monday, thus giving themselves a kind of extended weekend. slacking on fridays seems to be a nation-wide thing, because even our west coast line stops ringing around 4. from this i conclude that the work week mentally ends at lunch on friday. we may be here in body, but that doesn't mean we're actually doing anything.

when customer service is having a slow day (and sometimes when we're busy), we get to back up the mailroom. one of our CSR's counted 19 envelopes that had the wrong address but somehow got to us. one of them put the town and the state/zip on two different lines... i thought they taught you how to address an envelope in second grade. seriously, i googled it.

also, as a follow up to the snake story: one look outside proved our theory wrong. there are no tree branches overhanging the building, and so it couldn't have dropped from a tree branch onto the roof. it was quickly decided that an eagle must have picked up the snake to eat it, but since the snake was so slithery, it wriggled out of the eagle's talons and fell onto the roof of our building. so, at least part of the original story is definitely true. anyway, here is our retarded snake:

by the way, last night's episode of The Office (entitled "Gossip") was AWESOME. i took the idea and ran with it, spreading a rumor that the Pam in our office is pregnant, and it got picked up that our Jim Halpert called one of the CSR's stupid. by the end of the day, he was racist.

and Pam really is pregnant. but we knew that. 

so it's really like The Office.

promise.