clearly this is where we should all buy jeans

I spotted this place in Burlington, Vermont. Sadly, it appeared to be closed, ending my dream of finally achieving fashion plate status.

back on wednesday, and hopefully in one piece

I'm off to do some camping and whitewater kayaking. Unfortunately, once my adrenaline kicks in, it makes something in my brain believe I am invincible. With any luck, I'll come back with some stories, and all of my limbs intact.

Happy weekend.

do i need to put a lock on my closets?

Yesterday I put on a pair of pants I haven't worn since last summer. It seems a pencil bandit struck at some point between the last wearing and yesterday. This is a close up of the left leg of my pants.


Hello to you too, pencil bandit, and thanks for not using permanent marker!

Now I have to embark on a pencil bandit unmasking mission.

lost my blogging mojo there for a while

Sunny lost all interest. I started a great new volunteer job. I've been working out at a crazy new gym. I've also been recovering from working out at a crazy new gym. My computer crashed. The weather got better and I've been out on some great hikes. I've taken on a new role at work and I'm so busy my eye started twitching last week.

Enough with the excuses.

Thanks to all of you who wrote me emails which I never answered. That was quite rude, and I apologize. But I needed to come back on my own.

I like this blog. I like the blogs I used to frequent (probably yours, if you're reading this). I'm back. I may make some changes to structure or something, now that this blog is all mine. Suggestions are welcome.

why do open concept workspaces breed insanity?

This morning I was chatting with a colleague who amuses me immensely. Somehow the conversation turned to the dreaded shared printer, as we both have one right beside our desk. People have a tendency to print somewhat personal documents and forget to pick them up. Over my time at this particular office, I've viewed legal documents for a divorce, mortgage applications (including the applicant's salary information), performance reviews, and even a colleague's child's school report card.

When I got back to my desk after this conversation, I experienced a flash of brilliance. I added the printer next to my colleague's desk to my available networked printers, then got to work. Faking up a clinic's letterhead, I informed my colleague that he had a dangerously high level of vitamins A and K, and that he was strongly advised to cease eating carrots in high doses immediately. I hit print.

And then I waited by my printer. Sure enough, within 20 minutes, a document appeared on somewhat sketchy HR letterhead, approving my application for maternity leave. (I am very visibly not pregnant.)

And so I faked up a letter confirming my colleague's appointment for implants to his gluteus maximus and printed that. And the madness continued.

Soon my stomach hurt from laughing so hard. I had lots of work to do, as I'm sure my colleague did too. But our open concept office made our little game of one-up-manship more crucial than actual work success.

People in Asia spend their entire life in close quarters with others, with no discernible ill-effects . But put us in an open concept office and we start to go haywire. What's that about anyway?

when two old women go shopping together

Today was another nutso day at work, and Sunny had been away for business last week so had nothing in her fridge. And so we decided to pick up some groceries at lunch. This led one colleague to crack that we were two old women who go out shopping together. I'm not sure how said colleague got from "they both need groceries" to "they are clearly old and lonely," but then he never claimed to have passed the logic section on the LSAT.

At any rate, the store we went to was one that prides itself on its self-serve check-outs. I, painfully self-aware as always, refused to use self-serve as I know I have the patience of a mule worm some animal with no patience. Sunny, ever the technology optimist, went the self check-out route with the reusable, cloth bags she'd brought along. I got through the check-out in two minutes with a few more bags to add to the landfill. When I got to Sunny's side, she was swearing under her breath. Apparently, the self-serve check-out operates on a complicated system of weights and measures and anything other than plastic bags sets it into a tailspin, much like me trying to do the conversion between imperial and metric. She called the woman in charge over to help fix the problem more than once. The woman not only fixed the problem, but also deleted the food item Sunny had scanned just before the problem struck, more than once. Self-serve turned into extremely slow-serve, and not the good kind that means yummy ice cream. Or is that soft-serve?

Forget the patience; today I may have the brains of a mule worm some animal with few brains. Perhaps that's what you get when you're old and decide to go shopping with your equally old friends.

Rainy

one month left, people

I just have to get through one month. That's all I'm saying.