Tales from the Steppes

2005-06-21

8:30 a.m.
Fly away on my zephyr, I feel it more than ever

It is only 8:30 and the day is already shaping up to be something pretty crappy. I got to bed at 1:30 last night, looking forward to my 4 1/2 hours of sleep after an extrememly busy day. Only to be awoken 3 hours into it, screwing up my cycle and causing me to oversleep so I got to work late and will now have to stay later than I had planned. It also puts me in kind of a bad mood to have my sleep interrupted like that. So on my way in, I stopped at Dunkin Donuts to get some sugar and caffeine to attempt to jump start my brain. No big deal except there was only one person serving at the counter and the customer that was up had a complicated order. No, let me rephrase that. She was getting a dozen and a half donuts and she MADE the order complicated. Perfectly fine to want 2 of the chocolate frosted with sprinkles, two raspberry filled, etc. But to stand there and try to figure out what kind of donuts senior citizens prefer is too much. Apparently, senior citizens do not prefer cake donuts or so I learned from this exchange. The line of customers reached to the door as the woman nattered on. The final coup de grace was when she produced a tax exempt card and started trying to explain how to do this to the woman behind the counter whose English was more than a bit limited. I nearly offered to pay the damn tax myself in an effort to get things moving but finally it was resolved because the woman behind the counter realized that there was in fact no tax charged on donuts. I guess I could have left but I was the next person in line and I always suffer from too much optimism where these things are concerned. I tell myself that there is no way it could take more than a minute to wrap this up. Even though I am usually wrong, I still cling to this fiction that one of the parties involved will begin to behave in a competant fashion.

This morning I have to attend a mandatory training session on Fraud, Waste, and Abuse. I guess this activity right here counts as abuse of bandwidth. I somehow cannot help but think that if Management Services just sent out a memo or posted a PDF for us to sign off on, the entire building would be much, much happier. Perhaps I can make a deal with a buddy to gnaw off their ears in return for them doing that to mine. At least it is only 1 1/2 hours of blathering. Next week I have an all day mandatory orientation meeting that I cannot skive out of. And of course, it is on the same Wednesday that we have an actually important biweekly interagency meeting. I call it "actually" important because integral work occurs at this meeting. As opposed to the orientation, which is so necessary that they only have it once a year. Many of the attendees have worked here for nearly a year already. You would think that if there was necessary information to impart, it would have already been done. To the best of my knowledge, the orientation consists of an introduction to the Commission and hey, aren't we fabulous. I will have to get a full night's sleep before because I am not tolerant of stupidity on a good day and on a bad day I am absolutely wretched.

Of course, the Doof (Josh) will be glued to my side for the orientation, so that is something even more to look forward to. He has been much more attached to me of late and it is pretty much my own damn fault. I went out with him to do field work last Friday, as I had some that needed to get done and he had a few large complicated sites. I thought it would be a nice gesture if I helped him with his forest stand evaluation and wetland delineation checking. And the weather was good so I thought the tradeoff between his constant talking and my being outside was a pretty good one. But then I made a major mistake. I was yacking with a friend while on a brief 7-11 stop and did not get off the phone before getting back in the car. And he heard me say the word Pennsic. Well, he knows friends in the SCA. Do I know these people in NJ? He can't remember their SCA names or whose household they are in but they have their own encampment at Pennsic and go every year. He has been wanting to find out more about the SCA for years, maybe this is his chance. I thought about saying it was a sign from God but I don't want to open that topic up for discussion and I am completely sure he would not get the meaning of my tone of voice. But now he had his topic of conversation for the day and he was on a roll and I was a captive audience.

On the grand scheme of things, these are pretty minor incidences. The bigger picture would be that I got to spend the last two weekends with some of the people that mean the most in my life. I have outgrown many friendships over the years - people who don't change, move on in life. I guess to many outsiders it looks like we haven't either. We still tell the same damn jokes and laugh about the silly things we have done. But it would be a mistake to think we are the same people. I love watching how my friends have grown and changed over the years in ways that I could not have always predicted 20 years ago. Yeah, it's been that long. But that topic will have to wait for another time because now I need to go be told all about waste. I will leave you with one of my favorite pictures from the weekend - the EM and her surrogate little sister, Doodle. Yes, I know it's blurry - one of the mongols took it. But I still really like it.