A Day of Disappointment

In other words, a day like any other day.

Oddly enough, things went very smoothly today, all things considered. It seems like most of the parallel crises at work are boiling down to the point where I might actually get to do something other than ping from one to the next. Maybe I'll even get to do some of my own work "official" work this week! I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.

I'm really enjoying that the compooter room is nice and clean now. It's officially "done", as the last of the piles in the hallway was squirreled away over the weekend. The Mrs. spent quite some time on this, and it certainly is a vast improvement. Having the third, matching set of shelves was pure genius on my part, I must say. So, I guess I deserve most of the credit for the end result.

The compooter room is so nice, in fact, that I have become inspired to once again begin practicing my guitar. This is now the third day in a row. I believe, though don't quote me on this, that this is the first time I have practiced three days in a row since MaxieC was born. The Guitarist will be mightily impressed, as I will actually be able to play my new assignment at full speed after just one week. (BTW, that's not The Guitarist in the picture. That's one of his underlings.) Just so you know, I've whittled down my time with The Mrs. in order to make more time to practice, not my time blogging. As we've covered before, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Or was it colder?

I need a new battery for my laptop, which is owned by work. I'm trying to decide if it's worth the effort to try to get our department admin to get me a new battery (the only way to get a battery through work), or if I should just pop the $60 on my own and avoid the hassle. I might as well just get it on my own, as I am flush with the heady excitement of the gigantic raise I got today in the annual salary adjustment thingee. At 4:00, I was chatting with another gentleman of equal-stature, and we were trying to figure out if our raises covered the increased costs of health care for our three dependents each. Neither of us was sure. That in itself is a bad sign.

Update: I looked it up. The answer is YES! The raise does cover the increased health care costs, with money to spare! Not much money, but some. Like, maybe $3/day. Interestingly, that's less money than I make off the advertisements on this blog. You heard that right. Starting this blog is the biggest raise I will get all year. One hour a day of writing down the stories I would normally tell at lunch to fill the dead air between "Uh, so how was your weekend Scotty? Uh, so how was your weekend Brainky? Uh, you got any plans for the weekend Tommy?"

If a Democrat gets elected president, she will allow the tax cuts to expire, and I will have to sell our house. No question about it. I ran the numbers. And that's even taking into account that I'm paying AMT, so I don't even get the full tax cut. Ft. Collins, here we come.

You know, the only real disappointment of the day was lunch. For some reason, there is this bizarre love for a burrito joint called La Bamba up in Mountain View. I don't understand the attraction. Yes, it's cheap, but a) the food is merely passable - nothing special, and b) the seating is stupid. It's basically a take-out place that has a counter glued to the side walls and a bunch of plastic chairs. One of the newspapers described it as "prison room stark". That is an apt description.

The Mrs. informed me today that she is "coming down with something." I replied, "That's better than coming up with something." Then I thought to myself, "Self, that wasn't funny. In fact, that was stupid."

They can't all be winners. But, hey, I'm preaching to the choir on that one, with this audience.

Somewhere in there is a barf joke, but I just can't seem to nail it down. "That's better than having something coming up." Or maybe there's a sex joke. "Do you plan to go down with it?" or "How can you tell? You don't know anything about going down."

Those aren't funny either. At least I had the good sense to stop trying out loud, but it's killing me that now, almost 2 hours later, I still haven't found the right line. Maybe there really isn't anything humorous in it.

Maybe it's just tragic. As in, if The Mrs. gets sick it will mean that I will have to stay home and take care of the childrens. This is the single most horrible thing that can happen to a man. Worse than when you're sitting in the chair, and the doctor cuts you open and pulls some of your insides out and then says in a tiny, high-pitched voice, "Light! Light! We're not supposed to be in the light! Put us back!" And I know, cuz that really happened to me.

The second problem with The Mrs. getting sick is that I will invariably get sick shortly thereafter, before she's completely well. She will then, also invariably, accuse me of getting sick intentionally so that I didn't have to watch the childrens anymore, and then she will parade around all day with the children saying, "Mommies aren't allowed to be sick," whenever I am in earshot in an attempt to goad me into admitting I am a insufferable boor who would fake being sick in order to make his wife get up out of her death bed and watch her childrens.

Now, I'm not disputing that I am insufferable. But I do not fake being sick. It is a lot more restful for me to go to work than it is for me to stay home and try to rest. The only time I stay home is when I am too sick to drive safely, or when I am so sick I will surely infect the entire staff of the lab in which I toil. At work, people are sympathetic, and they never jump on your junk to wake you up. They also never heave a deep sigh and shake their heads every time you make eye contact.

That last one is subject to change given that my new boss, StinkyJ, is relatively devoid of any semblance of a sense of humor.

He does seem to have a soft-spot for off-color lumberjack jokes, though.