Take Me Away From Must All Of This!


This is Friday Entry Number 3. I had an especially harrowing afternoon trying to force the various technologies I work with to agree that I was going out of town and they needed to let other people know. My first hurtle was my voice mail. I don’t know anything about my voice mail apart from retrieving and deleting messages. I inherited that phone when I was moved into my current office, it had been an abandoned line for quite sometime and in the time it was left sitting there, it collected voice mails. A lot of voice mails. Once upon a time I knew how to delete old saved messages, but now I don’t. I’ve had 11 saved messages stuck in voice mail purgatory for two years, Gawd only knows how long they had been there before that, today I listened to the oldest one by accident ( I don’t know how I got there and I don’t think I’ll ever find my way back) “message number one” dates from 2001! . It took me two visits from my supervisor and 6 takes before I finally recorded a message that I was satisfied with. When I get back I may finally update my regular voice mail message to reflect my new supervisors name. She’s been there since February.

My next notification battle was with my email. I am all ready in a heated argument with the email system over wether or not it is going to allow me to add the state proscribed “Confidential Material” sig line. I know how to ad a sig line, I’ve added many a sig line in my day. The email program at work will not allow me to do that. It seems to want things I don’t have despite getting four pages of instructions on how to do it. I did mange to make my email go directly to my supervisors office, which was great until I mailed the daily blog entry to her. Oops. Fortunately, it was blog entry number 2 and mostly consisted of Friday Cat Blogging and a short screed on the evols of any technology that actually deletes things just because you told it to and won’t change its mind no matter how much you plead with it for a do over.

I really need a vacation. Today after I came home from work, mowed the front yard at 5pm in 96 degree heat, did some laundry, fed the dog, did more laundry - I took Dogger back to Dix Campus for a walk. It wasn’t a “walk” as much as it was a “wander”. We went to the huge field and I let Dogger wander at will and off leash. It was nice. I wandered around myself until I found a good place to lay down in the grass. I watched the sky. I really miss big sky. I miss seeing the horizon. Today I got to see both. I lay there in the green grass and listened to a couple of grasshoppers chat with each other and the birds visiting with each other in the trees. It was absolutely still and the grass was soft and the breeze was cool and the sky was clear and blue and big and stretched as far as I could see in all directions and Dogger was grazing near by, standing guard over all of us. Then had to get up, gather the Dogger and go home to take the trash out, gather the recycling, put the wet laundry into the drier and take the dry laundry upstairs, collect most of Doggers stuff in preparation for taking them over to Brosky and Alphagals tomorrow, after work, after I go to the mall... I will still be thinking about the big blue sky and the grasshoppers and the field and the soft grass and the birds and Dogger and the stillness. No matter how fast I’m going or how many things I still need to get done.

You guys be safe while I’m gone. Keep checking back as I will continue to update whenever I can. There will be Cat Blogging! I’ll miss you guys. See you soon.