Thar's a hole int' wall!

My cubicle is in kind of an odd place, a room to the side of the main departmental space. It's formally partitioned off by large windows. Due to the absolutely abyssmal circulatory design, it apparently used to heat up like a sauna, so they cut all the panes down. Now we have six-foot windows with less than two feet of glass in them, so aurally I'm not isolated at all (to my neverending disappointment). There are no outlets on the wall below the windows, so when my predecessors needed more electrical and data connexions, they just punched a hole through the wall and ran lines.

For reasons hopeless obscure to me, it was recently decided that this decade(s)-old solution is Not Good. Today, someone came to replace the hole with a box, meaning I had to clear off a table to allow access. I needed that push; some items literally had been there for years. One was an unnumbered multivolume set that I knew was going to cause consternation and it has: I had a tense conversation with my boss in which I told her in no uncertain terms that I was not going to violate national standards just to make her feel more comfortable. She'll get back to me.

I asked how long I had to keep the table clear and was told until the facilities manager came to patch up the hole. I had to laugh; saying "until Dave takes care of it" is the local equivalent of "until the USA goes metric". For over a year, one of our cubicles was abandoned because the roof above it leaked. Some workman had shoved a sheet of plastic into the suspended ceiling to stop the water, but the next time it rained, the plastic just ballooned out and filled with runoff. For months, we had a basketball-sized bag of foetid water hanging over a desk and my boss could get nothing done about it. After much nagging, Dave promised to take care of it by a certain date; he came in when she wasn't around and shoved the bag out of sight above the ceiling tiles.

I figure I'm looking at a year or more. The discipline of having less room to sprawl will be good for me.

Wintry mix

Today would be an excellent day to be at home. This morning, there was a blustry wind from the north that was predicted to blow all the warm air away. Plus, it's started raining. If the mercury sinks enough, we may get what's quasi-euphemistically called "wintry mix", i.e. some blend of rain, snow, and sleet. Good thing I mink oiled my new boots last night and wore them to work today! I also pulled my winter coat out of the back of the closet.

monshu is home, damn him! He took the day off to cook and bake for tomorrow. His cozy little apartment probably smells fantastic right now. He's taken care of everything else and my job is to find, gut, and cook a pumpkin for him to fill a pie shell with. My mind has already gone on vacation; work has become a slog today.

If it's not a pretty day to be on the street, it's a truly gruesome day to be travelling. My heart goes out to e. and bunj and anyone else who'll be on the road or in the air today. My decision to put my foot down years ago and tell everyone I was no longer interested in leaving town for Thanksgiving seems more justifiable than ever.

Thanksgiving update #1: Pumpkin madness!

Just got finished stowing away the pureed innards of three "pie pumpkings". Two cups or so in the fridge are for tomorrow's pie, the rest is frozen for soup to be made at a later date. The very genial and helpful man at Safeminicks told me that he was told to throw out all the big pumpkins leftover from Halloween, despite his protests that the people around here "love to make soup" out of them. monshu and I also shared the first clementine of the season and it's quite nice, if not as sweet and flavourful as they can be at their best. Outside, the snow is sticking even on the boulevards. When I left work, it was wet and icy and mixed with rain, but even then it was clinging to dry leaves, cars, and other things colder than the ground. It'll probably be gone by midday tomorrow, washed away by the cold rain, but right now it's looking prettier than it ever will again this winter.