Please Hold All Your Questions Until the End of the Tour
Monday, Sept. 01, 2008 at 8:17 a.m.
Hi kids, Happy Labor Day! I’m currently at work (of course) but I’m listening to a documentary of the Salem Witch Trials on Netflix while I’m typing this entry. Actually, I should take a picture of my desk to show you just how I’m so set up here:
Check that out, huh? I use the laptop as my desktop, but I’m able to have two monitors, then. I can watch (sort of) a movie on the laptop but still do work on the big monitor. God, it’s just the shiz-nit. And I’m getting paid for this. Now, let’s do a tour of this corner of my desk. The Dilbert™ cartoon (which is of course, compulsory in all offices) has the Pointy-Haired Boss saying “Don’t feel bad if you only got a 3% raise; I got 2% myself.” In the next panel, Alice questions, “Can we fell bad that 2% of your pay is bigger than 3% of our pay?” In the last panel, the Pointy-Haired Boss replies, “Don’t get all mathy on me.” This was a gift from the Hubster and his desk calendar the day after I had my performance review and got a – you guessed it – a 3% raise.
Below my monitor are an obligatory Happy Buddha and a stack of sticky notes, as well as a sticky note on my monitor that reads “Pay Attention!” – something I have difficulty doing when I’m typing a diary entry while listening to a documentary. *grin*
On the cube wall above my monitor is a cartoon that shows a person behind a desk and another person who appears to be on fire. The caption reads, “If you ask a question that the Help Desk thinks is dumb, we will set you on fire.” Next to that is a magazine cover with a picture of Hugh Laurie as House . . . Now, I have been in lurve with Hugh Laurie since I was 15 years old. That’s 22 years. He’s mine, I tell you. Mine. Back off. Below this clipping are two buttons, one which reads “Don’t Panic!” and another which reads “Whining” with a big red bar going through it. The “Don’t Panic!” button is an artifact from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy computer game from . . . oh gads, who did those? You know, Zork and all those text-based games where you get eaten by a grue?
Then there’s a cartoon about eating too many sunflower seeds (which I used to do before Weight Watchers, but I don’t want to just throw the thing away) and a wedding picture and a snapshot of my best friend’s daughter.
Also, the obligatory big cup of Diet Coke™, the tissue box, the little paper clip dispenser, and if you look close you can see a pair of knitting needles poking out of the pen cup. They’re a size 7, which is the best for knitting dishcloths. However, I don’t have any dishcloth yarn in the desk right now. I’m currently working on socks. More on that later.
The little pillow, of course, is to prevent me from breaking my own nose when I die of boredom and my head goes crashing onto my desk. No. I lie. That’s the pillow for my arm when I’m using the mouse. I’ve had that pillow since I got my first car at 17 (twenty years!) and I needed a pillow for my left arm on the door handle. It was hurting my elbow.
Man, 20 years. I should probably wash that thing.
So that’s one corner of my little cubicle. Wasn’t that fun?
The socks I mentioned earlier are the Jaywalking Toe-Up Socks I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks:
Can you see why they’re calling “jaywalking” socks? Don’t they look like a zebra crossing? Anyway, I had worked on these for a few hours yesterday, turning the heel, but then I had to rip back everything I had done because the foot wasn’t quite long enough. And if there’s anything I hate, it’s socks that are too short in the foot. Oh well, each sock is a learning experience. Someday, I hope to aspire to the Swedes and their knitting practices. If you read a Swedish knitting pattern, it just says, “Make a heel.”
That’s it. No explanation, no breakdown of rows in the heel, just “make a heel.” “Make a toe.”
Someday, God As My Witness! I will be a Knitter!