duck-shaped pain

Our Enormously Important Project (that cannot be named) is starting tomorrow at work, which is an incredible relief to me. I've been in charge, more or less, of doing a lot of the advance work for the project � buying and evaluating equipment, assembling endless identical charts and graphs, things like that. Today was the deadline to get the documentation I've been working on done. I'm fairly proud of it � it's comprehensive yet concise, and packs a lot into its mere three pages (the goal was two, and that just wasn't going to work). So I show it to my employer and he looks though it and gives me a look like, this took three weeks to do? Well, yeah. He should see the first one I did, the one I cobbled together in an hour. Then he would be overflowing with appreciation and might let me off the hook for not loading the dishwasher properly. [1]

I scratched something off of my lifetime Things I've Never Done Before list today. It's not something thrilling, like ski-jumping or eating raw ground beef or buying clothes without trying them on. It's something banal in the extreme, yet it made me pretty cheerful: I had my first can of tomato soup today. Don't ask me how I've schlepped out of eating canned tomato soup before today, I just have. It's never crossed my mind to have any before. But this morning I was running late and needed to take something in to eat for lunch (even though soup dirties up a bowl and the can opener and a spoon, which is cause for execution or worse these days) and there was a can sitting there in the cupboard. So I took it and I ate it and I'm pleased to report that I have a new favorite canned soup. Not like there was a lot of competition, but it and Vegetarian Vegetable might be duking it out more in the future.

Shill Xmas-related plug: some people who read this know me or are related to me in real life. Some of said people have asked me what I want for the holidays. So, in the public interest, I present to you: my wish list. Enjoy.

[1] We have a dishwasher policy at work. Since we work out of my employer's house, he lets us use his dishes, under the agreement that we will wash them and put them in the dishwasher after we're done with them. This is not a problem. The problem is that these people are so anal about their dishwasher. Every individual dish in their house has its own special assigned place in their dishwasher, and absentmindedly sticking one in the incorrect spot earns you a lecture and possible suspension of dish privileges. We're being officially "encouraged" now to just bring in all our own utensils � which wouldn't be so bad if we actually had a place to store them. Wait, that would require us to have our own desks or something like that. Which might lead to us having to get our own computers, so that we can all work at our own desks. Which would be a tragedy in the extreme, as you can see�. My bare-bones requirement for my next job is to have a desk of my own. And health insurance. And to not have to pay self-employment tax because someone doesn't want to pay payroll taxes. I don't ask for much.

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