It's hot and it's Friday afternoon and I'd rather be at home and so I'm going to be boring.

This week I am practicing "talking to strangers." I don't know why. It just turned out to be the week for it. It's sort of an experiment in elevators thing. Whenever I get on the elevator and one other person is there, I strike up a conversation.

Today I met a woman who seemed to assume I knew who "he" was and what kind of "race" he was entered in and that she was somehow involved with "the parade" (St Patricks?) tomorrow.

Another woman confided to me all of the trouble her office has with the Problem Employee that no one can stand but whom management won't fire.

A man confided in my about how he fell down some steps at a wedding and now has permanent back problems and he is going to sue some city because he's not the first person who has fallen down those steps which appeared to have been located in a park or something.

I'm doing pretty well at "talking to strangers" but I wish I were meeting more interesting strangers, you know?

The JimByrnes-lookalike guy still doesn't speak to me. He shoots me sharp, suspicious looks when we meet. That's probably because back when I was first working here, I used to walk the stairs up to the third floor, then ride the rest of the way up. (I'm working on my butt, okay?) He got freaky when I always seemed to be on his floor. I'm starting to think that he's up to something, but I hope not because his compatriot/girlfriend/wife/whatever, Gillian, is charming. Jim-n-Gillian are almost always seen together and they make a cute couple.

I'm rethinking the language thing, though. Originally I thought they were speaking Russian or some Slavic language, but 90 percent of the visitors to their suite seem to be Mexican. And yet, I know Mexican when I hear it, and J-n-G aren't speaking Mexican. It's all very puzzling.

One good thing that came out of my upgrade to Blogger Pro is that I can now write blog entries in the evenings and "delay post" them until the next day. That's been a fabulous asset on my other blog. (I write there a lot more compulsively, but less interestingly, than I do here.) Sometimes I write three or four posts and "time-shift" them into the next morning so that they publish half an hour or an hour apart.

There's a certain surrealism about it that's hard to explain, but it's a joyful surrealism.

(I did write to the blogger people and demanded to know why the software had eaten my post and replaced with with an insult about me having a "big body". They didn't respond to the latter but have assured me that they're working on the former and that the post itself is honestly not gone, just not displaying. Hmph.)

As for this blog, well, I know I haven't written much recently, but I dedicated myself to spending a few hours each day this week working for the company. That and not having gotten around to watching any of my accumulated Spike BtVS episodes last weekend left me short of both time and material.

I'm going off Spike. I'm not sure why. I didn't have any inherent dislike for the idea of him falling in love with Buffy, but the few first-run episodes I've seen this year have shown that the character has been reduced to mooning around and looking wistful. Borrrring.

I understand that TVShowsOnDVD, or whatever the name of the site is, is collecting "votes" for whether or not The Sentinel should be brought out on DVD. I went ahead and voted for it. We'd likely buy it even though it's really not a very good show and the last time we tried to re-watch the tapes we have, we realized that we were skipping easily half the episodes.

Dum deed dum dum.

I really don't have anything to say. It's just that the last time I didn't post anything for five days, I got a stern note from a friend telling me that I was slacking.

So, here you go. I wrote.

And now that I've written, I'm going to go read my brochure on "how to create good newsletters and brochures" and try to keep from falling asleep. (And, just for kicks, I'm going to time-shift this post so that it doesn't show up for five minutes. Because, yes, I'm easily amused and because there's something about the process that I find oddly fascinating. I used to work for a company that was constantly insisting that, in our products, we didn't use "technology for technology's sake" and I never understood why they thought that was a virtue.)