Alas, poor Chipmunk, I knew him not at all well.

It's been four days since my last entry but life has not been uneventful. For three hours on Thursday and over eight hours on Friday, Alvin and I reinvented our little corner of the world. Again. This is about the fourth time we've been through this since I started working here six months ago.

The process is not without its charms. There's something to be said, after all, for sitting around talking about how things should be done, instead of actually working on anything.

Anyhow. The upshot of this last round of negotiations is that the Chipmunk is out, in spite of previous plans to form a corporation and issue stock and all of those other business-related tasks that marry people of dissimilar abilities into a team intended to produce a product or service that will suck money from the pockets of the unsuspecting public.

The Chipmunk, it was determined, wasn't bringing enough to the table. At the birthday party of life, he was the boy who carried in a grubby twenty-five cent card and explained that he'd meant to go shopping, he'd thought about going shopping, but that there was a game on that day and he never got around to it.

It's all very weird. We'll have to change the name of this company and design a new logo. We'll need new stationary. Business cards. Comb-binder covers.

Alvin is trying to convince Buehler to fund the two of us for 12 months to let us put the new! improved! business plan into action and prove that we can, in fact, make some serious money. To that end, a two-hour meetings has been scheduled for this coming Wednesday. (A meeting, I should add, that I'm supposed to be preparing for at this minute.)

In the divorce, the Chipmunk got the clients set up under the then-existing agreement which makes it a tad embarrassing that the only contact information most of them have is mine. (On the plus side, I can see no reason I would ever have to go back to New Orleans under the new arrangement!)

The biggest kicker, of course, is that we can now no longer blame the Chipmunk for not doing something when business affairs aren't hustling along to our satisfaction. There will be no one to blame but the two of us.

Considering that I spend about six hour surfing and blogging most days, that's a little scary. (I've been looking for that missing work ethic but haven't located the little monster yet. I must have misfiled it the last time I cleaned out the closet.)

And now, just to add to the charm of facing my first five-day work week in quite a while, we're about to go back into the meeting and decide how to implement all of the grandiose plans we made last week.

Honestly, I continue to wonder why I continue to work for such small companies. I mean, sure, you get a lot of flexibility, but I'm beginning to think there's a lot to be said for the kind of job where you're just a cog in a really large wheel.

And since I have to go into a meeting, I don't have time to write about Spike BtVS, which is a pity since I bought Season Two this weekend and got to see the first three or four episodes.