Color me so surprised...the IT guys said they'd upgrade my PC to Windows XP while I was out yesterday and they actually did it! I can't remember the last time an IT thing happened on schedule.

Granted, there are a few small weirdnesses. For some reason, the icons on the Quickstart taskbar are all messed up. Excel has the icon for Hell's Own Software. Word has the icon for PSP. IE has the icon for Desktop Explorer, Desktop Explorer has the icon for Excel, and "show desktop" has the icon for Microsoft Access, which I don't think is even loaded on this computer. No doubt I'll get used to it.

(It's also likely to cause me much amusement on those rare occasions other people try to use my computer. Between that and the fact that I've typed so much I've worn the letters off some of the keys....) (People always marvel that you can find the letter 'e' even if you've worn off the label. You'd think that the advent of the internet would encourage the spread of touch-typing, wouldn't you?)

Lemme see...what else? On my Unpaid Day Off, I did very little. I mean, after oversleeping and being late for my 8:30 a.m. training session, the day was kind of disorganized. I read. Stared at my story file and realized I need to watch still more episodes. Ate some yogurt. Read some more. Made my bed. Read a different book for a while. Ate more yogurt. Bathed.

I'm not quite certain how I managed to spend an entire day at those things (well, besides the reading), but I did. Eventually I had to start pulling myself together to go meet with Coco. I hadn't seen her in months, so it was good to get to spend a couple of hours yattering with her.

She's been having any number of chaotic adventures since we last met (which explains why I hadn't heard from her) from her husband having a car accident while on safari in Africa (and being airlifted to a hospital in another city, leaving her 12 year-old daughter alone at the resort) to buying a new house.

She offered to hire me again. Sigh. I don't know what to do. I'd like to be loyal to Buehler who, I know, would like me to be here when things start to break again, but I'm so bored. And I'm a bit worried about the future. I mean...what if things don't start to break?

I have a certain liking for a job where my boss travels a lot, and I pretty much come and go as I want. And Buehler did start a 401k and he's making a couple of percentage points of matching contributions for both me and Sassy, which is a pretty impressive commitment from a company that only employs five people.

But I love working with Coco and it would be a very interesting project. It would be something I've never done before, which is both exciting and scary. And I'd be working from home 3-4 days a week.

I'm not sure if that's a plus or a minus, you know? I've worked from home before. In some ways, it's very stullifying. I'm not the world's most social person, but sitting alone in my apartment all day isn't stimulating, even if I am working. (I do work when I'm 'working from home' though. My worth ethic isn't that sad. In fact, that's another part of the problem. I have trouble stopping. The last time I worked from home, I found myself working at 9:00 at night a lot of the time, just because unfinished projects preyed on my nerves. There's an advantage in being able to stand up at 5:00 and leave your work behind.)

On the plus side, I'd save an hour a day or more, not having to make my current commute. I'd save on clothes, gasoline, wear-and-tear on my car, and the money I currently spend eating out for lunch three times a week. (I wouldn't save on coffee. I do live across the street from a Starbucks, so I wouldn't have to give that up.)

Working from home is very Green, which I like.

On the minus side, the R.C. doesn't like the idea. I don't blame her. On those occasions she takes a day off, she really doesn't want me underfoot constantly, even if I am in the other room, working. If we had a larger place, like a townhouse, where we were more spread out, it might not be so much of a problem.

But, enough of that, since I'm aware that it's of real interest to almost no one but myself.

I practiced my sketching some more last night. I got bored with rectangles and cones and moved on to heads. I'm appalling at profile. The shapes of the heads are never right.

The R.C. is mystified as to why I started with cartoons, although I have two exceptionally good reasons for having done so.

#1 - That's the drawing book that was on sale. The other one I wanted, the non-cartoon one, was $55. This one was $6.

#2 - You have to learn to draw the shapes of things. The advantage of cartoons is that they're mostly line. You have to master these lines before you can draw anything more ambitious, so why not just focus on them?

A third reason is that my efforts look like cartoons anyhow. This way I can pretend it's on purpose.

From my perspective, this is a good hobby. All I need is a pencil, a piece of paper, and my $6 book and I can sit quietly, peacefully in a corner, amusing myself for hours. For some inexplicable reason, it bothers the R.C. She's asked me about ten times why I'm doing it. (And I'm thinking...like any of my other hobbies have ever had a point to them? When I spent three months obsessively solving logic puzzles, was that somehow a more sensible hobby?)

Anyhow, it's very interesting since, as I've said before, I'm not really a "visual" person. I find myself studying trees as I drive to work. Looking at traffic lights. Watching the way people move when they walk down the street. I almost never really look at things. Now I'm having to look.

Gives me something to do during my commute.

So...what else? I've gone off the whole MYSA-AS thing a bit. I finally read the rest of the "Gravit___n" series and realized that the author/artist went completely batshit-crazy for several books in the middle of the series. Not only did the drawing get worse in every book, the story changed out of recognition. I knew it was going to get stupid when the author/artist brought in the giant flying panda that seemed equipped to start WWIII but it got worse than I'd anticipated. (I wondered several times if those books were even being drawn/written by the same person.)

Plus which, I have to say I was appalled at how the 'hero' seemed to be getting younger and younger. In the first book, he was almost as tall as the love interest character, and not much shorter than his best friend, and they were both 17/18ish. As the series went on, he got shorter and somehow younger, until most of the drawings made him look ten years old. Kinda' squicky.

The final volume was a reasonably satisfying wind-up to the main story arc. It's a pity that the mood of the story had been destroyed by those intervening volumes of batshit-craziness. That series started out as something very promising.

(Awww.... Moe came in and looked at my XP and fixed the icon-weirdness. I was kind of enjoying it.)

You see? I need a new job, don't I? I just sat down to kill a little time this morning and I've already written two pages full of absolutely nothing.

Of all the times for me to burn out on politi-blogging.... Tomorrow, Buehler is out of town. I'm bringing my story file.