8:45 in the morning and it's 78 degrees? I don't care what anyone says, this is not "normal" weather for Denver. Not even in August.

I have a 2:00 meeting with the "oversight" bookkeeper to discuss her "concerns." If one of her "concerns" is that I don’t do things the way a proper bookkeeper would, she's going to get precious little sympathy from me. I was told that my involvement with the bookkeeping stopped at generating invoices and receiving payments. That that turned out to be a lie doesn't surprise me, but I have no intention of taking on any more responsibility in that area. (For one thing, no one with my numeric dyslexia really should be allowed anywhere near a column of figures, and certainly not a column of figures that a company's financial health depends on.)

DiamondGirl will be in this afternoon as well, so it's likely to be lively around here this afternoon.

It's boring right now. I don't doubt there's something I could/should be doing, but I can't figure out what it might be. There are only seven items on my Tasks list, four of which I can't do anything with until Bernie does his part. The other two consist of sending two e-mails and making one phone call. I'm saving those to keep me awake later today.

Maybe I should have some extra caffeine to fortify me? The daily Starbucks trips are one of the things I gave up to balance out the 20% pay cut, but this one's on someone else, so why not? (Buehler handed me another Starbucks card yesterday. Every so often he strolls by my desk, says something silly and nice, and tosses a $10 Starbucks card at me.)

Later....

In the end, I didn't go to Starbucks. Call it inertia, laziness, or whatever. I stayed here and worked.

Another thing I gave up, of course, were those weekly Amazon.com orders. I've only had two orders from them in the last 3-1/2 months. That's a lot of self-restraint, but with the second of those two orders scheduled to arrive on Monday, I'm feeling more celebratory than deprived. (I should point out that I spent $250 at other bookstores during that 3-1/2 months. Self-restraint only goes so far when it comes to books.)

I was thinking about it because UPSteve was in today and we were talking about what a wasteland this place has become. When I started here, there were ten people plus a couple of part-timers. Now there's just the three of us in the office and I'm frequently here alone.

I don't mind being alone - I tend to be a lot more productive without interruptions, but there's just not enough work to do. And the work there is? Is largely boring.

If it's not calling someone to make sure they got Bernie's fax or his e-mail, it's bookkeeping or, as I said yesterday, calling companies randomly to see if any of them remember making some custom product that's sort of indescribable for us, no, we don't know how long ago it was, five or six years maybe. (Oddly enough, I'm finding it very difficult to get motivated about making that call.)