Getting off of the elevator a few moments ago, I just happened to look down and what did I see? An abandoned sunflower seed laying in the floor.  Combine that with the news of a curiously uninteresting bank robbery in the building earlier today and the freakily coincidental rumor that a "crime lab" was tossed at almost the exact same time a mere 20 or so miles away and you get...darned little.

 
I'm sorry I'm so boring.

I thought that one was going to go somewhere, but it didn't.

Would you like to hear how I took myself a mini vacation earlier this week

Well, I did. took myself (lots of tooking going on...maybe I'm morphing into a hobbit?) to the mountains for a couple of days of R&R (that's "Relaxing and Reading" in Anne's World). 
 
I meant to stay for three days (I'd taken three days off work) but since I was staying in the frenetic, low-stakes gambling mecca of Blackhawk (you can't beat a $49 room rate), by the second day I was deciding that it was all just too LOUD and I came home.  (A decision I regretted the instant I stepped off the bus into the 100+ heat of Denver.)
 

I didn't sleep well while I was gone (I never sleep well the first night in a new bed) and I didn't sleep well the first couple of nights after I got back (first night it was hothothot and second night was a combination of dog barking and backache) so all in all it's a good thing I wasn't thinking of "resting" as a major component of the week.
 
Work...remains worklike.  The new phone/internet system is functional almost all of the time now.  The largest remaining problems are, (1) the toll-free lines haven't been ported over to the new system yet and clients are bitching about having to pay for the calls they make to us; and (2) my access.
 
(1) is my fault.  I got a call about it last week but I didn't get around to dealing with it until today.
 
(2) is not my fault. My laptop, after slapping me with the Blue Screen of Death two or three times a day for the last month, finally bit the dust. (A combination of karma, cursing, and quick thinking enabled me to salvage my files, none of which had been backed up, so it's not the disaster it might have been.) I stole a PC from the desk of the bookkeeper (she's almost never here) and for some reason, it seems to loathe and abominate the new internet system.  (Either that or there's some perfectly sensible technical problem that I just don't understand, but that's not really likely, is it?  A ghost in the machine is far more probable.)  I get about 30 seconds of internet access, followed by 2-3 minutes of hanging and timeouts.

 
The Three Stooges are, naturally, AWOL while all of this is going on. It was supposed to be handled while I was out of town, but it wasn't.  Color me surprised. (It's a sort of mango-pink frost.)  No sign of them yesterday or today, so I finally filed a complaint with Buehler and he's going to smack them around for me.
 
I finally caved in and assigned the voicemail on an unused phone to Extension 17.  He still doesn't have a phone at his desk but at least he has a direct-dial number he can give the 20 friends and family members who call him every day.  That saves me the 40-45 minutes a day I used to have to spend taking messages for him. (This morning, before he got here, someone called and I said he wasn't here yet and that I could NOT take a message unless it was an emergency and they told me the message they wanted to give him anyhow.  I was that far from just ignoring it but I finally wrote it down and left it for him.)

 
Isn't it nice how I managed to solve that problem right at the moment I have the most spare time to actually take messages...since I can't do the part of my job that requires internet access?  Very nice.  Hmph.
 
Keyless Joe continues to show up, sans keys, about once a week, but I'm making a strong attempt not to be cranky about it.  After all, the poor man is having to move to Pittsburgh. That's enough punishment for anyone.

 
Buehler seems to be suffering from a summer cold.  He's been here for about four hours, and he's been bitching constantly about how he wants to go home.  He's the boss.  Why doesn't he just leave?  (A work ethic is a terrible thing.)
 
I haven't really thought much about Mulder recently but in those casual moments when he and Walter cross my mind, I'm sort of relieved to realize that my Carter-inspired bile is subsiding.  Still no sign of a renewed interest in reading or writing fanfic, though.