You ain't got to be so bad, got to be so cold...

I spent all day in meetings today.

Okay, well I am exaggerating a little; it wasn't *literally* all day, but damn close. I thought I was just going in for a two-hour meeting, and half-considered putting a trap out somewhere hidden at Eviljob and swinging by on my way back, but it is good that I didn't because it was over eight hours later that I headed home in the pouring rain that had been going on for at least an hour or so.

Sigh.

I am currently hoarding on my laptop over 200 MB of journical articles...yes, a whopping majority of which I have read, though I will vehemently deny having read a single god damned one of them for comprehension.

Okay, well maybe a few. I am all conscientious and anal like that.

Butsoanyway.

I like Job II--no, I LOVE Job II. A lot. I am happy, happy, happy...I just have NO time. And I am *so* grateful that Rhett and Cookie are healthy and good cats! They just play and sleep with each other all day, and I will get around to getting them adopted out just as soon as I (1) figure out how in the fuck one does that other than walking up to random people and asking, 'want a kitten?' (2) get their second and third round of those shots--the FVNBCABCCBSCBCNCICAFL/CIONRANWAY2K shots.

Yeah. Those.

and (3)...

I just forgot what (3) was. It'll come back to me, I hope. But I am waiting for it.

But my point is that they are such good little babies, and they have stopped hissing at me, though Rhett hasn't learnt to meow yet, and so the noise he makes is a cross between a hiss and a meow, and sounds like a creaky door hinge slowly opening. He opens his mouth as if he were hissing, and tries to meow--it's funny. Meg and I say that he is saying, 'MAAAAAAAH'. :-) And I have a really funny story about that, but I guess it will have to wait.

Cookie, however, can meow just fine. :-) She is so cute, and she is in LOVE with Squooshable--Mummers says she thinks he hung the moon. :-)

I don't want Rhett and Cookie to be the only lucky ones, but I don't know how I am going to manage to do much else myself. It is completely possible that I may stay this snowed in until December.

Ok; I need to finish reading some stuff that is WAY out of my discipline (and therefore feels as if it is going in one ear and out the other, or one eyeball and out that other, whatever) and then go to sleep. Our group has some new equipment, and it isn't as supported as we'd like it to be from the vendor, and so we are cramming a shitload of prepping into this week for a teleconference with the vendor on Friday. I am fully aware that at this point I have become stultifyingly boring, so in sum tomorrow and Thursday will probably be booked as well. Bwaah!

And I still have no problems with my new co-workers, save one slightly-kooky soon-to-be divorcee (details to follow) and one other person who I think believes that I am trying to take over our specific-interest group (I am avoiding keywords here), but I am not; I couldn't 'take it over' even if I wanted to. I am just so psychotically driven to get things done and put to bed that I don't sit and wait for things to happen like I think a few people have been doing pre-me. I need to eventually give a better explanation of how our group(s) are set up, but the bottom line is that I was brought in for a specific reason, to address a specific purpose, and I'm trying to do my best, 'cos I kinda like the place I am at now. If that ends up looking like I am trying to 'take over', then eh. Whatever.

And I target the 'taking over' thing as the primary possibility because this person has become increasingly begrudging of details and information given to the group, and I've found that when people do that, it is usually an effort to maintain a form of control, to protect their status, and/or to lock others out--so that is why I picked it. Even today, as we were playing with this equipment from the vendor, I said that I didn't understand why it did xyz, and this person replied with the speed of a knee-jerk reflex that I didn't need to understand it, 'cos *they* understood it, and it is *their* job to understand it. O-kay, then.

Now in fairness, I am there to replace a part of their previous function, but what I am replacing is a function for which they were over-assigned and under-qualified. My September ended having submitted a re-do of something they had 'researched completely' (allegedly) which was, and I kid you not, about five pages that essentially boiled down to 'this is so new that there's nothing on it yet'. Ummm...no. And I HATED turning in my reports which contradicted those glorious five pages, but that's what I am here to do. So oh, well. I'm sure that if I had written a 'here's the situation'-type report in *their* field, I would have completely screwed it up and made mistakes and had misunderstandings as well.

And I totally know that I am skimming over all of this, but if I don't address part of it, I will forget later, or too much will happen and everything will change. Who knows--we may be best friends next week. :-) I think another issue is that when I had to leave campus (work-campus, not school-campus) on a materials-hunting expedition, and I didn't take them. Yes, go ahead and gasp--Ancodia committed a social blunder. But I didn't know at the time that it was all that bleeding important to them, and one would think that, being an adult, they could *say* something if it were, but whatever. So that may be a part of it, also.

Okay, and I have to quit analysing the crap out of things now and get stuff done and go to sleep. Argh!

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