four things

thing 1: my annual review is coming up in the next few weeks. usually these don't faze me so much; i'm decent at my job and i tend to not get into trouble. the complication is, because i work at home nowadays, my supervisor might well want to perform the review on these here premises. of this i am fearful. we're not used to visitors and there is (i'm sure, though i'm used to it) a lingering nasty dog/cat smell, especially given max's tendency toward incontinence of bowel and bladder. plus of course there are partially full (and partially empty) boxes upstairs, remaining from when we moved into this house a year and a half ago. there are fully empty boxes as well, waiting long months for there to be room in our recycling bin for disposal. items of variable value (boxes, documents, trash, pens, clothing) are deposited on our dining table and remain there for months on end. needless to say there is work to be done.

i can understand the need for my supervisor to check out my work area and make sure i'm complying with all the legal issues surrounding health information. but i've been working from home since august and no one's bothered to visit thus far.

thing 1.5: the other day i had a surprise visitor and had little choice but to grant him entry. there's a little something in the medical transcription universe called speech recognition. i won't delve into the details of that but say only that the speech recognition software had not been working on my particular computer for the last six or seven months. the telephone rang early monday afternoon but it is my practice not to answer the phone during work hours (or other hours). and our doorbell is only occasionally functional. i was alerted to this visitor's presence by the barking of our dogs. i ventured downstairs and there was a man at my door, telling me he was from the speech recognition company (to make a long story short) and he was here to tinker with my machine.

fortunately i'd swept the bunny-sized dust bunnies from most corners of the house over the weekend. as i say, we're not much in the way of housekeepers but sometimes enough is enough. last weekend was enough and i'm glad of that, because having swept somewhat lessened the humiliation of having someone see how we really live. he was quite pleasant (his name is steve) and said nothing untoward. he worked on my computer for a short while, and the next day my speech recognition was working!

all the same, i'm going to try to have the review take place in the office rather than here. we'll see.

thing 2: i'm not such an avid frequenter of youtube but sometimes i tune in to this los angeles woman's video blog. here's her latest missive; check it out. i like it quite a bit, though i can't get behind the canceled-television-show post title (though, sure, i like claire danes as much as the next fellow). lucy is beautiful and she looks so sad here.

thing 3: kara and i have been granted admission to the star island all star 2 conference the week of july 7th to 14th. normally i would be overjoyed at the news but we have the max situation. he is rickety at best, but holding on. if he is alive we are not going on vacation and we are not going to kill him in order to go on vacation. if we tell the good people at star island by the end of may that we're not coming then we get some of our money back. i think the deadline is may 26, a month from tomorrow. if we tell them before the deadline that we won't be coming, max will die on or about the 27th of may. isn't that the way it goes? i'm not sure what we're going to do.

thing 4: tonight is the third meeting of the drawing class i'm taking at the community college. i am at this point disenchanted. i'm no good at shading as of yet and i had trouble bringing myself to practice this past week. the class is fine but perhaps not quite as fun as i was hoping. but i'm not giving up; i'm going tonight. i'm trying to maintain an open mind.