Mentally done with work for the day

While I was gone, Margo decided that the arrangement of the shelves in my "space" was "just not right," so she took away half of my shelves, and put in some little cabinet, which I would never use unless I was hiding something, right in front of the shelves that I still do have. Why you would move someone's office furniture around while they were gone will be eternally beyond me.

I will be spending the next hour deciding whether I should buy into the patent-leather-shoes trend, and if so, whether I should get flats or pumps or both. Any input would be appreciated.

I'll give an update on Paris and the Homeland Security fiasco, including my terrorist doppelganger in Richmond, VA, when I get home.

The clock in my car is finally right!

Re: My pretty office

And no... this cannot wait, even though I'll be out of the office all next week. It has to be done today. She has now recruited other people, who apparently have no work to do, either, to help move shelves and fake palms and screens around.

After it was all finished, Patsy came over to exclaim over how much better my "space" looked, how much more room I had... I mean this is not my bedroom. I don't need more light from some ugly tiny little 15-watt lamp, I don't need "more privacy" from another fake plant, I don't need a 3-by-3-inch rattan basket for "more storage space." Just leave me alone and let me do work already. I think they are all a little disconcerted because, as you probably know, I'm not very good at expressing excitement when I do feel it, let alone when I don't, so it's really hard for me to be super-psyched about taking an hour out of my day to put in one shelf.

On a more exciting note, I'm meeting someone from Craigslist this afternoon to buy a copy of Microsoft Office 2007, I guess Microsoft had some kind of launch event and gave out free copies, and this person is selling his for less than half of the retail price. I guess people are selling these launch copies for so little is because there's no hard-copy of the CDs or the documentation, it's just the product key, so you have to download the actual application online, which I already did to use the free 60-day trial. Which means that if no one hears from me for a few days, I've been kidnapped. But we are meeting in a nice public place in the middle of the day.

Ugh and then Patsy just came over to say "Hahahaha, it's hard to keep stuff off the floor, huh?" because I haven't had time to put all the stuff back on the shelves from when I had to take everything off to move them because I have work to do. Which I told her. GO DO SOME WORK. God.

My pretty office

So they moved my desk a couple of weeks ago. I was in this side room, basically the entire office was in one section, and then four people, including me, were in this other room. Which at first I hated, but the women who were in that room were pretty nice, and I sat right in a small room with them so I could talk to them.

Then they decided to move me. It was allegedly so that I would be closer to my two attorneys, but I really feel like there was some other weird reason, like maybe the woman who was sitting where I sit now, they wanted her to be somewhere else. I just know that they really were pushing me to like my new desk. So anyway the new desk is like, they basically made an office out of a space in the hallway, and then put up a screen, like a wooden folding screen, and a tall fake plant to create "privacy." So everyone else around me is in offices, real offices with doors, and I'm in the hallway. Every time someone walks by, I hear it, every time people stand out in the hallway talking, I hear it. But, there's no one around me, if I wanted to like, look at another human being's face. And everyone I talk to is like, "Sooooo, how are you liking your new space? Is it more quiet?" My supervisor, Patsy, asked me that, and I was like, "Well I like it, I have more room, but no, it's really not more quiet at all, I can hear everyone walking by and talking all around me." I don't understand why everyone thinks this would be more quiet, it's really odd.

Then yesterday I find out that this other paralegal used to work at this desk, but there was no screen or plant, she was just at a desk in the middle of the hallway, and her attorney didn't like it, so her attorney bought the screen and plant with her own money. Now this woman, Margo (who's apparently the office like, interior decorator because she spends all day moving fake plants around), comes over today and is like, you know I'm thinking of giving you more shelves because it looks like you don't have enough room, you're keeping files on the floor. Which is true, I have piles of files on the floor, but they're files that the attorneys bring in for me or whatever, it's just easier. So I said, yeah but it's not a problem, it works for me. Well, apparently the attorney who "designed" this area is "really funny" about it and needs it to look nice, and files on the floor make it look not-nice, so they're going to disrupt my day to bring in more shelves, that I don't need, and won't be able to access because the way they are going to move the shelves will put the majority of them behind my desk. But it'll look prettier I guess, so it's all worth it. This is the same woman who on my first day occupied an hour and half moving the shelves in my cubicle around so that you wouldn't be able to see the electrical outlet because it was "so ugly." Don't these people have to work to do???

I'm famous!!

I googled my blog, and someone linked to it! And it was a news source that reports on an issue dear to my heart: Bird Flu Breaking News. See that, it says "the Best Bird Flu Blogs." I am officially one of The Best Bird Flu Blogs. I think I need an awards section.

P.S. - I just discovered how to post to my blog from email. Meaning I will be posting all day long from work.

I'm back, and it's important: Dead Birds.

So maybe you've heard about these dead birds they found on the street in Austin, the ones that turned my fifteen- minute morning commute into an hour-and-fifteen-minute iron-clad-excuse-to-be-late- to-work. Well they've pretty much ruled out bird flu, or at least they're claiming to. But I want to know, does anyone think I can somehow like, whip the mob up into a frenzy and get Austin to ban fowl kept as livestock inside the city, namely the rooster next door? I mean it's kind of barbaric in this day and age to have livestock, filthy birds, in an urban area. We are living right on top of each other, and I can smell their chicken coop (can salmonella be air-borne?). I feel like I could start some kind of fear-mongering campaign. I mean it's really pretty archaic that people should be allowed to have these birds. Any thoughts?

We're In!!!!

Okay so much happened yesterday. We went to this street fair thing, like some kind of arts & crafts festival that they roped off 6th Street for. There were lots of stalls with different crafts and things like that. There was a petting zoo, with lots of goats, but they also had a baby kangaroo in there that I felt sooo bad for, because it was obviously completely terrified of all these little kids, and it was all alone, and the other goats were mean to it and would try to butt it. It alternated between trying to escape every time someone came in and cowering in the corner. It was pretty cruel to have it in there, I thought.

We had checked out of the hostel so we just had to drive around all day, trying to find things to do and places to be until 12:01 when we could move in. We went to Book People (which is downtown), and then to Barnes & Noble (which is far away) until they closed, and then we drove back into town at 11pm. We drove around downtown for half an hour, and then headed over to our house. There's a keybox on the gate, which is basically like a padlock with a combination that can hold a key, usually they put it on for realtors to use. Since we didn't want to wait until Monday for them to change the locks and give us keys, Andrea called Eric today and he gave us the combination for the box so we could get in. Well, he gave us THE WRONG F-ING COMBINATION. Honestly. So we are standing there in the middle of the night, with the little keychain light thing that Daddy gave me, trying to figure out how to open this box, hoping that we just didn't understand it, trying to give Eric the benefit of the doubt, that he wasn't that retarded. But he is. So we just decided to call a locksmith.

While we were standing around outside waiting for the locksmith to come, one of our neighbors, Will, came home, with his girlfriend Lauren. They're from Beaumont, which I guess is near Houston, they've been dating since they were in highschool (aw). They stood outside for a while talking to us about Austin and New York (Will and Lauren are huge Seinfeld fans and asked if I knew where their diner was). And then when I was starting to feel awkward because we had been keeping them outside for a while, Will invited us inside to wait for the locksmith, because "we're neighbors now." Sooo nice. The inside of their house is all covered in Longhorns (the UT football team) and drinking paraphernalia. There's a shelf that runs along the top of their kitchen cabinets where they arranged all these beer bottles in rows. Oh college. We watched South Park and talked more about what goes on in Austin, apparently Halloween is a huge deal here so I'm pretty excited for that.

Finally the locksmith came, so we said good night and went over with him to the door. The locksmith said he was from New York, although he had an accent so was from somewhere else originally. He was really friendly, in a good way, and we were talking a lot while he was opening the door, and then he mentioned that his name was Levi like, Bronstein or something and he was Israeli. What are the odds of having an Israeli locksmith in Texas. Then we talked about how there were no good bagels in Austin and how they don't have scallion cream cheese, and he said New York was great because there was a big Jewish population there and there were Hebrew newspapers etc, so then Andrea said Yeah, she's Jewish, pointing to me, so he said Oh! Well then you know all about it. And when Andrea asked how he'd learned to pick locks, he said Oh well she can tell you, you know Israelis, we just need to look at something once and we can figure it out. Yes, that's exactly what my family has told me about Israelis. He was really nice, though, and really funny, kind of hyped-up, definitely another Character, and he gave us his phone number in case we ever needed anything. Speaking of phone numbers, Will, our neighbor, also came over with his phone number while the locksmith was there, in case we ever needed "to borrow a cup of sugar." So, now we have a house.