Today is my loooooong day. Not in hours, so much. To be honest. I work much longer hours when I work from home. But today is the day I have to stay at work until 5:00. This is pretty stupid, as it means I don’t bother coming in until 8:30 and I then make sure I take time to run out to the grocery store to buy food (and by food, I mostly mean beer, though I may toss a few other things in my basket so as not to appear to be an alcoholic to the bored kid at the register who couldn’t care less and only asks for ID in order to be polite). It’s not bad this time of year because the beer food stays cold in my trunk, but come summer I have to bring fake ice for my thermal bags. Maybe I should stick a couple coolers in there (though I really need to clean my trunk out, because I cleaned my car out a couple weeks ago by tossing all the shit in the car into the trunk.

Yesterday was somewhat exciting. I went to let Fritzi in, and noticed that the other two dogs (I still think of them as puppies, but they’re over a year old so I guess they’re all growed up now) were nowhere in sight. Turns out, there was a hole where the crappy wooden snow fence was busted up, and they skedaddled into the woods. This is kind of a bummer because they don’t typically wear their collars (because Bud take them off either himself or his sister and then proceeds to chew them into tiny little pieces).

Peggy heard me whistling and cam running back in through the hole in the fence, but Bud was nowhere to be seen. So I had to go out into the woods (which sucked because it was about 38 degrees and raining), where he was still nowhere to be found. After much whistling and pondering over which direction I should try heading off to next, he finally came bounding through the snow and came back inside with me. Then I had to go fix the hole in the fence and walk the perimeter looking for more escape points. As soon as I let them out again, they bounded for where the hole was, saddened that it was a no longer viable egress.

For now, things seem secure, but of course I now feel compelled to stand around looking at them all the while they’re out.

Otherwise, there isn’t much of interest going on. That Bladerunner dude is still insisting that he thought his girlfriend was a burglar. Far be it for me to judge somebody else, but when you live with another person and you hear someone in the bathroom in the middle of the night, do you really automatically assume it’s a burglar?

Not at my age.

If somebody took a shot at me every time I went to the can at night, my bathroom would riddled with bullet holes. I’d risk getting blasted about ten times a night.

At the very least, you think maybe – even if you felt compelled to grab your firearm – you’d say, “oh, honey…. I have my .38 trained at the bathroom door. If that’s you in there, please say something, or at the count of three, I start blasting. One..two….”

Our union has reached a tentative 5-yr contract agreement with the State and, as predicted, we’re getting screwed. Health insurance premiums up 6%, a furlough amounting to a 2% pay cut over the next two years, no increases for the past two years when we were working without a contract, basically diddly-squat this year, and 2% raises over the final two years.

Could have been worse, I suppose, but the increase in insurance premiums combined with the furlough and the previous 2% increase in the payroll tax is all kind of difficult to deal with all at once (it’s not like any other prices – or taxes – are going down). Could be time to cut the satellite TV service off when my two years are up in April. I’ll miss SU games on ESPN, but, well, whattya gonna do?

Oh well, time to get back to work while I still have a job, I guess.