Today was one of those vaguely surreal days at work. It started with my coworker Andrea calling me at 6:15 am as I was fumbling around, getting into my car with my work stuff. Andrea was already at work, but alas, she’d arrived there with a large nail in her tire. So I picked her up at the tire place on my way in.

Then at 8:30 my boss stops by and asks if I can follow him to the Volvo dealer so he can drop off his car for a 7:30 am oil change (time delay due to his excessively cryptic Outlook reminder taking over an hour for him to decipher – note to self re: making clear Outlook reminders for personal events). Okey dokey. At least it was all breaking up the day more than usual.

Sidenote: Altho I live in an urban area of the Twin Cities (Uptown Minneapolis), I work in a very suburban area – here’s a picture from the elevator lobby on my floor. Yup, it was as cold as it looks – I think maybe 15F at the time of the picture.

In the middle of the day, I rebooted my computer, and in retaliation my computer refused to acknowledge the perfectly functioning keyboard attached to it. That took LAN Support about 45 minutes of goofing around with three other keyboards, and resulted in my 2nd new keyboard in two weeks (the original keyboard having died in a tragic early morning mocha accident). While LAN Support was puzzling over my persnickety computer, I took the opportunity to take a picture of a recent addition to my cube clutter (approximately 3″ tall), procured entirely due to the black cat on it:

Later in the day, a painting appeared, leaning against the wall in the lobby on our floor. This was interesting because we’ve been in this space for over three years, so why start decorating the lobby now? Apparently there was some disagreement among folks on our floor as to which way they hoped the painting would be hung (should the painting ever move from leaning against the wall, that is). Throughout the afternoon, the painting was moved from position 1 (artist signature in lower left corner)…

to position 2 (artist signature in lower right corner)…

and back. I personally never saw anyone moving the painting, so for all I know, the painting itself was waffling.

And here I am (at home at least), still logged on and working… It’s a sad state of affairs that having to work on a Friday evening caused absolutely no disruption in my personal life, other than to the cat’s feeding schedule and my baby knitting schedule.