Busy Day, Bizarre Day

Ever have one of those days? Today was pretty bizarre. I worked the graveyard shift this morning, so I didn't roll home until after 9AM. Towards the end of my shift, I noticed that my phone battery was dying, so I turned the phone off. Who's gonna call during the day on a Tuesday? I passed out shortly before ten, and woke up around half-past two in the afternoon. I decided that my first order of business would be charging the phone. Yeah, good idea not to be cut off from the outside world. I plugged the phone in, and noticed that I had a voicemail... it was the division head at work- they needed someone to come in to work a site in the afternoon. Great.

Well, it turns out that my universally beloved co-worker had to work late polishing up an abstract she's co-writing with the site manager for a conference presentation, and the site director (who is a very caring individual) did not want her to be on site all alone. I knew I'd be covering the shift (I swore when I was promoted to supervisor that I'd lead with my chin, so to speak), and this just made the prospect more pleasant. I haven't met anyone who wouldn't jump through a hoop of fire for my co-worker.

After a bit of a pain-in-the-ass commute (lot of aggressive toolburgers on the highway today), I got to work in one piece. I spent a good deal of time listening to my co-worker tell a hilarious story about her recent move to an apartment three blocks from her parents' house, and the multi-week ordeal of spackling and painting her new place while shuttling back and forth between the new place and her parents' house. She had enough of her stuff in the new place so she could camp there overnight, but she had to run to her parents' place to get dressed for work. Her landlord is allergic to cats, so she couldn't bring clothes to her new place until she washed them. She couldn't keep her work clothes in the new place because of the paint fumes. She described the situation as "keeping Kosher" sartorially as she had two separate sets of clothes and she's not even Jewish. It's hard to do justice to her story, I told her she needs to tape it as a comic monologue.

I was also able to give her a critique of the abstract that she'd been working on. She and the site manager will find out in November if they've been accepted, and the conference is in June. Good luck to her, it'll really be a feather in her cap if she's chosen as a presenter.

On a weird note, I found a sizable fish on the grounds, about fifty meters from the nearest water- it was dead, but in somewhat decent shape... if I had to guess how it got to where it is, I'd have to say that it may have been dropped by an osprey, but I'm not sure where the nearest osprey nest is, though the birds are present in the region. If it wasn't an osprey, then I blame fish.

Being myself, I also took some time to grab some purslane that I'd found growing on site- I have enough to make a small salad when I get home. It's a fringe benefit. I decided to leave the fish, though- can't be eating carrion, now.

It's been an unexpectedly busy day, with a soupçon of weirdness. Thanks for putting up with this barely conscious stream of consciousness today. I'll have a more substantial post up in the next couple of days- I actually have some big news to tell, but I'd prefer to wait until I'm in better cognitive shape than I'm in now.