Somehow it seems like Thursday has turned into “let’s have a meeting” day.  After 7 hours on the phone, I can’t help but wonder where I’m supposed to squeeze in any work.

But at least they left me an hour to scarf down some lunch and didn’t overlap meetings.  Tomorrow morning is fun in that I have four overlapping meetings between 9:00am and 11:30am.

I braved the rain on Saturday to head over to the local Cabela’s in search of pants.  Specifically, I was looking for their Stretch 7-Pocket Hikers.  The only problem is that they tend to scatter the displays for the stretch hikers amongst the regular ones and several other types of pants (like their Chinos or Khakis).  To find the color you want often involves wandering about the area checking out all the racks that have pants.  Oh, and just for kicks, they rearrange the locations of these racks from time to time.  It’s not like in some stores where I can simply beeline my way to the desired item.

So I’m bumbling about the men’s section looking for the right color pants and trying to avoid the crowd (which was surprisingly thick for a rainy Saturday), when I spied a rack of stretch hikers a little further over and went to investigate.  There was one pair on the front that was easily examinable, and at first I thought that the hips seemed a bit odd, but I didn’t think much more about it.  However, I was mightly confused when I saw the size marked as “18.”  Obviously no one makes pants with an 18” waist (at least outside of children’s clothes), and these were definitely bigger than that… 

About this point the little lightbulb went off and I realized that I’d stumbled into the women’s section.  With a furtive glance about the area to see if anyone had noticed, I hastily beat a retreat back to the familiar area of the men’s department.

They definitely need better markers between the sections.  Or perhaps an alarm system (“Intruder alert!”).

My hours outside of work for the past couple of weeks have been taken up by reading a bunch of novels by Val McDermid, especially the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series.

It all started innocuously enough last year when I saw a preview for Wire In The Blood on BBC America.  After watching a couple of episodes I was hooked.  Recently I discovered the books that the series was based on and ordered one of them.  Well, that was like extra crack for the addict.  So I found myself ordering the rest of the Tony Hill series as well as a couple of others. 

Over the past two weeks I’ve read the following:
The Mermaids Singing
The Wire In The Blood
The Last Temptation
A Place Of Execution
The Distant Echo
Killing The Shadows

And right now I’m working on The Torment Of Others.

Yes, I know it’s cheesy and it’s not realistic, but I’m a sucker for crime stories of all types.  One thing I have to say, though, is that Ms. McDermid has a wickedly evil imagination.  Her serial killers are some pretty sadistic bastards.

Because I work at home, I have a second phone line installed in my office.  It’s used strictly for business, and it’s set up such that calls to my business line are forwarded to this phone.  The phone itself has no voicemail or answering machine, since my company is paranoid about communications being stored on devices outside of corporate control.  That’s all handled by the forwarding service.  It’s actually kind of handy, since messages left at my business line can be sent to me in an email and I can get faxes without having to connect a fax machine (the service stores them and I can get to them on a website).

Anyhow, I never give anyone the actual number of this phone, since it’s only intended for forwarding.  If someone I know wants to call me, they’ll use my regular number or my cell.  But I can always tell when it’s the beginning of the month, since this phone starts ringing every few hours.  It appears that the previous owner of the number skipped out on some debts and the collectors seem to get busy around the beginning of the month.

I have to answer this line, since even with caller-ID I can’t be certain whether it’s for work or not (the majority of these collectors don’t show a name, only a number if I’m lucky).  The ones that can’t be arsed to use a real person get under my skin a bit, but what’s really starting to irk me, though, is that the mouth-breathing morons haven’t figured out after two years that I’m not the guy they’re looking for.  I even had one of the more idiotic ones ask me if I knew where the guy had moved to!  Hello!?  How in the name of John Moses Browning am I supposed to know that!?  I’m just the poor schmuck who ended up with the deadbeat’s number.  Now quit bothering me and take this number off your lists!

Anyone know a keysequence to send down the line that will set the caller’s phone on fire? 

On Thursday a week ago I was trying to get wrapped up with work in preparation for taking Friday off and getting out of town for the weekend.  I got an IM from my customer asking me if I was going to be at the Austin meeting next week.  Since I hadn’t heard about such a meeting I was a bit confused.  It turns out that he had only decided on Thursday that he wanted me to attend.  This all meant that after my trip to East Texas over the weekend I had to turn around on Monday and go to Austin.  I just got back last night. 

I drove to Austin and back, since it’s not much more hassle than trying to fly there, and it doesn’t take much longer.  The flight from DFW to Austin is about an hour, but when you figure in time for check-in, parking, and security, you’d probably take three hours or more, and the drive is only 3.5 hours.  Another upside to driving myself is that I can carry my usual complement of sharp pointy things and other implements of destruction.

Coming back last night it really hit me how much traffic on I-35 is composed of 18-wheelers.  I left Austin just before 8:00pm and once I was on I-35 there was a long period where I was the only “regular” vehicle on the road.  For the most part, I kind of like driving with the big rigs, since they’re generally not prone to fits of road rage, they don’t usually make sudden lane changes, and they don’t usually tailgate.  Once you find a slot where you can match their speed it makes for a fairly relaxing ride.  At least until we hit Temple and all the idiots got on and started darting in and out and tailgating.

This whole Christmas thing snuck up on me while I wasn’t looking.  I only really hit me on Monday that Christmas is Sunday and that I have to leave for Colorado on Friday.  So I’ve got a bunch of things to do before I go.  I’ll be visiting my sister for an agnostic interpretation of a Christian version of a pagan holiday…

Anyhow, I’m going to be out of pocket until the beginning of 2006.  Until then, Merry Christmas (or non-denominational, seasonal-appropriate greetings for the easily offended) and Happy New Year!

I have a bad habit of waiting until my hair is unmanageable before I get a haircut.  I’m not sure why, but there’s some sort of unconscious procrastination involved. 

Anyhow, I was all set to go in on Saturday, but much to my chagrin I discovered that Fantastic Sam’s had gone out of business and come back as a new hair salon*, which appeared to cater to women only.  Now I’m going to have to drag my shaggy behind to some other place.

I was kind of afraid that something like this would happen, since I had previously noticed that they had cut their hours.  It’s usually a bad sign when a business cuts back on hours, as it indicates they’re not getting enough business to stay open the whole time.  I suspect it’s partially related to their location.  They were in a shopping center that has been fairly deserted since it lost its anchor store (a Winn-Dixie).  I keep hearing that new businesses are coming to that building, but so far nothing has materialized.  Without an anchor, though, I suspect that this shopping center will remain deserted. 

* On a tangential note, any time I see a banner for a store that has obvious misspellings it automatically drops my opinion of the business.  In this case they were offering “waxs,” which set off my bad spelling alarm.

I suppose “working vacation” is something of an oxymoron.  Anyhow, I’m going to be taking vacation from my regular job in order to attend a CERT Trainer course in Denton for the rest of the week.  Posting here will likely be even lighter than usual.

With this class and the other activities I have for this week, I may need a vacation to get over my vacation.  At least I’m free over the weekend (although I’m contemplating redoing my closet and putting in an organizer system).

My manager contacted me yesterday to tell me to knock off early today, since I have to travel this weekend for a business meeting that starts on Monday.  This was something of a shock, to say the least, since my old organization’s manager would have been after me to make sure I billed the project for the travel time (and to heck with knocking off early to compensate for it).

Anyhow, I’m off to run errands and put things in order.  I have to leave at the ass-crack of dawn on Sunday to get to the airport for a 7:00am flight.

Wish me luck, as I’m leaving for New York state (with a connection in Chicago; Ack, spit!).  There’s just something weird about knowing you’re in a place that makes it a felony to do what you do everyday at home.  And knowing that you’re not any different in your disposition or capabilities between those two places.  I’ll be glad to get back home to a semi-sane state on Wednesday night.

I spent last week in East Texas visiting with my mother and my nieces (who had been sent to stay with her for the week).  It was nice to get away to the country and do next to nothing.  I rarely checked my own email and never even bothered to fire up my company-issued laptop for work emails. 

I have to admit that it’s kind of hard to get back into the swing of things after that, especially with the heat.  I find it interesting that I only felt like getting back into posting today.  Today is the first reprieve we’ve had from the heat for a while.