Allegra is on my desk again while Thalia is in the shop. I'm writing this from hcolleen's machine, because it has a larger keyboard, a happier processor, and a larger screen. Allegra is a good and steady little machine, but not quite what one would want for one's web-surfing needs. I ought to mail the BOfD to let her know that yes, the system is on her bloody way in. ( I write a stiff little note. )

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At work on Tuesday, I was all set to leave at 8:30 when Field ambushed me with a "few questions" about the spreadsheets they use. Some of the stuff used to boggle me about those spreadsheets, but after all the database work I'd been doing, and all the digging around in the Queen Bee's spreadsheets, these seemed almost simplistic. I poked at things and realized (to my horror) that there were things going on in there that ought not to be done the way that they were being done. (To wit: there were three-positive-line entries that were being treated as if they were two-positive-line entries in the formula at the very end. O, the horror of it all. I got in there and fixed it with some swiftness.

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Group tonight was fun. I've been working on "Hell's Angel" in slow but fairly steady little dribbles. I still don't know where it's going, but it's going somewhere. It looks like it may be the corporate novel that Welcome to the Workplace didn't turn out to be. Nick is much more fun than a thinly-disguised co-worker, and Mary is much more fun than the Mary Sue I was trying to float. Mary is quite possibly a teacher, and goes out drinking 'cause of job stress ordinarily, but now what with Current Events, she's out not just getting tipsy, but getting plastered.

... In hell? Twelve step meetings are hellish.

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I was at least somewhat out of it tonight. I did get M on film sniffing her shoulder to clear out her nose between sniffing at highly scented tinned candles. That was amusing. Dinner was Of the Fun, though I can't remember much of it. There was silliness and whipped cream, and I employed my Book of Quotes happily. (I still want a scan of the workplace Book of Quotes, because there's so much good stuff in that one.) I had this pink water bottle of grape juice and blackberries, and I took to forgetting it places.

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"I'm parking in the car wash." There's this broken sprinkler at the one end of the iHop parking lot, and I picked the spot that gets rained on the most. hcolleen thought that it might have been fixed, but no -- kilarneyblarney came in, letting me know that my car was under the water spout and getting righteously drenched. (Right on!)

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A couple weeks ago there was a Crazy Lady dropping in on group, someone rather frantically worried about her ex-husband and his computer follies. She was exceptionally non-technical, and had a distinct case of non-computer-person paranoia. I wound up giving her what tech support type help I could. She was absolutely paranoid about identity theft, and seemed to think that her daughter's social security number written in a file in the computer was an open invitation for identity theft to happen. ... rather along the lines of "OK, so this text file is in a non-shared folder on the computer that I use on dial-up with a firewall. Someone is going to telepathically sense that this is a machine with juicy data ripe for the taking and break in to it and STEAL MY BABY'S IDENTITY OMGZ!" I gave her the hairy eyebrow and pointed out that if she's running with a firewall and not doing anything, say, STUPID online, there's probably about as much chance at identity theft as someone doing a physical break-in and identity theft. The risk exists, but she's ... being over-cautious. She chilled out, finally. That woman made me very very nervous, because she seemed the type to become psycho!clingy. Today I saw her poking her nose near the door of the writers group room. Scary!

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I didn't do plasma today, because I am due my annual physical, and I got off to a late enough start that I did not have time. Alas! If only I had gone to bed earlier Tuesday night!