That's right all you nonbelievers out there: Due to my apparently crazy work ethic, an ulcer isn't the only thing I've earned. Turns out I have at least a week of vacation time I'll lose if I don't use it by August 31st. So I looked at my calendar and picked my time, and in two weeks, I'm taking a week off. Now I just need to figure out where I'm going and what I'm doing. I've considered a train ride somewhere beach-y, or perhaps a road trip to some place mountain-ish. Anywhere but a desert, if you please.

My budget is limited, but I can do something reasonable (= pretty cheap, actually) so throw some ideas at me, folks! Collectively, you kids have done it all, and I need something interesting, fun and fulfilling. Oh, and relaxing.

Definitely that.

Any ideas?

Last Thursday, my colleagues and I recieved an e-mail stating that our division is laying off 50 employees. We were informed this will occur on Tuesday (today) and we are all to stay home between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. and wait for a call. If we get the call, we lose our job. The unfortunate ones who receive that call are to stay home for the rest of the day, and return to work Wednesday to transition projects and clean out their offices. And that's it.

So now, we wait.

Somehow, despite all the waiting and hoping and willing the powers that be for our office to be spared, I find my mind strangely at peace this morning. Whatever happens, I am prepared. I just hope the same is true of all my colleagues.

And now, until noon, I leave you with a funny picture of Lucy. She's a peacemaker, that one.

Lucy says, this is how I feel about layoffs. Pththt.

EDIT OF STILL EMPLOYED

Well, I made it through to the next round, anyway. We lost a good friend and colleague, but I am happy that otherwise, our office was unscathed. My heart goes out to the 50 families in our division who now face a closed door, and hope each of them find many new open ones.

Today is not only Father's Day, it is also the second anniversary of my father's death; therefore, it seems only fitting I should write a tribute to the man who influenced my life in so many ways. And what a grand tribute I had prepared, but alas, technology was against me from the start. After much fretting and frustration, I offer instead  glimpses, mere glimpses really, of a good man who lived a good life, and enjoyed it fully.

“Once when someone asked me why I was a writer, or why I wrote, I said it was, I supposed, a way of sending out messages, asking, Is there anyone out there? Anyone who knows the world I speak of, who connects with it more or less as I do?

This, I think, is the unasked question we bring to one another in the flesh, when we meet strangers, so much unknown to each other, all to be guessed at, sensed, read from evidences seldom bold, plain or certain.”

 – Don

 “I would like to have done more for my children; beyond that, I have no real regrets.” –Don      

“It is in my opinion that every thing worthwhile in this life is and rightly ought to be addictive. Arts. Music. Love. So the caution is: know your addictions.”

“It is an enormous garden in which we wander, and I find my path through it instructed strictly by that which by chance I find pleasing.” - Don

“The truth is, sweetie, only now am I beginning to see how much I flew by the seat of my pants as they say, how I bullied and bluffed my way through so much of it. . .and with such good luck, I might add. . .and not to discount the strong peasant stock from which I came, to keep me always, ultimately, on the side of survival.” – Don

". . . when in great truth, all that matters or reasonably ought to matter to me is the life given me, and the loved ones, and the small history I leave in the blood of my progeny, and the place or places I have called home, my personal contact with the earth in this or that particular place that in time became home, and the community of which I became a part, all of which I leave with regret and most unwillingly, but with a sense of wonder and gratitude, even so, that it ever was, that I lived and loved as fully as I have. . ." - Don