What the L?

My keyboard, which I loved so much for its relative tininess and clickety-clackety sounds has wronged me.

Specifically, the L key. I have to practically punch the keyboard to get an L, which has led to concerns about right-hand third-finger injuries.

Granted, that finger serves very little purpose, aside from actually hitting the L key (and the O key. And the period. That's it. Never noticed that 'till now ...)

What would my life look like without Ls, Os and periods?

As a sampling, I'll show you what this post would look like:

****

My keybard, which I ved s much fr its reative tininess and cickety-cackety sunds has wrnged me

Specificay, the key I have t practicay punch the keybard t get an , which has ed t cncerns abut right-hand third-finger injuries

Granted, that finger serves very itte purpse, aside frm actuay hitting the key (and the key And perids That's it Never nticed that 'ti nw )

****

Sad.

Ls and Os and periods should be appreciated for the hard-fought components of Laramie news that they are. Their presence is the result of pain and frustration.

Letter of the Week

I just about pee my pants laughing every time I think about this. I may have even snorted once or twice ...

My favorite comment card this week accused us of having "bad gramor."

Oh, man ... I asked Deb to frame it and hang it up.

Another box of sugar, please

There was something oddly ironic as D, J and I sat in the conference room, picking D's story to heavily edited pieces and then (how do these turns in conversation happen?) discussed cholesterol and blood sugar levels ... all while J and I down box after box (mini boxes) of Nerds. We also laughed that a bunch of word nerds would be eating Nerds ... which might have made us bigger nerds for even thinking of it.

For the record, my blood sugar's fine. At least, it was before the Nerds.

Can the sky please fall, now?

If it could go wrong last night, it did. The only thing(s) that might have made it any worse would have been a) our building catching fire, b) Sue's "fluttery" feelings turning into a full-fledged heart attack (again) or c) the press dying in Cheyenne.

I have very good reasons to dislike being in charge ... I was confronted with most of them last night. The buck stops here, and the buck felt more like a speeding brick.

Today, however, as Anne would say, is fresh, though ... it came ready-made with mistakes in it ... but mistakes for which I can make some amends tonight. I hope.

At least there's another warm body helping us put this monster together tonight. I feel better already.

'Tis the season for typos

So ... kids write letters to Santa. And most of them in Laramie wind up here at our office. And we get to type them up and put them in the paper.

The trick for us is to type "Santa" and not "Satan," which is trickier than you might think, several letters into it.

Dear Satan,

I want a barbie doll. I love you.

Little Susie may get an exorcism for Christmas instead.

This brings me to the subject of Christmas carols, and how I used get the words mixed up because I didn't know what they meant. I just tried to emulate as best I could what the children's choir director was saying, so I often wound up singing

Hark to Harold, angels sing

Good King Wesses Went to Town

Gloria in egg shell says day-o

Good tidings we bring to you and your kid

It didn't matter that the words, strung together, made no logical sense. Our parents weren't listening -- they were hoping we'd get through the pageant without picking our noses or flinging our dresses over our heads. And if they were reading lips, it all looked the same from the back of the church sanctuary, like "olive juice" looks like "I love you" to someone reading lips.

On that note, Merry Christmas to all.

If it's all that goes wrong with my day, I'm doing alright

I'm having difficulty laying out my page; the vector in all the photos is looking Stage Left (um, that's the right of the page, to someone reading the page ... sorry). With three pieces of art to play up, I'm either going to have someone looking/walking off the page (a no-no, according to The Big Boss), or I'm going to have pictures sidled up right next to each other (another unforgivable).

And if that's as bad as the night gets, I think I'm okay.

You can get back to whatever you were doing which, I'm sure, was much more important.

Chicken Little is broke

The sky is NOT falling. But it's not raining dollar bills, either.

So ... I never look at my investment statements.

I get the envelope.

I toss the envelope in a pile.

Three months later, during a manic cleaning tear, I find the envelope again.

I take the papers out of the envelope, flatten them and cram them into one of a dozen manila file folders tottering precariously in a tower on my kitchen floor at three in the morning.

Those papers don't make sense in the middle of the day after sensible amounts of espresso; I'm not about to attempt unfogging my financial future while sitting cross-legged on the cracked tile in my fluorescent-lit kitchen, bleary-eyed and distracted by thoughts of how I'm really going to stay on top of the housekeeping "this time."

I've had this particular account for three years next month. And I never look at the statements. Ever.

Insert the new-fangled InterWeb thingy.

What idiot picks a recession to first look at her 401(k)?

This idiot.

I cried.

That was two months ago.

Tuesday was Meet With Joe the Investment Guy Day. And (for me) it was Print Random Pages From Your Account and Weep Day. And so, for the first time in three years, I met with Joe. The meeting is mandatory for all employees who've been here at least a year, elective for everyone else ... I elected to listen through the spiel of "This is a 401(k). This is what it does. This is why you should have one." I clutched my sheaf of papers which said, essentially, that I have been making very nice contributions to someone other than myself, and I listened very intently to Joe's speech, wondering whether I had slept through something crucial the first time around and was now being punished for it.

The meeting finally over, I took my papers up to Joe, who asked what I was worried about.

"I've lost a fifth of my money this year," I said, the tears welling up in my eyes.

He laughed.

I'm not kidding. He laughed.

"You wanna trade?" he asked (still laughing). "I'm down thirty-seven percent this year. I'll take your nineteen percent any day."

My publisher was still sitting there. He laughed.

"Do you wanna trade? (to Joe) I'm down fifty-one percent."

And really -- really, that's all I wanted to hear. That someone is worse off than I am. Well ... that, and that I'll someday get that money back. And whether I should rearrange my distributions. "I filled out the form thingy in the back of the booklet thingy," I said. "And then I filled in the distributions by what it told me to ... but maybe I was high? Because one of these things has lost 51 percent this year. That can't be good."

"You're young," Joe said. "Your risk tolerance is high." Which, according to the questionaire that I filled out three years ago, is true. On paper, statistically, my risk tolerance is high. But it's one thing to have a high risk tolerance when your account is making money every quarter; it's a completely different thing to read that a fifth of your money is gone and still tolerate any level of risk. On Tuesday, I had no risk tolerance. If it's possible to have a negative risk tolerance, that's where I was. I wanted to run - screaming - from risk and never see it again. I do not have a constitution that can handle the stock market. I sometimes don't have a constitution that can handle the supermarket.

"Stop looking at your account," Joe said. "What you were doing before was just fine. Don't read it. Just stick it in a folder and let it sit there. In thirty years, you'll have your money back."

And I believed him. I'll hide the investment folder, the way I hid "Crime and Punishment" under my sofa so I wouldn't be reminded that I didn't finish reading it. I'll hide the folder so I won't be reminded that some big, cosmic black hole is getting rather rich off of a naive copy editor in a frozen Wyoming valley.

Which brings me to another pondering:

Do we trust people in situations like these because the advice they offer is sound and worthy of our trust? Or do we trust them because we want to trust them, because we want to believe that it'll all be better, even if the tiny voice of common sense is screaming at the top of her lungs in the back of our mind that we're crazy fools, soon to be broke crazy fools?

Derailed train ...

I had something very clever that I intended to write here once I'd logged in ... and in that five-second span of time, I forgot what it was ...

That's how brilliant I've felt all day. The cleverness is there, and as soon as I'm ready to use it ... it's gone.

Guess there's always tomorrow.

Happy Thankfuls

Here it is ...

I'm thankful:

- for my wonderful family, who I'll get to see at Christmas - including MATT and MOLLY!

- for my job (even if it requires me to work holidays), and that I enjoy what I do for a living.

- for the people I love who are still here, and that I can be thankful to have known the people who aren't with us anymore ...

- for friends who will listen to me gripe on the days when I'm not as thankful as I ought to be; who will make me smile, no matter how bad a day I'm having; and who will comisserate when romances big and small come to an end ...

- that clementines were on sale this week at Safeway, that Millstone brought out its peppermint-flavored coffee already and that Celestial Seasonings added new fabulous flavors to its holiday teas ... (hey - even the little, mundane things can necessitate gratitude!)

Hallucination

One final note before I take my full, two-day weekend (woo!):

I sometimes think that the little hand icon that is my mouse on the screen is flipping me off.

Usually after I've done something particularly stupid.

It just seems like the kind of thing our IT guy might program it to do ... since he can't do it to our faces. Even though we may deserve it sometimes.

The evening snooze ...

Mexico City is set to begin handing out free Viagra to elderly men there, citing that sexuality is too important a contributor to citizens' happiness to allow it to sag. Ohhh, that was a bad pun ...

In related news, our sports editor has decided to vacation in Mexico City. As soon as possible.

*-*-*-*

Nearly 30 children, some of them nearly adults, have been abandoned at Nebraska hospitals under the state's "Safe Haven" law. It gives a whole new depth to the threat parents give their kids that they're going to "take them to Nebraska."

In what is perhaps an ironic twist, Nebraskans have debated abandoning their state legislators in neighboring Iowa for penning and passing such a ridiculously undefined law in the first place.

*-*-*-*

And two orb-weaving spiders taken to space during the current Endeavour mission are having difficulty weaving symmetrical webs in the zero-gravity conditions aboard the shuttle. In fact they're having difficulty weaving anything that remotely resembles a web. But assymetrical globs of sticky spider silk still might have been handy for catching the tools an astronaut lost today while performing repairs on the shuttle. Even tangled webs could serve a purpose ...

Overheard today ...

"Yeah, ( ), the next time you need help on your roof, I'll get up there with ( ) ... and push him off."

I think there's a waiting list to do that, actually ...

It can always get better

My day yesterday began (well, toward the beginning, at least) with me dropping my hair pick, watching it bounce off the bathroom counter ... and right into the toilet. Nothin' but water. Ick. So now I'm down to one hair pick.

It continued on to work, where I forgot about doing a page until very, very late. And then something was wrong with the way our plates were printing, which meant we had to dig D out of bed to walk us through re-sending some stuff.

"We gotta quit meeting like this, Sarah," she said.

"I know," I said. "I think I talk to you more on the phone than I do in person, and I see you every day."

In the pause of waiting for a page to (slowly) process, we chatted about life, namely her newly 15-year-old daughter. "Am I offering congratulations or sympathy?" I asked.

"We're still debating," she said. She sounded very tired. The 15th birthday came complete with a driver's permit and a new reason to stay up very late at night worrying.

I finally left the office around midnight ...

In unrelated news: September is the month when we celebrate Johnny Appleseed.

My only education of Johnny Appleseed involved a musical cartoon produced by Disney in the late '40s. I dug up my very old dictionary (a big, red, mouse-nibbled, hardbound copy of the American Heritage Dictionary that's too outdated to be allowed as a reference in any place but my home -- it was tucked under my bed, which indicated that the last time I read it was in bed ... some might find this a bit sad). The "Johnny Appleseed" listing instructed me to look up "Champman, John," which I did, only to find two brief lines; basically, when he lived and that he's become a legendary figure in American history. I realize that a dictionary's not an encyclopedia, but I was still expecting a bit more.

Giving up, I hit YouTube and found that old Disney cartoon and got re-acquainted with Johnny Appleseed. When all else fails, YouTube is there to educate.

The night ended with a two-hour chat on the phone with Mom, which is a good way to end any day. Of course, I got the extended story of Mr. Nice-n-Handsome. And a lot more stuff, including the Church Ladies' Guide to Baking Bread and Discussing Fertility (only in my mom's women's group at church could this happen ...).

Wyoming Weekend

Actually, it was a Gillette weekend. A good weekend.

Mom and I spent Saturday garage-saling. I haven't been to a garage sale in years, and I was proud to have honed my scavenging skills among the racks of Nu2U, Goodwill, the ARC and Savers, because these skills helped me make a haul on Saturday. I came back to Laramie with considerably more than I left with.

That includes three boxes of books that I was ordered to clear out of the storage shed. In the whole scheme of the storage shed, three boxes (four, if you count the box of stuff I didn't want back) don't take up that much room, but ... I was really glad to get my original-edition Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books back. I'd been wondering about those.

I'm scared for the next trip home, though. I think I'll have to tackle the bags (and bags and bags) of stuffed animals, and I'm not quite sure that I'm up to it.

Sunday was church and a potluck and lots people who I don't know but who apparently know plenty about me. It kind of makes me uncomfortable to have a conversation about my hopes and dreams with a person whose name I can't remember. When they get into boyfriends, I really get worried. How come they know so much about me, and I can't even remember their name?

I spent pretty much all of Monday with the Springers.

I passed along the joy of twirling to a 2-year-old. I got to get in hours and hours of baby talk and baby grins and baby squeals.

I tried to share the joy of Fat Tire with Brooke, but she said she doesn't like it as much as the lime-flavored Bud Light. I think she's crazy.

And I learned that some guy at Brooke's church was just dumped by his girlfriend and that this one fact ought to be persuasion enough for me to move back to Gillette. But she couldn't remember his name. Guess I'm staying in Laramie for now.

I also learned that 2-year-old girls, given a box of raisins at 9 p.m., will be mesmerized by "13 Going on 30."

I just need to get her to learn the phrases "I'm reading Jane Austen," "I need more shoes, Mom" and "Michael Phelps is awesome." And then my portion of Amelie's education will be complete.

But twirling was a good start.

Spent time with the folks, who still think that, despite a perfectly good and usable college degree, I should drive a truck in circles at a coal mine. The money's definitely better, but .... it would be in Gillette. We all know how I feel about that.

I attempted navigating the length of Highway 59. In the rain. On a weekend. I offered a fervent prayer of thanks that I arrived back home alive, physically unscathed, with my sanity intact. I also managed, after almost 30 years of calling Gillette "home," to take a wrong turn on my way home, because the orange cones were set up in a totally confusing way. Can't wait 'til it snows on that one.

Spent time with the dog, who is still terrified of traffic and practically wrapped himself around my legs for the hour-long duration of our walk in the rain. If not for the paranoid clinging, I think it might have been a considerably shorter (drier, warmer) walk. But who knows. Charlie (the dog) met his first bunny and his first herd of antelope, and he couldn't understand why neither wanted to be best buds with him. He looked a little hurt when they all just ran away from him. And then he went back to wrapping himself around my legs.

So yeah -- good weekend. I was sad to have to come back today. I'm ready for another vacation.

Tryptophan Hangover Musing

I love Thanksgiving. I really do. It's the gateway to The Most Wonderful Time of the Year. What I don't like about Thanksgiving is having to work on that day. Like I did this year.

Determined to not have the pathetically self-pitying Thanksgiving that I had two years ago when I had to work the holiday, I set out to enjoy the offerings of one of the local churches that was sponsoring a community Thanksgiving dinner. It was delicious. I had hot & spicy fried turkey, a fruit stuffing, and all the other trimmings ... including a tryptophan hangover that showed up right around the time that I was supposed to show up for work. I tugged on the jeans and sweatshirt (traditional post-gluttony clothing) and dragged myself to work, where the promise of another holiday treat is holding me over through my I-hate-working-holidays grinchiness ...

And that treat is peppermint-flavored coffee. Did you know there was such a thing? God bless America, land of the free and home of brave food developers. That peppermint-flavored coffee made it out of the experimental lab and into the bulk coffee bins at my local Wal-Mart is likely no small miracle. That it is now mingling with Coffeemate in the mug on my desk makes working the holidays a little less bah-humbug-ish. Scrooge, you can make me work every major holiday this year, but you can't take away my coffee.

God bless us, every one!

Am I Heartless? Musing

I find it pretty much impossible to have any kind of sympathy for someone who is so hellbent on having their cigarette break that they go out every hour or so, regardless of the temperature, to have a smoke, and then they want to spend the rest of the night pathetically coughing and spitting and sputtering because, oh gee, their lungs just can't handle the cold and smoke.

Am I heartless for feeling this way?

Human Dustbuster Musing

I feel a bit like a Dustbuster some days; I breeze through bits of written text, cleaning them up, picking out the crud and leaving the "carpet" of the story looking clean and smooth ... and some days, I feel like and industrial-strength vacuum cleaner/shampooer. Tonight is an industrial-strength night.

I'm a Big Kid Now Musing

In the world of anonymous criticisms, I have graduated. I have gone from being a sub-human copy editor who can't read to save my life to being an inept copy editor who reads and punctuates on the level of a seventh-grader. The latest anonymous bally-hooer has hopes, even, that I'll get to an eighth-grade level, so I'll let that count as a sort of cheering section.

The funny thing about these letters and phone calls is that the letters that criticise our spelling, grammar and punctuation are so poorly spelled, structured and punctuated themselves that I can't help but laugh. And really, when you set out to insult someone, you shouldn't leave yourself that wide open to be soundly insulted in return. The ones who call, well, I can only guess that they don't know how to type or write, which, again, leaves me laughing. Want to criticize my work? Prove that you can do it better. Until then, your letters and voice mails remain on my list of "Idiots of the Week."