For Your Reference

You can't tell me this makes any sense.

I need to quit checking my work email.

I am not working. But Robbie has no other way to talk to me during the day! What am I supposed to do?! And then I see the subject lines of the other emails waiting in my inbox, but I do not read them, because then the senders would be able to see that I had.

Except the snake guy. He doesn't work for us, so like the entire rest of the world besides my agency, he is not using Novell GroupWise, and I can look at his email without him knowing it.

Only it's an email I really need to answer, so I do. I have to apologize to him for the difficulties we are experiencing in scheduling him (and his amazing snakes!!) to present at our December safety training. He's going to describe how not to be bitten by snakes. He's a pro and it's perfectly safe and should be no problem at all, but someone in my department likes to make a big fuss about how scared she (or he) is of snakes, so a few hoops have been generated for me to jump through.

Yesterday evening, as my dad and I were walking along the pretty, if amply horse-poop-bedecked, trail that wends up the hill just a (careful) hop, (careful!!) skip and a (Jesus, watch where the hell you're putting your foot!!!) jump from my parents' house, a teeny tiny little itty bitty baby snakie-pie wriggled across the path right in front of us. I wanted to catch it and bring it back, and let it live a happy little life among the plants in my cubicle, but it disappeared into the underbrush before I could quite finish working out the logistics of transporting it safely and comfortably in my luggage. I emailed Robbie about this, but he said he'd prefer something larger.

There are other emails in my inbox with subject lines that tempt me to open them. Intriguingly, there's one entitled "Go paperless" which was sent today from, um, somebody who's extremely frightened of snakes, or at least wants everybody else to think that he (or she) is. But I can't see who the message is addressed to without opening it, so I don't know if I was the only one who received it. Maybe so. Maybe she (or he) is peremptorily ordering me to get rid of all the paper files in my office, on the grounds that they are likely to harbor snakes.

It would make about as much sense as anything else.

Anyway, today we went to Onondaga Lake Park, walked approximately 82 miles, and got a lot of pretty pictures of the lake, fall foliage, some boats, some wildlife, and more. Don't feel like you have to look at them. I don't want to be one of those people who sits you down in front of a slide projector (remember those, kids?) and subjects you to hours of vacation slides from a place you were never particularly curious about.

I promise that the reference marker is the only work-related photo I took.