The forgotten birthday card.

I just discovered the birthday card I had intended to send to the ex’s sister, still sitting stampless on my desk. Her birthday was a week and a half ago.

Now, I know that his Mother reviles me at this point. There was so little time elapsed between my splitting with her son and my ending up with the Professor that I suspect she thinks there was something going on while I was still living with her son. (I suspect others think so as well.) She’s wrong, but after all, it was her son who was slighted, so there isn’t going to be much I can say in my own defense. My intention was to simply take the high road, keep things as cordial as possible, and let them throw the first stone, if stone throwing ever becomes an issue. But now I’ve gone and forgotten his sister’s birthday. Crap. Makes it look like I’m snubbing them.

It doesn’t help that I didn’t much care for his sister anyhow. She was nosy, opinionated and domineering. But I never made much of an issue of it, and I don’t want to look as though I’m cold-shouldering her now. I’d best get myself out to find a decent belated card, while I’m still at least in the right month.

The Professor continues to plug diligently along on his novel, while I fail to accomplish anything on mine beyond the rough outline. I suspect that, rather than waiting for my Muse to kick in, I’d be doing better to just write. Anything. I can go back and tweak, amend, or even trash. Better to do something than to simply sit there and and stare at a blank computer screen for fifteen minutes before giving up and hitting the forums or the games at MSN (which have proven far too addicting).

Yesterday at work was frustrating. I allowed a few people to cut a couple of corners on an important project, because it made the work flow easier for them and because they assured me that things would work fine if they did things the easier way. Because I believed them, two lots of animals got mixed together that should not have been mixed together. Definitive ID marking was lacking on one of the lots, meaning that (in my opinion) animals could not be appropriately resegregated. Since one of the two lots had to be presented to the Feds here for approval, and since I couldn’t verify which animals were which, I was prepared to simply put all the animals involved into the “unsuitable for use” category. The people who purchased the animals for us (and who, coincidentally, were among the ones I had cut a break for) just happened to be on the spot when the mix-up occurred. They swore they could positively sort the animals back out into their appropriate lots. I was unconvinced and would still have just stopped things in their tracks there, but the head Fed on site said he was satisfied and allowed us to procede. I’m still very unhappy about it, though. There will be no further exceptions to protocols, regardless of the reason, though. I’m finding I just can’t trust people to follow through. And I begin to wonder if this job is worth the aggravation.

Richard and Teddy Thompson’s version of ‘Persuasion’ just came on the radio. Damn but I love that song.

Sunny, thanks for your note on my last entry. I’ve known enough people who had a history of eating five or more hotdogs a year and died from causes other than heart attacks that I’m willing to take your brother’s observation with a big grain of salt!

Moonman, having read your entire journal now, I suspect we have a fair amount in common, philosophically speaking. While I am not religious, I consider myself spiritual. I recently read Ursula Le Guin’s Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching : A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way. I found many of the concepts interesting, but rather that seeing it as a blue-print for how to live I found instead pieces of it that I could pull out to incorporate into my own life. Regarding the picnic, I’ve decided it was presumptuous of me to make the decision on my own. Tonight I’ll discuss it with the Professor, and see where we both want to go with it.