A roller coaster of a week finally slows down to a merely chore-filled weekend.

Work: God only knows and He's not talking yet. The situation in a nutshell - my life is a Dilbert strip, and I am Alice. "Must...control...Fist...of...Death!" I barely controlled it this week. We have the fantabulous D for just another week unless we can convince people who make decisions in a vacuum that we really do need a secretary. As of yesterday the POV was "Now that all the filing is caught up, you can take on LOTS of new cases!" I reported this to Boss who responded with a particularly colorful string of expletives.

It's not like we're shirking work. WE WANT more cases, we like the work, we can see the potential. We really COULD manage new cases if we got to keep D, but without her it's not possible. THEY (those clueless faceless beings high above us) see this as a filing backlog issue, and once that's caught up we don't need a secretary. The gap between reality and management is just breathtaking. The Grand Canyon is a friggin' pothole in comparison.

D hasn't been filing for a month. She's been tackling the many scheduling issues, organizing neglected cases, writing stern letters to people who don't respond to her attempts to schedule, and she has been plenty busy. We are moving more cases forward simultaneously than has ever been possible before. And this really was a slow week. So they want to send her away and then dump a big new caseload on us. Okay.

I had a mid-year review and it was entirely, glowingly favorable. I was not surprised. I know my shit, both the legal and the technical, I am on top of things and responsive. I love the work. I just hate my job. Boss (who is not my boss, we are actually a team with the same boss) is even more beloved by all who matter, up to half of my glow comes from basking in his aura, but we operate in the same aura at this point. We are the scariest team we've ever met and we know it. We could do much more, we want to do more, but we can't without more hands attached to intelligent humans, because paper doesn't fly around by itself and - oh wait, that's a separate rant how this paperless office is judged by the content of its paper files. I'll return to that another day.

We have an intelligent human who has demonstrated that she's a perfect fit already, and who would stay if we could keep her. But right now it ain't looking good. It's like a microcosm of all that is wrong with Corporate America. It is so fucked up - Dilbert speaks only truth, we prisoners of corporate life laugh because we recognize reality. The movie "Office Space" is hugely popular - we quote it like the Bible. I could go on at enormous ranting length about the bureaucracy and the triply-redundant paperwork and the bean-counter obsession with form over function, but right now I'm pissed off enough about my own immediate issues. I really don't want to do this for the rest of my career. This is idiotic and no way to spend a life.

But it's so hard to think of leaving - Boss and I are becoming a single working organism, pretty soon we will dispense with speech and communicate telepathically. Today we were just joking about something and kept saying the same things at the same time. It has been thus practically since we met 12 years ago. The other day he called me from the road while he was working on one case to ask me about a trial order in another because he was concerned about deadlines - I had just had the same thought and had picked up that trial order and was reviewing it and literally had it in my hand when the phone rang. He said if we work together much longer we will be unable to be separated without dying. I think we may be there already - reuniting last fall after a couple of years apart just made us bond tighter. The thought of going from this sort of organic, natural, perfect team to finding a place somewhere else - God, I don't want to think about it. As long as we can laugh and get the work done, I'll stay, but damn, they make it so very hard. I strongly suspect that if one of us goes the other will go too, and that will be Dilbertworld's tough luck. TFB.

Onward...last night I was on the phone for three hours with the Glorious Girlchild, who continues to amaze me with her depth, intelligence, common sense, pithy comments, sharp insight, hilarious sense of humor, and a wisdom that I didn't get until I was way older than she is. It was another long, rambling conversation on everything under the sun, and again, you mommies of little girls who wonder what it will be like when they grow up and are sort of dreading missing your little girl - trust me. I remember this darling smart pretty little girl, a riot and a treasure as a child, but I'm SO delighted by the woman she is now, and how she is both my daughter and a smart, funny friend I can share my life with. It's cool when they grow up. You're still mommy but on a different level, and it's wonderful.

Knitting - VK came today. I was so excited by the ponchos and shawls blurb on the cover because I am looking for the ultimate shawl, but the content was crap. I paged through it twice, not I thing I'd make.

Crochet - still working my way along the All Seasons Shawl, still loving it. Other shawl starts may be frogged, this may be The Shawl. Like the Constant Companion bag, this may be The Shawl that wants to be made for various purposes. We shall see.

My weekend looms with lots of heavy lifting again. I feel guilty when I don't exercise, and I haven't been exercising lately - if I can sit in my cheap chair on the patio and crochet instead of walking in this godawful heat and humidity, that's fine with me. I feel guilty, but then my guilt is assuaged when I think of how much furniture I lift and move, how many books I'll shift around this weekend, and the fact that my new "fat weight" is down 3 lbs this month and that's without trying. Apparently I am exercising enough.

Happy Friday. I know I owe you pictures. I owe a lot of people a lot of things. Patience is a virtue I totally lack myself, but expect of you. Now run along.