I'm sooo tired....

Thank God we'll unload the truck tomorrow. I just don't have it in me tonight. Work just sucked the life out of me, and then we let the wrong person pick the lunch place, a wings and subs place that he said was great. It was pretty average as far as I could tell, and the smell of grease stayed with us after we left. Boss and I sniffed our clothes and bitched all afternoon, and decided this person is banned from selecting lunch destinations henceforth. I should eat dinner, but...ugh.

To elaborate just a tad on the Secretarialization, my point on this is that it's so damn sexist. I am "secretarialized" because I am a woman. Today I went to lunch with three men - Boss and two men from another part of the organization. This is an act of mad rebellion in this environment. First, I am the only paralegal who goes to lunch with anyone outside the legal camp, ever. The other paralegals and secretaries will all eat together, the (all male) attorney staff goes to lunch and never, ever invites them. They are the Girls and the Girls don't Eat With the Men. The Menfolk go talk important lawyer talk, the Girls talk about decorating and stuff. It's like a freaking time warp.

So Boss and I fight the local culture by eating together when we bother to go out at all, and eating with people from other departments in the organization. So today we were all talking today and everybody was bitching about the lack of administrative help and how we are all spending insane amounts of time organizing paper while also being bitched at for not getting the substantive work done, and afterward I said to Boss, "See? This is why I get an attitude. I know we all do admin work and I am not saying I'm too good to do it. But you guys do this and it does not change your status within the organization. I do it and I get asked what I got for Secretaries' Day." It's happened too often and it's been done to me by people who sure as hell should know better, and if I get no respect from them, I am undermined in the entire organization. And I'm sure if I were a Boy Paralegal this would not be happening. What year is this again?

I get my validation that I still have a brain and know my job from outside. Today one of our experts read a motion Boss and I did together - I developed the "theme" of the motion and backed it up with documents I'd culled and assembled myself, he wrote the bulk of it, I edited it, changed words and moved stuff around, rewrote parts here and there, we consider it a team production. It's highly technical in nature and about an aspect of construction we never dealt with before this case, and the expert who has been doing that stuff for 30 years pronounced it brilliant and absolutely dead-on accurate in the technical details. Damn, we're good. Too bad it's wasted on our current job.

Four days until Puppy, Six days until MDS&W! It is going to be VERY hard to leave the new little dog baby and the Girlchild and of course my Dog Baby to go away for four days, but I'm so excited! I have more cash than I thought I'd have to spend, thanks to hitting the small lotto prize, I also did the "save the loose change thing" but I've been saving it for a long time and decided to dedicate it to this purpose. Loose change alone threw another $106 into the spending pot. This may turn into shopping madness - at the very least I know I will come home with a nice wooden swift that will not sigh and collapse under the weight of a heavy yarn. An inkle loom sounds fun - I am sneaking up on weaving, but right now a small project I can do in front of the TV sounds about my speed, until I decide if I really enjoy weaving. And I want soft, soft yarns, and handpainted yarns in rich colors, and I'm also shopping for gifties for various friends. Yes, it's going to be a spree. I'm glad I'll be hanging with some S&W veterans who can guide me to the good stuff.

Murphy really, really wants me to go sit outside and knit, so I think I will take his advice. That mistake rib scarf is sooo nice.