Yikes, Suela, are you serious? I had no idea. I've always had a friend or family member or someone to help me when my hard drive crashed. Then again, they often couldn't recover anything from it, but at least it was free.

Oh no Allyson, do you need to escape?

My day isn't busy so much as blank. Two sick kids so I'm home, but for some strange reason I'm not mopping the floors. How odd.

I have just remembered that I will be meeting with an outside HR consultant on Monday afternoon. (I've really got to start reviewing both my personal and work schedules a little further in advance so it doesn't feel like items I'd scheduled but forgotten about are leaping out of the undergrowth to tackle and devour me, but that's another issue.) This is nothing, or almost nothing, to do with me personally, and is all about the general stresses and problems we've had functioning as a department since our new director came on board.

So...how should I handle this, if my goal is to A) protect my own job stability, and B) help the department? Because I have all kinds of opinions of what's going on here, and who's doing what wrong and right, but I'm not sure how to express them effectively in this context.

tiggy, Yahoo mail is working fine for me.

ION, is it 1/20/09 yet?

[link]

Dubya, in a videoconference with troops in Afghanistan: “It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks,” Bush said.

Cable down. Internet down. Migraine. Home sick on incredibly busy work day. Like, HUGE. Noisy children in courtyard. Stealing bandwidth on very flakey connection.

I'm surly and grinchy so I don't have the love for noise in the shared areas of the complex, no matter how old or young the people are. At least there will be pizza.

Hey...internet came back! Muted whoopee! More intermittent reading of lighting blogs.

In other news, my new medication seems to be doing the trick with keeping my heart beating correctly so I'm feeling good about that.

That's good to hear, Gud.

The Amazon sale is tempting me to buy the SG-1 complete series boxed set. Tell me why I shouldn't.

I kind of want to try the glo pillow.

Ooh, that's a tough one, Susan. I mean, not so much worry about protecting your job (I doubt anything you say will make them think "You know, we REALLY don't need an administrator..." or even "Wow, that Susan is really the problem") but you also don't want it to inadvertently come back to you and sound really bad...

you also don't want it to inadvertently come back to you and sound really bad...

Yeah, that's the concern. There are only 5 of us on the leadership team, so it's not like it's difficult to figure out where an opinion is coming from. OTOH, I do have lots of opinions on the interpersonal dynamics I've been observing the past few months, and that's what the consultant is for, to help us sort all this out...

ION, I have officially canceled my Saturday commitments. DH is taking AB to the brunch, and I'll just try the next meeting of the writers group.

When someone was let go at my last job - and she sued, I was pretty honest. Careful - not to place all the blame in one area - but honest. As in I felt the administration had created a problem by incompletely addressing an issue,however the employee did not address the issue and seemed to very unhappy with all aspects of work. Turns out- everyone said pretty much the same thing -and management/ administration actually changed for the better. not perfect but things went from difficult to tolerable.

Aurelia, you don't need the SG-1 series box set if you have Netflix.