My beloved surrogate mom is a HUGE puzzle champion. Every gift giving holiday features dozens of new entries into the 'can she do it?' puzzle sweepstakes.

One of her sons made a custom tabletop, with lip, for her card table. It's made of slick whiteboard material, bordered by a simple molding. It's light-weight and easy to move around. Super efficient.

There is a giant table on the patio, and now that summer's here I can monopolize that occasionally.

Connie, if you have large flat surfaces free already and just need a way to protect a partially-finished puzzle while you're away from it, can you get a large piece of acrylic to fit on top of the surface and cover it? I've been thinking that I'd love to get back to doing puzzles (which I haven't done since I got my cat back in 2004), and thought about that solution.

Of course, that wouldn't help with the question of what to do with the pieces while I'm working on it and the cat is sitting in the middle of the puzzle, knocking pieces onto the floor...

I keep waking up before my alarm. Which I guess is a good thing overall, but I could have used that extra half-hour of sleep this morning! Ah well....

I have a lot of little things to get done this weekend, but I'm doing a volunteer project Saturday afternoon, and that's usually when I get everything done. Will I be motivated to get out of the house in the morning? Only time will tell!

Also, my DVR is totally full, so that's a whole nother agenda item!

Jesse, how's the new job?

I couldn't sleep. Am tired now.

So far, so good. They really are all about the slow ramp-up, which I guess is good. I finally have a project to work on, but it's small and not due for a month! But I'm starting to meet people and etc....

Oh, this is kind of funny: there was a job that I had applied for a while back because it sounded really interesting, but I wasn't necessarily qualified. I didn't hear anything until last week when they emailed me that they had hired someone else. I learned from the in-house newsletter yesterday that the person they hired came from my new org! A different department, though.

Funny. When I took my current job a few years ago, there was another person hired into the same role a couple of months later, and we figured out in conversation that she had actually interviewed for my old job in the interim. (Her instincts were a lot better than mine though, since she ran away screaming while I suffered through that lunatic place for three years.)

Observation: the cat has breakfasted on a huge mound of asparagus stems and is now passed out cold on the kitchen counter.

Analysis: cats is weird.

Fay, glad to hear you're okay. I was thinking about you when I heard the news this am.