Happy birthday, Allyson!

Matilda has been watching The Golden Compass over and over and is resentful of Hec and me, to the point of tears, that we didn't name her Serafina Pekkala

I'm totally taking notes. Don't want Sprog to get mad at us a few years down the line for missing out on this most awesome of names!

Dream report: I dreamed that I was taking a class in high school, and not only did I get a terrible grade on the test, but it turned out that you had to pay a fee if you did poorly on the test. By the end of the dream I had accumulated around $1000 in penalties and was pretty worried about how I'd pay for it all. Kind of the worst aspects of adolescence and adulthood combined.

I desperately want to be near the windows so I can see some sky.

After 2 1/2 years here, I finally got to move to a cubicle by the windows a couple of months ago after a coworker retired, and it's pretty remarkable what a difference it's made to my mood and my willingness to come to work and sit at my desk for hours. I can see the sky, and the sun, and the green trees in the park, and open the window for a breeze if I want! It's really nice.

I bet you're joking, Kate, but beware that naming a child Serafina now will make some people think you got it from the Garner-Afflecks. IJS.

Well, I know somebody that named their baby after Aeryn Sun and that's still awesome!

Oh, we definitely have at least one beloved-fictional-character name in the running. Just not Serafina (sorry, FutureSprog!).

More good news in the "things are changing" front:

Starbucks Boycott Over Marriage Equality Spurs Tenfold Backlash

The National Organization for Marriage’s decision to boycott Starbucks for the company’s support of the freedom to marry has turned out to be a dismal failure. In the five days since NOM launched its “Dump Starbucks” petition, it has only gotten 19,000 signatures, compared to the nearly 250,000 individuals who have signed SumOfUs’s retaliatory “Thank You, Starbucks” card. In fact, SumOfUs has gotten over 8,000 new signers since 8:30 this morning.

Not only is NOM’s petition failing when it comes to numbers, it’s also failing when it comes to authenticity. As Jeremy Hooper has tracked, Dump Starbucks counts any information that is submitted, but that hasn’t stopped NOM from boasting about its campaign repeatedly all weekend. Worse yet, it seems that the site can’t even provide an accurate count of who is signing — either that or the organization is intentionally manipulating the numbers to make the petition look more successful that it is, which of course it isn’t anyway.

Happy birthday, Allyson!

(Also, I keep wanting to say "I dreamt" instead of "I dreamed." But hardly anyone uses that irregular verb, right?)

All the more reason you should use it. Keep the dreamt alive.

A southeastern Pennsylvania church subjected members of a youth group to a mock kidnapping and interrogations without telling them it was staged, and the outraged mother of one 14-year-old girl has filed a complaint with police.

I hope the kidnapping Christians get the book thrown at them, and that the parents of the other 16 kids join in the legal action.

We have virtually no private offices at our corporate HQ - I can think of three people offhand who have both a cube and an adjacent team room that is reserved for their use most of the time.

As of a few weeks ago, I don't even have a cube anymore. Some people in my group still have permanent cubes, and the rest of us use one of several that are kept open. This was entirely voluntary, btw. I work from home sometimes anyway, and I saw this as a way to sort of shift my default from office to home.

Biggest challenges so far:

- finding a place for all the shoes I used to keep at the office (so far, they're all still in my trunk) - remembering to have cash/change on hand for vending machines - having to look up phone numbers that I used to keep written on my whiteboard

Open plan/cubelife is frustrating if you don't have enough private spaces you can drop into for quick meetings or private conversations/calls. Otherwise, I never found it a big deal.

having to look up phone numbers that I used to keep written on my whiteboard

I bought a little whiteboard for this very reason. It sticks to my fridge with magnets.

Today is a perfect day. It's sunny but cool. I have the patio door open, and there's a little breeze blowing in. I'm especially grateful for this, because my AC isn't working and the HVAC people haven't called me back to schedule an appointment yet.

Happy birthday, Allyson!

One call center I worked in, AKA Hell on Earth, experimented briefly with First Come First Served on cubicles--find an empty one when you come in. Management was apparently under the illusion that all the machines on the floor were configured identically, and it turns out IT had only configured the machines as per the projects that particular section was working on. So every day there would be jockeying for cubicles, and people who came in late would have to tell their supervisors that they couldn't work because the machines that were available weren't configured for the work they needed to do.

It only lasted for a week, praise be.

Oh, we definitely have at least one beloved-fictional-character name in the running.

Sauron. Instill the proper respect in the other pre-schoolers.