I'm trying to figure out why "data are" is so grating to me. It shouldn't be!

Let's be active, not passive! Organise the data! Datas! Datae! Datum. It's very flexible. Jilli--please interrupt the presentation, stat.

Ha. No. One of the presenters is terrifyingly blonde and perky. I am lurking safely in the back of the room, and now away from whomever had hosed themselves down with a horrible floral scent.

Suela, I really hope things get better for you soon.

'Suela,

can you leave work early? I think maybe it isn't the best place for you today.

Poor Suela. Sorry things are the perfect storm of crap right now.

Suela, so sorry. I'm glad you're making sure to find moments to take care of yourself.

And my folks just got in the car to drive back to the old place. Either they get there and discover they don't have a key (in which case my mother melts down) or they get in and discover that it's mostly emptied and kind of a mess, with random piles of stuff everywhere (in which case my mother melts down). And then they call me and I end up hanging up on her.

Oddly enough, they do seem to be getting marginally better, but I'm less and less able to deal. And my sister is at a conference for 3 days in Monterey.

ARGH.

Walking out straight into a daiquiri. Or libation of choice...

Sometimes it's really hard communicating with my team. Table tags, the difference between ping and tracert, just...things I thought were our commonish language, you know? And when it's the business saying "Hey, I ran a tracert and it looks kind of dodgy once it hits the data centre..." I'm cringing listening to them not understand the call or my manager trying to make sure a cascade of half-rights didn't start up (She knew it wasn't really a network problem, but the language to say the tracert was misleading? NSM).

And I just looked over my shoulder to see the anti-virus software pop up with a hit on one of the developers' machines--he's just sailing through his emails and clicking on stuff not one week after a virus took down our entire shared storage. At least it caught it--if not, he'd have been the third dev in our group to get his machine infected, totally aside from the network.

The org charts in Smart Art are for an org chart with like 20 people. If you have twenty people, why do you need a chart?

Alas, for me the answer is "because clients keep asking for them with each new proposal even if we've worked for them before, and things change just enough to require a new one each time instead of using what I made 6 months ago."

Consuela, can you just think about what you need right now to get to tomorrow? And then do that? Whatever it is.

I'm with Jesse. That actually might be my life motto.

And if that is, "Go to the airport and get on the first plane out of town," and that plane is going to Cincinnati, totally call me. I'll even let you sleep on the good mattress. We can go to the good indie bookstore tomorrow, and you can help me review NEH digital humanities grants.