I had a bad night, but a good day.

Last night, trying to fall asleep, I had a spasm in my shoulder that kept twinging and waking me up. I finally jumped up and stormed downstairs for a big round of self-pity and mersyndol sometime after midnight. Though I thought, as I took the mersyndol, ‘taking this so late is going to leave me too groggy to get up in the morning.’ And I was right.

So at work, I was kind of zombified. But my coworker was out of tasks, so he said he was going to run to Tim Horton’s and he brought me a coffee.

We had a meeting of the entire programming department today. That was nice for a lot of subtle reasons. The more time I spend in my new position, the more I like my director. I respected his intellect before, but he’s a difficult person to get to know. And so now that I’m working more closely with him, I find I respect his character as well. Which is nice. So I think I’ve developed kind of a Man Friday complex (which is bizarre in someone who wants to take over the world). And so what was particularly nice about the meeting was that my Director, in spite of making it clear that meetings are not his favourite thing, was so competent at chairing it. So I got to just sit back and watch, with nary an itch to grab the reigns.

And we got lots of good feedback from a lot of the programmers. I think we have a ton of people who are only too happy to be invited to be more involved.

Later, I called a cab driver to ask if he was in possession of my bank card. I had dropped my bank card in a cab on Friday night. And then, on Sunday, I talked to the driver who had found the card. And he said he left it in the cab and wouldn’t be driving until Tuesday, but he gave me the number of the guy who would be driving on Monday. So, when I called, this second guy had my card, and he offered to put it in the mail for me. And I was like, “couldn’t I meet you somewhere, maybe?” And so he took down my address as well as my work address and said that if he had an opportunity to stop by either place, he’d bring it. And then he ended up bringing it to my office and leaving it with our office manager for me. I thought that was super-nice. I expected most cab drivers would have just said, “I’ll leave it at our dispatch office. You can pick it up.”

So then for the rest of the afternoon, I was just super-productive. I was so productive and so engaged in my work that I’ve come home with tennis elbow, which I get far more than compressed carpal tunnels.

Middle of the afternoon, one of the PMs came to me and said, “J- and I were discussing how you’re like the secret power in the programming department. And I said how you were like a silent executive but then he said you were like Dick Cheney. I just thought you should know, in case you’d like to shoot him with a dart gun or something.”

He was trying to get the goat of the person who had compared me to Dick Cheney, which person was sitting just across the room with his back to us. But he was engrossed in his work and didn’t notice the conversation. Then he turned around, and got up and was walking past. And I quite unsubtly grabbed my other coworker’s suction cup dart gun from his desk and shot my maligner. I totally thought he would see it coming, but he did not. He ducked enough that the dart just hit his cheek, I think, but it was pretty point-blank range.

When he looked flabbergasted at me, and there I was, red-handed, I got to say, “well… you pretty much have to expect that if you compare me to Dick Cheney.”

That was the same coworker who had bought me coffee in the morning. Guilty conscience much?

After work, I got the kids, dropped Rachel at her belly dance class and brought Ethan and Hannah home. Ethan finished his homework really fast, and then went to play video games. And so Hannah and I sat in the livingroom reading ‘Kittens’ about twice and ‘Barnyard Dance’ once and ‘Puppy Peek-a-boo’ like twelve times and ‘Baby Animals’ ten times and ‘Up Bear Down Bear’ four times until I was tired of all of them, but she just wanted ‘Puppy Peek-a-boo’ over and over again. But she finally got distracted by her Baby Einstein piano that plays mozart. And she sat near it, on one knee and with one knee bended, would lean forward to hit a key, and then rock back onto her knee and dance, bopping her body up and down and shrugging her shoulders. It was the most ridiculously cute thing, ever. I hope she shows that trick off at her birthday party this weekend.