One smell of what rising up through the air?

Instead of paying attention in my meeting (they don't really need me for this part anyway...), here's what I did.



I got 119.5.

- posted by Laura @ 2:04 PM

 
Lonesome but for the 'net.

I've been thrown out of my normal routine - I'm involved in a face-to-face (AcronymCo-ized, it's "F2F") meeting all day today and tomorrow. A "F2F" is a large, project oriented meeting in which all of the key stakeholders in the project get together to discuss requirements, strategy, and timelines. Generally the F2F is called when people from other sites have to travel to meet in a central location, and the agenda is packed with as much stuff as can usefully get done in the short amount of time that everyone can be in the same place at the same time. In this instance, it's just because we're working under such a tight deadline with so many conflicting priorities from different groups, that we're doing it this way.

It's taking place in a distant conference room waaaay off on the opposite side of the campus that I normally work in, in a forgotton corner of a building that is between purposes at the moment, and is therefore mostly deserted. The rest of the meeting participants have departed for lunch, leaving me alone in the conference room with my laptop and my bowl of chicken noodle soup. We'd just gotten word right before the break that a colleague from another one of the sites (overseas) was murdered this morning, and the news has cast such a pall over us. The project we're discussing right now was one that she worked on quite closely with us, during its inception four years ago.

I was not close to her - really, I've just sat in a few meetings with her and knew her in passing. But it's so awful to think that her life was cut short in an act of violence. Sometimes, I hate the world we live in. And the feelings I have at the moment, coupled with the quiet and distance from the rest of civilization that I'm experiencing here in this forgotten corner, have got me feeling pretty darned surreal and out of touch with everything.

Yesterday was such a lovely day that I'm finding it especially hard to get back into the swing of things, right now. Calvin and I both played hookey from work, and spent the entire day enjoying each other's company. We had lunch, did some errands, and bought "Finding Nemo". We watched it after Marie got home from school, and I've been declairing everything "Mine? Mine? Mine?" ever since. Later, the three of us sat together and watched TV yesterday evening, and bawled over the "goodbye" episode of "Eight Simple Rules".

The futon in The Kids' room (which we're slowly starting to refer to as The Den - although Marie still protests, "It's Michael's room!") has been folded back up into its "couch" function, and all my books that were stored in boxes in the garage are now occupying the shelves that Calvin put up in the closet last weekend. Geek that I am, I spent the next couple of days finding excuses to go up into the room, just so I could open the closet door and admire my book collection - accessible finally for the first time in almost seven years. My mother and grandmother would be pleased to know that all the Hummel figurines of my Mom's made it, unbroken, across the US from their storage place in my Uncle's basement in Maine. I'm not particularly partial to knick-knacks, but these particular figurines have meaning to me, so Calvin put up some corner shelves on which they could be displayed. Along with the dolls that my Grandmother made for my sister and I when we were little, which are occupying the back of the futon, the room is taking on a decidedly "girly" feel. I hope to not let it go too far. And it's still very much The Kids' room, for when they come back out to visit.

I must say, that futon is a great place to take a nap. I did that very thing on Monday during my lunch hour.

We're throwing a goodbye happy hour at our house for a departing colleague on Friday, and I'm compiling a grocery list in my head. I'm perusing all my regular journal reads, and contemplating when I'm going to write another entry for ~Snerkology~. I'm answering the "Can you believe what happened?" e-mails about our poor departed colleague, feeling out of touch with everyone because they're all congregating together to talk about it, and I'm stuck over here in this conference room way off in BFE. And yet, I'd rather not be amongst all the chatter, since we're pretty devoid of information and they're just rehashing the small amount of facts we do know.

I'm lonesome except for the connection to the outside world that the internet provides. Perhaps I need some coffee.

- posted by Laura @ 12:35 PM