Michelangelo sibyl from the Sistine Chapel

 

more wind than chicago

A relatively calm first night back at work gave way to a wonderful seven hours of sleep this morning. If the wind hadn't been rattling the awning outside my bedroom window, I might have slept even longer. It wasn't until I saw the weather report that I found out that the wind had been blowing at a steady twenty miles an hour for most of the afternoon.

...

I have a small confession to make about the contents of my refrigerator. Sometimes I let things linger in there longer than I should, but today I tried to correct that mistake. In my effort to clean out the unwanted debris, I emptied five small jars with various amounts of salsa left in them. Now hearing that I have so many jars of salsa, one might get the mistaken impression that I eat salsa with every meal, but I don't. What happened is that I would buy a new jar whenever the one that I had been using was getting low and then forget about the other one. Now doing this once or twice might be understandable, but I did it four times. Rather than rinsing them out and recycling them, I would just keep shoving them towards the back of the refrigerator.

In addition to the partially filled salsa jars, I also consolidated my pickle jars. There were at least five of those floating around the refrigerator as well. In my defense I should mention that not all of them were the same. Some of them were dill and others were the bread and butter kind, so I couldn't mix all of them together.

Other items that were cast out included a soggy head of lettuce and some leftover Italian sausage that I think I grilled sometime last week. I won't even mention the half-empty salad dressing bottles that line my refrigerator door. Maybe I'll throw those away next week. The smell of the peppers and onions from the salsa was enough for me today.

...

Last Friday at work I played a small joke that I didn't think anyone noticed. What I had done was left a humorous message on another workstation that did not belong to me. Well, judging by the email that my boss sent to my department someone finally noticed. At first I was a little hurt that they didn't see the humor in it and then I got more upset the longer that I thought about it. I kept wondering why I should work for a company that takes itself so seriously. Then within an hour, I was completely worked up over the way that they reacted to what I thought was a minor joke and this is so typical of me.

I never deal very well with management giving me a slap on the wrist. Yes, I know that they could have done worse than just sending a group email, but I always wonder where it will lead in the future. Office politics is something that I detest and try to avoid if at all possible, but here I am on the verge of a conflict because of something very minor.

So often I become defensive and end up aggravating the situation and getting myself into more trouble. I can never tell when I need to just pull back, watch everything go by and wait for everyone to forget about whatever was bothering them in the first place. I guess that in office politics the best defense might be to do nothing.

 
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