Wednesday night, while Sonya was on the phone, my boss left a message on my machine. He left his home number and asked me to call him.

"Well, crap," I thought to myself, "that's it. I'm fired."

What had I done to get fired? Nothing that I could think of. Then why was the boss calling me?

Well, no one could get much work done last week due to the crash of one of the servers. Since it looked like the server was going to stay down 'til Monday they decided to have all the contractors stay home.

I'm a contractor.

While I wasn't too crazy about burning my own sick or vacation time (I also had the option of not being paid; that's not gonna happen) I did like the super-long weekend it resulted in. I like my job fine, sure, but not-at-work is always better than at-work. 

Besides, my friend Christie and her sister Annabeth were coming to town for the St. Patrick's weekend, so I had lots of use for a couple of days off.

So what did I do Thursday? Lots of things. I took a bunch of mail for previous residents of our apartment to the post office to be forwarded. I also mailed a post card that may get us in to a taping of Letterman when we're in New York. That'd be pretty nifty, huh? And I went to the grocery store for, like, beer and stuff. I took Sonya some lunch from Joey K's (where I saw Kevin from Better Than Ezra get in his car and talk on his cell phone, just like a normal human being instead of the Rock Star he is) and I picked up some cleaning. Then I went back to the house and scrubbed that bitch from floor to ceiling.

Funny: I had already sprinkled carpet de-stinker all over the downstairs carpet when I remembered that the vacuum cleaner hadn't worked to well the last time I used it. I suspected the bag was full, but I had no spare bags and no inclination to go out and buy more. I took the vacuum into the back yard to investigate.

Sure enough, the bag was brimming with the horrid crap that vacuum bags get full of. Time to get improvisational. I cut a hole in the top of the bag and dumped the offending filler into a garbage bag. Then I used cable ties to seal off the open end of the bag and put it back in the machine.

It vacuumed like a motherfucker after that.