New Show! New Show!

It's official, we've got a cast, we have a nifty poster and tix should be on sale soon. (Or just contact me and I can hook you up.) Tix will be $15 and will include snaks and beverages.

Official title: The Muses: Memories of a House
Location: The Muses, a beautiful home off of 2222.
What is it: A collection of short scenes and monologues performed in and around the home.
Warning: We will be walking the audience from location to location, some of which are outdoors- wear comfy shoes.

Hope you get a good lawyer...

Just when you think your bosses are counter-intuitive asses, you find out it's still better than working for the US Gov't.

Seriously, I hope this guy finds a good lawyer. Or several. Dozen.

conrats

Evidently I'm having one of those days. You know the ones I mean, the ones where little things that you normally just shrug off get stuck in your head. Like a festering wound, oozing and burning, these little things just sit there eating at your very sanity. And you'd chew your own arm off to stop them from bugging you.

I mean, I spent about half an hour sitting at my desk irritated at the font the new LadyBoss has chosen for her e-mails. It's not hard to read, it's not blinky or overly stylized, I just don't like it. So every time I got an e-mail from her I had one of those gut "grrrrr" reactions and I had to repress the urge to just delete it to get it out of my inbox.

But I digress. It's a font, I'm letting it go.

Then "conrats" happened. And my world collapsed into a fuming pile of inconsolable irritation the likes of which my cat can't even replicate on her worst day. (And those of you who know, realize that's quite an accomplishment.)

"But who the what where and why?" you ask. Let me break my irritation down.

First, the initial salvo. Apparently there's a new Manager in another division, and someone thought everyone needed to know. So this nifty little "please welcome so-and-so," e-mail goes out to the entire company. Name, rank, and mini bio follow (mourners please omit flowers would probably be a little overdramatic, no?), and my irritating sh*%-o-meter goes up a notch.

Because I know they're coming. Its inevitable. They can't be stopped and one must endure the painful platitudes of... The "Reply To All" Addicts. All companies have them, all companies mock them, and yet they still exist.

Now my company, in the last six months or so, has had three separate training memos sent out about abusing the RTA button, but still I start getting the little e-mails. "Congratulations!" "Welcome!" "Glad to have you!" And so on, and so on, and so on. All the while the meter's climbing.

And then it came. The one-word, RTA message that had me halfway into a scathing e-mail on proper account usage before I deleted it.

"conrats"

This sent me over the top. How many e-etiquette rules have we broken? Let's find out.

1. Misuse of the "reply to all" button.
2. Spelling counts. The word is "congrats," and that's not even a word, it's an abbreviation.
3. While the usage of punctuation is debatable in one-word e-mails, I'm already irritated, so here we are.
4. It's called capitalization, look into it.

Now I'm as guilty as the rest of you when it comes to the last two, and I have my spell-check set to 11 to keep me from flubbing #2, but that's not my point. This is:

If you're sending an e-mail to a co-worker you have never met, how do you want to present yourself? As a professional, courteous, and intelligent resource, or as a lazy, ignorant, and inattentive slacker who tosses off an e-mail with the forethought of a drunk Hollywood Celebrity. Whoops! Maybe that's not the impression we're trying to make...

But enough with the rant. Its quiltin' tme

Liam the Lonely; a Little Lost Lizard

My good deed for the day. I don't know how (and I'm not sure I want to) but one of the lizards that live in the bushes outside my office building ended up in the hall. On the third floor. I thought he was dead, but he did this little skitter move when I went past him...

Tell you the truth, I felt pretty sorry for the guy. They keep the AC so cranked in this building that his little cold-blooded toes must've been numb.

So I picked him up, he really didn't protest too much and he was only half the size of my pinkie, so I kinda had him beat in the size dept. And I carried him downstairs and out the door. He perked right up in the sunlight, and when I set him down, he scuttled off into the bushes like he belonged there.

Well he did belong there, but you get what I mean.

Nice little interlude to an otherwise blah day....

Memory Lane

So it started with an idle conversation via e-mail and a chat board. I think we were talking about things we did as kids (or as younger adults) that we wish we had more time to do.

And I started talking about writing. I used to write a lot, ask Ebon Butterfly over there, she used to contribute, and I kept it up until about high school. Now and again I've started things up and I would set them aside as they always began to feel more epic than I wanted to tackle.

So my friend bounced me over to one of the fanfic sites she occasionally contributes to, and she asked me if I would ever consider writing something like that. I kinda hemmed and hawed, and perched myself on the fence for awhile, mulling it over. And then it hit me like a big bolt of "Duh!" upside the head. When I started writing as a kid, it was fanfic. I took the characters from cartoons and later from books and wove them into my version of the world.

That more of less decided it. The genre makes me feel kinda geeky, but it just feels good to be writing again. It's all work in progress. The community I'm posting in is pretty supportive, and until they tell me to stop, I just might keep truckin.' Who knows where it might lead? If I get comfortable with the fanfic, I might branch out to one of those forgotten projects. Maybe finish one out.

And an extra thanks to EB, who's enthusiasm over her current project reminded me how much I missed it myself.