Yes, as a matter of fact, it is one of those days. I'm not grumpy - quite the contrary; I'm in a fairly good mood - but it's dark and raining outside, I'm sleepy, I'm sniffly, I want to go back to bed, and I can't think of anything worth talking about.
I'm feeling pretty good about work, at least. I'm on a new project that is in essense an extention of the old project, but if it goes through, the four of us who are working on it will have given our office its first major non-government contract, and its biggest single contract ever. Four of us. Heh. It makes me a little nervous, but if we can pull it off, it will do wonders for my career, both in terms of salary and options.
I can't actually talk too much about the project here, since some of my readers are competitors to this company, but one thing I'm pleased about is that my manager noticed how well the Two Mikes and I work together, and decided not to screw with it: Scary Mike will be doing the network stuff, Random Mike will be doing all the hardware interfaces and underlying dlls, the manager will be doing all the really freaky stuff like cryptography, and I'll be pulling it all together into an interface. And, it looks like for this project, I'll be handling the databases, since I'm the only one with any database experience in this team.
I'm actually kindof excited about it. Of course, you'll want to ask me again in September, when the first phase is scheduled to be finished, and yet again in December or January when the whole thing is supposed to be done. If I'm capable of coherence between last-minute panic and the lack of sleep, my whole opinion may well have changed a bit by then.
Damn, I'm sleepy. I can't figure out if it's the allergy attack (darnit, my Claritin isn't working!), the rainy weather, or the fact that I spent half the night sloshing through surreal dreams that faded the instant I awoke.
Maybe it's because I spent half of yesterday with Barenaked Ladies songs bouncing around in my head. The whole morning my brain was insisting that "Enid, we never really knew each other anyway," and the whole evening after I got home from work, I kept mentally humming, "This is me in grade nine, baby." Naturally, I could only remember the choruses, not the verses, so they played on continuous loop until I was ready to kill.
So today I brought the CD to work with me. Hopefully that'll stave off any further mental bombardments.
Word of the Day: dovecote - a small compartmented raised house for domestic pigeons; a settled or harmonious group or organization
Every morning after the war, Joshua went up to the roof to check on the dovecote. It wasn't that he felt responsible for them or anything, but that the chore gave him some slight excuse to get away from the pounding resentment that coursed in waves through the living spaces below.
He especially appreciated it when they needed some care - when the whitewash on the box was peeling, or the occupants required some attention more than simple feeding. After the war, idle hands were simply inexcusable. Even sleep was put to work, excess heat stored to incubate the more-than-ever precious babies, and every minute that Joshua spent caring for the 'cote was a minute he didn't have to be down in the living spaces in the noisy, cold dark.
This morning Joshua opened the front of the box and frowned. They had been fighting again. More and more, since the war, they fought during the night. Mama Sichel had scoffed and insisted that you couldn't tell what they did when the doors were closed. They were only screens and wires and buttons, she'd told Joshua as they'd mixed up the day's rations, and brains floating in vats of amniotic fluid. All you could do, she had said, stirring the pot with unnecessary vigor, was follow the instructions they gave. That, she snapped, actually stopping for a few seconds to glare at him, was what the dovecotes did.
Joshua knew better than to argue with Mama Sichel when she was in one of her moods. But he whispered his theories to the screens as he cared for them, pushing the buttons that fed nutrients into the vats and carefully wiping their screens. Maybe decision-making was what they did, he told them in a fair imitation of Mama Sichel's thick accents, but no-one knew for certain how they arrived at those decisions. Maybe, he told them, looking seriously into the camera lens on top of the 'cote, they argued about it until they reached a consensus.
Maybe, he muttered, they hadn't intended the war to happen at all, and that was why they fought so much, now.
Joshua had been talking to the dovecote ever since the war. Never before had it answered.
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