(We take you now to the Oval Office.)

George: Condi! Nice to see you. What's happening?

Condi: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China.

George: Great. Lay it on me.

Condi: Hu is the new leader of China.

George: That's what I want to know.

Condi: That's what I'm telling you.

George: That's what I'm asking you. Who is the new leader of China?

Condi: Yes.

George: I mean the fellow's name.

Condi: Hu.

George: The guy in China.

Condi: Hu.

George: The new leader of China.

Condi: Hu.

George: The Chinaman!

Condi: Hu is leading China.

George: Now whaddya' asking me for?

Condi: I'm telling you Hu is leading China.

George: Well, I'm asking you. Who is leading China?

Condi: That's the man's name.

George: That's who's name?

Condi: Yes.

George: Will you or will you not tell me the name of the new leader of
China?

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Yassir? Yassir Arafat is in China? I thought he was in the
Middle
East.

Condi: That's correct.

George: Then who is in China?

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Yassir is in China?

Condi: No, sir.

George: Then who is?

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Yassir?

Condi: No, sir.

George: Look, Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of China.
Get me the Secretary General of the U.N. on the phone.

Condi: Kofi?

George: No, thanks.

Condi: You want Kofi?

George: No.

Condi: You don't want Kofi.

George: No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk.
And
then get me the U.N.

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: Not Yassir! The guy at the U.N.

Condi: Kofi?

George: Milk! Will you please make the call?

Condi: And call who?

George: Who is the guy at the U.N?

Condi: Hu is the guy in China.

George: Will you stay out of China?!

Condi: Yes, sir.

George: And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the U.N.

Condi: Kofi.

George: All right! With cream and two sugars. Now get on the phone.

(Condi picks up the phone.)

Condi: Rice, here.

George: Rice? Good idea. And a couple of egg rolls, too. Maybe we should
send some to the guy in China. And the Middle East. Can you get Chinese
food in the Middle East?

Well, not really, but people keep handing me checks today. If only it were Friday, this would be a glorious day.

As it is, I have to stay late and hammer through my backlog of files, because I lost an entire day to computer errors yesterday.

And then my assistant reminded me that he's on vacation til Tuesday. I don't remember telling him he could go to Vegas for four days. Then again, I'll get even when I go to France next month.

Maybe it's the overcast sky, but I feel unfocussed and disconnected today. Even the jolt from a venti mocha isn't helping my poor brain wake up.

I spent the weekend in bed dealing with a rare but intense asthmatic reaction. I think the rain and the heater in my new house are conspiring against me, because now that the heat's off, I'm fine. Mostly. I've called PG&E to come and clean the heater and check it carefully, as well, because there's a funny smell when we use it. Not like gas or mildew, just…funny. The smell of an iron when it scorches damp cloth combined with something vaguely sweet. Whatever it is is NOT GOOD.

I have a million things to write about, but I also have 35 new files facing me down, mocking me with their newness and incomplete-ness. How dare I write in a journal when they are waiting for my attention?

Still, it'll be an early day for me, as the office is shutting down at 4 so the boys can all go to some sporting event. They invited me, but it's not my thing.

Ah, well, the files are winning after all.
Back to work.

I braided my hair today, because I'm tired of having it in my face, and while ponytails are easy and quick, too many make my head hurt. So I have pigtails, which make me look about twelve. Maybe thirteen. To quote the words of another journalist I read often, “It's never too late to have a happy childhood.” Somehow, the act of braiding my hair has put me in a giddy mood and everything is making me giggle.

* * *
Starbucks has the most wonderful ginger-bread, well, ginger-cake, really, that I've ever gotten from a coffee place. It's moist, and not too sweet, and even has cream-cheese frosting. It's even better than my previous autumn addiction, pumpkin scones.

* * *
I stupidly forgot to buy tickets for Harry Potter in advance, and now, per Fandango, my preferred theatre is sold out for the first week. Argh! Well, it's not like I /have/ to see it in the first week.

* * *
Flowers! I have flowers! My mother treated me to $250 of flowers for the bed in front of my house, and we planted them about ten days ago, and now they're blooming. Yes, while the world around me is all crunchy leaves and greying skies, I have poppies and delphinium and snapdragon. I so love California. I still need to buy lattice and some vines so I can make our front patio a bit more private, and plant the lemon tree (“lemon drop futures”) that Kass and Libby brought us as a housewarming present. It's a rule, isn't it, that all Californian's must have lemon trees in their yards?

* * *
Work is actually going well. I told the guys if they each funded and originated one loan a day, I'd be very happy, and I was mostly joking, because that level of volume is really hard to maintain, but it's 11/06 and we already have 22 fundings on the board. (I only handled 17 of them, though.) So, I'm busy, but in a good way, and (this week, at least), I love my job.

Except, they gave me permission to find an escrow assistant, and there's someone I really would like to hire, who doesn't have any mortgage experience, but I know he's good with computers and customer service, and bright enough to pick up anything, and then they said WAIT. I suspect if we maintain this volume through Q4 I'll get my assistant after all, and a raise to boot.

* * *
I've been bad about commenting in people's OD's and LJ's. I do read all my friends and favorites, and I tend to compose comments, and then forget to actually type them in before work distracts me. This is one of those things that makes me really antsy for that t1 to be installed.

* * *
November has always been a difficult month for me, but so far, this one's not so sucky. Let's hope this is a trend, shall we?

Than sitting in an office on a Wednesday evening, watching a co-worker's pet spider crawl around it's teal plastic container. It's a wolf spider, so, harmless, but I hate spiders, and yet, even so, I'm oddly compelled to peer at this poor captive creature.

It must be the cold meds.

On the other hand, I have two loans of my own funding this week, in addition to the override I get on everyone else's loans and my own base, so, that's a good thing, because the new mortgage is about $1200 / month more than the old mortgage, and while the number isn't that scary, really, I don't like to be under financial pressure.

It's 5:22, and if I'm lucky, Fuzzy will be here by six.

I still feel icky, but tomorrow's Halloween, so it'll be almost like a day off, and we're having pumpkin ravioli for dinner, which I love, and I'm taking Friday off completely to spend some time with Mom before she returns to Baja Sur.

And I'm babbling, sorry.

I have a cold, and my head feels disconnected from the rest of me. That floaty actifeddy feeling does not mix well with work.

At the coffee place this morning, I barely touched my bagel or drink.

I want to go home.

When I was a kid, Asbury Park, NJ, was still a place of innocence. The perfect beach-boardwalk amusement park, with roller coasters, spinning tea-cups, skee-ball in the funhouse, and the best salt-water taffy on earth. It changed at about the same time I got old enough to see beyond the magic of twinkle lights and coastal breezes, declining first into despair, the funhouse turned into a drug-den, and the ticket booth plastered with posters advertising the next rave, and then becoming a relic, a shadow of its former self.

When I was nine, my mother and I spent a year living in a 2nd-story walk-up flat carved out of someone's old summer house in Ocean Grove, the next town down the boardwalk, or up the highway (35? 36? I never remember which is the coastal one and which is not). While there were no actual train tracks to be on the wrong side of, there were gates, because Ocean Grove was privately owned by the Methodist Church, and every summer a tent city bloomed colorfully in the poorer side of town, as everyone same for the religious equivalent of a girl scout jamboree.

The differences between Ocean Grove and Neptune City/Asbury Park grew more marked with every day that passed, or so it seemed. Within the gates, it was an idyllic place to be a child. The beach was clean and safe, there was an old-fashioned soda fountain in the stationers store, and you could trick-or-treat at all the stores on Halloween, on the way home from school. Outside the gates, suburbia was being paved over, and high-rise apartments were replacing ages-old Victorians – summer homes now occupied year-round by senior citizens who wanted to spend their last days at the Shore.

The last time I saw Asbury Park, it was mid-winter, and I was 21. There was no snow, but it was grey and foggy, and it made the entire landscape seem haunted. I snapped pictures, but I don't think I ever remembered to develop the roll of film. But I remember wandering through the empty husk that used to be the funhouse, half convinced that if I knew how to look, I'd see the twinkle lights, and hear the noises from the arcade again.

It didn't work, of course, so I went to sit on one of the empty benches that faced the sea. Even the Atlantic looked gray that day – starkly beautiful, but somehow sad. Old. I watched a couple of leftover sea gulls playing in the sky, kicked at a candy wrapper with my sneakered foot, and in the roar of the waves and the wind, I heard it. Just as parents tell their small children you can hear the water when you hold a shell to your ear, I heard the echoes of summers past, the sound of young kids screaming in delight when the spinning tea-cups seemed out of control, of the ubiquitous Springsteen music that became part of the soundtrack of my childhood, of young lovers huddled under the weathered wood of the boardwalk itself, of grandmothers shouting to their charges to come out of the water Right Now because Your Lips are Turning Blue.

I smiled to myself, as I left the bench, and headed to the local coffee shop for a bowl of minestrone to take the chill away.

(Why does it not surprise me that I scored the same as )

No, really. He does.
Yesterday we covered the pool in order to be able to mow the lawn without getting grass in the pool, and my dogs, neither of whom care that the pool is there, when it's uncovered, both trotted over to investigate.

Cleo, a 25-pound mutt whom we refer to as the Barking Bitch of Beelzebub, mostly affectionately, jumped onto the plastic cover making a sound sort of like this:
*thu-splash-squawk!* She walked a couple of steps then fell off the edge of the cover, into the deep end, and Fuzzy had to bail her out.

Then Zorro, who is a 9.5 pound Chihuahua/JRT mix, decided it was his turn. He went to the opposite side of the pool from where we were comforting Cleo, and and hesitated, backing off a bit when I said in that Warning Tone that pet owners and parents both develop, “No, Zorro.”

But temptation was too great.

He leaped.
He landed. There was no discernable splash, only a perturbed expression on a small doggie-face when he realized his footing wasn't solid. Not even a little. Another couple of bounding steps, and he was on the ground, on our side of the pool. His feet hadn't even gotten wet, till he landed in Cleo's dripped water.

Note to self: Leave pool uncovered when dogs are home alone. It's safer.

Yes, this is shorter notice than we planned, although I think some of you knew about this in advance.

Anyway, beginning at 3:00 PM this Saturday the 26th of October, we're having an open house/ housewarming party, and we'd love for you to come. Feel like bringing people, go ahead, just give me a head count by Friday please.

The address: 440 Halsey Avenue, San Jose, 95128 (nearest cross streets are Stevens Creek and MacArthur, or Bascom and Scott). Telephone info: Home: 408-279-8507 / Me at work: 408-557-9880 x 204 / Fuzzy's Cell (cuz I never remember to turn mine on): 408-594-1112.

We'll be serving grilled chicken and spicy hot dogs, as well as assorted finger foods, so bringing things is not required unless you have specific dietary requirements. The pool is NOT heated, but if the day seems warm enough, folks are welcome to swim, in which case, bring suits/towels.

Because we're both terribly busy, and indecisive, we're tacking paint samples on the walls of several rooms, and begging for thoughts about color.

If I know your email address, you'll be receiving an evite as well, from 'zenobia@zenitopia.com' most likely.

Happy Monday.
Make it a great day.