Reading: The Mother Tongue

Moving: Not an auspicious end to March

31 March 2000: It's snooooooowing

I had to be at work before 7:00 and so I had my usual anxiety dream that I wouldn't get up on time. The alarm didn't work and I woke at 7:30, and for some reason RDC had to drive me, and then it was 8:30 and we hadn't left yet, and then the alarm rang at 5:45 and I caught the 6:15 bus in the snow and got to work just fine, before time, and found myself completely redundant. I was helping out the Meetings department and I'm not at all sure I did Dot Org any more good at the meeting than I would have at my own desk in my own cube at the office.

When, by mid-afternoon, I was completely unnecessary, we discussed my leaving. Then a man strode up to the desk with a pipe, unlit but belching tobacco ash with every exhalation, clenched in his teeth, and he said to the three of us, "Hey, girls." We did not know him. We are none of us under 18. I seethed and told him that smoking is not permitted in any public area of a hotel in Colorado. I had to say something, and about that I could be both officious and articulate. "It's not lit," he told me. I turned my back and diddled with whatever else. He had greeted someone who didn't exist, anyway. And I left, because staff assistant or not, I don't put up with shit like that.

In the mail came a letter from ABW with two photographs of the boys, a wallet-sized of NKW and a little two-hours-after-birth 1"x2" thingie of AEW (now eight months old). Can anyone tell me what I should do with my growing collection of wallet- and smaller-sized photographs of my passel of kidlets? Are there photograph albums catering to the size-challenged photo?

The importance of knowing how to spell: RDC asked me to proof his quarterly summary of why he earned his bonus. I got to tell him that "assess"' takes two s's in its final syllable.

In the evening Dot Org had a reception for the meeting at the Denver Art Museum. Socializing with people amused me and I found out that Landscape just got engaged yesterday. I think the Museum dropped the ball on the catering because while the bars functioned, there were no nosebags for quite a while past the appointed time. I don't know if hunger made people oblivious or what, but even while the director and president spoke, the murmuring continued loudly and unabated all around me. CoolBoss, whose responsibility the meeting partly was, caught my eye and using our eyebrows we semaphored disparaging comments. When the speakers were over, RDC and I waited no longer for troughs to be produced but went through the exhibit and then scarpered to Ilios, a Mediterranean restaurant on Broadway. Rack of lamb and paella packed with scallops and shrimp satisfied much better than cocktail peanuts.

I have to confess that we went to Ilios partly because it was closest and therefore faster than walking to lower downtown and the not-quite-proliferation of restaurants there. Speed was an issue because RDC hadn't eaten for over seven hours and we had both forgotten to snack him before we left. The main reason we didn't want to walk to LoDo was that the snow clung wetly to glasses. That's the one thing that saves us from moving from Portland or Seattle, the constant drip. Now that I'm mostly back in contacts, it doesn't bother me, but my eyes do need a break from them every once in a while and I'd been using my enforced non-gymming as such a break, so I was in glasses last night. RDC is always in glasses, but still moisture doesn't bother him in Denver, because there isn't much. Except for last night.