Yesterday was one of those conflicted days where, hey, it's 67 degrees in early February and you've got three hours to kill. You have your bike. You have your book. But you're really tired. You have a class from 6:30 until 9:30 and then have to work at 6:00 the next morning. What do you do? Bike-ride or nap? Read in the lounge chair of the sunny quadrangle, or nap?

I napped with my window wide open and felt that was a fair compromise. What does Boulder reward me with? A next day even sunnier and warmer than that one, with no obligations to meet and no naps to take! I might go out on a limb here and say that this is the first time that nature has ever rewarded me for being lazy. (Or global warming has just gone on a total rampage with no regard either way for my laziness.)

In non-weather-related blog news (ah, if only ALL blog news could be such!) I am currently having an awkward etiquette problem that I'm pretty sure couldn't even exist until last year at the earliest. See, I'm a Scrabulous junkie (and I continue to call it Scrabulous despite the whole legal kerfluffle with Hasbro, etc) and I've been known to carry on 10 or 12 games at a time, playing them at work while my buses circle placidly around town, evenly spaced and happy.

Now, our network has always blocked Youtube and celebrity gossip rags and porn sites and things of that nature, but never bothered to block Facebook or any of its applications, probably figuring that it was OK if its employees wasted time in innocuous ways. Yesterday, though, Scrabulous (and Facebook) suddenly became blocked. Solidly blocked. Neither switching browsers nor going through tunnel sites nor adding s' to the http's worked at all.

The day before yesterday, I played an exciting, extremely evenly matched game with a stranger. She asked me for a rematch. I accepted and started the game, saying I'd play consistently the following day. Following day comes, Scrabulous is blocked. I can't even get ahold of her via Facebook to tell her what's going on. Having had this happen (players disappearing on me suddenly after starting a game), I know how frustrating this is.

Now my quandary has several solutions, but Miss Manners not having covered Scrabulous etiquette in any of her manuals yet, I can't decide which is the best:

a) Using the Scrabulous chatbox when I get home to apologize for my situation and offer to gallantly resign the game if she chooses not to play a one-move-a-day game;
b) Using the Scrabulous chatbox to apologize for my situation, but expect her to keep playing;
c) Decide to not care because this is the internet and there are assholes on the internet and everyone expects assholes on the internet and besides, Scrabulous games aren't promises signed in gold so I should just play when I wander by my computer and to hell with what she thinks about me because we will never meet; or
d) Demand that our IT guy unblock Scrabulous because my work is on-demand and rare, and the nature of it is that there cannot be extra work, really, so Scrabulous couldn't possibly be affecting my output, and risk being laughed at and having Blogger blocked as well.

Ideas?

It's a Midwestern rainy day in the desert. I've got a glove with a coat hanger twisted through the fingers making the 'rock on' sign in the corner, and a wasteland of chocolate wrappers surrounding me. I have a surprise birthday party coming up that, yes, I am supposed to know about, but not the details, and the details being a surprise is enough for me. I also have a surprise birthday dinner coming up that was wholly a surprise until I figured out the clues in a burst and rush of lucky guesses this morning.

It occurs to me that if this were a story, trying to 'illustrate' my happiness, to 'show and not tell' the details that made me that way, it would probably sound forced, but since it's real, and I'm not trying to write, and this is a fleeting feeling, it reads real, at least to me.

I was sitting on a bench mostly hidden by thigh-high grass, blowing the white seeds off dandelion puffs, and I looked at the yellow dandelions surrounding me and I thought 'I'm surrounded by wishes that have grown up."

Funny I should think that while my head was whirling from work. All work is, is packing massage creams and lotions and complexion masks, and translating my boss's stream-of-conscious into polite email form, and looking interestedly at malfunctioning yard tools, but it doesn't take much for my head to whirl. Everything holds so much gravity for me, even when it doesn't deserve to. I dream about screw-on black capped soap dispensers.