I'm back to work

but apparently no one else is this week. At least one of the reasons why I was discouraged from taking annual leave so I could accompany the S.O. to the tundra is now clear: my team lead wanted me here because she was planning to be gone. Ditto a whole herd of other people. I noticed the parking lot was looking pretty empty compared to a typical morning, so I guess we should all hope no killer flu hits today -- Large Nameless Agency is definitely not running at full capacity.

It was a rather quiet weekend at home. The S.O. and the dog went on their merry way, the back of the truck packed full of stuff that the S.O. thinks he's going to need while working on the retirement bunker, and I retreated to the recliner with a good book. Or two. Or three. One of the library books (Mummy Dearest) was a nice fun read in which one author (Joan Hess) paid homage to another (Elizabeth Peters). It had a lot of in-jokes that fans of the latter would find amusing, and I did. The book ends with the heroine declaring that the absolute one thing she will not do while in Egypt is to give in to the cliche of being photographed while sitting on a camel in front of a pyramid -- and then when you look at the back cover, there's the author: sitting on a camel in front of the Great Pyramid at Giza. You gotta love an author who can mock herself.

The weather was sufficiently wet and dreary that I didn't venture far from the recliner until this morning. The one bright spot was a vintage dress finally sold on Etsy, giving me hope the others will eventually move, too.

I did listen to various news shows, did the usual weekend C-SPAN immersion, but must be hitting the saturation point (again) because listening to the tinfoil hat crowd didn't trigger much of a reaction. It does floor me that there are still people out there in wackaloon land who want to keep harping about the infamous 'fake' birth certificate. Some of them are good for a laugh, e.g., the ones who only memorized half of Rush's talking points and so babble about Obama being born in Hawaii* and therefore not a citizen, but most are just pathetic.

I'd ask rhetorically just how long this whining is going to last, but I already know. The next four years for sure, and probably the next eight. The Clinton-haters didn't let up on Bill the entire time he was in office; the Obama-haters aren't going to be any different. And now. . . back to work.

*A digression: the ignorance of many Americans is never ending. I find it perfectly believable that there are a lot of wackaloons who would believe being born in Hawaii would make a person a noncitizen because I've run into many people who think Michigan's upper peninsula is part of Canada -- and just recently I heard a great story about the Atlanta Olympics. When people from Albuquerque called the agency here in Georgia that was doing advance ticket sales via phone orders they were told that the tickets could only be sent to U.S. addresses, not to foreign ones like in New Mexico. The frightening thing, of course, is those people are voters.