Life has just been frelling insane this week.
- Business trip Mon-Tue. Well, actually, Sunday evening to Tuesday pretty much all day. Good trip, but …
- A good dozen Major Projects for my group, either in progress, late, just getting started, being discussed, etc. I, my managers, and their staff are all double- and triple-booked. I spent yesterday 95% of the time on conference calls, most of which I needed to be an active participant in. Today’s a little better, but not much.
Today and yesterday I worked from home because, basically, I didn’t have time to drive into the office …
On the bright side, I’ve been “rediscovering” the office upstairs — which has been, for about the last five years, pretty much just a storage room. I’ve turned my old desk into a workspace (esp. when I’m working while Katherine’s home), and have been getting our technology of about five-plus years ago (multi-user dial-up modems! yow!) packed away. Needs a lot more work, but have made a lot of progress during non-participatory phonecons.
- Evenings have been sucked up by this and that, but in particular by Cotton Patch Gospel rehearsals. Opening night is a week from tomorrow. Yikes!
- As noted elsewhere, about the only spare time available available at night has been desperately grasped at to do some CoH and get some intense relaxation.
As a result, not much getting done here at DDtB. My apologies.
On the other hand, I’m enjoying watching flocks of grackles visiting the back yard (and our bird feeder). They’ve consumed a couple of inches of seed this morning alone.
And, hey, lookie there! A hurricane bearing down on our largest office! Horrible performance on our timesheet system because of the off-day major processing! Other big problems because of some new upgrades in other systems! Oh, boy!
Grackles, yuck!
At the University of Texas when I was there, grackles roosted in a tree under which I frequently passed on my way to the Philosophy Department. The flock was large, in the thousands, and by morning the sidewalk would be absolutely covered with a thick layer of Grackle guano. It was very slippery, and it stank fiercely. I would walk on the other side of the street to avoid it. UT started sending a gardner there every morning with a high-power hose to wash the sidewalk down. After a while, they decided to get rid of the Grackles alltogether, so they started sending a team down there every evening with shotguns. They would fire a blank just when the grackles were about to settle in the tree, sending them away. After several months of chasing the grackles all over the campus, the grackles finally went elsewhere to roost. Reportedly, they began to roost in a tree on the grounds of the Governor’s mansion and the Governor demanded that UT send their shotgun guys over there every evening to convince the grackles to move somewhere else.
You don’t want a big flock of Grackles roosting in any of your trees.
Doesn’t seem likely, but a cautionary tale.
We usually have a few grackles around — one year, right after we moved in, a pair nested in the (mesh missing) vent to our stove. That was fun (well, not really, but it was interesting).