"Getting Exercise" is a great excuse for Stacey and me to walk from our house to the Old Market area and snoop around. After reuniting with our favorite second hand store (perusing old clothes, collectibles, chicken kitchen paraphenalia, etc.) we went digging around in the Antiquarium's record store, knowing we couldn't really buy anything but just wallowing in the basement's great atmosphere. We headed toward the stairs to leave and Stacey told me that going to these places makes her miss Chicago. I miss Chicago a ton. Omaha's good and just right for our economic and spiritual situation but Chicago is, well, Chicago and we're both feeling the itch to visit again, knowing it won't be too soon.

The situation could very well have happened at The Office or come straight out of Office Space.
My boss wanted to listen in on a teleconference (where people pay a nice big fee, dial in and listen to Experts Talk About Issues) so she had me sign our office up for it. The confirmation email came last Monday and I sent it along to her so she would have the information at her disposal. This included the dial-in number and the passcode needed to hear the conference. Technology is a beautiful thing and the lovely thing about email is that one can send information along so people have it right in their own laps without having to ask others for it at inconvenient times. My boss is also vocal about not wasting paper or printing things out that don't need printed out. So, like I said, I forwarded the informational email along to her so everything would be right where she needed it. I ended up being sick, really miserably sick, Tuesday through Thursday (well, through Friday, but I managed to be at work that day). The teleconference took place on Thursday. I woke up a bit after noon to find a voicemail Barb had someone else in our office leave for me asking where all that information was. I logged into my email and she'd emailed me, as well. I emailed her back, telling her that I'd forwarded all the information along, even giving her day and time (I've taken to saving nearly everything I send for this very reason!). She replied that if I had done that she didn't know what it was. The person in the business office who used to sign her up for these used to send her a hard copy, she said, and that's what she was looking for. I was absolutely blown away by the fact that not only was the blame pushed back onto me anyway, but that she still wouldn't acknowledge that I even sent the email and that a hard copy is what she needed despite the fact she never told me that or asked about it. This is the sort of ongoing thing that causes my nearly constant chronic neck pain and stressed-out insomnia some nights. The crazy thing is that I actually like my boss as a person. Too bad the job market is lousy.

Sunday afternoon we went with Walker to go see a movie. The only one playing anywhere near the time we got there (the two we had wanted to see had already started and weren't playing again for quite some time) that didn't look as if it would just outright steal 2 hours of our lives was Napoleon Dynamite. We ended up digging it quite a bit. The film comes uncomfortably close to how I was at that age. The difference is I was very sheltered, went to a Christian school, and lacked even the slightest bit of self-confidence. For example, I crushed on the same girl from 5th to 9th grade. Then, finally in Grade 9 I started becoming friends with her. As fortune/fate/Satan would have it, we sat next to each other in typing class. Yes, I'm old enough (and our school was backwards enough) that I learned to type on an electric typewriter and it wasn't until 9th grade. Anyway, we talked and became friends and I asked her to meet me for breakfast on this youth group trip we were taking to Indianapolis. My intention (and as I recall, I'd hinted at it a couple times) was to use this breakfast meeting to ask her to our "Spring Fling" banquet (our version of a prom, I suppose). She agreed to meet for breakfast at a cinnamon roll place. I went and waited for her for quite a while, then figured she must have slept in. I started walking back to my room and saw her eating breakfast with this other guy. That one took years to get over and every little crush after that was more painful and so self-conscious that the next two or three girls I liked, I could only communicate with them via sloppily-scrawled notes. I made Napoleon Dynamite look like a popular preppy jock kid, come to think of it.

Last week NPR had a rare (his first in 19 years, they said) radio interview with Bob Dylan. The interview, the first chapter of his new book, and a few other things are right here at npr.org .