It was a pretty good day at work. Julie's favorite thing is to talk about the reputation of state workers - "leaning on their shovels" - a way of saying the workers are lazy. Well, I bought a toy shovel last Friday when I went shopping and I gave it to her today. You would have thought she'd been given a diamond ring. She loved it! She hung it up in her cube and told everyone about it as they walked by. She said she was going to decorate it with some phrase like "official state worker shovel" or something like that. Last night, the tech geek for the office and the head honcho for the office went around to everyone's cubes and snooped for our secret passwords to our computers and for confidential information laying out in the open on our desks and in our drawers. I knew I should have written that love note to Bob Wise and tucked it under my desk calendar. This morning when I got to my desk, my calendar was upside down. You would think these snoops would have enough respect for the employees to put things back the way they are supposed to be. Any idiot could tell that my calendar was not to face the way they had positioned it. But then, our tech geek isn't just any idiot. She is our idiot. Unfortunately. And Tony claims he will not be dressing up as a hula girl for Halloween. We may have to do something about that. Have I told everyone about the Hula Girl story? Well, the short version is this: We play pranks on Tony often as he is the only guy in our little pool of cubes. The attorney is hardly ever in the office. So, Tony gets all the girlfriend jokes and such. One day, I found a picture of a man wearing a hideous plus sized hula girl costume, so I made a copy of the picture, then made a copy of Tony's ID Badge to get a picture of his face. Then I taped his face to the hula girl picture, made a good full page copy of it, and waited for Tony to head out of the office to the Mason Co. office for the day. Once he was gone, I taped the hula girl masterpiece up to his monitor and let everyone in the building see it before Tony returned. And as I leave for the day before he comes back to the office, I escaped any retribution. Heehee. A couple weeks went by and the Hula Girl picture surfaced again (I had made copies). I faxed it to the State Office so everyone there could have a good laugh and I showed it to the Regional Manager who thought it was so hilarious she took it around to show people. Tony is pretty good natured. And of course, he can't get all that mad at me, I did give him Shania Twain pictures to hang in his cube.

Just a quick comment about the controversy regarding the Cubs fan who tried to catch the foul ball. It's a foul ball people. He isn't responsible for the 8 runs that lost the game for the Cubs. That you can attribute to sucky players who can't get the job done.