As if I needed something to make Monday even worse, I had a call from the Boss this morning. He wanted to give me the bad news. Julie, who has been doing most of the actual bookkeeping work on the kennel for us (that is, for me) has moved out. She’s gone home and left a big void behind.

But here’s the thing. The Boss tells me she says she’s still going to help us with things like billings of clients and percentage lease payments. These are exactly the things I have no idea how to do, and I’m not even connected to anyone who does know how to do them. No one except Julie, who is now in another state.

“She’s made some bad decisions,” he said. Well, he made a bad choice when he gave her such a hard time that she moved out on him. He let his son call the shots, even though his notions of good business practices are based on his long experience as a supervisor who antagonizes his crew members so much that most of them quit within a few weeks of being hired. Now he’s done the same thing with someone who can’t be replaced so easily.

Julie says she will still help us. The Boss doesn’t believe her. I do, only because she told me she wouldn’t leave me (not the company, me) in the lurch, high and dry, up a creek. How far this faith is going to get me when it comes time for billings and lease payments remains to be seen.

Even though all this trauma went a long way toward making this Monday even harder to take than usual, something else happened that turned things around and brought them back the other way. I no longer have that unsightly discolored unusable fish tank in my living room.

It was the worst kind of conversation piece — the kind where the conversation begins, “What the— ,” and goes downhill from there. But Suzanne and Mom came by today and siphoned out what was left of the orange water, scooped out the moldy gravel, and cleaned the whole thing out so that it can be resold to someone with a little more of a fishy thumb than I apparently have. It’s the best Christmas present I’ve received so far this year.