What a ridiculous day. I had to call Tim early this morning to remind him that I didn’t have the time cards yet, and if I didn’t get them soon, the payroll checks would be mailed late, and he’d be facing a mutiny by sixteen angry construction laborers who are all younger and in better shape than he is. He took some of the wind out of my anger by admitting it was his fault and apologizing profusely. With the usual excuses: getting ready to go out of town, running around picking up materials, blah blah blah. Bleh.

“If I have to lend them money,” he told me, “I will.” Well, good. Except that creates new bookkeeping problems for me, since I have to pay him back for what he lends them, and then take the right amounts out of each of their checks. In other words, it’s a way easier solution for him than it is for me.

So I spent most of my day waiting for the imminent arrival via fax of the time cards, so that I could get started on the payroll early enough that I wouldn’t have to work all night long to avert a crisis not of my own making. I didn’t want to get started on any project I might have to abandon, but I didn’t want to waste the whole day, either. I even returned some phone calls that came in while I was at the post office, so you know I was reaching. I hate making phone calls almost as much as I hate waiting for someone else to do their job so I can do mine.

Well, you know how these things go. I wandered further and further away from doing any actual work, even though I could easily have started on the project I had planned to start tomorrow. It would have been annoying to interrupt that task to get the payroll done, but on the other hand, it would have been nice to have a good healthy start on it, so that it would take less time to complete when I actually did have a whole day to work on it.

But no. I meandered around the web, and I read a couple of chapters of Janet Evanovich, and I even turned on a soccer game (my goodness, the weather in Southampton was bad today!). I had little to show for my day by the time the time cards finally arrived at 5:30 pm. I worked as long and as late as I could stand, leaving just a little to finish tomorrow morning before I head for the post office. Tim called to apologize again, and it’s a good thing he couldn’t see the gestures I was making at the phone.

The paperless newspaper that I now read on line tells me that the voter turnout here in my county is higher than normal for today’s primary, even though the lines at the polling places are shorter. That’s because most people here voted, as I did, by mail. I sent in my ballot last week for the Senator from Illinois, and I think he’ll carry this part of the state, even though the Senator from New York has apparently won the popular vote. Now that it’s over, and nothing has been decided, California becomes irrelevant. I wonder how the politicos who thought we needed an early primary feel about leaving it all up to Ohio and Texas.