It's not as if I got up earlier this morning than anyone who's paying me an hourly wage should reasonably expect. If the "office" (such as it is) opens at 8 am, then 7:30 isn't really early to get out of bed. But the "office" is also my house, which includes my bed, where you can usually find me at 7:30 am.

Not today, though. I had to be ready by 9 am, so I almost had to get up earlier than usual. It's a good thing, too, because the auditor who was supposed to be here at 9:00 was ten minutes early. That's also a good thing, because he took more than an hour and a half auditing my books.

That's pretty much where the good things end and the groaning and grumbling begin. I can't say it's all his fault that the audit took two or three times longer than usual. Some of it was the fact that the operating system on his laptop picked this morning, as soon as he booted it up on my dining table, to being installing the updates it had downloaded when it was connected to the Internet yesterday.

And it was his fault that of all the records he needed to look at, I'd only prepared the ones he asked me for ahead of time. The other things, the ones that he didn't mention in his letter, I had to prepare on the fly, while he sat and waited.

And I made a couple of mistakes. That part was my fault.

We got through it, and he even got all the numbers to balance, but it was a workers' compensation audit, so I won't know the results until they send me a bill for underpaid premium. Once upon a time I got a check because we overpaid, but I think that was a tease. It never happened again.

Anyway, all this put me in a sour mood. I was put off by the whole ordeal, but mostly I was just dog tired. I need my sleep, even if it's on company time. So I was too quiet at coffee this morning, and I wasn't quite with it at dinner with Tammy, David and Eric tonight.

But both of those occasions, as tired as I was, were more enjoyable than having my account books picked apart by a total stranger first thing on a gray, drizzly morning when I should have stayed in bed.

The good thing about an audit is that it can bring me back to reality and remind me that part of my job is attention to detail. I've been trying to skate for the last two or three weeks, because I haven't been able to focus very well. It seems I can't do that and get away with it. At least it was only a minor discrepancy that was easily explained as a clerical error. Trouble is, I'm the cleric here. Amen.