Foolishly believing that the worst part of the company's own special version March madness was behind me, I had high hopes today for getting on with the next series of chores the Boss wants me to do.

Then I got interrupted. Then I went back to the chores and got interrupted again. Chores again, interrupted again. Then the same thing again. Then I gave up and just waited for the next interruption (which didn't interrupt anything but my waiting).

Unfortunately, it didn't come until after 5:30 tonight, when I wasn't thinking about my job any more. In fact, I was in the middle of wading my way through Unit 4 for my ASL class when the Boss decided he wanted to tweak the spreadsheets one more time before sending them to the accountant.

We tweaked and tweaked and tweaked some more. I had to explain to him why a positive number last year was negative this year. (Answer: because more went out than came in this year.) He wanted to change some labels and move some columns around.

He wanted to know why we did something one way last year and another way this year. (Answer: "We" decided to do it one way last year because you decided to do it that way. I decided to do it another way this year because it's the right way to do it. Next question.)

This went on and on until he could feel my frustration (possibly because my voice gets loud and shrill when I'm answering the same question for the third or fourth time; the cows and sheep across the road could also feel my frustration, if you know what I mean).

At one point he said to me, "You were going to pay off some credit lines so they don't show on the bank statement at the end of this month," and I told him yes, I'm going to do that. I was going to do that today, but I kept getting interrupted. Now I'm going to do that tomorrow. He apologized and I laughed. I hope that was the right thing to do.

But I didn't lose it today; I didn't lose it-lose it, even though I was weary and sick of trying. I did a decent job of keeping my composure, which probably means I did a decent job of keeping my job.

As for the homework, augggghhh! We had so little of it last week and so much this week, all new material. We're learning how to give a person's age, and we're also doing family relationships. At the same time we're studying the complex grammar of ASL, so I find myself learning how to say things like, "Before Ken's mother was 13 years old, her family had no car." And "Cheri's father's bird was two years old when it died." And, "Ella was 17 years old when she met her husband."