proprietor

Friday, October 29, 2004

It’s not exactly turmoil and chaos around here, but there is a lot of excitement. The Boss is getting all moved in to his new kennel surroundings. They’ve put a temporary travel trailer on the site where he can live and work until his new office is built. We don’t take over officially until Monday, but it’s already a busy little beehive.

I’m not there. It’s a hundred miles away from where I sit and work. I would like to visit some day and see what the commotion is all about, just check in on a business that I’m now part owner of. I don’t feel like a business owner, not at all, and maybe the distance and not having seen the place has something to do with it.

Tim and the Boss are doing their best to make sure I feel part of the operation. I’ll have to give them credit for welcoming me. They put up all the money, after all. All I’ve given up is eighteen years of tears and sweat, and an occasional weekend of overtime. (But never more than three or four weekends a month, so I’m okay with it.)

Yes, I’ve complained about them in the past. And I’ll complain again, the next time they do something that I don’t like. It’ll happen, because I know them. I know I don’t like the way they treat people they consider beneath them. There are four kennel employees we’ve inherited from the previous owners, and I’ve made a bet with myself about how long they’ll stay (and whether they’ll quite or be fired).

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to get the Company, the one I’ve been running (he said modestly) for the last eighteen years, to the end of the month and the end of the quarter. I spent today on state sales tax returns, which means all the bills I usually pay on Thursday that got pushed back by my trip to the wine country didn’t get paid on Friday and will have to be handled over the weekend. But what’s one more weekend, when I’m a business owner?

Clouds.

I worked without my wrist brace most of the day. I’ve been wearing it all night, and until today I’ve had to take two or three breaks from work during the day, just to feel the security of the brace for a little while. This was the first day I haven’t done that, and I’m glad for the progress, except that I’m paying the price tonight. I can really feel it, and I’ll probably go back to being a little cautious. Not that I have much choice, if I want to keep going at all.

bunt sign

Stuff

This isn’t a political blog. If it were, I’d go on and on about how the Bush/Fox spin machine is trying to turn a big mistake (losing track of 380 tons of explosives at al Qaqaa) into a campaign asset (by trying to convince us that the explosives were gone before U.S. troops got there, despite clear evidence otherwise, and by making a false comparison to the munitions that have been captured), and then accusing Kerry of demeaning our soldiers (which he did not; he quite properly blamed the commander-in-chief, who unlike Kerry himself has never been in combat and has no idea how to conduct a war and at whose desk the buck used to stop), while Rudy Giuliani, in a campaign speech for Bush, does precisely that (i.e., he blames our troops for losing explosives that they claim we never had). It’s a good thing this isn’t a political blog, because I’d have to have links for all those Bush/Fox lies. Or I could just tell you where to find all that information on one page, at Media Matters for America.

Recent recommendations can always be found on the links page.

One year ago: Collector
"They're not even old enough to figure out they have to work for a living in the first place, year after year for another fifty or sixty of them. And thank goodness they don't realize that, or it's hard to tell what they'd do."

Two years ago: Informed
"There's still a difference in the philosophies of the two parties, but in practice they all seem to be in the same crowded bed, snuggling up to each other and whispering sweet nothings about war and "security" (a code word for repressing the freedoms we used to take for granted, since the definition of terrorism is being kept deliberately vague, and in some countries anti-terrorism now includes gassing a theater full of hostages)."

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Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding