Room without a view

Above is a shot of my cubicle where I've been working for more than 15 years. Lovely view, eh? And people wonder why I'm so uninspired. I think I've had the same chair for at least 10 of those years.

Note my lunch to the right of the keyboard and the cans of Pepsi to the left. They don't allow us to drink vodka anymore while on the job, so we editors need something else.

What's frightening is that someone purposely designed this office to look like this. Hardly inspiring.

Storm stories

We had some nasty storms roll through last week. I ran through the front head-on as I picked up Alyssa from a friend's house. Dark clouds swirling, tree branches crashing to the ground, power flickering.

We watched the storm reports on TV. The weather folks spread panic like it was the end of the world. Poor Elspeth was so disturbed by the weather reports that she went up to her room and brought down all of her stuffed monkeys -- she has a million or two -- so that if we had to run to the basement to avoid a tornado she'd have her monkey friends safe.

We lucked out. The storm curved around us, but did some nasty damage inland. Allegan was hit hard and lost power for a day or so.

And this brings me back to the cubicle picture.

I was in my cubicle more than usual last week because of the power outage. We had to print early one night because the Allegan printing plant was out of power. The paper was printed in Grand Rapids.

The next day, we were under the assumption we would again print in Grand Rapids with a five-hour early deadline! Well, it turned out Allegan's power did come on in time to print there.

Thought: Some would call it funny that our paper was printed at the facility of our competitor, the Grand Rapids Press. Others would just shake their heads.