We’ve been home for a week, and our two-week vacation has become a memory. All this week, we’ve been getting up, going to work, coming home, catching up with shows on TiVo, catching up with reading, catching up with Riley.

For me, work wasn’t so much catching up as deleting a bunch of unwanted emails and shaking my head over the way a few of my clients seem to think that it’s no big deal to arrange a lot of hotel rooms with only 2 or 3 days’ notice. Unfortunately, my backup had to deal with this as it happened on the Thursday or Friday of the second week I was gone.

There’s a new, more strict policy at work about use of the Internet: basically, using it for personal reasons if not on break or lunch could be grounds for a very serious talking to, or possibly termination. So I won’t be blogging much during the work week unless it’s from home.

This is not a great loss to humanity. After encountering Stephen Fry‘s blog this week via AKMA, I’m feeling pretty humble about my mad blogger skillz.

The new “no pursnal internets” policy actually helps me stay focused better at work and I’m struggling to be a good little cog in the machine and mostly succeeding, but my patience was taxed last night when I received an email request very late in the day to add 6 people to an existing air group – I back up the air groups person, who logs out at 430pm.

For some reason, the particular division that does these little air groups always seems to have a crisis and needs to either add more people, or book an entire new group, after 430pm on a Friday, and there’s a mad scramble to get space, email the itineraries for approval, and receive it in time for sending everything to be ticketed before closing time. It’s maddening.

And then on Monday, the changes will begin, the boogers. I didn’t get out of work until an hour after quitting time, but at least it’s a legit overtime situation.

There’s also a moratorium on overtime – basically, you can’t get it unless you’re actually on a call or finishing a booking (or multiple bookings) when your scheduled log-off time is reached. There’s no more hanging around afterwards “watching” records (most of our stuff is run through a quality process that finishes and autotickets them). Now, everyone just logs out and leaves, after giving the team leader a list of their unticketed records. I used to be the person that did all the watching, but I now just leave my TL a list and go, too. I did last night, and I still had 2 exchanges to issue and she had to fix a couple of my other records, too. No wonder she had a headache and a stomachache, the new cost-cutting policies mean she has to be the backup person for the entire team as soon as the end-of-day cutoff time is reached.

I’d never be a team leader in a million years – I do not have the patience or the temperament to be able to handle it.

It’s been a nice week for catching up with Riley, too. He’s been extremely lovey-dovey all week, and has been a complete slug as far as wanting to be petted and cuddling up close at all times. He may hate me tomorrow, though, as it’s the annual Pet Blessing at Holy Moly, and today we bought a nicer carrier for Riley, and a harness and leash, so that I don’t have to take him in the large, awkward airline-style crate.

The choir is doing an anthem based on a prayer by St Francis, and the plan is for me to have Riley in the pew with me. At least we’re not suiting up in our choir robes, as the weather is still too unseasonably warm for that. So I won’t be the wacky choir lady in the penguin-colored outfit holding her cat and singing about St Francis as she struggles to turn the pages of the music… but as near as dammit. Things could get interesting if my buddy Katy brings her dog Belle, but she sits a row ahead with the sopranos, so there will be some separation.

Since we’re pretty informal at church, I’m seriously thinking of wearing the faded old “Maui Window Shopper” T-shirt I have that shows a little fuzzy orange kitty snorkeling in a school of tropical fish. I may repent of this notion and wear something a bit less casual, that won’t show the pet hair. After the service (I probably won’t stay through the second one, and may plead the kittybox defense if pressed by the choir leader) we’re supposed to go help our friend Steve at a “punchlist party.”

We’ve been catching up on “our” shows via TiVo; the season finale of Doctor Who provided one of those “WHOOOOOOOOOOAAAAA!!” moments at the very end, via a throwaway line.

As in “The Face of Bo WHOOOOOO? WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?”

Very enjoyable, if you’ve been following the “New Who” since the very beginning. Also, I don’t know if the series will pick up where it left off (David Tennant is doing Hamlet, and the show doesn’t expect to return before 2008) but if it does, it’ll be a period mellerdrammer. Love it when the Doctor collides with his next storyline…

I’ve been reading several books; while in Maui, I mostly finished American Gods and bought several more books, one of which had me laughing so hard last night before getting totally put off by the author: Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly, Ex-Sorority Girl’s Guide to Why it Often Sucks in the City, or Who are These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me?

The author, Jen Lancaster, is very funny, but she’s also from the “get over it” school of eye-rolling conservatives, and I just can’t find a joke that depends on a stolen election or two for the punchline to be all that amusing. Especially since people keep insisting on dying in illegal wars and all.

I’ll probably finish it, because politics aside, her mordant wit (and the local touches, she’s from Chicago) make me laugh too loud to read this book at bedtime. The following two books are more in the Hawaiian vein, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands by Isabella Bird, and Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai.

Now that we’re caught up, we’re just in time for Sunday, and a new week. During which, I’ll be playing catchup again. Whee, etc.