Working so hard every night and day / And now we get the pay back

Seems like my employer has caught the holiday spirit and decided to cancel work today because of the snow. Yay!!!! Haven't had one of these in like 2 years. My company is notorious for never shutting down, so many's the time I've had to dig my car out of a snow drift to crawl either to or from work at 30 mph on the Turnpike. It took me over two hours to get home on some nights. On those long hauls, you really start to despise salt (for caking up your windshield) and trucks (for mercilessly splashing you with slush).

Then there was the time I was caught in traffic between 15W and 16W, and my windshield wiper flew off in mid-wipe. It just disappeared, forever lost to the purgatory that is the shoulder of the NJ Turnpike. Thankfully it was the passenger side wiper, but I had to make an emergency run to Target for a replacement before getting into work (late, needless to say) that day. Ever since I started working, I've dreaded the snow. Better not curse it too much, though, because there's plenty more to come.

Right, so yesterday's headache actually stems from a service call we got the day before. For the past two weeks, we've been getting questionable results on this instrument, so the service guy came in, took it apart, put it back together, and declared it in perfectly good condition. When my colleague went to use it yesterday, however, the thing was completely off. I sort of became the point person for this instrument back in January, so I got to wrangle with the manufacturer to place another service call and get someone else to come in, again. And so the saga of muffinjr's exciting work life continues (next week! Yay!) ...

On a more interesting note, I'm intrigued by Brokeback Mountain, which comes out today in NY, LA, & SF. Maybe they thought it would have an extra shot at the Oscar if they named it along the lines of Cold Mountain. Anyway, it's based on a short story by Annie Proulx, published in The New Yorker in '97. Recent events have conspired to increase my awareness of homosexuality/transgender issues, i.e. watching Boys Don't Cry and reading My Own Country by Abraham Verghese, which documents the rise of AIDS in a sleepy Tennessee town during the mid-80's. Along those lines, the Felicity Huffman movie Transamerica, which came out the other week, looks interesting as well.

After reading these things & thinking about it a little bit, I realized that I'd completely missed the homosexual overtones in the relationship between the 2 men in Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which we read back in 11th grade. Did anyone else get the possibility that Singer & Antonapoulos might have been gay lovers? (And no, I did not remember their names off the top of my head - thank goodness for Amazon's "Search inside this book" feature). The book might be worth a second read ... then again, maybe not. But it did make Oprah's Book Club.