Author: Mark Alexander

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And The Drama Continues…

It’s not much, but it’s mine.

When I arrived at work last Tuesday, instead of going directly to our temporary area, I decided to walk past our usual work area to check up on what had been done with the cube reconfiguration. To my surprise, everything was put back together, and I discovered that my supervisor had already set up house in the cube that was in the general location of his previous one. I asked him if everything was working, and he said he wasn’t sure, but he was on wireless so it didn’t matter.

I told him I would go ahead and lay claim to the cube directly north of his (where we’d all previously decided I’d be moving to—in direct contradiction to where Ms. Elphaba Thorpe had placed me on the “agreed upon” seating chart.

I ran upstairs to get some ice water and when I came back down, Elphaba was standing in the middle of the space, lecturing my supervisor on how no one should be sitting in the area yet because Goodman’s wasn’t finished with the construction and blah, blah, blah. I looked at her and said I’d move when Goodman’s showed up. As she rode off on her proverbial bicycle, she quipped, “Why not move now?”

I found a vacant cube (not the one she had intended to put us into) and set up shop. This was vacant, but had all the accoutrements already in place (a 32-inch monitor, docking station, keyboard, mouse, phone) so I plugged in there and got to work.

I did the same on Thursday, but for shits and grins right before I left that day, I swung by our reconfigured area one more time to see if anything had been done since Tuesday, and to my surprise a major reconfiguration had occurred in the interim.

When the original planning for our new space was being discussed, I had resolved to giving up my previous location completely because of the way the new layout had been designed, so imagine my surprise when I saw that instead of my old area being cut in half and designated as the work area for an as-yet-unnamed and unhired “temp” employee as it had been that previous Tuesday, it was now a full-sized cube that doubled my original “tucked behind the column” work area.

Needless to say, I claimed it as my own.

Elphaba sent out an email Friday while I was working from home telling everyone we were free to move back in Tuesday next week after the July 4th holiday.

I’m on vacation (praise the gods!) all. next. week, so not wanting to risk losing the claim to my old/new workspace, I went into the office this morning and moved all my stuff in. (This wasn’t done in a vacuum; I’d told one of my colleagues of my plans yesterday and he said he had already moved his shit back in.)

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Satisfying

Was it perfect? No. Were there gaping plot holes and twists that made absolutely no sense? Of course. But was it a fun ride? Did it finally answer some long-running questions? Did I enjoy it more than Season 3? Absolutely.

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My Latest Acquisition

Prompted by this and an offline convo I had with one of my readers (you know who you are), I decided it was time to add Ray of Light to my vinyl collection. This 2-disk, 180g clear vinyl, Record Store Day/Black Friday 2018 special edition didn’t come cheap. It cost a bit over twice what I’m used to paying for new vinyl, but it was worth it.

Now I’m just worried that this purchase will  justify shelling out twice that for the purple vinyl edition of Prince’s Purple Rain that I’ve been eyeing for years.

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A Repost

As I am wont to do on occasion…

I come up with some really weird shit when I’m laying in bed, wide awake at 2 am and can’t get back to sleep; shit that sounds amazing at the time but when I actually get around to putting it down for posterity the next day it doesn’t seem quite as amazing as I’d thought it would. (This leads me to believe that perhaps I wasn’t quite as awake as I thought I was.)

Case in point, this little meme. I don’t know if it’s really a meme if I’m only one doing it, but the idea came to me last night when my usually fool-proof method of forcing myself back to sleep—counting backward from some arbitrarily high number—utterly failed me.

It works like this: starting from the current year, assign a few words, a phrase, or a picture that best describes that year to you and work backwards as far as you want.

Mine goes like this (updated for this post):

2022: Insurrection. Return to the non-functional “normal.”

2021: New beginnings…and saying goodbye to a furry friend.

2020: Lockdown. Fire. My sense of security destroyed. Removal of the orange menace.

2019: Hired full time. “I’m a real boy now!” Benefits!

2018
Thinking outside the box is strongly discouraged at ADOT, but the arrow finally found its mark. Return of the Quirky. Revisiting the ghosts of Solano Drive.

2017
Gub’mint work. Disaster strikes; Touchbar woes.

2016
Underemployed and overextended. Fear of a Cheeto planet.

2015
Back to Phoenix.

2014
Done with Denver. DISH: a feculent vat of toxic hellstew.

2013
Marriage to Ben, Dad’s passing.

2012
Exploring Colorado. Devil’s Tower. Mt. Rushmore

2011
Denver! (What have we done?)

2010
Ben’s Graduation

2009
Mom’s passing. Road trip to Wisconsin. Mac!

2008
Ben

2007
Anderson, Yellowstone

2006
Never leave home without your camera.

2005
Full time employment returns!

2004
Abrazo

2003
Cancer

2002
Return to Phoenix. Living with Dad.

2001
9/11 and the surreal beginning to where we currently find ourselves in this country.

2000
Foggy early morning, walking down Market Street on January 1st to go to work to make sure that our interconnected world hadn’t blown up at midnight and thinking, “So this is what the year 2000 looks like. We were lied to.”

1999
Realizing I’d become the very thing I swore I never would when I originally arrived in San Francisco in 1986: a jaded old queen living up on the hill.

1998
Back to Phoenix. Turning 40 and living with Mom; later, returning to Oz again.

1997
Redeeming my life at 33 rpm

1996
Return to Oz. Employment hell. Yosemite and Mono Lake. Dragon Lady Productions

1995
Leaving San Francisco. Tucson and the Emmett Higgen affair.

1994
Jezebel, the car from Hell.

1993
Hell on Fell.

1992
The Rory Hansen Affair.

1991
Dennis’s passing.

1990
14th & Church

1989
The Earth shook.

1988
The Michael Rose Affair

1987
My first apartment in San Francisco. Kenny, Dave, Kevin.

1986
Aliens (the movie). Breaking up with Bernie and moving into my own place. The black behemoth. Yamaha, finally! Ben Walzer. Arrival in Oz. “The City will chew you up and spit you out!”

1985
Bernie, Kekku and the trip to San Francisco.

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Oh Michael… (NSFW)

Yes, I will always repost these whenever I come across them on in my journeys on the interwebs.

If you’re new to my blog, you can read the whole sordid story here and here.

(Sorry, I tend to repeat myself on certain subjects, but it’s my blog so deal with it.)

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