And I'm back where I started again.

Two days ago, I had a blessed, blessed day off. What you have to understand about my days off is that even on a day when I'm "off," I usually end up here. But Wednesday, I didn't even come within 50 feet of the building, and that was pretty cool. I helped chaperone (is that even how that's spelled? Spell check is telling me there's no E, but I think it looks weird without it.) a bunch of Girl Scouts on a field trip. We went here:

It was a good day. Hot as all get out, but good. The girls were basically well-behaved (there were a few exceptions, of course) but I'm glad I went. And I avoided sunburn! Really and truly, that's a feat. Remember how I mentioned I'm the palest white girl ever? I escaped the day without the slightest burn or tinge of pink. Forget managing not to lose a single Girl Scout and giving endless piggy back rides and keeping 13 ice cream orders straight. . .not getting burned is what I'm most proud of.

Yesterday, The Peak had an uproar. I'm going to attempt to tell the story without getting too specific. I came in and CaseyDownstairs told me to let her know when I knew what pages I had to lay out, because she had revisions for me. (For those not in the industry or who just don't know, the job that CaseyDownstairs does is put all the ads the Ad Ladies sell onto the page in the manner in which they are supposed to be placed. You know, not putting competing businesses on the same page, etc. Sometimes, the Ad Ladies get ads in late or something changes, and they have to add a new ad to a page, so they print out a new copy of the page layout on a brightly colored piece of paper and bring it to whomever is laying out that particular page. That's a revision.)

Anyway, we had a little breakfast given to us upstairs by someone that, apparently, we'd done stories for (I knew nothing about it, but I wasn't going to turn down a free, not to mention delicious, breakfast.) So I sat in Vi's office with CousinCasey, Derek, Kathy, Vi, and Christine for half an hour or so and had breakfast. Afterwards, I took the pages I'd been given down to show CaseyDownstairs.

As she was printing out the revisions, she said, "Now, I know you and Abigail (one of the designers) are friends, but I wanted to tell you my side of the story before she told you and I looked bad." I, having been sitting in a breakfast room, had no idea what was going on. She explained to me that someone, she wasn't sure who, had told the general manager something negative about Abigail and that the GM had yelled at her in the parking lot.

I say, ok, good to know, and start to head back upstairs. Derek is coming down the stairs as I'm starting to go up, and he goes, "You're not going to want to do that." I said, yeah, I know, thinking that Abigail was just in a bad mood. No, no. Apparently, there was yelling and crying and a whole host of other things going on. Apparently, Abigail had said she quit and was packing her things.

So I stayed downstairs for a while. I didn't want to be in the middle of it, and that's probably where I would have ended up.

The end of the story is entirely anticlimactic. After the yelling and everything else. . .Abigail is still working here. The end. Today, it's like nothing happened. Sometimes, I don't understand this place.

We're having a Last Day Party for CaseyDownstairs today. She's been here for 10 years and today's her last day. It'll be kind of weird without her here. They're not hiring anyone new, but instead, spreading her job among several people. Which really? I think is a little lame.

But that's just me.