Road Grinder Day
During the afternoon, I sat down and calculated that I'd spent my workday, on average, constantly traveling at about 10 miles per hour. That's far too much driving, even if I'm getting reimbursement. A big chunk of it was that I had to travel into the wilds of western Marin county over unpaved roads. The house I went to was nice, though, and had nice pets.
One easy icebreaker while I'm doing on-site work is to play and compliment people's pets, and the ones I've run into have been pretty easy to pull that with. Of course, then I have to get my work done instead of goofing around with various animals, but life is full of that. This morning there was a big ol' puffball of a Samoyed who was very friendly and a slightly ragged black cat who, every time I said something like "Hey kitty, come here, I want to give you love and attention!" gave me a "FUCK YOU" look and stalked off. I was also very amused that the homeowners had thoughts on cat naming pretty much like mine: name 'em after royalty or lunatics. This one was Marie Antoinette. Perfect.
I also ran into, between today and yesterday, an irish setter, a golden retriever (big puppy eyes begging for attention) and a pack of Siamese, including a great little hyperactive just-out-of-kittenhood tom who pounced on everything, including my hand, but was far too cute for it to hurt. Also a couple of dogs and cats that I can't identify offhand (not hard to stump me), but uniformly pretty friendly - and bridges to their owner's acceptance.
Things like that help take a bit of edge off of a twelve-hour work day. I know that that's getting more and more common around here, but it's not any more fun because of that and it's a symptom of America's collective buying of the work-harder-not-smarter fallacy.
One easy icebreaker while I'm doing on-site work is to play and compliment people's pets, and the ones I've run into have been pretty easy to pull that with. Of course, then I have to get my work done instead of goofing around with various animals, but life is full of that. This morning there was a big ol' puffball of a Samoyed who was very friendly and a slightly ragged black cat who, every time I said something like "Hey kitty, come here, I want to give you love and attention!" gave me a "FUCK YOU" look and stalked off. I was also very amused that the homeowners had thoughts on cat naming pretty much like mine: name 'em after royalty or lunatics. This one was Marie Antoinette. Perfect.
I also ran into, between today and yesterday, an irish setter, a golden retriever (big puppy eyes begging for attention) and a pack of Siamese, including a great little hyperactive just-out-of-kittenhood tom who pounced on everything, including my hand, but was far too cute for it to hurt. Also a couple of dogs and cats that I can't identify offhand (not hard to stump me), but uniformly pretty friendly - and bridges to their owner's acceptance.
Things like that help take a bit of edge off of a twelve-hour work day. I know that that's getting more and more common around here, but it's not any more fun because of that and it's a symptom of America's collective buying of the work-harder-not-smarter fallacy.