Mr. String and Mr. Bird in Everyday Ramblings

Diego apparently has the ability to teleport from room to room, or else he can be in two places at once without being anywhere at all. Kes tells me that my brother calls this site-to-site transport. It is a secret feline adaptation. :)

My eccentric Dante teacher has mentioned this idea of the arrow hitting its mark before leaving the bow, or by grace, forgiveness being given before the act that needs to be forgiven. It is a fascinating thing to think about.

I think when I read the Inferno before I must have given up before the end because the imagery is so powerful of the giants, cannibalism, and then the towering three faced Lucifer frozen in ice and the Poets’ journey down through the very pit of hell to the cool cavern on the other side of the world, it is unforgettable.

This time I read the English text as I listened to it being read, which I highly recommend.

The class dwindled in size from 24 folks to 7 of us hardy holdouts. Did I mention the professor is eccentric?

There is another concept at the end of the poem that rings true, that if your deeds, forced by suffering, or evil, are so egregious or very very bad that you go directly to hell, while still alive. Your body is taken over by a demon that runs the show until your body succumbs to death but your eternal torture has already begun.

I think I work with a few folks like that.

Yesterday at work we had a major server fail and our whole financial system went down for a time. It was quite the thing. We didn’t know if we’d been hacked or attached or what until this morning. Then, unrelated to that, yesterday something wonky happened to our payroll file that goes out to the banks for direct deposit and no one who gets paid electronically, which is by far the majority of us, didn’t get paid when we were supposed to. We are talking about 10,000 people three weeks before Christmas.

Whoa, the anger… folks were white hot. Luckily for her, our beloved payroll manager is retiring next month, as is our Director of operations, and our Comptroller is planning on retiring next fall. He may be asked to go a bit early now.

The communication out to the community on this was a bit slow. I had a Help Desk guy call and ask me, me because I was available, what to tell the freaked out people that were calling him. Eek.

Don’t want that responsibility…. Oh no. No sir. Absolutely not.

it is pretty much all better now. I won’t bore you with the details. But if you had a stress level area map visible from a satellite view our building would be thrumming right now all the way out into space.

I am still patiently working with Diego on leaving my hands alone when I am using a keyboard and a mouse and both of them were apparently fed human food before so keeping both cats away from me when I eat is also on the agenda. They are such goofballs. They make me laugh.

Wednesday night I had a break in the action in terms of commitments and I was puttering and playing with them and realized I was just plain content. Happy even.

It was a very nice feeling. Maybe boring to write about but heck I have all those visions of the circles of hell to keep my mind from getting bored.

And as my private student is back from Australia, I’ll be leaving in an hour or so to teach.

Last updated December 05, 2014