Nice Enough to Walk Home

What a lovely, lovely day today.

I work a little late, talking with my dashing young protege, who's having something of a crisis with her fella. Dawn wants to walk home, which for her is an hour walk, but for me is an hour and a half. So I split the difference, like I do with the walk with her into work in the mornings, and meet Dawn at Judiciary Square Metro and we walk home together from there.

I don't know why, but I'm in a sullen mood tonight. It's great to walk by all the blooming cherry blossoms, though. There's this one tree, on the south side of D Street, between New Jersey and Louisiana Avenues. It's just fat and bursting with blossoms. It looks almost wooly. Every other tree we see is like a 98-pound weakling compared to this tough guy.

The loveliness of today refers mostly to just the weather, though. I spent the day wrestling with these data sets, lists of attendees for various meetings, as well as lists of abstract submitters. I need to filter out duplicates, but I've got no primary key. I'm just going by name and location. So like people listed one way as Larry and another as Lawrence are giving me fits. Aargh. It's frustrating. I do the meeting attendees separately from the abstract submitters, and the woman to whom I send it all wants me to match between those two sets. More aargh.

I also notice today that I've lost my ATM card. Luckily I walked Dawn to work and we stopped at the ATM together to get cash, is where I noticed it was gone. Last I had used it was Monday, so who knows when and where it's gone off to. I look all around my desk at work, thinking I might have left it out when I was trying to sign up for kickball on Wednesday. Not there though. I call the bank and report it missing.

I thought I'd find it somewhere at home as soon as I arrived, but in fact I don't. That sucker is gone.

First time I can remember losing a card like that. First time in at least ten years anyway. Where'd it go? I'd just gotten the new one last weekend, and was carrying both for a couple days, until Monday when I confirmed that the new one worked. I know I cut up the old one. Last time I saw them both. Last time I saw the new one.

Crazy.