Today was easily one of the most boring days of my life. There isn't much going on at work, and I'm at a point in my projects where I can't do anything until I get things back from other people. I try to be diligent and keep myself busy with reading 'work-related' things, but there's only so much I can do before my head hits the keyboard and my waffle face gives me away. I ended up reading work docs and clicking over to rate stuff on Worth1000 and editing some pictures for the scavenger hunt online album. Guilt, guilt, guilt. But what's a girl to do?

Deena's off to Ireland today - her flight leaves later tonight. I do envy her - just for even having the money to travel. I have to do be doing something wrong to be as broke as I am all the time.

One of the few bright spots that stood out from the dullness of today was when I was driving home along the West Mall. I had to stop traffic to let a family of geese cross the road. The goslings weren't the cute, fluffy little balls of feathers and feet anymore - they were the gangly adolescents that waddle/stumble/walk after their parents, making you want to laugh, rather than 'awwww....'.

Things that smell: dumps, me after being in a dump all morning.

Wow. You understand that there's a lot of garbage in the world, but until you're actually standing next to a mountain of cardboard that is being reordered by an enormous bulldozer, you just don't get it.

It was also quite disturbing to see how close the dump was to Lake Ontario. REALLY close. A door was open at the back, and looking through it, you could see that the lake started just a few feet away. A beautiful view of downtown Toronto and Centre Island, mind you. But the smell kind of distracted from the view.

I've spent the rest of the day watching my stats from the photoshop contest. I was ninth out of 71 at one point, which I was very happy about, considering this is my first entry. I may be hooked. I'm trying to be inspired by the next image up for 'shopping. Inspiring inspiration doesn't work so well.

Yay! My 'Worth1000' photoshop image got positive comments! That's the way to start a day. Now, I don't care (as much) about my final rating. I'm just glad people didn't think it was horrible.

A couple of things that affronted me: one other person (at least) used the same idea of using 'Sunday Afternoon' as an inspiration. Grr. Also - and this is more funny than mildly disconcerting - someone used the same old guy that I was going to use in their image. They did what I had initially started to do - an old guy fishing, unknowingly pulling something huge and scary out of the water. I figured the idea was kind of trite and unoriginal. Guess I was right.

Now to face a day of sauce squishing.

It's back! It's bigger and better!

No, it's just back.

I've been thinking about getting more involved with photoshop fun. I've been spending a lot of time at www.worth1000.com, and I actually became so bold last night as to put in a submission in one of the beginner contests. Then I had nightmares about how everyone would tell me how I did things poorly or incorrectly and that I wasn't good enough to submit any more entries and could I please just leave.

And an odd thing I did today - I was so cold at one point today that I couldn't hold my pen to write anymore. Odd, because it's the middle of June in Toronto, and we're having an extreme heat wave. I didn't realise that we'd be working in refrigerated storage when I left the office. But the fun part is tomorrow, when we go and watch them smash the recalled product. Why? Because I wanna see it.

Tonight is Cell, and I'm happy to be seeing everyone again - I ditched too many meetings and now I feel all out-of-the-loop-y again. Doesn't help that people do things like get pregnant and sell their houses when I'm away for a week and no one tells me. Ah, well - my own fault, I suppose. But it's hard to be part of a community when you live 45 minutes away. I need some local friends...

Time to make dinner and then try to figure out the traffic-lightest way to get to Hamilton.

Tara.