(no subject)

Either I caught this head cold at the party on Saturday, or possibly I gave it to everyone else; either way, everyone I know is sick, including our entire department. Good thing the Davos research and the yearly budget are both due this week!

I cannot believe how much snot is coming from my face. It seems unlikely that the front of my face could contain or create this much fluid, so I'm forced to conclude that my brain is now producing or storing snot. Which would explain why I'm functioning at half my normal speed, I suppose. That could also be the Sudafed.

Good thing it's not snowing...wait, what?

This weather is seriously creeping me out. There has been no snow this winter -- it has snowed three times, but it hasn't stuck once. It feels like early spring. It's January in Chicago and people are going around in light sweaters. It's been like nine months since we've had snow.

The apparent cause is a shift in the jet stream, which is sweeping further south before it hits us or possibly just not hitting us at all or something, I wasn't paying that much attention to the weather channel when they were explaining it. I don't know if that's global warming or El Nino or whatever, but I don't like it at all. The warm weather in itself is still creeptastic, like I'm living in some pre-dystopian moment in the first five minutes of a weather disaster film, but even creepier is that nobody else seems alarmed by it. Some people don't seem to have noticed that it's January and we haven't had winter yet. Some people are happy about it, and I feel like setting them on fire.

Maybe it's about to really slam us. I could just do with a blizzard right now.

(no subject)

So, on the plus side, I dragged myself in to work today for a budget meeting and it wasn't as futile as I thought it might be. I learned a very important fact that was apparently not communicated well by email, because it turns out that the budget for next year isn't due on Tuesday, it is due in February. Tuesday we just have to have projections for the rest of this year, which is no real problem and not relevant anyway since it won't impact anything. But since I was freaking out about the budget, I have a spreadsheet prepped which will allow us to project forward six months almost effortlessly, so I get to take tomorrow off and kick this stupid cold.

Also I think my boss might be a Time Agent. We were discussing how fiscal years are marked at my company and not only did she forget it's 2012, which is understandable because it's only been 2012 for ten days, when I said "But it's 2012" she checked her watch. Like she needed to confirm where she was in the timestream.

On the minus side, I found out that the guy we report our budgets to is...well, let's put it this way. When he walked out of the room I turned to my boss and said, "There is a man who is master of the small picture" and she laughed. Also, the deeper I dig into the way our budget is structured, the more I realise that the woman managing it before me was totally bonkers. If I couldn't account for all the money, I'd assume the insanity was to hide her embezzling funds, but everything zeroes out; she wasn't even incompetent. She was just crazy. My bosses agree with me.

I should be able to fix everything with this year's budget requests, streamline the process considerably, and arrange it so that we aren't using our "office supplies" budget as a secret fund we can dip into when we need to pay consulting fees. We will have a whole line for consulting fees, all on its own, and our office supply budget will not be thirty thousand dollars.

I have drawn three conclusions from all this:
A) I cannot trust a man who approved a thirty thousand dollar office supply budget.
B) Holy shit listen to me, I sound like a professional and all.
C) Fuck geometry, college admissions offices should require you to take a book-keeping class in high school. WAY more useful.