Smarter than the average phone?

Definitely smarter than the average picnic basket. Which is progress.

Work went really well yesterday. I had no trouble at all staying awake during the staff meeting. We will give my decongestant the credit for some of that, although it was a relatively short, blessedly tight meeting, for which my geriatric plumbing was most grateful.

Afterward, I was one of the first to get the show-me-the-money part of the performance review. My raise and bonus will be considerably better than I had expected, given the state of the economy in general, and considering that I spent the first four months of last year on the admin team, and only eight months as a legal secretary. The raise takes effect on Saturday (our workweeks run Saturday through Friday; heaven alone knows why).

I walked into my attorney’s office, closed the door, and said, “I know that we are not supposed to talk about money, so I will just say thank you.” To which he responded, “You’re welcome, and I think [the other two attorneys] may have had some good things to say as well.”

My greatest blessings are not monetary, and I’m glad that I have sense enough to recognize that. Nevertheless, monetary blessings are never unwelcome. I will need to noodle around with the online calculator available at work and figure out how much to increase my 401K deduction, how much to increase my charitable contributions (more in the buckets that are established? an additional bucket?), and how best to tweak what I pay on my line of credit each pay period.

The bonus is larger than it was last year, by about as much as my monthly gross when I left the steno pool to marry the children’s father. The mind boggles.

And this morning I am harrumphing only a little. I do think I am going to have to spring for another packet of decongestant, at $15 a pop, but I have enough to get through the day. I took half a dose before bedtime last night and was a little less wired during the winding-down hours. My dreams were weird, but not nightmarish: the difference between “D” and “DM”.

Major progress on the phone last night. I got Firstborn’s stuff wiped, the apps reinstalled, and I can check both emails. I know how to use the maps feature now. And I know how to back up to a previous page, woohoo! The young man who helped me was about Willow’s age and of the same variety of cute-boy that I liked when I was a slip of a girl. [No, I did not have a coyote moment, just a wee bit of nostalgia.]

One of my dear friends is in the ER with a kidney infection and complications from diabetes. [Girls, we stayed with them after leaving Fbg.] Her oldest son’s last post said that they were still trying to stabilize her enough to put her in ICU. I’ve sent him a message with my cell phone number, and I will try to go see her tonight. She’s in the hospital on the highway that leads south to their house.

Oye.

I feel a little embarrassed to close with knitting news, but that’s what some of you come here for. I put several rows on the Chutzpah II sweater yesterday and am about one-third of the way up the body. Seventy-two stitches on 00000 needles takes longer than it does on 5’s or 8’s. I think this must be some corollary to the black-hole theory of knitting.