Talked to my nephew for two and a half hours last night.  We caught back up.  We talked about highschool.  He said he's close to graduating, that the last time he talked to any school officials, they told him he'd be done by November.  That means he'd turn 18 and graduate.  I'm OK with that.  In the interim, I'm planning on sending him a Dell Vostro.  They run under $500 reasonably configured.

Talked to Laurea for about fifteen minutes.  It's funny how quick we can catch up...since we talk to each other once a day and send email.  She's really enjoying her time there, though it is a pretty tough schedule and workload. She's jogging in the morning, too.  I am very happy that she's there and getting a lot out of it, and very unhappy that I am not with her.  But hey, months fly by.

Today at work we ran out of work.  So we did preventative maintenance on file systems, printers, and computers.  Dusting, cleaning, archiving.  The single most frequent comment: "why are they hiring someone when you don't need anyone?" followed by "where are they going to put him?"

I have no answers.  It was fun to work where I work, but the new middle manager / guy in charge is an unyielding number cruncher who has hired 50 percent of his old company.  I have nothing but bad vibes about the guy he just hired for IT that we don't need.  Because when number cruncher managers hire people they don't need, they replace people they do need.

So. We'll just have to see.  In the meantime, we'll deal with it.  I worked at Dell for five years, for the love of fuck.  I can take anything.