Awake? Awake.

So I'm awake. Dammit.

My wife's in the library, sitting on the floor with her laptop, curled up in a throw blanket. She's on a teleconference with people from Australia -- I wanna go!!! -- doing a Disaster Recovery drill. When I was at EDS, we called it a DRA drill -- Disaster Recovery Activity -- while at IBM, it was just a DR Drill, to the point where, when I would reflexively add the A, they'd say What's that? , whereupon we'd go into a five minute song and dance about it, and they'd look at me funny, like you look at people who insist on pointing out that calling it an 'ATM Machine' is redundant, because of course the last letter of ATM is....yeah, yeah, I get it. And now it appears that HP calls it that, too, so....I guess I do.

Speaking of HP: they announced that in addition to the five percent pay cut, they're also doing a ten percent one time special in March, thanks for volunteering. I've also seen some of the expected grousing about the CEO's taking a 20% cut, but of course thats just base pay, and if you figure against his actual compensation, its more like one percent, meanwhile for us, it truly is the amount we said, no fair. I am sure that there are cold-eyed people in Accounting here and elsewhere thinking we could cut salaries a lot and still have people stay, because, hell, where are they gonna go? Been a long time since the turn of the century when companies were being earnestly advised to be good to your employees, because otherwise they'll up and leave when things get better. Which I think they would, generally speaking. Us? No, not us. We no longer believe in company loyalty, but we also don't believe in leaving just because you can. Course, we also believe in the boiling water/frog metaphor. And thats enough of that for right now.

So anyway I woke up and she wasn't here, and that was enough to get out of bed and go get a snack. I don't have any of the brownies I baked for the youth group meeting that my daughter didn't even go to; I'm not mad about that...much. Well, okay, a little. She's at that color guard sleepover, and since its almost two AM I figure there is about a thirty percent chance she actually is asleep by now. We'll be retrieving her around ten, and she'll be grumpy from lack of sleep, and then one of us -- one of me, because my wife will be at work, whether here or actually in at the office -- will get to say hey, remember you were going to work on your science project today, and finish your homew -- which is as far as I expect to get before she snaps at me.

Enjoying Audacity of Hope. Damn, but he has a way with words.