No time lately to write an entry at work, read the diaries I usually keep up with, send sexy e-mails to Sara, or anything except working. We've got three deadlines right in a row due to an upcoming string of conventions. The best part of it all will be attending PhotoshopWorld for the first time and getting to visit with Miguelito again.

In other big news, Deb will be in Burgandy and Paris in mid-March. How about that? Like the Germany trip last spring, she's excited and nervous at the same time. I kind of wish I was going with her, except for all the wine tasting that would bore me to tears. But, I've promised a trip to France for her 50th birthday, so I'll get to go then.

Every once in a while, on our evening walks, Angel and I run across a family piling into a car in front of a certain house along our route. A passel of kids in the back seat. No child seats, no seat belts, just a bunch o' kids heaped on top of each other, the old fashioned way, the way you rode in a car when I was a kid.

So the kids wait in the back seat and jump in and out of the car while the adults get their shit together, lagging behind in the house. It's the same way every time I see them.

Last Friday night the kids came out of the car to pet Angel, surrounding her. I was a little worried that she might snap at them, but she was very good. I was able to extract us and head on off down the sidewalk. Then I heard one kid yell, "That ain't no MAN!" with a big "you moron" inflection to one of his siblings or cousins.

Then I heard a little plap-plap-plap-plap-plap-plap coming after me. I turned around and there was a little girl in a pink coat running after me. She's at that age right after toddler; I don't know what it's called. But she was doing better than toddling, but I hesitate to call it actual running. It was that stiff-legged, fast-stepping miracle of uprightness that little kids do. She wanted to pet Angel some more. Her mom or adult female relative got her before she got to us, even though I'd stopped Angel to let her catch up if she could.

You may remember me talking about Leslie, the employee that I pleaded to keep at the sacrifice of another employee? This is one of the reasons I preferred to keep the one I did.

We were trying to get a story on the photographer(s) for Christie's, but they turned us down. I asked Leslie what she had told them she wanted to know that made them shut us out, their age and dress size?

Here's her reply:

"I said I wanted to go behind the scenes, turn the flourescent light of day on their filthy little secrets, watch the rats scatter in the brutal glare, feel the moth holes in their phony 'renaissance' portraits, trace the ancestry of their over-priced 'antiques' all the way back to yesterday in some hell-hole of a noxious-fumed plant in Toledo, where the wretched, stoop-shouldered detrius of foreign shores sit caning and tacking and coughing up bits of their tubucular lungs.

And they denied me this. They denied me."

You just can't get well-aged bitter sarcasm like that from a 23 year old.

On Saturday night I attended what was supposed to be a cop social gathering at Doug & Boobsters, that haven for inner-14 year olds, with Sara. Jake was eternally grateful that she didn't have to go. Sara said Jake would've had to curl up in a little ball and whimper from all the noise and visual stimulation within 30 seconds if she'd gone. We didn't find many of the cops who were supposed to be there, but we did blow $21 on games in an hour and a half.

I did very well in the old-style pick up an air rifle and shoot the little targets in the mock saloon game, and surprizingly I did well at the skiing video/interactive game where you stand on the little platform that lets you move your feet from side to side to direct your skier. I absolutely tanked on the machine where you sit on a motorcycle body and try to race through a video course. I never could stop overcorrecting. Sara did better than I did at the station that takes you through a police raid. You hold a gun and stand on a rubber pad, and the game knows when and how you duck, weave, and shoot. Pretty cool.

That night we had sleepovers, so Sara stayed with me in the attic and Deb spent the night with Jake.

I just noticed that Jimmy Shea, the men's skeleton gold medalist, looks all clean-cut and all-American, but that boy has some fangs. He was competing during daylight, but maybe it wasn't direct sunlight. Somebody needs to check that guy out. But don't give Sara his phone number.

And I want to try skeleton really bad. How does a beginner start in this sport? Do they just say, "Here's a diaper; go for it," and let you go zooming off at 80 mph?

Sara and I took a trip to Value Village on Monday morning where she bought a grocery cart full of books and I bought an outfit to be able to rip off her during a date. Hee. Skirt and blouse for less than $5.

Then we had another date on Monday afternoon, once again misjudging Jake's ETA, so the dogs hadn't been let out or fed. This time it was kinda my fault. I'd gotten us to the winding-down phase, but then got a little too into the scene talk again until I couldn't stand it. So, my bad.

Date report later. It's late, and I'm just trying to get my last guess in for the Nikon Coolpix contest as soon as it turns midnight. I don't know if they'll have the last clue up yet or not, but you can only vote once per calendar day, and I already have another guess that I think might be a winner.