It's time for my annual office relocation. This morning we packed up our computers and what not and moved across campus to the Towers. OOOOOOHHH. Sounds scary. The Twin Towers. The Two Towers. More like Fawlty Towers. But I am most definitely NOT complaining. From my new desk I can see Biscayne Bay and the skyline of South Beach. Hell, I can see. Period. My last uh, one, two, three offices were bunkers with no windows at all. I'd leave work and see puddles and feel like Sherlock Holmes: It must have rained.

Now I have carpet and windows. And a kitchen. And my own bathroom that I don't have to share with the sort of riff raff a public hospital is prone to. Answer me this: Have YOU ever seen shoe prints on the seat of the toilet where YOU work? I have. I don't like to think about why.

I'm in training. Training to write code. The first question they asked us was what our expectations were for the class. So I said I expected to be reduced to tears at least twice. Half the class are members of a team that already use ColdFusion and just need to learn the ins and outs of the latest version. Another three are developers and then there is me: a graphic designer who was taken by the sucking black hole that is the world wide web.

One of my fellow trainees has decided to hijack the class. She is needy and demanding. And whiny. And she has a stoopid name: Tonda. Yesterday the instructor offered to skip the lab modules and cover more information at the end of the three day class. Since half the class already knows the program and since the optional material is the most valuable to the rest of us we all went YIPEE!

At 11:30 as we were rolling into the next module, Tonda announced that it was lunch time. "This is a big retail area and it's a very busy retail season so if you want us to be back in one hour, you need to let us out now." So our teacher let us out. When we came back, Tonda demanded that we take another vote about the class format because she wanted to do the labs. "I could be getting the same knowledge from a $50 book in front of my laptop at home."

Yeah? Then do us all a favor and go home with the book. There was much eye rolling and hemming and hawing as nobody ever wants to confront a bully. But we all know how charming I am and how much I love a fight, so I finally said, "Look, you're being selfish. The rest of us need the information from the end of the class. You want to do the labs, do them at home."

So we hit a compromise: if she wanted to do the labs with the instructor at the end of the day, he'd stay with her and the rest of us could attempt to beat rush hour traffic. That led to the rest of the day's acting out activities: constant questions, interuptions, and demands that the instructor not click his freaking mouse so fast. I was ready to bitch slap her into the next class room.

Today she's sucking up and trying to take the instructor to lunch so she can have some private face time. He keeps dodging the bullet, but we'll see how it plays out.

Yesterday my husband treated me to the most wonderful birthday. He let me sleep in. He made me coffee. He took me to an afternoon movie (Star Trek: Nemesis, the best part of which was the lights coming on in the theater when it was over), and then out to dinner at Les Halles with a few of my best girlfriends. We drank, we smoked, we yapped like lap dogs and we ate divine food. And I got presents. It just doesn't get any better.

One of my presents was getting the koi pond finished and filled with water and fish. Another was a watch with Charles Demuth's "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold" as its face. And band. Only my favorite painting in the world.

I received several books yesterday. Nina gave me a Dr. Suess 4-pack which included another one of my favorite things: The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Marc gave me two books, the latest one by Christopher Moore, and David Hockney's essay on Optics and Art in the Renaissance. Fabulous.

Yep. It was a great birthday. Wish me luck in my attempt to survive till the next one.

This is the perfect time to test out the commenting software. With the story of how it came to be on the page. I found a cool site that hosts blog commenting. They are free and have a link down there on the right. Their site has an automated cut and paste feature to write the code into your page. I copied. I cut. I pasted. I ran the code and reran it and it just wouldn't work. I checked for bad nesting. I checked, but did not see. I whined to the help desk, with a final question: Am I too blonde to blog? The reply was short and to the point: You nested your code incorrectly. Here's what it should look like. And then they had the correct code. Very sweet.

The short answer to my question was yes. But they were too polite to say it.

So here's a big shout out to the 1 or two people who actually are reading this.....

And then there are days like this. It's warm out, even for Miami. There is a tacky little vendor fair in the park in the middle of the hospital campus. Sunglasses, beads, orchids, cheap cell phones, and food. I am sitting in my office now, with a cold green coconut. It has had its little top punctured and a straw stuck in it. The spanish word for this delight is Coco Frio. Cold coconut. Now, where else could you do that in the middle of December?

I missed out on the steamed pork buns from the Korean guy two tents down.

There was a poll on the front page of Excite.com today asking if people approved of the use of nuclear weapons as an American response to, well, here's the question and the answers:

The United States issued a warning yesterday to Iraq and other hostile countries, saying it is prepared to use ?overwhelming force? ? including nuclear weapons ? in retaliation to any biological or chemical attack on the U.S., its forces abroad or its allies. (AP)

Do you support the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. in response to a chemical or biological attack?

Yes: 58% => 3405 votes

No: 31% => 1808 votes

I'm not sure: 9% => 547 votes

I don?t care: 0% => 20 votes

Oh, yeah. That's a fucking cheery statistic to look at. FIFTYEIGHT percent of the respondents think that America should use nukes. Who are these people? What fucking planet do they come from? Have they no concept of the repercussions? Political, physical, biological? Who are they? Is this the Christian fundamentalists looking for Armageddon? I, for one, do not wish to go out with a bang or a freaking whimper. Am I the only person who is frightened by our "president" and his gang of war mongering henchmen in Washington?

Oh, I need a cigarette and a stiff fucking martini. And it isn't even noon.