It was grumpy this morning.

For the last month, when the alarm goes off I peel open the good eye, look at the clock, and mutter something along the lines of, "F@#K." to myself.
I don't like that about me.
It may shock you to know that I don't enjoy being grumpy.
It's something I need to improve upon.

But work will do that to a fella.
"The workin' mans a sucka."
That kid in the movie A Bronx Tale said that and he had a point.
Riding my bike and taking pictures of the flowering dogwoods around Piedmont Park makes me happy so I decided to do that rather than "work" or God forbid, have another conversation about commercial liability insurance.
I did point out to my contact on the job that in 2009 I drove an 80 ft. boom lift thru Central Park, with police escort, and then hovered for nearly a month on the outside of The Metropolitan Museum of Art while the guys and I installed 10,000 sq.ft. of exterior window film on The Arts of Oceania, Africa, and The Americas Wing to protect primitive works of art collected by Michael Rockefeller (just before he was eaten by cannibals) and didn't have nearly as much difficulty in getting my insurance approved.

Let me just repeat that:  I was in the busiest park in the busiest city, working on the biggest museum in the country, AND the museum was open to the public the entire time.  Meaning that, if we had made one teensy mistake, not only could we have destroyed irreplaceable works of art but we could have actually killed a patron of said arts and I still had less trouble getting my paperwork approved.

So, I sent myself home without pay until such time that my attitude has improved sufficiently to adequately get along with my coworkers and peers.

It could be a long suspension.

If anyone needs a guy to ride his motorcycle across country to report on the current state of Guinness, I have just the right person for the job.

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This is why I like my neighborhood.
I was sitting here at Aurora, having a cup of coffee and writing and watching people, and struck up a great conversation with a retired school teacher originally from California.
It was a long, pleasant conversation that veered into politics, dogs, "the trouble with young people", hurricanes, odd places in Arkansas, an affair that ended in a shooting here in the VaHi, and the many silly things we did as children.
All in all it's been a pretty successful day.