Last week I moved into what is approximately my 17th office in 21 years with my company. My office space has ranged from the using the cubicle desk of a co-worker who was out on maternity leave to a renovated closet (when she returned) to the grand and glorious corner office I staked my claim to a few weeks ago. There is much intrigue surrounding this, but, sadly, I will not be able to share it here because there are too many cautionary "I lost my job because I wrote things about my workplace>" tales in various journals.

This office does not have the best view of my many locations (that was two offices ago, which had a sweeping panorama from the towers of Immaculata University to the church spires of Malvern), but the windows do overlook the quarry (the blasting that used to be a regular occurrence 20 years ago and coated the cars in the parking lot with a fine layer of white dust has now stopped) and in the distance I can usually spot the steam from the Limerick nuclear power plant. I always wonder what's going on when the big puffy non-radioactive clouds are not visible. Being from the same state in which the country's worst nucelar disaster occurred, this is not merely idle curiosity.

I am not one to look a gift office in the mouth, although I did inform the facilities staff that if they did not immediately remove the two hideously frightenting prints of cowboys driving horses through suggestively swollen streams I was going to sell them on eBay. One person's nightmarishly freakish Americana is another's treasure, and all that. They showed up within a few hours to remove the offending "art".

When I got home from traveling on Monday, I was dismayed to find that the campaign sign I had planted in my yard had disappeared. The wire frame stood piteously alone, the body of the sign having been stolen by cowardly rat bastards. It has since been replaced with not one, but two, shiny new signs which I certainly hope cause my neighbors' guts to twist in distress as they see their fragile status quo so thoroughly threatened by the change that is represented by the signs (I am, perhaps, leaping to an erroneous conclusion that one of my more reactionary neighbors stole the sign, but I'm willing to take that risk). This time the signs are electrified, topped with razor wire, and connected to trip-wires that set off sirens and spotlights and some small anti-personnel devices. It was either that or sitting very still on the front porch every night, wrapped in dark blankets, cradling my shotgun in my lap, waiting for the perpetrators to slink out of their slimy hole to attempt another theft.

Only kidding. I don't own a shotgun.