So I have now been through my first official week in the new desk, without Emm, and sitting directly in front of Madame Director (which I am calling my new boss because she is much more formal than my previous bosses). And, as you can tell by the title, it wasn't that awful. Which surprised me because the day before Emm left, when I was officially moving into the new desk and discovered the hard way that said new desk is directly in front of the speaker for the door alarm (which sounds like a fire alarm on steriods), I almost burst into tears and quit right on the spot. And I'm not exaggerating.

One big thing that made this week better was finding out that Madame Director also does not think my department can put together any programming until the spring semester. I've been saying this since June -- normally our fall semester is at least tentatively planned by the end of May at the latest, and even if we could find a willing speaker now, we'd never be able to get space. And even though I've said this to Madame Director at least twice and yet she said it to me this week as if she'd just thought of it, not having to worry about her suddenly expecting me to put together a full programming slate a month before school starts is a huge weight off my shoulders. Also, I've been given leave to redesign the website for one of the awards we administer, and creative stuff always cheers me up. I still want another job -- I don't think I can be happy going back to bottom rung on the totem pole at least not here, where I'm always going to resent the fact that I had no say in the sudden shift in my job description. But I don't think making the best of it will be as difficult as it appeared last week.

I downloaded GIMP (an Open Source equivalent to Photoshop) this week so I may play around with some new graphics around here. So if there are any broken images or weird margins floating around the next few days, I'm working on it.