I left before the memo went out yesterday. My resignation was brief and to the point. Boss congratulated me on the new job and DoublePlusBoss said he would "miss me . . . personally!"

April 28 will be my last day. April 29 I'm off with Mason to Coachella to get dirty and dance and eat tunes. May 2 is my birthday. May 3 I start the new job.

I've never been so exited for work. It's with an association that represents and advocates for independent booksellers in Canada, and includes publishing their trade magazine. It's easiest to say I'll wear lots of hats (I hope literally!) but it's a position with a lot of definition and, most refreshing of all, structure. I work with three women.* Somewhere someone is groaning about the all-women-ness of it, but I do very well in women-only environments. I think the estrogen makes me smarter.

This is the good things. This is the big smile. This is me singing out loud and taking big strides walking on the sunny side of the street in the morning while Matinee Slim and the Ultralight Orchestra sing to me about big asses. See the big shaking ass? That one's mine.

Notes
* three women: Imagine! Only three staff to deal with! And they like each other! No family politics!

Sometimes I read over my posts from a year ago and I use them as a wishy-washy reflection. It's a game to check what's happened within the last year. I'm making it sound like a marriage between self-criticism and apathy--not entirely far from the truth. For example,

Friday, April 23 [2004]
. . . So as part of our glorious leader David Miller's new plan to clean up the city and make his illegitimate children forgive him for years of neglect and missed school recitals, everyone in Toronto is encouraged to spend 20 minutes cleaning up the city today.

Man, what kind of a mood must I have been in to accuse Mayor David Miller of having illegitimate children he never calls? I like Miller! I think he's a great mayor (even if he isn't technically my mayor since I live two blocks north of the dividing line between city and burb). I still have the cover of Fab which last June he graced in an all-leather suit. Not to say anything either about illegitimate children as a group. It's more adjectives than I ever got to describe me.

I don't think I post when I'm in a crabby mood as often anymore. Really and truly, I don't go to my confessional (that I'd only call a canon in its moments of glory) unless I have laughing somewhere in me. At least I haven't in the past few months.

I'm trying to allude to good news in a coming post. But grace has never been my forte. How ironic since my middle name 'Anne' most commonly derives to mean 'Grace.' I just realized that. As I was writing the words.

She had never paid much attention to the Middle Eastern situation, per se, and now she knew why. It was an overload of craziness. It was a seventy-piece orchestra rehearsing a funeral dirge and a wedding march simultaneously in a broom closet. It was a firebug convention in a straw hotel.

Tom Robbins is up there with James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison for me. That means he writes so well that I stop writing.

I hope I'm never so old that I stop counting down to my birthdays. Only three weeks till my birthday!

Spring cleaning works for Firefox too.

I kinda want to take these links outta my "time wasting" and "miscellany" bookmark folders, so I present them below. May the vapid bounty of cyberspace protect and nurture them that they do not get 404'ed.

Public bashing of Nickelback. (See? I keep promises.)

Neil Gaiman's blog. (I never ever go to this site. I kinda have a guilt complex about it 'cause if Neil Gaiman would read Help! Bats! Everywhere! if he knew about it.)

The Internet Anagram Server (I, Rearrangement Servant). (Mine, incidentally, will anagram to BABE IN A CALM HELL).

The Deadly Follies of Stick Figure Warning Man.

The Phobia List.

The Devil's Dictionary.

Spartacus Educational. This had to do with a New Year's Resolution. See December 31.