Imagine, for a moment, that you work in an office. (For most of you that will not be too difficult, since you do work in an office. Or even a cubicle.) Now imagine, that one day, your office breaks. This office is where you do the majority of your work--you use this office constantly, and all of the stuff in the office. But for some reason, it breaks, and you are told that you have to go use a different office for a while until your original office can be fixed. And the temporary office doesn't have any of the stuff you use in your daily work in it, so you have to take as much as you can from your regular office and put it in your loaner office. (And you use a lot of different kinds of stuff in your daily work.) And there's one more hitch: At the end of the work day, you have to take out all of the stuff you put into the temp office and take it home, because someone else might need to use the temp office later, and you can't put your stuff back into your regular office, because they had to take your regular office away for its repairs. Oh, and to add one more little nicety--the temp office has a strange smell in it.

Okay, kudos to those of you've figured out what I'm complaining about. For the rest of you--my unit went 10-7 on Monday, near the beginning of my shift. (Unit=police car. 10-7 = out of service/dead) The transmission went out on it Monday morning, so it had to be towed away to the maintenance barn (and then in turn to the transmission shop) and in the meantime I had to drive one of the pool units for the rest of Monday and all day Tuesday. Urgggggh. Horribly aggravating. There's no mobile radio in the pool units, so I had to make do with my hand-held radio. And due to the magnetic storms/sunspot activity that has been going on lately, our radio reception has been absolutely dreadful--tons of static and skip from other areas. But really, the biggest problem was the stuff. I had to figure out what I was going to need to transfer from my car to the other, and what I could get away with leaving. First off I had to get everything remotely valuable out, since god only knows who was going to be crawling through it. Then I had to get all of my various paperwork out and my portable filing case. Then my computer and power supply, and my unit organizer and notebook and ticketholder... And I still ended up leaving some vital things in my unit. Like my mapbook. Akk!

But, supposedly I'm going to get my unit back tomorrow, which is good because if I had to drive that pool unit all weekend I think I'd go nuts.

And in writing news (yes, once upon a time this was a journal of a writer!) I just found out that my story, "Extant", which was published in the SFF.net anthology The Age of Reason was given an honorable mention in Volume 17 of The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. Took me completely by surpise, let me tell you!

I really do need to start writing again. And actually, I have a pretty cool story idea forming... Who knows!