I may have to change my name. I am now an entire Research Department. They keep referring to me as that, in jest. "Oh, the Research Department is heading home for the day. The Research Department is having issues with network connections." Heh.

The office is in one of those old buildings where everything seems laid out as if someone sort of randomly tossed rooms together in no particular order. Consequently it has a marvelously quirky atmosphere to it. This is only enhanced by the fact that one side is lined with picture windows that overlook the river.

I have a desk that cries out for plants. In fact it cries out for mounds of papers and other work-related clutter but I figure that will come with time. The plants, however, will have to be brought soon, if only because they are slowly being nibbled to death by the cats in the garden window over my kitchen sink.

It was a good day, as far as first days at new jobs go. A great majority of the day was spent wrestling with my computer, since first of all we couldn't seem to make the monitor talk to the computer (or vice versa), and both I and another man spent a large amount of time crawling back and forth underneath desks trying to stare at the back-end of a tower in a dimly-lit area, trying to figure out what we weren't plugging in correctly. And then once we finally made the monitor and the computer shake hands and be friends again, we got to play "How much does Windows XP suck?" by trying to figure out just why it was that my computer didn't want to connect to the network. My user login still isn't configuring correctly and I need that to happen before I can install the software I'll need in order to do actual work. But I left this afternoon feeling pretty optimistic anyway. After all, I am my very own Department. I have a database to design and create, somehow (a rather daunting task which, I am fairly certain, will involve me, at some point, sitting on the floor yet again shuffling papers around trying to lay out schematics and entity-relationship diagrams. Woo!). And if nothing else, there wasn't a mollusk, or a barnacle, in sight.