It's been a calm and quiet week at work. With one of the estimators now gone, there are only four of us there fulltime, and the two college interns only come for a few hours on the days they are there. Add to this the fact that the noisiest of the lawyers downstairs is moving out and it's made things almost peaceful.

The lawyers downstairs, by the way, are some of the loudest people I have ever not met. They yell – to each other, on the phone, even in normal conversation. They are always arguing. I suppose this is a lawyerly thing to do – the constant need to bicker – but it would be so much nicer if they would at least try to do it in a more civil volume. It has reached the point where one of the principles at our office broke down and complained to the landlord. We don't think they have any idea how loud they are, but surely pesky little things like client confidentiality might just be a concern when your upstairs office neighbors can hear nearly every word of every conversation you shout to your coworkers each day.

But anyway, back to the peaceful and calm week it's been. I've mainly been rummaging through file trees and tracking down project information to store in one of the databases I created. It's not as easy a task as it might sound, but at least it's kept me busy up til yesterday, when I drove down to our company's office in San Francisco and managed to inadvertently jump head first into lots more work. Actually I'm a little excited about it – it means more database tweaking; new tables, rearranging indexes. All the little things that make a nerd girl happy. Plus there's the added bonus that I managed to find the office in San Francisco without having to backtrack or circle around the maze of one-way streets or otherwise get lost. Not bad when compared to my usual (infrequent) treks into the city.

Luckily the new additions to the database are not requiring a whole lot of complex thought because today my brain has felt as if it slowly leaked out of my ears last night. My boss was home sick a few days this week with a nasty cold and it seems to have jumped ship and come to land in my sinuses, bringing with it a stuffed-up nose, sneezes, and taking away significant chunks of my ability to manage rational thought.