There is something a bit weird about working from home. For one thing, the days all start to jumble together, until I am never quite sure what day of the week it is, or whether it is a weekday or a weekend.

When you work from home you can sleep in as late as you want (or as late as the cats let you). You can shuffle around the house in your too-big-for-you t-shirt and flip-flop slippers - the white ones with the cat faces on the toes - for as long as you want, and frankly, there really isn't much incentive to even comb your hair, especially if you braided it the night before. When you work from home you can make grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch and snack on Lucky Charms or Count Chokula, or whatever other cereal you might have in the house. When you work from home you can eat lunch whenever you want, especially if this means that you just happen to be in town near the all-you-can-eat sushi bar two days in a row. When you work from home you can sit at your desk in bare feet with your keyboard in your lap and your feet propped up, cats snoring softly in various boxes and cat trees around the room. And when you work from home but there is nothing for you to work on, you can take a leisurely drive to the library in the next town over and check out a huge pile of books - mysteries and science fiction - and flop into one of the rocking chairs in the bedroom and read and read and read.

I know it's not always going to be like this. And it's not like we're being lazy all the time - we've dutifully read through all the training manuals, and even managed to come up with some insightful questions to ask of King Squid* when next we all meet. He wants all of us trainers to be as ready as we possibly can when we get to our "real" training sessions, and I think we're definitely ahead of the game. It's just that for now there is only so much work we can do, and it doesn't very long to get it all done.

One downside to all this slacking off and sleeping late is that by the time we finally drag our lazy butts out of bed and putz around on our computers and then stagger downstairs to scrounge up some form of sustenance, caffeinated and otherwise, it's been getting too late to consider going biking. Admittedly this hasn't been helped by the fact that my front tire keeps going flat (aftereffects, I fear, of my encounter with the puncture vines), so each time we've actually managed to work up the motivation, we couldn't actually ride.

This morning, however, I set the alarm for 7am (which of course meant we were both up before it went off), and lo and behold, the front tire appears to finally be retaining air pressure, so we did 20 miles, bringing our yearly total to just over 800 miles. We swung by Starbucks on the way, but it wasn't as lovely a breakfast as it usually is because someone, some evil corporate person somewhere, decided that they should discontinue their cinnamon chip scone and replace it with some nasty apple cinnamon scone that has little rubbery bits of cooked apple and just does not satisfy my cinnamon chip craving. Upon discovering this travesty last week, I went home and fired off a sniveling complaint to Starbucks last week on this issue. Today I finally received a reply, stating that they would send my comments on to the appropriate people. I'm not holding out much hope though. I'm thinking that my cinnamon chip scones are long gone. For now, I'm holding off the depression with their classic coffee cake, but if they ever discontinue that one too, well, there's no telling what might happen.

*You're wondering what the heck is up with that King Squid reference, aren't you? Richard, in his journal, decided that we are all working for the (so far pretty darn cool) King Squid. The company shall hereafter be known as Benthic Creatures, and our job is to train the mollusk handlers of the state of California how to better manage their sea turtle administration. Don't look at me - this was all Richard's idea, but it seems to fit. Especially the part about the mollusks.