The chair in this hotel room is too darn short. This in itself is not unusual – most of the time I run into this problem. But this particular chair tends to get shorter over the course of an evening. When I get back from a training site I adjust it to the maximum height. Then as I'm sitting, it slowly sinks back down to the lowest setting, forcing me to mess with the levers every half hour or so. Tonight I finally gave up and stacked it with pillows. I may feel like a two-year old sitting on a booster seat at the family dinner table, but at least now my keyboard is not up around my neck.

On the way back from the training site last night, the phone rang. It was Richard, letting me know that the word came down that we did not have to be gone next week after all. Originally the entire team had been scheduled for more happy mollusk training fun in Santa Clara county, but the powers-that-be decided they'd be marvelously nice and give us the whole week off instead. Small cheers resounded all around at this news. I'm particularly happy about it because I was starting to have some small panics about how I was going to handle getting all the shopping done, clean the house, *and* thaw the turkey for Thanksgiving. In other words, I'm hosting it this year and it's my very first time ever in my whole life I've cooked a large bird. So having several extra days in which to take care of things was definitely welcome news.

Tuesday afternoon my throat started feeling raw, and by yesterday this whatever-it-is was kicking in with enough force that I finally broke down and ran off to the drug store to get some cold meds. Today (all fingers crossed) I'm feeling a bit better. Heck, I can almost talk normally, instead of sounding like I've been nursing a 10-pack-a-day habit for most of my adult life.

Only one more day of mollusk training. I say this with no small amount of relief. I've nothing against the mollusks themselves, but the hours of sitting and thumb-twiddling are really starting to get to me. We tend to sit in the back of the room and mouth along to the training video (now that we all know it pretty much by heart). At one point I calculated how many times we'd have to watch it this week. With having to stay later three days this week, I figured out that I've had to see at least parts of that video (if not the whole thing) about 34 times this week. I can see parts of it when I close my eyes now. I'm sure that if I were to actually remember my dreams, the actors from the video would figure prominently. Gah.