1st day: check.

My first day of work was today, and it went really well. I spent time getting acclimated to the office and learning more about the details of the Community Conversations project. I also got to hear some Minnesota accents on a conference call with potential CC facilitators, which made me miss my senior year housemate, Mark, and his family, who proudly hail from St. Paul. You know--St. Paul, Minnesooooohta.

Two glitches in the day, both having to do with flimsy cards whose meaning only makes sense to a computer. At the beginning of the day I put $10 on a Metro card. Then when I got to work, I stuck the card in my backpack, next to my cell phone and iPod. Why didn't I know that this was a bad idea? Since when do small electronics de-magnetize cards?

Since always? Oh, cool, SCIENCE.

So I found myself in Farragut North with a de-magnetized card at rush hour, and a very nice station manager wrote a little code on my card so that I could go home to Van Ness-UDC without buying another pass.

Then, I drove to the supermarket and parked in a lot that charged an hourly rate to the general public but not to supermarket customers but I forgot to get my parking ticket validated so I totally paid $3 when I didn't have to because by the time I realized the reality of the whole scenario I was already at the friggin gate pointing to my groceries but still being all, "Yeah, my bad" and shelling out 3 clams to the dude who was very nice but still had to do his job.

Am I really blogging about my supermarket parking ticket validation? Look at me being a housewife in training.

It's thundering and lighteninging outside. Part of me wants to run around in it, but mostly I want to curl up with Mark's copy of Mason & Dixon and fall asleep, so that's what I will do.