Burying the hart and resuming the hunt

In which our Hero has a hobbity morning and a musical afternoon

Friday was a nutcase day. Got into the office to have breakfast with Hollywood because if we’re fired, it may well be the very last fried-egg sandwich we have as a team. Well, as a team here… I figure we’ll be reunited at some point. But that was at 8. At 9:30, I went out to have breakfast with [] to talk about job/business opportunities for the next year. Got back to the office by 11:30, just in time to grab lunch before Hollywood and I zipped off to the next thing. I could have finished it, I’d like to assert in defense of the honour of my stomach, but lunch was neither so tasty nor so visually appealing as either of my previous meals.

The thing we zipped off to was a funeral for a colleague’s father. It was an Anglican service, which for a green faithful like me is a bizarre parallel world of profoundly familiar prayers and hymns in a completely different service. But it was beautiful, and it was loving, and it was right and good to see the rows of coworkers who stood in respect and memory.

The service closed with a procession out, and then the organist broke into Elgar’s Enigma Number 9, that beautiful piece that I’ve previously said is what I’d choose for the last thing I might hear. It’s a piece of music that’s built for strings, that I’d never have thought to even try on something that general tends so much more towards thunder as an organ does. Three notes, maybe four, however, and recognition made me lose my step and my heart surge in recognition and joy and grief and awe.

After the service, we stayed for a bit of the reception. To my great surprise, our agent stopped to shake our hands, and told us that he appreciated us coming. I told him the truth, the same thing that had made us make the long drive to pay our respects to his mother on her passing, that we were here because the bereaved was one of our own. I maybe overly particular about that definition, particularly with professional contacts, but I was utterly sincere.

I also saw the other of my two mentors from my former life, my former department head. We caught up a little bit, and then I told him that “Obviously not here, but we need to catch up because we’re out the door at [client] so we’re going to be asking if you know of anything.” Which was meant to be a polite update and the end of it but we ended up talking more.

Now I’ve been resurrecting my resume after years of neglect. It’s not a pretty process. Once again, I’m reminded of just how profoundly much Microsoft Word sucks the Olestra-infused large intestines of a dyspeptic goat eating used diapers in a chili pepper patch. And once again I’m struggling with the balance of length versus brevity and utterly hating the result. The one good thing I did was give up on building a new template and instead just reusing the old one long enough to get the new content in. Now to fix some of the worst offenses and work on a modern format that’s a little more maintainable.