A Wonderful, Happy, Hour....

It was another beautiful day today. Now it's officially summer, it seems that Spring is trying to get back a little of the time it missed. It was warm without being unpleasantly hot, breezy with no humidity to hold back the fresh air.

It was the first day in a while where I've come home to lunch with the puppies and not wanted to go inside to the air conditioning. It made it hard to crate the puppies up and send myself back to my own cubicle-sized crate at work.

The afternoon didn't take too long to pass. It helps that I had a meeting with my boss among others. My boss is funny in meetings. He's ok in the ones where the entire staff have to attend or, even, when his own 'boss' is there. Yet when it's small groups of us, my boss is like a fidgety child. He likes to play with buttons on the computer. He also very frequently gets distracted and leads us down bizarre areas of discussion. For example, I learned that the term "crapper", used to crudely describe a toilet, was named after a plumber named something like Thomas Crapper. We looked it up on Wikipedia in the middle of a meeting. We also learned that my coworker worked at the most unfortunate Ruby Tuesday restaurant in the world. It burned down once. A mirror fell on someone's head and half the staff passed out because of carbon monoxide poisoning.

We've had a lot of odd discussions like this when my boss is present. Unbeknownst to him, I've actually started to not hate meetings when he's attending and no one higher up than him is going to be present. They're often quite...interesting.

Anyway, after the meeting with my boss, the afternoon whizzed by. There had been talk of a happy hour after work but, as I suspected, it either didn't happen or it became one of those 'exclusive' happy hours that the annoying little high-school-esque clique in my office has sometimes. I may sound bitter but, actually, I'm not. I just get fed up of the slightly unprofessional vibe in the office that involves whispering, gossip and secret lunches/happy hours. It makes things a little uncomfortable for those of us not involved. It's not that we want to be involved but it becomes a much bigger deal that we're not because of the covertness of everything. It's much like everything in the office that is worthy of a staff meeting to announce something bit- it remains a horrible secret until we're in the meeting. This leads to paranoia and gossip that wouldn't be nearly as present if they'd just tell us upfront what's going on instead of making us wait until a staff meeting.

As I said, the happy hour didn't happen. Instead, I came home and spent some time playing with the puppies in the garden. Then I took my laptop out, grabbed a beer and sat outside and wrote a little of the novel I'm currently working on while the puppies played nearby.

All in all, I have to say, that's probably one of the best 'happy hours' I've ever had. Since I tend to prefer the company of the puppies to most of my coworkers, there was no awkward socializing. There was no trying to be friendly when, mostly, you wonder why you're spending your free time in which you're NOT getting paid to hang out with people you personally don't care for outside of working with them. Also, the beer was way cheaper. Also, it's a rare happy hour at a bar when a furry little dachshund catches sight of you watching her and makes a running leap to try to get on your lap to give you 'kisses.'

Also, I got to work on my novel which is always a nice thing, particularly when the early evening sun is shining down and the breeze catches you just right.

Now that....was a happy hour.

Happy Thursday!