You've got to be kidding me with this. Monkeys? In his pants? "Excuse me, sir, are those monkeys in your pants, or are you just chirping down there?"

The story says the man was returning from Thailand, so it begs the question: Is one of the monkeys the one from Survivor? The one that stole the castaways' bananas? And in the link, it says "monkey.pants"! HA! That's a great nickname for someone.

OK. Now. You'd think that this company never put out a weekly publication before. Our managing editor came down here this morning from his daily meeting with The People Upstairs and informed us that they'd made a mistake and misinterpreted our production schedule covering the next couple of weeks. Basically, they fucked up, and we have our deadlines pushed up a day or two. So now we're forced to close more pages today and Monday, and next Thursday and Friday to make up for it. It's not our fault, and yet, we have to fix it. To our ME's credit, the schedule for next week still gives no mention of Christmas Eve. It has Monday's pages to close, then a note that says "12/25: CHRISTMAS DAY OFF!!!" and then it goes into the 26th. So it looks like the plan is to still try to have little to no work for Christmas Eve. I'll take it. I'll stay here until 11 tonight and Monday to have Christmas Eve free. Actually, ideally I'd rather leave around 8-9 tonight and stay until midnight or whenever on Monday. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

I just took a phone call and came back to this, and I have to be honest: I'm not sure what I'm talking about. I mean, that sentence doesn't really flow with the previous thought. It does, a little, but it's not really what I'd chose to put there.

Whatever. I'm going to leave it anyway.

I still have Christmas gifting to do. I don't know what to get Dad. Last weekend in D.C., he went out in the morning with his buddy Steve to a nearby fishing store and bought things. When I walked into Ann's place, he pointed to the bag on the floor and told Jess and me to pick out Christmas presents. C'mon, Dad, that's not the way we want to do it. I'm not even sure what CDs he might want (other than the ones of mine that I copied for him � actually, that reminds me, I actually do have something for him. I just want to get something else). And Jess. I don't really have anything for her. When she sent out her birthday/Christmas list last month (her birthday was the 7th), she had several things in triple figures and just a few more reasonably priced. I think what I'll do, though, is let her pick out some nice notecards from this photo catalogue and order some for her to use with her own photos. Whereas Mom asked for notecards using my photos, Jess is enough of a shutterbug herself that I'm sure she'd like some for her own work. Last year, she asked for (and I provided) a gift certificate from Exposures.

So I guess that covers it. I still have to make the labels and covers for Dad's CDs and some others I'm doing, but hopefully I can tackle that tonight or Sunday or Monday, because that's about all the time I have left. In fact, I think I should see about doing the covers now.

It's nice having a little free time at work. But that will all end in an hour or so.