It began with off-and-on dreams about work this past week --- yes, even when I was still a timezone away. They culminated in a too-real dream last night that had me convinced that I was already back at work and catching up with colleagues on what had transpired with my projects in my absence.

How little did I know.

Today, the colleague who's my closest friend at work rang and updated me on all the goings-on from the three weeks I was away. Every time I come back from leave, the power positions have shifted: there's a new big boss/medium boss/intermediate boss/bosslet/reorganisation/restructuring/other nonsense I have to digest in five seconds while all my colleagues had at least five days to figure it out. Not that it's ever affected me adversely, but once, just once, I'd like to come back from leave and find everything just as I'd left it.

Perhaps I'm not so unsuited to the civil service after all.

Anyways, it sounds like tomorrow in particular will be interesting. And possible every day after that, until I finally leave this joint. It was enough to give me the tinglies --- and not the good kind --- in my stomach after I got off the phone with the colleague. And to make me really not want to go to work tomorrow. Not that I wanted to in the first place, ever since the vacation hit its second half and I knew it was closer to the end than to the beginning.

I must have courage. And also my Clie, which has been restored *fingers crossed* through a little crafty Hotsync'ing, to dupe it into accepting data that it didn't want to a few weeks ago.

If I have any free braincells tomorrow (in between clearing three weeks' worth of work email), I'll think about how I'm going to write about my vacation without alienating my reading audience. I promise.