I am writing this over the internet from a laptop with no wires. Just got my 11 Mbps WaveLAN in the mail. John has an 802.11b accent point in his apartment, so I can go wherever I want and still be online. I know all of this seems painfully trite and uninteresting to everyone but me, but this is my first time going wireless and I'm still feeling pretty excited about it. So bear with me.

Tomorrow is the X-division breakfast, which is usually a fun occasion to get together with all the other groups and hobnob. Hobknob? I have no idea. Anyway, the group leader of X-1 died in a tragic swimming accident this morning - got caught in the riptide in Florida. Rip tide? Again, no idea. So this is basically a huge tragedy for the division, and the breakfast "party" tomorrow promisses to be odious.

So, bad news aside, back to the good things in life: my new secretary in the X division office, Pearl, is awesome. I met her this morning for the first time, and she said on the phone I would recognize her because she would look like a lime. I didn't know what she was talking about until I saw her dress. Very much a lime.

She gave me a catalog for office supplies and told me I could pick out anything I needed and LANL would buy it for my cubicle. So I got to go catalog shopping for staplers, post-its, binders, etc. Again, somewhat trite. But it was fun. And all free. And as I was waiting for her to come out from behind the fence to get the catalog and my list, I sat in the afternoon sun outside the badge office and watched the hummingbird moths and butterflies feast on the flowers.

Hummingbird moths are somewhat creepy. But there was this one giant butterfly that came down and was drinking from flowers about two feet from me. It was probably 6" in wingspan. Bright yellow and black, striped like a zebra, except for a few deeeeep blue spots at the base of its wings and four small orange lunes. It's body was yellow and black as well. Very bright. The wings, along the edge that is attached to the body, were actually furry. Bright yellow hairs coated in the dusty wing pigments coated its back, some almost a centimeter long. If only I had had a camera with me, I could have taken some amazing photos of it; I was that close.

Ran into David from Tetazoo in the cafeteria today. Had no idea he was working here for the summer. Invited him and the guy he was sitting with to tonight's untimate. Tonight's game got started late, but was the most well-attended yet. At the peak we had 23 people. Fun game. I'm still pretty slow, but am having a good time and not experiencing nearly as many problems with the old lungs as I have in the previous two summers.

OK time to go back to work, which is to say, to have the laptop in front of me while I watch the Matrix, and pretend to be busy. Because I can.