I'll address the skewed perspective part first. You just have to take with a grain of salt, anything someone writes while on Soma, Lodine, and a host of BP meds while sampling a breakfast consisting of generic H.E.B. toaster pastries, (frosted with sprinkles), a dish of strawberries and Homemade Vanilla Blue bell, room temperature coffee and a glass of chardonnay(it seems to compliment the pop tarts and the pain meds). Seems I have a bit of an issue with my sciatic nerve, pending the results of an MRI on Monday. A month ago I didn't even know I had a sciatic nerve.......funny how that works when you hit your fifties, huh? It's a nasty little painful condition that comes and goes, and defies reasoning. Sometimes I can barely walk to the printer from my desk. Others I can get on my mountain bike and do ten miles pain free. Only found one thing that seems to be a sure fire trigger for a flare up. Can't really go into that though(think missionary work maryann). As my pal the Grey-Beard Loon put it, "face it kid, yer gettin' old".......though I still refuse to do that.

Anyhoo, I mentioned a raise. Yay. The evidence of how things are going in the oil patch, and my business(engineering/design/refinery construction) is no more obvious anywhere than here in Houston these days. I have seen hard times and good times, but never times like this. I get calls about twice a week from other headhunters, companies, and friends at other companies, looking to share a bounty with me for hiring me away from where I currently work. It's nuts. I have had a $10.00 hourly increase offer on the table for a couple of months now, to pick up and move a mile away to another outfit which I have heretofore, just looked at and procrastinated on. Allow me to interject here, part of the reason I have procrastinated is that I really like my job and in particular the team of people I work with and have for most of the last 13 years. So, yesterday my boss called all of us in one at a time, and passed out increases.......not annual, and not peanuts, (the annual peanuts review/raises are in December). No, this was just a thank you for staying, we know what others are offering all of you, get with the program adjustment. That spoke volumes to me. It was sufficient for me to dismiss thoughts of the other offer I had staring at me. The only down side to all of this is that I wasn't really able to savor the moment as he was explaining the current and forecast workload to me and to wallow in the spoils of victory. Reason being, the afore mentioned sciatic nerve and brand new prescriptions. I had taken my meds on an empty stomach, and chased it with a sugared up cup of iced coffee about thirty minutes before the boss came and asked me to follow him to his office two floors below. To give you a hint of my condition, as I dutifully followed him down the stairs as the soma was really kicking in, I actually entertained asking him for a piggyback ride the last flight of stairs. Thankfully, I didn't, and when seated in his office looking at that astonishing piece of paper and hearing his voice, I couldn't help but think about how the last time I had felt those sensations, was at a Grateful Dead concert about twenty five years ago. I think my meeting went well(again, I could have passed gas in a two syllable, dual pitch manner that sounded like "AF-LAC!", and would never have known), because the last thing I remember was shaking his hand and being told to keep up the good work. I do remember thinking about trying to buy someone's chair and paying them to push me to the elevator and back to my desk afterwards.........but I actually made it under my own power, and I came to a short while later. I can truthfully say that yesterday was the first time in my life an honest to goodness legit prescription drug with MY name on the bottle, taken as directed has scared me. Lesson learned. So anyway, today is my day off, I slept a bit late, and woke up to the national news. What do I hear? The stock market went in the dumper overnight and they were talking $7.00 a gallon gas later this year.

So I got a raise. Big whoop! Looks like I need to just go to payroll and revise my direct deposit allocations so that the raise goes directly to Mustafa's Corner Shell station. Looks like he's gonna end up with it anyway.