While waiting in the psychiatrist's office I took a test in Time magazine about how spiritual I am and it turns out that I'm empirical and not into self-transcending. big whoop. I don't get so involved in doing things that I lose track of time. I don't give of myself completely to improve the world. I don't believe in miracles (well, not really). Boy do I sound like a cold, hard person. But I do love spring flowers and get lost in their beauty. It didn't ask me about the persona of animals and whether I believe they have as much of a "soul" as humans do. But since I don't really believe humans have a soul (as defined by most people) I guess that would be irrelevant. I just believe that animals exist as completely as humans do, that their lives have as much meaning as human lives do. Then why do I eat meat? Well, because I get hungry, I like the taste of some of it and it's a simple way to get protein. I don't know why Americans are so barbaric in the way their treat livestock, why they believe it's ok to treat animals so inhumanely (I like the application of the word inhumane to animals, it only emphasizes how little value we place on the life of anything that's not a member of the human race).

But I love my dogs. They are great in the morning, when the alarm goes off. They have their drowsy period, it doesn't last as long as mine does--which is a good thing on work days. This morning Chances was lying next to me, totally parallel, sound asleep. She never does that. Once they both started to stir they did their usual, which invoves nudging me a lot in the face with snotty wet noses. Tess has her vantage point, Chances has hers. They're both so excited and eager to be rewarded, having them in the morning is just so gratifying.

So today my goal is to actually write the documents I've been assigned to work on. Procedures for automating a library. How to determine what percentage of your collection is in the data base. What steps to take to barcode your collection. How to convert your holdings to machine readable format. I'd much rather continue with my clerical tasks, they're way more fun, but that's not really what I'm paid to do. Besides, I'll get caught one of these days, when the director asks me for the documents. There is some accountability in my job. Not much, but some.