THE LETTER arrived by courier last night as I was getting in my car. Handed to me personally from the library's lawyer's office. It contains many pages of charges against me, mostly that I spoke in a loud voice (well, yes I do, I suffer from a hearing loss and tinnitus) and a number of other "charges" that would make you laugh if you didn't know they were levied against me. They're asking to suspend me for 5 days without pay. My first thought was that it would be lovely to not go to work for 5 days, especially now when I have meetings and will be on the road for the next 2 weeks and have trainers coming from NYC to do a workshop for me. Kick me out now, PLEASE! I'll go visit my mother for another while and we'll have a good time. I'll have the money because my closing is tonight so it's not a financial hardship. But of course I have to look it over more closely and decide whether I want to grieve it or not. Some things are better just to give up on and surrender to the goons. But this one, well it's just full of so many things that have been exaggerated and made into lies. All that happens is it goes into my file. Or I fight it and it costs the library money and grief and maybe some of the charges are dismissed. Haven't spoken to my rep yet, he's not been available today. Will see him on Monday.

And it's cold today, and snowy. We spent the day --all day, doing our planning process, the assessment portion of it. Kevin, Julie's husband was our facilitator and he's a master. Knows a million methods for doing this sort of thing but in the end he had us draw fish on the wall. The head was our issue, and the bones were elements and ways of dealing with the issues. Not as grand a method perhaps as it might have been earlier in the day. I put big lips on my fish. Everyone else followed his example and had a big square head for theirs. Honestly.

So now I go home, shopping en route, and have my closing (if FedEx has delivered the papers as they're supposed to). Can't wait can't wait. The bright spot (and it's a big one) in my life.
I need to see if the ground is frozen because I still have bulbs to plant (oops). I may try to move the bed upstairs to the floor by the window, setting up my winter sleeping quarters. This would be a lot of work in terms of getting everything away from Tess, but it might be worth it. I'll buy bird seed on the way home (when I buy Chances' new collar--to replace the one Tess just chewed) and start feeding the birds. Late this year.

I have to meet with the director and my union rep to go over the charges, and the day she's picked for that is the exact day and time I've scheduled to have my chimney cleaned RATS RATS RATS. Well I can work around these things. The stove seems to be working ok and gets plenty hot right now. The creosote crinkles a bit, not good, it's burning, but I doubt it will burn all the way up the chimney.

Supposed to warm a bit this weekend. It looks a lot like December right now, some snow on the ground.