Good: One thing about my office - we work well as a team. There are no major personality clashes. Twice this afternoon, we had a last-minute cancellation, and both times, by jumping on the phones in a coordinated effort, we got the hole filled.

Better: In yoga class this evening, I came very, very close to that elusive crane pose. It felt right. I could envision my toes lifting off the mat. I wasn't able to do it, but I could feel how close I was to the right balance.

Worse: Phillip and I are both seeing the same, troubling symptoms in Gladden. He seems confused at times - like he's not quite sure who we are. He seems jittery at times. Sometimes, I walk into the bedroom and see Gladden sitting in the cage. As I walk closer, he'll suddenly jump - like I've startled him, like he couldn't sense me approaching. Gladden is getting old.

I dreamed this morning that I was involved in a huge, elaborate Catholic ceremony. I was annoyed when the alarm clock interrupted it.

No matter how much I enjoy a film or movie, it's always rather distracting to me if it takes place in Seattle. Due to filming constraints and schedules, they almost always mess up the geography. (The worst situation, of course, is a movie that uses Vancouver, BC as a substitute for Seattle.) This is true of any city, I'm sure, but Seattle is my town.

That was the case with Little Buddha - a film I love despite popular opinion to the contrary. Monks arrive in Seattle, driving northbound on I-5. In the next scene, they've jumped over to the northbound lanes of the Alaska Way Viaduct. Then they pass under the Convention Center on southbound I-5. Later, there's that downtown monorail ride that seems to go on for several miles.

But what should I think of Steven King's Rose Red - the miniseries I've started watching on the Sci-Fi channel? It's filmed in Seattle, but it seems to be an alternate reality Seattle. It involves a fictional Winchester-type haunted mansion "on Spring Street." Sure enough, in the movie, it really is on Spring Street, on First Hill, right across the freeway from downtown. (You can see the old Federal Courthouse and the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the background.) In this alternate Seattle, Spring Street ends at the front gate of the Rose Red mansion. Curiously, though, the overhead shots show Red Rose looking west over I-5 and Elliott Bay - but there are houses and trees where downtown, Belltown, and Queen Anne Hill should be. (There's some creative digital work in this movie.)

Parts of Rose Red were filmed on the University of Washington campus (there was a lot of buzz about that in The Daily), but it seems to be a fictional, unnamed university. However, people in bars watch "The Huskies" on TV. (In Alternate Seattle, they play college football in May.)

There are flashbacks to early 1900's Seattle - or, rather, Alternate Seattle - with the Seattle Waterfront Trolley passing by, complete with the route 99 sign displayed. (The Waterfront Trolley was brought to Seattle from Australia in the early 1980's as a tourist attraction.)

Rose Red isn't a terribly bad movie, overall. The acting is overdone, but it's entertaining.

I finally bought Beth Quist's third album - "Silver" - from Magnatune. Because we have a dial-up connection, rather than cable, and because we have an inkjet printer, rather than a laser printer, I chose to pay a little extra to have a physical CD mailed to me, rather than download the album.

Magnatune's business model continues to fascinate me. This is the web site that allows you to listen to entire albums online before you buy them. After I placed my order, I was given an access code that allows me download the album, or individual songs from it, even though I just purchased the CD.

I've never had much use for a high-speed cable connection. Phillip would like to have it in order to play Neopets better. With our new CD burner, the ideas of MP3s is starting to appeal to me, and a high-speed connection is pretty much necessary for downloading music.

This Sunday is Writers' Group. I'm writing about Squeak. I tried writing her story a while back, and failed. Now, I'm liking how the second attempt is turning out. I haven't shown it to anyone, yet - not even Phillip. This time, I'm trying not to get bogged down in explaining things (like the obvious "What is a sugar glider?"), and instead, let the details reveal themselves as they arrive in the flow of the story.

I meant to do more writing last night, but then I got distracted by our new CD burning software and played with it instead. I was writing some more a little while ago, but I started explaining things and got stuck. I need to think about where I went wrong, and start deleting back to the end of the good parts.

It is a sad story, of course.

Back in my Boeing days, my supervisor called me into his office late one Friday afternoon and congratulated me - I was being transferred to another department. It was not a transfer that I had asked for, nor one that I wanted. My supervisor explained that it was a reward - that other department needed a strong leader. I was suspicious, however. Things didn't add up. Why wasn't I allowed to turn down the "reward?" Why had no one from that other department ask me to work for them? That other department was being dissolved in less than two months - why would they suddenly need a strong leader?

I kept after my supervisor - I kept asking him to tell me the truth about my transfer. Finally, he broke down and told me that my lead didn't think I was happy in my present position. I actually was happy there, until the attempted transfer, but no one had asked me if I was. Something else was going on, but I never found out what it was. I asked for, and was reluctantly (because I was being so uncooperative) granted, a transfer into a third department - which turned out to be a very good move for me.

What brings that story up is that I told my boss this morning that I didn't get that job at the other clinic. She replied that both she and my manager were prepared to give me extremely good references, and that there could be other positions out there. I just wish that someone here would show some relief that I'm staying, or some disappointment that I'm trying to leave, so I could trust my glowing reviews a little bit more.