In which my faith in humanity is restored....

or, if slightly short of that, at least successfully reorganized.

It was a kind-of-a mishmash first day back at Le Grind today, after a lovely weekend with wife, child and BF-of-latter; Eleanor described most of those happy moments here.  We did have a few minor bumpy moments over the Noo Yeahs weekend, though, some of which she also posted about; these included:

(a) her having her computer monitor come up with a fairly major case of gas, which seems to be slowly dissipating;

(b) our finally figuring out why she hadn't been getting any comments on her entries for the past several weeks; whereas I'd attributed it at first to her subordinate server location and/or the overwhelming number of holiday-season posts on comms likeyuletide, it turned out that either a two-fingered or a four-pawed typist had accidentally diverted her LJ-notify emails to her spam filter;

(c) my having a rather annoying experience with Amazon, after someone tipped me off to a one-day 99-cent sale on their Inception download; when I went to check it out, I discovered I could only order it through "one-click" ordering, and that one click resulted in, not a 99-cent download, but a $9.99 one, blessedly reduced by a $4.00 credit that I'd obtained from some prior order. Fortunately, that pricier download is also permanent, at least as permanent as any Amazon digital download is, and despite the annoyance of it requiring yet another software download to view the damn thing, I began watching the film last night, and it's pretty good. I was, however, saddened to hear of Pete Postlethwaite's passing this morning; I suspect this is the first time I've ever experienced the death of an actor during a motion picture.

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But enough about the weekend. This morning, I began my rounds of calls, emails and court appearance, and I felt relatively Back In Swing by early this afternoon. By then, I'd even gotten in an unexpectedly prompt payment on one of my early-December invoices, which let me plan on paying some things a few days, or even weeks, ahead of when I thought I could,....

until word came, later in the afternoon, that one of my clients' late-December payments had, um, bounced.

Depending on how my bank arranges debits against credits, this could cost me anywhere between 10 bucks (their minimum fee for depositing a bad check) and a couple of hundred (for all the checks and withdrawals that I made after his bad deposit). Still, if today's payment hadn't come in, I would be looking at an even bigger world of hurt over the next few days as even more things come due, all of which, thankfully, I can now cover even if December's payment doesn't get made good immediately.

And yet, whatever bad came out of that experience got blissfully reversed a couple of hours ago, when I chanced to check our home voicemail and saw a message from the local library. Some unknown benefactor found, and returned, my missing Sherlock book from last month, which means I will get back all but five bucks of the replacement cost I paid for it last week. (Most of that? Will go to buy my own copy of the damn thing, but still. Knowing it isn't Somewhere Out There anymore is immensely satisfying:)  I doubt the librarian will give me the name of the finder, but when I go in, it will be with a handwritten, heartfelt thank-you note, which I hope they will pass on:)

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It was also Emily's actual, factual birthday today; and the night that we got to watch the thoroughly delightful gag reel of Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren et al in The Last Station (we watched the film itself last night, and it's wonderful, too); and the occasion of Eleanor showing me this Educational Film on the Daily What that almost choked me to death with laughter-

"Over the Rhine at the 2019 jazz fest" (Watch on YouTube)

- and, in general and in the end, a good way to start the first workday of Chapter 2011:)