One

The office smells like smoked meats today, for reasons I don't care to investigate. Combined with the nails-on-blackboard voice of the woman having the LOUD phone conversation with her office door open (why? why? why? you have a door for this very purpose) and the looming dread of my impending 90-minute conference call (pretend to listen, occasionally release the Mute button in order to make some sort of half-intelligent/intelligible comment to the collective, try to finish today's crossword), said meaty odor is making me want to escape into what really is an amazingly sunny morning.

But dommage for me.

I've come to the (admittedly obvious) conclusion that the man a few doors down from me who busies himself with the task of adhering small slabs of colored marble to the facade of his house will never, ever be done. He just won't. He's been doing this for five years, since the day I moved into my current domicile, and there's just no way something like this could take half a decade, especially since he works on it every single day. Really, he's got to be just killing time now, and whether that killing takes the form of removing and replacing some slabs each day or applying marble to the roof or just moving the piles of crap on the sidewalk in front of the house from one spot to another, I can't quite tell. I mean, sure, to each his own and all that jazz, but there comes a time when one just gets tired of stepping around bags of concrete and piles of stone every time one exits the house and walks half a block north. That time has come.