Little Tokyo Red Watch Tower (Yagura)

Monday was my first day back at work after a week’s vacation. The first day back at work is always a hard one for me. Normally, it always seems to stretch on way too long, not this Monday though. Starting almost as soon as I walked in the door, the day started off with a bang and then devolved into a marathon of meetings. I had four meetings in five hours and only after all that did I manage to snag a minute for lunch. It was almost two when I finally could come up for air. The rest of the day was calmer. I spent it reading email and generally catching up on things that I missed. It appears that the fire drill that I had been working before vacation had continued to roil in my absence. Plus a ball that I had dropped had landed with a thud at my boss’s feet and now that I am back had rolled to my feet. All this work will fuel the rest of my week. This is all just the daily dribble of my regular work and as such is not all that interesting, but I did have a brush with fame today.

While running down some of my recently acquired to-dos, I bumped into General Halftrack and his entourage. Let’s be clear here his real name is not General Halftrack. It is just the nom de guerre that I give all of our visiting dignitaries. Heck, he wasn’t even a general. I was scurrying from one building to the next when I ran into them. A bunch of the entourage was standing around in the hallway and most of them were standing next to the walls. So, instead of turning around like I should have, I thought that I could thread the needle and make it through OK, after all the hallway was an extra-wide eleven feet. After I had committed and before I made it through, the conference room door opened and General Halftrack and the important half of his entourage boiled out into the hallway. All at once, everyone else started moving too. I nearly ran into the guy with the clear plastic curly wire behind his ear. I tried making like a hole as they all moved in the opposite direction around me. It was all over in a second, such was my brush with fame. I figure though that it only decremented my fifteen minutes of fame by a second or two, so it was all worth it.