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The End of Sand Volleyball and Email Tips and Tricks

Well hell! You want to know what�s exciting in my world? A bunch of people read my journal in the past couple of days! Wow! Thanks to everyone for the lovely comments. After I�d written Wednesday�s entry, I went to bed. Ryan got home from work about a half an hour later, and I told him the story as well. He has been working crazy insane hours as he�s nearing a major deadline, but he still stayed up and talked with me about our thoughts on the war, our misunderstanding of world events, our feelings of helplessness when it comes to addressing such things. I�m not going to dwell much more on the story in my journal, but it is certainly an experience that will remain in my mind in the days to come.

My motivation to work for the past two days has been fleeting. Travel has sapped all of my energy. That and a late night volleyball game. We won one match, but lost the next so our season is officially over. Boo hoo. There was drunken talk of joining an indoor league where we would rule the court with our mad skillz. These skillz include missing 1 out of every 3 serves, running into each other because we refuse to call or recognize a call for the ball, and consistently bumping the second hit into an impossible spot in the net where the setter has no choice but to awkwardly swat at the volleyball while falling on her ass. Special. Maybe having a hard surface would make a difference. I guess we�ll see. I did get hit on last night in the middle of a volley, or at least I think I was hit on. A guy on the other court asked me my name. Twice. While the ball was in play on our court. I didn�t really get it. When the play ended, he asked again. Distracted, I said my name and then asked in a super-bitchy tone, �do I know you?� I hope I didn�t because I was surely an asshole. But come on! Who asks someone a question like �what�s your name?� when the ball is in play. For serious!

Someone asked in my guestbook about my trick for emptying my inbox. The trick is to sort by name order and then start at the bottom refusing to move past an email until you�ve addressed it. This is all fine and dandy until you get to one of those really obnoxious emails that you either want to respond to with a flame mail or you want to delete permanently and blame the spam filter for eating it should the person repeat their request. I have exactly 11 of these emails in my inbox right now each one attached to a task that I�d just simply rather not do.

I do have one pet peeve about emails and that is the pre-recorded signature at the bottom of each email. I�m okay with the name, title, contact info stuff, and I employ that trick myself. What bugs me is the �Sincerely,� or �Best Regards� that some people automatically put before their name. Typically it is in some kind of scrolly font that doesn�t match the body of the email. Often times, the tone or the nature of the email doesn�t lend itself at all to a standard �Thank you,� salutation. Even more obnoxious than a poorly matched salutation is a really bad joke or inspirational quote at the bottom of the standard signature. Ugh! Hate that!

Anyhow, back to the inbox, it is getting closer and closer to empty. I got distracted there for a second and knocked out a few more emails. Since returning yesterday, I went from 81 emails all the way down to 7. Wait, wait! Make that 5 emails. Two were just FYI�s! Yee haw!

So that�s the trick. Don�t skim the emails � read them, respond to them, file them away. Thank you Captain Obvious, right? It is harder than it sounds. Believe me.

Okay, I�m off to a happy hour. Double woo! Have a great weekend.

5:17 p.m. - August 05, 2005

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