The funny thing about working all day is that you’re tired at the end of the day. I’m having some difficulty focusing my eyes right now, and it’s only 11:30. Sad.

Today was the ornament exchange at work. Carl got a Tazmanian Devil with (as I put it) awesome Nutcracker action. I got the most technological ornament, which gave you a place to put a picture and record a message for all time. Others suggested I have my girlfriend record something for me, which I responded to as Squall (in FF8) would (i.e. “…”). Despite the fact that Marin and I wrapped our ornaments in the same paper, and the fact that Laura noted out loud “hmm…there are two gifts here wrapped with the same paper…,” it took Ramona a few minutes to figure out that her gift was from me.

My coworkers are quite an entertaining bunch, when they aren’t all grousing.

Otherwise at work I dedicated myself to scanning payment batches. For my day’s effort I finished scanning a full (business) week of payments; this also provided me with a sore butt. This is impressive only because I am quite good at sitting—it takes something extraordinary for me to get tired of sitting. In fact, at the end I was pretty much going crazy; lucky for me, everybody else ditched early.

Final grades came out today: The Streak continues unabated.

This evening Marin and I watched the first four Kimagure Orange Road OVAs. One of them (“White Lovers,” for those of you keeping track) was especially egregious, and played out exactly like the lecture model everybody learned in school: tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em, tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em. In this episode, there’s a legend that if two people who are in love with each other ski down this particular mountain, they’ll suffer some calamity and eventually be found frozen, naked, later. [Yes, in many ways, the KOR OVAs are simply episodes of KOR that were too hot for TV.] Of course, Kyosuke and Madoka end up skiing together, and get trapped in a cave by an avalanche. We then learn how there is a story about these two lovers who got trapped in a cave, wandered around, and then fell down a pit (with molten lava at the bottom, as I predicted moments before Kyosuke used the exact same words); the guy managed to grab hold of something with one hand, and a hand of the gal with his other hand. After a while, though, his hand cramped and the gal fell to her doom. Ever since then, the gal haunts the mountain and causes trouble for other lovers.

Then a pack of zombies (curiously enough, though their flesh was generally worse-for-wear, their eyes were intact) appear out of nowhere and cause Kyosuke and Madoka to go running around their cave; they then fall down a pit (with molten lava at the bottom), and Kyosuke finds himself in the same position as the guy from the story. The bitter ghost then appears, and encourages Kyosuke to drop Madoka to save himself; Kyosuke elects, however, to fall to his doom with Madoka. (Curiously, again, he falls just a bit faster than Madoka—gravity must act more powerfully on him—so they can interact a bit during the descent.) The ghost is so moved by this display of chivalry that she dissolves the illusion that Kyosuke and Madoka are trapped in.

The two then wake up in the snow, holding hands. The clouds part, and we see the no-longer-bitter gal and guy from the story reunited as they ascend into the clouds.

Needless to say, the episode was Comedy Gold.