Ohh, it is so nice seeing this pale blue "entry" screen again. I thought I was doing pretty good about keeping my cool when all of Diaryland disappeared. Especially when the site meter (and my sister) were telling me that other people were logging on here and reading.

But I could not.

Many of you out there may understand the problem of individual ISPs no longer recognizing DNS numbers, but I do not. At the time, my best guess was someone had hacked my account and blocked me out.

The frightening thing was not that possibility, but instead the horrible thoughts that went through my brain as to what I would do to that person whenever I found out who they were.

And, of course, I probably shouldn't mention cyberstalking Andrew to ask him what was going on. (Anyone want his address and phone number?)

So,

Saint Patrick's Day.

I meant to get up early (and actually, I did) so that I could check the Saint Patrick's strutting ground on Saint Patrick's Day, but having been online to two in the morning, and needing to be in meetings all day and evening, that didn't seem wise. So back to sleep I went.

The meetings?

The afternoon was spent learning the results of some of the sage grouse research that's being conducted locally, and then a couple hours listening to a major oil company (like, 8th largest in the world), two major wind power companies, and a huge federal agency whimper and whine about who would need to come up with $40,000 to carry two sage grouse research projects through another entire season.

I'll bet that is less than two minutes of operating expense for each entity. Any one of them could pay the entire amount without blinking, and never even know that they did. But each was more interested in trying to get the other companies to pay more. If we had just met with each one individually and asked for $13,300 each, we probably would have had the money and been done in 15 minutes.

The evening meeting was much better.

We had cookies.

Delicious four-leaf shamrock cookies that tasted more like scones than sugar cookies. The baker and boss both apologized for the green frosting.

They promised they would have an orange one for me next year.

And hey, all the kissing near the end of the meeting was fun, too.