October in June blog.

This isn’t right. At noon today, the E*Trade (nee Northern Trust) time & temp sign near the Sears Tower said 59 F. I demand Congressional hearings! The Midwest isn’t getting its share of global warming. No June day should ever be this cold. We’re being cheated. Robbed, I tells ya. A lost summer day is gone for good. We aren’t going to get any warm summer days in October.

My old friend Tom Jones is on the road this week and next, visiting clients in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Southern Wisconsin got blasted by storms and tornadoes last night, and he must have been caught in it. And it’s cooler up there than here. Hope he brought an umbrella and jacket.

The painters came to the office early today, hours before I did, a kind of Mutt & Jeff team in terms of body sizes, or perhaps Matt & Jose to reflect their respective ethnicities. They went about their work with more efficiency than I muster when painting walls, listening to country music and chatting about this and that. Then again, I don’t have to do it as a living, only as a chore I can procrastinate.

I was sure I was going to be driven out of the office by paint fumes, but it wasn’t so bad. They didn’t paint my room, since I didn’t want to spend the next few days trying to reconstitute my setup, but they did the rest of the space, which can hold four other office workers comfortably. I remarked to one of the painters that the paint didn’t smell too much like, well, paint, and he told me that it was an expensive Sherwin-Williams brand.

He even checked the invoice for the retail price: something north of $30 a gallon, though his company got it for about $20. Just another perk of the upper classes, I guess. Smelly paint is for the masses. Why my office was treated to this upmarket paint, I couldn’t say, but perhaps our upmarket landlord, Equity Office Properties, wants it that way.