The orange tarp comes down.

I couldn't let my co-workers and blogger friends be the only ones who paid tribute to the mess of our most recent working conditions. I began to feel like I was living in a third-world country, wading through the devastation of 9/11 or the most recent Greensburg, Kansas tornado disaster.

Greensburg, Kansas. May 2007.

I don't have a picture of the construction nightmare going on in our office. But this snap of the Greensburg aftermath pretty much resembles our digs over the last month. My nose feels permanently filled with sheetrock and mud dust. My desk and files have a nice gritty white film permanently adhered. And I've had the audacity to wear black garments almost every day through it all, which now sport white prints and smudges. Hard to avoid when almost every garment you own resides on the black side of the fashion color wheel. The natives were getting restless, tired and really cranky. Why is it that construction always seems to involve destruction first?

However, the dirty, dusty, f'ugly safety-ORANGE tarp came down today and the painters have arrived! A cleaning crew came in last night to minimize the damage, and the construction team actually turned on the shop vac this afternoon. (I started to wonder if it was broken.) Which means we may have turned a significant corner back toward less chaos. And soon, new digs and a big open house to show off our newest achievement.

I feel so much better already! And it's not even Friday yet. Pics of the new space will be posted soon.