It’s been a tough day at work.  When people ask me for statistics or reports at my new job, I assume that they’re asking for something that I can in fact find.  Sometimes that’s not true.

Today’s search lasted for the morning and the first hour or so of the afternoon, and it ended with one sentence in the middle of a giant instruction manual that clued me in to the fact that the numbers I need don’t exist.  They could exist if I imbed some extra code in a few spots, but that data will never exist for the past.

I know I learned a lot while rummaging through manuals and websites and playing with different stats this morning.  I also feel like it’s the least the computer could do to give me a positive answer to carry back to my co-workers after that much effort.  The lack of a positive answer makes me feel like this:

 

 

In an effort to keep this from being one big, insignificant complaint about something I can’t change, I’ll show you the painting that popped into my email inbox yesterday:

 

 

I like it.  I like it a lot.

I went through phases while I was studying art history back in the day.  Sometimes I only liked art that had awesome deeper meaning or came from a turbulent point in someone’s life or history or whatever.  Goya’s art was part of that phase.  And sometimes I wanted to look at pretty pictures without wondering what the tree symbolizes and what the blank space around the tree could mean on another level.  Keiser might have a great story behind this painting, and I’m sure that knowing the story would help me to appreciate it more fully.  For today, I just like the pretty tree.