A window and a heater! My kindgom for a ...

My office has no windows. It also hasn't had much heat today, the coldest day on record here in the Circle City in almost a year.


Since my office has no windows and no heat which requires me to keep the door shut to warm it up with the little space heater, I just got up to walk down the hall for no good reason.


Sigh.


Today has been a bit of a frustration. Stuck in my closed office, it's become apparent that the rest of the world, so it seems, gets to take off the whole week. The people who I need to return phone calls aren't in their offices.


And I'm not really in a job anymore where I can track them down and be annoyingly persistent. This is one of the things I miss about being a reporter. (So is being able to look out a window, but that's another story...)


Someone being out of the office wasn't usually a good excuse for why you couldn't reach them for a story. I'd badger secretaries, leave messages anywhere a person might be (home, work, cell phone, etc.). There were times I literally drove to someone's house just to see if they were there but dodging calls.


I don't get to do that as a grant writer. Or if I did, it wouldn't help my case much.


I've got proposal deadlines looming later this month, but I need questions answered before I can really start into things. There's no point in wasting my time writing a proposal that doesn't meet a funder's criteria. Really. We have ideas for how we would ideally like to spend their money, but if our ideas don't fit with their ideas, we are willing to think up other ways to use their grants.


Perhaps some of my frustration is just the whole I'm-back-at-work-after-a-holiday thing. I can't do anything about not having a window, but they are working on the heat and hopefully, tomorrow will feel like a more productive day.