It's Opening Night in the NHL tonight. Or it was supposed to be. No Opening Night. Then again, there hasn't been any training camps or any exhibition games either. The owners have locked-out the players in a labor dispute.

The NHLPA made its first proposal in 15 months to NHL negotiators Sept. 9 in Toronto. it was immediately rejected and there hasn't been any movement since, and there's been rumors of the entire NHL season being lost.

All I know is that it probably means more people going to the Wolves games that we have to deal with. Our opening night is this Saturday!

Our new "little boy" Chip has been sneezing for quite a while now. Indy sneezes all the time, but it's a "quiet" "dry" sneeze. Chip's isn't - his nose is wet and his sneeze sounds different. So, it's off to his first visit to our vet (the first all exotic animal hospital in the country). As it turns out, there's been some turn-over at the Vet's office, so Carol & I will be meeting a new doctor, too - Heather Bixler. Well, let's just say that we like Heather a lot and I think she liked Chip, too. Both the doctor and the tech just seemed to swoon over Chip as he came out of his soft-sided carrier in the examining room. So far it looks like we've been raising our rabbits absolutely fine and doing everything correctly.

However, Chip does have some kind of upper respiratory infection, so we're going to have to separate him from Indy (even though they're not "together" at all) Indy is healthy and is showing no symptoms, so Chips cage has to be moved away for a couple of weeks. During that time, he's going to be fed antibiotics twice a day to see if we can get rid of this sneezing problem.

Chip made the trip pretty well - it was his first car ride since coming home from the Wisconsin State Fair back in August. He also handled his first medication feeding session really well. He's our first rabbit that hasn't tried shutting his mouth, jerking away and not swallowing the medication. We'll be doing this for two weeks, so hopefully 1) he'll cooperate and 2) he gets better.

So, I got to work around 7, like I've been doing all this week. It's been dark as the sun doesn't come up until after 7, not to mention cloud cover lately.

Anyway, I'm walking to the deli, thinking about a coffee and a donut when my phone rings. It's the Account Manager for my contract company. It turns out that we've done such a great job getting the number of call tickets in queue down, that we're no longer needed. In fact, the count is so low, a lot of the people here don't have much to do, only the more difficult, long-to-resolve tickets. That's it.

I have half a day of work today and then it's back to unemployment, unless my company can find something for me (which I'm doubting).

I was just getting comfortable with this huge campus and was felt like I was just getting into the swing of things and now it feels like the rug was pulled out from under me. Again.

*sigh*