A New Year now starting at the office with a number of people still out on vacation this week, so it still has that holiday feeling as if it's OK to dog it a little: arrive later, leave earlier, spend an extra minute or two surfing the net, the hell with the fact they're tracking your every move on a computer. I'm a short timer. Why yes, I did visit Google News. Four hundred times in one day, you say? You're sure? And you consider that excessive? Good thing I'm a short timer. Easier to just blow me out the door on schedule, better to track others over whom you still hold a hammer.

I guess it's more a feeling that nothing has started yet. They're still finalizing the budget, at least around the edges, and there are people, contractors particularly, who don't know if they'll have a job in another two weeks. Contractors are like push pins. You want to put a picture up on a cork board, you take a push pin and attach it. You decide to fund this or that project, you attach contractors to it, otherwise you show them the door. It can be nervous, being a contractor. I know, since that's how I started.

Then again, that's just another of a number of undercurrents at the moment. An interesting time. When you have six months left, is starting a new year a beginning or an end?