Ah, four days. This is a good thing, dear reader, and the Sole Proprietor is very happy to ease off on the throttle for a while.

We took our manager to lunch today and celebrated her promotion to a grade 12. Before joining a large company, the Sole Proprietor had no idea what grade anythings were about and it has taken him some years to learn the terms. Any Dilbert reader would know all this without instruction, but the Sole Proprietor takes longer with this stuff due to advanced age and some of the medicines he takes.

Anyway, we took our manager to lunch. Went to a restaurant called Soizic a short walk down Broadway toward Jack London Square. A friend with a much greater knowledge of food and restaurants had suggested it just after it opened some two years before and the Sole Proprietor knew enough to order the Caesar Salad with chicken. Nicely done. Doesn't include anchovies as a true Caesar should, but very good and moderately filling. With Thanksgiving looming on the horizon, the moderately part made good sense.

Watched the local news when he got home. The Sole Proprietor likes to watch the news, but mostly the McNeil News Hour and the various talking head shows such as Washington Week in Review and This Week in Washington (I know, I know nobody watches these things, but the Sole Proprietor does). Local news he avoids for the usual reasons. Getting home early, however, because of the holiday ahead, he turned on the local news and learned that Chelsea Clinton, daughter of the President, was stressed and despondent after ending her first major affair of the heart.

They interviewed an "affair of the heart" expert who explained that the end of your "first affair" is an emotionally difficult business, all the news heads nodding in somber and sympathetic agreement.

Can you imagine the kind of crap Chelsea Clinton must put up with? Even assuming she's emotionally light years beyond the Sole Proprietor's own maturity at her age, this stuff must be absolute shit. She's in a fish bowl, her father has been "not having sex" with a woman maybe three or four years older than she is and the daughter of the special prosecutor has just started at Stanford as a freshman. What is said, where do you look when the President's daughter passes the special prosecutor's daughter on campus? Stanford is not a large school. What do you think and feel when everyone around you has an opinion on all the rights and wrongs of this business and in ways both gross and subtle make sure you know it?

The President must be pretty much emotionally bullet proof about these things by now and the First Lady is a big girl who's been around the block more than a few times herself, although the Sole Proprietor, who is close to their age, doesn't really believe any of that. Old or young, this stuff hurts. The daugher, however, would have to be nature's perfect child not to be bent in a million ways by this pitiless blistering unrelenting hurricane of shit.

The Sole Proprietor wishes her well. She evidently lives in a world inhabited by people who eat their own for breakfast, lunch or dinner, some of them news reporters who tracked her down like an animal this day and stripped her naked, put an apple between her teeth and served her up for the five o'clock news. Happy Thanksgiving, Chelsea. Happy Thanksgiving Day.