The editor (unstable, not sleazy) comes back from Houston next week. It's been quiet at the magazine, without her manufacturing crises and having conniptions through her headset. Upstairs it's just me, Лена (Lena), Ягмур (Yagmur), and Владимир (Vladimir), with Александр (Aleksandr), Пётр (Pyotr), and the new receptionist down below. The other layout guy besides Пётр, the one who used to fire darts into the board by my desk with deadly accuracy, got fired. He was pretty clearly losing his motivation and butting heads with the editor a lot, and according to Лена and Александр she ended up acting frosty towards him until he quit.

Владимир, a journalist, is new. He worked for the magazine before, but had trouble with alcoholism a couple years ago and either quit or was fired. The editor re-hired him about a month ago. He's about 60 (or maybe he's in his 40s, Russia's hard on men), seems kind and softspoken, but has the obnoxious habit of wandering over to Лена's desk (I sit between them) and chattering in a monotone about nothing, as far as I can tell when I understand it. Лена humors him, as her eyes flick between him and the article she's working on, and he stands in front of her desk and gabs away. For some reason it irritates me more than it does her.

Лена and Александр and I go to lunch every day around 2. I overdosed on the greasy meat and potatoes, so now I just get soup and bread. Our most animated conversations are about the editor. For the first month or so that I worked there, the two were really diplomatic, but now they let loose. The common refrain of the micromanaged, screwing up by doing what we're told. Александр even warned the lunch ladies. "You know the crazy American woman? Not this one, the other crazy American woman. Yeah, she's our boss. She's coming back next week." Crazy is сумашедший, sumashyedshiy, I learned it last week.