A Sure-Fire Way to Get Slapped

"No, you looked fat even before you put on that dress."

Maybe I'm just sensitive.

When I woke up this morning, my apartment seemed lighter than usual. It wasn't that I overslept and the sun was up*, but, for some reason, the nightlight I keep in my kitchen (so I don't kill myself if I get up in the night to find the bathroom) seemed brighter. Then, in my living room, I could see my porch light through my blackout curtains, which I'd never seen before. Have I collected so much owl stuff for so many years that I'm starting to acquire better night vision?

A little later, on my walk to the gym, I passed under the high tension power lines, as usual, but this time I could hear the electricity sizzling along them. I'd heard this phenomenon years ago, at a college campus in Arizona, but never at these power lines.

Better vision, better hearing -- will I be able to turn my head 180 degrees next?

On the other hand, if my vision and hearing are improving, does that mean one of my other senses is diminishing? Losing my sense of taste might mean I would eat less. It also might mean I eat more, trying to satisfy myself because I can't taste food as well.

Since I'm on the topic of sensitivity, let's have a listen at this.



You know, even if I account for years or decades since she first recorded the song, Christine Lavin looks nothing like I expected.

* For me, "sleeping in" means I don't get up until 6:00 a.m., and that's still well before sunrise in The Noog. If I'm ever in bed when the sun comes up, something is seriously wrong.

I know why the caged bird sings.

This is a follow-up to this post.

Yesterday, I heard over the radio that the plumber had fixed the problem with the hot water in the coaches' locker room. What did he have to do? He opened a valve.

Are you kidding me? Six or seven months after I first reported the issue, they finally look at the pipes and figure out that a valve was closed? Sheesh.

Weird Science

Just because it comes from a cartoon doesn't mean it's not real. In the cartoon "Of Mouse and Man", The Brain staged a workplace accident involving a microwave oven and non-dairy creamer. Lo and behold, the following message is printed on the case of creamer which I picked up for my crew today. (I am not making this up.)

Caution: Like all powdered products, this product should not be stored or used near an open flame or high heat source.

People usually say I'm backwards.

When making my bed yesterday morning, I noticed that I had put the top sheet on sideways. Oh well, as long as it covers me and my future bedmate.

That's not blood on my napkin; it's beet juice and chili.

Don't you hate it when you bite the inside of your mouth when eating? As if the pain weren't enough, the area then swells up, which makes it more likely that you will bite yourself. Again. In the same spot.

I bit the inside of my lip on Saturday. At lunch yesterday, I hit the same spot five times, but only once at dinner. The spot seems a little less swollen this morning, and I haven't bitten it yet as I eat my breakfast, so maybe it's finally healing.

(I ate them separately, of course. The beets were in my salad; the chili was on my hot dogs.)

This sounds like a not-bad rule to live by.

When reading, I often find a quote I think is funny, think applies to me, or just plain like. It's rare when I find a whole paragraph, but here it is (from The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White).

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn -- pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics -- why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."

You all want me to have a good night's sleep, so I don't share my weird dreams with you.

I dreamt that my mom and I were at an Episcopal church, looking for my buddy Robomarkov. It was a large church, and the part of the congregation we were in was off to the side, so the service was nearly over before any of us could hear that it was already going on. The minister called out for hymn #2, but someone changed the signboard and posted an omega symbol in front of the two. I opened the hymnal and looked in the front, but it wasn't that page two. It wasn't the next one, either. The third one (and what sort of book starts numbering its pages three times [in Arabic numerals each time]?) was the right one, but it showed just the words, not the music. I told my mom she'd remember the tune ("Be Thou My Vision", if you care) once it started, but I couldn't read the hymnal where she was holding it, so I tried to carry the tune for her and hoped I remembered the words correctly.

Then I was outside, with my paternal grandmother, walking under some trees, toward the church doors. This time, we were looking for my mom. When we got to the church, a guy told us that everyone had left, except some people working on the candles, and my mom wasn't with them. We walked on, and I told my grandmother that we were on the campus of the school where I work, and I explained that it was just like the small, college campus in the town where she lived, except the college also had female students, and they were in their twenties, not their teens.

My grandmother had a large (and I mean almost as big as she was, but she was still able to carry it in one hand), styrofoam cup of green soda. She set it down to take a drink from the straw, and some boys playing frisbee nearby pinched a bit of the cup so that the green soda flowed from the side. (I, naturally, was indignant. The boys, naturally, didn't care.) A large fly (proportionately large, like the cup) was attracted to the sweet soda but got caught under the flow. With one tremendous burst of energy, it managed to fly out of the stream.

Then, Skippy showed up and told me that I should look for a song by the band "Hot Dog Brownie, Old Fudgies, and Go". Then my alarm clock woke me up.

My first thought was I think even pregnant women with cravings wouldn't want to eat that. My second thought was I don't think I'd be interested in music by that group; it sounds like a punk band. My third thought was that I didn't go to bed late, but I had woken up several times in the night (two of those times, I heard it raining), so maybe it's not the duration of sleep but the quality that counts.

Pass it on: Tommy's keys are in his car!

One student shouted to another, "Hey, Malcolm (or Chandler, or whatever rich boys are called these days)! Tommy left his keys in his car!"

Okay, so if you know who Tommy is and what car he drives, you just got yourself a free set of wheels!

Consider this my announcement to the world.

The weather is not my fault. It has not been my fault for over a year. Stop telling me that I made it rain last night.

Actually, I wasn't sure it rained, or if the humidity was just denser than usual. (Yeah, we usually have dew on the grass, but this time the asphalt and concrete were damp, too.) According to the swimming coach, whom I frequently see in the locker room in the morning, it rained just as he and his wife were going to bed.

I, of course, am blaming others. I think it rained last night because Thing One's daughter and granddaughters are flying back to NM today. My reasoning goes like this.

1) The day I moved from NM to The Noog, the "drought" they were experiencing ended with a 2" downpour.

2) When Thing One moved from NM to The Noog last winter, the city experienced more snow events (including one at 6-8") than had happened in years.

3) As of last Sunday, Thing One's mother has moved to The Noog from NM, and we got 9.58" of rain on Monday (and another 0.58" Tuesday).

Actually, I see it's getting worse. I think we need an embargo on any more New Mexicans moving to The Noog, before those of us already here get washed away.

Hmm, this could be a new variable to test. If my New Mexican friends Betty or Gimpius Maximus come for just a visit, will the precipitation vary accordingly?

I haven't been properly dry since August.

Boy, I never expected to fit a Harry Potter quote into the titles of my blog posts.

It misted or drizzled all day yesterday, but there's no precipitation this morning. In fact, the streets and sidewalks look as if they're starting to dry off. (I wish I could say the same of my shoes.) Weather records based at the airport say we got 9.85" of rain on Monday and 0.58" Tuesday. I still think we're better off than other parts of the country.

Dry and Alive - for the Moment

I really need to pay attention to current events, instead of merely scanning the online weather forecast. The forecast called for rain. Current events said the remnants of a tropical depression would pass over. Not that knowing in advance would've kept me any drier, mind you.

One of my crews accomplished very little yesterday, short of continually driving around campus, in case one of the storm drains got clogged by fallen leaves. While they were dry and sitting down, the other crew and I were in ankle-deep water on the athletic fields, emptying the trash cans and turning them over, so they wouldn't get even more water in them. (Not only are they very heavy, the anaerobic decomposition of whatever organic materials are in them makes them smell nasty.) Mind you, I'm not sure they stayed turned over, since they were on the verge of floating in the first place, and it became windy overnight.

The power went out (twice) in my new office and the neighborhood where I live, but the rest of campus (which receives its electricity from a different direction) was unaffected. My office phone still doesn't work, since the campus computer department has to "reboot" it (the price of technology).

At the end of the day, I went home and tossed everything I was wearing, except my raincoat (which I didn't want to melt) and work shoes (which I didn't want to make an infernal clunking and possibly damage the machine) in the dryer. Gosh, toasty-warm underwear sure feels nice! I think it took an hour for my feet to dry, though.

More rain today and tomorrow, which is no surprise, since there has been some form of precipitation for the last 24 hours. Mind you, I'm not whining; I do realize that many other people are worse off because of actual hurricanes, and not the remnants of one.

There's no place like home for the holidays.

Alas, I'm not there. (September 1 is a holiday, right?) Today marks my sixth anniversary as a homeowner. Since I've lived elsewhere for the last two years, though, I haven't inhabited my condo for 1/3 of the time I've owned it. I figure that, if I live in The Noog two more years, I'll have not inhabited my home for half of the time I've owned it.

Happy Emma M. Nutt Day!