Over Afternoon Tea

Tea is not only a drink but a ritual over which people have been relaxing, talking, and catching up on each other's lives for centuries. This blog is intended to serve as a virtual cup of tea, helping me keep in touch with friends and family in my physical absence.

Foot-In-Mouth Disease

My husband, to his wife: "Do you want quintuplets? Why not? You have ample hips. Good child-bearing hips."

August Inside

There are days when I hate central heating. Days when the radiator on the wall is under the impression that it's -32 outside and is trying to offset the weather for us, and the radiator under the window that the maintenance guy says works on a thermostat doesn't and is also going full blast, when we're trying to run the A/C despite the fact that it's cold enough outside for winter, at least where I grew up. But it's too cold outside for an air conditioner to draw from, and it keeps freezing up. We open the only functioning window in the house, a foot by two feet at the most, but keep having to bang it shut because the downstairs left neighbors are smoking again, and the smoke somehow finds its way in the window more than the cold, fresh air does. I'm recovering from a cold, so the cold bath/bare feet type of remedy is out. I'm drinking lots of cold water instead.
I'm sure by January they'll get the heating turned down.

Highlights of my week

Getting called by an answering machine.
Me: Good morning, Pandiscio & Pandiscio, may I help you?
Answering machine (in a distinctly answering-machine-ish way): BEEP!
I managed to splutter through the length of the message in the hope of it identifying itself at the end, like the last one that called me did. I'm not sure what good it would have done--guess I could've gone to Mark and said, "I think someone at Mitek is trying to get in touch with you; their answering machine called." Um, yeah.

Watching a guy on my right, in the right-turn-lane, signalling right, pull left in front of me. Again, um, yeah.

The computer deleting all but the first 17 pages of the 88-page document I was editing.
I was scrolling innocently down through the doc, page 15, 16, 17, 1, 2--what? And again, down to the bottom, 15, 16, 17, 1, 2, 3...the bottom toolbar says page 3 of 17. I opened an older version of the document. 88 pages. Scrolled down. 16, 17, 1, 2, 3. Grand. Finally (sort of) solved the problem by only using the scroll bar in Word, as opposed to the one on my mouse, and surviving through about 5 hours and 88 pages of mind-numbingly simple edits (capitalize all uses of the word 'Agent' etc.). I also randomly came down sick in the middle of the afternoon, so it was probably a good thing the edits were simple, since when I'm sick I don't have much mind to numb. I had to stick a piece of tape on my mouse scroller to prevent automatic reactions. I finally finished the document and took it off. I hope we don't have a replay tomorrow. I made sure to save the document in several locations.

God is not the author of confusion.

Somebody is writing under a pen-name.

For the die-hard nerd

I found a Latin-to-Greek dictionary on E-Bay. Oh yeah.

Someone gave my boss a cactus.
So he put it on his window-sill. Behind the closed blinds. On top of the air-conditioner vent.
To help it surmount these challenges in life, he gave it a little piece of paper with three stamps.
One says: URGENT
The next says: REMINDER
The third is handwritten: Please Water
It is very, very dead. Even for a cactus.

Fall Without Me

This morning I went jogging at a quarter to seven, watched my breath puffing into air I can no longer term brisk, or even chilly--it's unquestionably cold. The sky has turned a bright, hard blue like some splendid cabochet sapphire, and the trees are decking themselves in scarlet and gold. This morning there was not mist on the pond, there was FOG, no longer curling over the surface in polite tendrils, but piling its four-foot wisps into a monster column in the center that promised to ascend like Babel to the heavens and become a cloud. It's undeniable: it's fall without me. Without me in classes, buying books, arguing with the registrar's office, doing homework or ignoring it. My internal clock pleads with the weather to be sensible, to realize that since I'm not in school it can't possibly be autumn, that it's somehow got things dreadfully wrong. The sun seems as confused as I am, beaming brightly, determinedly, perplexedly down on a world it can touch but no longer warm, its rays still heavy with the strength of summer, but growing feebler, failing in the face of the cold breeze, rising later and setting earlier, growing too tired to stay awake. It's fall without me; I'm inside, wearing long sleeves like I have all summer in an office of perpetual winter, and only just noticing that it would be too cold to eat lunch outside if the sun weren't so warm on my back, and that soon I'll have to move my picnic indoors. I keep waiting for the semester to start, for the classes and the homework to start pounding in, but they don't come, and fall is whispering of winter.
It's finally beginning to sink in: I'm not a student anymore.

I darted in as soon as he put down the phone.
"Those assignment are ready, Mark," I said, touching the files lightly so he'd see where they were, in case he hadn't noticed me setting them on his desk a few minutes ago.
"Great, perfect!" he seated himself and I took a chair. He sat looking at the papers for a few seconds.
"How do you feel about jelly doughnuts?"
"They're all right," I said, and I'm proud to say I've been with Mark long enough to say it as though this were a common question at times like these, as though it were difficult if not impossible to sign legal papers without first discussing doughnuts.
"Just all right?" he sounded shocked.
"Well, it depends on what kind. I like the raspberry ones, but if they're those nasty blueberry ones that taste like failed Jell-O..."
"How do you feel about some jelly doughnuts right now?" This thoughtfully, and seriously. I tried to neither laugh nor stare. "I have that phone conference at 4:00..."
"What time is it now?"
"Twelve minutes to four. It's just down the highway..." he gazed at me speculatively, rapid calculations occurring behind his absent gaze. "I think we could make it. What do you think?"
"How far down the road?"
"Just an exit..."
"Let's go get jelly doughnuts."
So we did. I like my boss.