Tag Archives: Personal Blather

The office move is becoming a really real reality, and soon. As in we need to be out of our current office by the end of next week. We’ve already got a lot of things moved to our new location, and even more things are boxed up and ready to go, but we’ve (rather predictably) run into a few snags…
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On the drive in this morning my wife and I got talking about how confusing word order can be in different languages. It’s a strange situation, as a native English speaker, to get all introspective about how we organize adjectives and nouns. Generally, we stack up the adjectives and point them at the nouns, instead of the other way around. So you don’t find out what you’re talking about until you know what it’s like.
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In the style of the inimitable HP Lovecraft, “The Great Old Pumpkin” By John Aegard.

It’s kind of strange. Pretty much the only consistant spam has been the Nigerian 419 scam letter. The other types of spam I’ve been receiving have been changing over time. It used to be advertisements for various love-life enhancing supplements. Then there was a flood of mortgage and refinancing ads. Now I’m mostly getting ads for tobacco products. I guess it’s a stage of life kind of thing: first they want you to party, then settle down, then kill yourself off…
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I very nearly played a spirited game of “Punt-a-Cat” on Friday night.

Ok. So here’s the scenario. My Wife was feeling a little tired, so she decided to take a little nap after work. “Wake me around 9” she said.

So I went to geek out a bit (short version: neither of the house PC’s will run Windows XP), then decided to head into the bedroom with a bottle of wine and two glasses. I snuck around all quiet like, stocking feet and all, down to the cellar and back. I opened the bottle in complete silence, crept down the hall, avoiding all squeeky floorboards.

And then, in the bedroom doorway, I stepped in cat puke.
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We’ve got a box of rubber bands that’s been part of our office since before the last time we moved. It’s an ordinary, rather tattered actually, cardboard box with a little rip-out lid so that you can grab a single rubber band out of the morass inside. It’s a sort of zen calming device. You have to relax and work gently to remove a rubber band from the box. If you’re in too much of a hurry and try to just grab one rubber band and yank it out it’ll get tangled up with its neighbors and you’ll wind up with a huge clot of rubber bands springing out and showering all over the office floor.
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The extended entry has a nifty image from an online reprint of a self-defense article out of Pearson?s Magazine, 11 (February 1901), 195-204. No real point to this post, apart from noting that I love the way that even the loutish assailant is properly dressed in a top coat and straw hat.
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Is this actually topiary? I mean, if you spend all that time gardening so that you can have a perfectly square shrub in your yard, wouldn’t it be just a rather truncated hedge?

I’m getting back into a hobby that I picked up in college. Actually, I suppose it’s a sub-hobby, since it’s attached to an existing superset of hobbies that I’ve had since high school. Or would it be a hobby extension? Never mind. It doesn’t matter how you wind up drawing your particular personal Venn diagram of hobbyism, the point is that I’ve started painting minis again. I may post a couple pics at some point…
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It’s always fun to see contractors come in, look around and go, “Huh.” with puzzled expressions at what the previous contractors had done.

“Huh” can be a very expensive sound.
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