Thursday, February 21, 2002
Ever since we went up north to play in the snow the last week of 2001, I've been prone to chills, nasty lingering things that take a long time and a lot of hot drinks to squelch. It seems even the slightest change in temperature--cold to warm or vice versa--is enough to bring them on, and usually not even being bundled up in a hot room is sufficient to get my temp back to normal. Is there a way to fix one's internal thermostat?
Wednesday, February 20, 2002
I guess I should have lunch now, eh? slacker.
My company's sponsoring a trip to a local amusement park. An ex-coworker and very good friend happens to love this place, and as the trip is scheduled for right around his birthday, I figured I'd see if he wanted to join us. This guy is an antisocial übergeek, but--but!--he accepted the invitation.
We have a lot of fun when we meet for lunch an stuff like that, so I'm looking forward to this (even though it's not 'til June).
An old friend of mine was in town last night (okay, in a town about an hour away). She's a Japanese woman married to an American man who up and moved 'em all to Israel. Go figure. We met three years ago when she needed an editor to look over the dissertation she was writing for her linguistics Ph.D., and her advisor paired us together. We've been in touch ever since, but only via E-mail, occasional snail mail, and the very rare phone call.
Anyway, so we drove out to meet her, helped her finish her shopping, went out to dinner, and rounded out the evening with some damn fine coffee at one of the best 'houses around. Lots of conversation and lots of laughter from all of us.
When I spotted her in the store where we were supposed to meet her, she ran up to me with a huge smile, gave me a hug, and said, "How are you? Actually, I have something to ask you. My daughter asked me to bring back this...sort of a doll, you see..." She led me off to the toy aisle for a consultation. That's her all over! In retrospect, it was sort of cool, though; I felt more like we were neighbors or coworkers meeting 'out of character' rather than friends who've been living thousands of miles away and haven't met in three years.
I already can't wait to see her again!
Monday, February 18, 2002
Our apartment is pretty deep in the complex, waaay down the main drag, which deadends at our street. Yesterday I found myself driving home behind this slowpoke who had apparently been told to turn into the first driveway after the forty-third horizontal crack in the pavement and were studiously following directions. They were going 10 miles an hour (the speed limit is 15 mph, which no one obeys; you can probably swing 25 without feeling like a bat out of hell) and I was behind them down the main road alll the way. I wished we didn't live so far in so I would have been able to turn off at any of the side streets--or at the very least, I wished this driver would turn off before I did.
Sure enough, though, I followed them right up to the dead end at my street. All I needed to do was turn right and I'd be home free. But this mook stopped at the stop sign and waited, oh, twenty, thirty seconds. Only then did they put on their turn signal. (Left, thank God.) Another ten, twenty seconds go by. I'm screaming at them by this point, but since I know they can't hear me, I also touch the horn lightly. Amazingly enough, they wait yet another ten seconds before they decide to actually take the plunge, make the decision of their lifetime and TURN THE GODDAMN CAR.
Okay, so maybe they didn't know where they were going. There's a signpost at the dead end that tells visitors that, say, addresses numbered between 2600 and 2700 are to the left and between 2710 and 2800 are to the right. I would like to think they had an address, at least, and that they could handle the rudimentary math involved in figuring out where that address could possibly be. You never know.
