Bistromathics
One of the great pleasures of listening to a well-loved set of books1 on CD is becoming reacquainted with wonderful things.
1. I have discovered by listening to them that my favorites are The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Life, The Universe and Everything. I like them all of course but these two crack me up the most.
This just in
My quality of life has just improved by about 75% thanks to the new mattress and pillows I had delivered yesterday. It doesn’t hurt to have a friend who works for Mattress Discounters.
I now have, even with the “low boy” bedframe and half-as-deep box springs, a very tall bed. The mattress alone is 17″ tall. I have to get a running start just to climb into it, but but once I’m there? Bliss. And the pilllows—made by Tempur-Pedic™—have not only contributed to my overall quality of life but given me a slight Swedish accent.
I must say that mattress shopping is one of the more relaxing things I have ever done. You go and lie down on a whole bunch of beds waiting for one (or several) of them to love you. As it turns out, several of them did love me (as is often the case when you’ve been sleeping on the mattress equivalent of a slab of concrete) but the Sealy pillow-top mattress loved me the most. And I love it the most.
The cats have been a little more reticent about the whole thing. Figaro spent the entire morning crouched in the bedroom closet hiding from the noise and chaos and Abby chose to hide, unwisely, behind the old mattress propped up against the bookshelf in the bedroom. I knew the guys were almost finished when Abby came squirting out of the bedroom and down the hall in a low crouch looking for a place to hide. After much humiliating scrambling, she ended up here, where she stayed for most of the day, glowering at me:
Eventually, the call of the new soft bed overtook both cats and as I lay down to sleep, they came in and joined me, both making the leap to the top of the bed on their first tries, and proceeded to try to push me out of bed so they could have it all to themselves.
Things that never fail to make me giggle, example #43
There are, for all of us I think, certain words or phrases or images that trigger infinite giggling, and I have discovered a new one in the book Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean:
“Tropic of Cancercorn”
I don’t even care what type of verbal slip it is an example of. All I know is that I cannot stop giggling whenever I read it or think of it.
Do not want
Apparently, I’ve always been pretty clear on what I do and do not like, will and will not do, and feel and do not feel.
This doesn’t mean I’m not open to change or new information; it just means that in general, I have a pretty strong sense of these things. I also tend to go with my instincts, which have very rarely ever let me down.
I mention this because I am currently enduring weekly abuse for not having watched the Seasons 1 and 2 DVDs of Arrested Development to the exclusion of all other aspects of my life. I have them. I will watch them … probably. If I don’t watch them, it isn’t because of any of any of the following reasons: stupidity, laziness, evil, hatefulness, spite, something is wrong WRONG with me.
[And let me just interject right now that if you actually go to the trouble to comment that I MUST or SHOULD watch the show (or anything else) immediately, then you are a moron.]
The problem isn’t with the show. How could it be? I’ve never watched it. The problem is that I know it is a serious investment of time and I have to be in the mood. The other problem is that since I have not watched the DVDs, I do not know the extent to which I am depriving myself of something wonderful and am therefore immune to the abuse that is being heaped upon me. Honestly, the abuse? it just doesn’t work.
The abuser(s) in situations like this one would argue that they are simple encouraging or cajoling me to do something. Given how all encouragement and cajoling of this sort transmogrifies almost immediately into abuse (of the “What is WRONG with you?” and “What else have you go to do that is more important?” variety) I generally react badly to it.
In fact, people who want me to do something would be wise to learn that the more they push, the less likely the thing they want is ever going to happen. The other result may be that I will do the thing they so desperately want me to do and never, ever, under any circumstances, discuss it with them at all let alone in the outrageous detail they so desperately require.
Let me admit that I am not immune to this sort of behavior my own self. If I catch myself cajoling (to include abuse), I try to head it off or at least make amends for it. There are books and movies and such that I really want friends to experience but I try really hard (and sometimes it just KILLS me) to not be a pest about it. Instead, I gift people with the book or DVD in question and leave it at that. Usually. Like I said, I have a hard time with this too.
But seriously, back off. If I want to do something I will.
Below average
“The average adult English speaker has a vocabulary of around thirty thousand words and speaks ten to twelve sounds per second. Most of us in modern America, apart from the very solitary and the very garrulous, speak anywhere from 7,500 to 22,500 words a day.”
-Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, Michael Erard
I seriously doubt that I have ever achieved 22,500 words in a single day. I find the concept that I might have managed to utter even 7,500 in a single day unbelievable.
This is a very interesting book, by the way.
Shifty
I’m having a very strange day. It feels like everything but me has been shifted about 15 degrees clockwise or something. It’s not bad; it’s just odd.
