Or however you spell it. I keep getting hits for things I misspell when the searcher misspells them in the same way.

What I wanted to complain about today was the way my morning started out. After staying up late working on a project, I woke tired and in a hurry, because I had to go drop the project off somewhere on my way to drop the kids off too and go to work. So, yeah, in a hurry. And then I had to help Gamma brush her teeth, and she wanted her hair braided too. So braided her hair. Finally got dressed, did a bunch of other stuff, dropped off the project, dropped off kids, rushed to work. Traffic jam. Finally made it into the city, where Buddha or whoever, in their infinite wisdom, in order to remind me of one of my philosophies of life, namely “it could be worse” sent me a boddhisattva in the form of a garbage truck.

It appeared to be headed the same place I was, because I followed it for miles. People sure throw away a lot of stuff. What can you do but take a deep breath and think, “well, it could be worse.” Because it always can. “At least a nickel and iron planetoid isn’t crashing into the Earth,” you think, and everything looks half as bad, seen from the new perspective.

“At least I don’t have to play cello in a recital.”

Oh, wait, my teacher was trying to talk me into that last night…

“At least I’m not dead and in hell.”

We got some money. We bought a woodstove and an axe and wood with the money, with exactly enough left to pay bills.

This morning when I went downstairs to make coffee, the thing we hang coats from had broken in half in the night (and was lying on the floor with all our coat) so now we need a new one of those. I couldn’t talk Alpha into a board with pegs sticking out.

What does furniture do while we sleep?

Then I realized my situation: I – a grown man – was standing in the middle of a retail store with an axe in my hand.

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Featuring the cranky little clip-art guy.
[Tom Tomorrow]

Among the little things in life I appreciate are the times when someone arrives at the site thru some out of context search engine referral and still takes the time to leave a comment on an old post.

It (I just finished 4 hours staring at a bright monitor and my eyes can’t focus on distance yet) sits 150 feet away on the patio of an old villa, tan corduroy jacket, black trousers, right leg crossed over left, left arm over right leg, cigarette in right hand, right elbow cupped in left hand (this is starting to sound like Twister): someone taking a break.

I head down the street for lunch. Ramadan or not, I’m getting a sandwich. First to the cash machine. Then to the kebab place. Where the hell is it? Twilight. The light is failing, it’s like late in the evening, but it’s lunchtime. Is this what the end of the world will be like? A femailman says hi as I walk past. Failing light.

The cash machine has an armored glass shield over the controls. You have to wait for it to go up, slowly, after inserting your card into the slit before you can press all the buttons. Only this armored glass shield happens to be broken, so you have to wait for an empty plastic frame to slowly slide up, even though the buttons are all exposed. So I pretend there’s still glass in the frame and wait, then get some money.

Where’s the kebab joint? Heck, I must’ve walked past the place, so I stop at a seafood place instead, they have some good-looking shrimp at the takeout window. Prawns, I mean, not the people working there. There are two women at the cash register, one middle-aged Austrian woman and a young Asian woman, I can’t figure out where she’s from and her accent doesn’t help. I notice various seafood wrapped in flour tortillas with salad and stuff and order one with smoked salmon, and another smoked salmon in a bun.

The wrap was pretty good and I didn’t get any on my clothes, eating as I walked back to the office. The sandwich though. First of all, it was the sort of thing where you bite in and can’t bite clear through the salmon and you’re stuck there holding the bun up to your mouth and face the choice of either gnawing the rest of the way through or pulling it away and risk having a big piece of smoked salmon slide out of the bun and hang from your mouth, half-bitten-throuth.

So I gnaw through. I notice the salmon is getting a little grey around the edges. It looked so good in the window! The color is really dodgy, but I’m hungry. I figure we’ll test my resistance to salmonella.

Then I notice it’s with mayonnaise when I’m already half-done. Quick check of lapels reveals some on coat. How I managed not to get any on my suit I’ll never know. Did they pack napkins? Yay, they did.

At least the bun was fresh. Pass a bunch of school kids with cell phones in each hand yakking away. Trudge back to office, in the dying noon Viennese light.