Alpha lost her voice last night due to a sore throat.
Aww.
{{{{Alpha}}}}
Not one to whisper, she communicated last night via a complex system of squeaks until I finally told her it was bad for our relationship.
This morning I got up and did the usual things and she came down for some coffee with me and conversation, which went much better than last night because she was using sign language this time. (When I first typed that, I wrote “sigh language,” which would also be cool).
Sign language conversations are useful because they eliminate the linguistic level almost entirely, and allow you to directly access the subtextual level of what people are saying, that hidden meaning that usually gets obscured by surface meaning.

It works like this:

Some man: Good morning, Honey-Bunny.
Some woman: [waves]
Some man: Voice still on the blink?
Some woman: [Nods. Gestures.]
Some man: It is called a grapefruit in my country.
Some woman: [Shakes head, gestures.]
Some man: You want me to change lightbulbs at the mall? Is Beta awake yet?
Some woman: [Nods, gestures.]
Some man: She’s dancing the macarena on the ceiling. Okay.
Some woman: [Emits coffee through nose, shakes head, gestures.]
Some man: [Explains new method pharmacist allegedly recommended for application of throat lozenge]
Some woman: [Brandishes big serrated bread knife]

Highly recommended.

It’s okay to be obsessed with Condoleeza Rice, or Condoleezza Rice for that matter. It’s a normal, okay thing.
Driving home yesterday, I was reminiscing about when I used to date her.
I remembered the following details, for starters:

• Condoleezza Rice can melt lead in her mouth.

• Condoleezza Rice can unlock doors with her eyes.
• Condoleezza Rice wears a brassiere made of pure hammered platinum.
• Condoleezza Rice can drive a forklift through a crowded warehouse at 35 mph, backwards.
• Condoleezza Rice dreams the same dream every night.

It is very windy here today and has been since last night. Beta had difficulty falling asleep and so she drank some hot cocoa before bed and sat up reading for a while. Gamma fell asleep okay but talked in her sleep alot during the night, according to my wife who apparently didn’t get a lot of sleeping in either.

I slept well, on the other hand. This morning I made coffee and fed the cats, at least the one who came home in the morning, but he didn’t like his food so I petted him for a while until he accepted the fact that he wasn’t getting anything better and climbed off my lap to go eat a little after all. I made lunches for the kids and put away clean dishes from the dishwasher and drank coffee and ate some cottage cheese and talked to Alpha for a while. Then I got up to wake up Beta and turned off a light that was in the cellar. When I sat back down at the kitchen table I couldn’t remember whether I had woken up Beta so I went back upstairs and woke her, either for the first or second time – she couldn’t remember either.

I felt like that tertiary character in “50 First Dates” who keeps introducing himself to people every 10 seconds because his short-term memory doesn’t last any longer.

Wind is my least-favorite weather. Even toads and locusts would be better, because although they are officially plagues, at least they are rare and interesting, at least where I live. Wind, however, blows my car around the street and I also have to park it beneath trees where I work – all the streets within walking distance are tree-lined, which is nice on a calm summer day but on mornings like this not so nice – branches were already covering the streets when I parked and I figure there’s a 50:50 chance something substantial will fall onto my car during the day.

Two deer sightings this morning, though. I had expected they’d all be in the woods, out of the wind, but there were two in the first field and three in the second. I pointed them out to Beta, who gave them a glance before returning to her book, “The Collector” by John Fowles. She dislikes the main character mightily. I told her to concentrate on the style, because it’s marvelous, and on the vocabulary, because one can learn a lot of new words reading John Fowles.

We also studied the sunrise extensively on our drive into town. The wind had scoured the atmosphere clean and stretched out the clouds and it was all quite intense and brought me right back up against the window of my soul.

Traffic here spiked yesterday as a result of National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice’s nomination for the post of Secretary of State. I misspelled her first name in a post (Condoleeza instead of the correct Condoleezza) and judging from my referrer stats seem to have done fairly well in searches for

• Condoleeza Rice sex

• Condoleeza Rice Bush sex
• Condoleeza Rice nude and
• Condoleeza Rice e-mail (“De4r Secretary Rice wH4t R U w34R1nG?”

when in fact had I spelled her name right, searches like that would have never led them to metamorphosism.com, and searches like:

• Condoleezza Rice naked on a jet-ski

• Condoleezza Rice Bush cigar
• Condoleezza Rice piano+brahms+topless and
• Condoleezza Rice upskirt briefing

would be likewise unlikely to lead them here, as competition would be stiffer.

• You can’t go wrong with a dark suit, at least in Vienna. Accept it. No need to experiment. If you feel overdressed, remove the tie.

• Seriously, go with the suit.
• If people remark on how well you speak German, change the subject. Under no circumstances should you agree with them: you can’t go wrong with self-deprecation, or at least modesty, either.
• Especially if you’re drinking. After two drinks your language skills disintegrate.
• Of course you find it difficult to talk to your kids, especially when they get big. Why shouldn’t you? You still can’t talk to your dad, either.

There is a thing kids have in Austria called a Freundschaftsbuch, which means Friendship Book. Friends stick in a small picture of themselves and answer a list of questions about themselves – birthday, star sign, favorite color, other favorite things (music, food, sports etc) things to do, dreams, what they like about the friend whose book it is, wha tthey wish for them, and so on. Last night before going to bed I filled out an entry for myself in Gamma’s friendship book, each friend gets 2 pages.
Then I read what my wife had written. Where my dream is “to be alive”, Alpha wants to be shot into space.
What would you write in my friendship book?

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