Sunday, March 23, 2008

Comfort Inventory 5

Let's call this the "How Much I Delight in the Overlooked Fleck of Eggshell in the Egg Salad" Edition.

  • There was occasion at 5:00 a.m. to answer D.'s comments on a second wooded-side-of-the-house skunk fumigation with a sleepy but bold declarative: "Bad!"
  • My NCAA bracket has sunk like a heavy ball to the middle of the pack. On the bright side, this means that I can refocus all of the time I have been wasting puttering around with basketball games on the tube.
  • We went to church this morning. The U.U. folks don't do Easter in typical fashion. The "interim" pastor read a kids book about memory and aging (the subject of the story--a woman who was young once and who grew old and eventually died); she also brought up the myths about the parting of the Red Sea. Today the U.U. felt to me like it should be pronounced "uh-uh". Happy Easter to you all the same.
  • I'm about 85% pleased with my CCCC presentation. It is more or less together, but I have yet to share it with another person whose assenting nod would quickly put to rest any worries I have that it builds up reasonably well (through the early framework to the examples). Some of us are doing pre-conference run-throughs on Wednesday, just in time to correct any presentational wobbles.
  • Time for paying March bills. D. usually handles most of this, but there are weird ones this time. Stuff that requires phone calls. One of them, a bill for $53.01, I paid using online bill pay. Everything went through smoothly. But a paper copy showed up in the mail showing that $53.01 was received and that $53.01 was due. This isn't an ongoing service or anything; more of a one shot payment. I logged on to the system for this particular biller. Shows a zero balance. What could this mean? The bill was produced in those few moments between the posting of the payment and the zeroing out of the account's bottom line. Perhaps I'm not alone in feeling impatient with paper bills that reflect system glitches.
  • One week after I present at CCCC, I will drive over to Buffalo to present at NEMLA. On the one hand, I don't mind the back-to-back conferences because I am working with similar ideas and materials that are very much a part of the diss. But I've never done two different conferences on consecutive weekends, and I doubt I'll do it again soon because of how much I dislike the way NEMLA (from my presenterly standpoint) is obscured by CCCC. I mean that I have not been good about giving the second conference's preparations their proper due because the first conference is standing in its way.
  • We ate brunch at a place called "Egg Plant." Not Eggplant. Nothing eggplant in the place. But "Egg Plant." As in egg-foods factory or something. Ph. recommended it. They had framed "Best of Syracuse" awards on the wall, but the longer I live in CNY, the more suspicious I am of "Best of Syracuse" wall hangings. Looked to me like they were done on a 16-pin dot matrix printer with PrintShop Pro Deluxe. Lending support to this speculation was the faintly sour smell of the "Keep Refrigerated" coffee creamers which sat (deteriorating?) on the table in a dry, unrefrigerated ceramic bowl.
  • Y. made a cute little throw-up on the kitchen floor late this afternoon. With Is. and groceries in my arms, I happened to step in it, which dialed my stress level up a full notch because I happened to be wearing socks.
  • A small dose of snow is coming tomorrow. Dreadful: that's what I think of snow in late March--after it's officially "Spring."
  • Just to make sure I don't have an over-productive March, I'm reading Iain Banks' The Steep Approach to Garbadale--a holiday gift back in December. So far, so good.
  • The next commenter (i.e., first on this entry, if there are none to other entries) will win a decorative "E.W.M. 2000th Commenter" button. Quite the conversation piece, that one will be.

Bookmark and Share Posted by at March 23, 2008 10:25 PM to Unspecified
Comments

Just because I like winning stuff, let me just say:
1. Snow after official first day of spring: sooooo upstate NY. Yack.
2. I have done the cat puke in sock feet, and can only surmise that it's equally grody.
3. Did I mention that our neighborhood skunk did a small whiff a few weeks back in the garage? Which meant my car (and my landlady's) stunk something awful? And of course it was too cold to drive with the windows down...

Posted by: susansinclair at March 23, 2008 11:16 PM

I hope this means that I can lay claim to the EWM Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Comment 2001 prize.

cgb

Posted by: collin at March 23, 2008 11:41 PM

Winner! Winner!

Now I have to come up with the prize. Give me a few days, okay?

Oh, and 1. March in upstate N.Yak, indeed; 2. the dog barf registers a 90 on the grodyometer; and 3. I remember something about a skunk around the same time we had ours visit in Feb. But I didn't know it fouled the garage. I'm still not sure what we're going to do about the one that likes to call our neighborhood home.

And, Collin, yes, the E.W.M. Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Comment 2001 prize is all yours. Congrats!

Posted by: Derek at March 24, 2008 8:39 PM