1.
Missed the last few weeks for the usual reasons,
so some of these are left-overs from earlier attempts. As always, hosted by the marvelous Conversion Diary. If you came here from there, I sincerely apologize for the lack of cute children on this blog.
2.
Remember how last time I said I was in the
market for a gas mask? Well, I got one! That military surplus store came
through (though it was a bit farther away than I had anticipated). The staff
was friendly, laid-back, and helpful, and I walked away with an Israeli
civilian model mask that fits over my glasses and beard (which I hadn’t even
considered until the clerk brought it up), a filter, a hydration straw, and a
couple of old field manuals: one on first aid, the other on setting booby traps
(let’s see people ignore that “no solicitors” sign now!). Actually, that inspired me to go on something of a bug-out
bag shopping rampage, and I ended up with a few more tools for my car, an extra
roll of duct tape (forgetting I’d already gotten one), lots of rope, and a
blanket for my car (getting ready for winter). Now I really should get the
actual bag part, but I’ve been
spending way too much lately and need to go on a freeze for a while (look,
there was a rare DVD of The Return of
Godzilla available and a complete
eleven-film set of the Gamera series:
I wanted to grab them while I still could).
3.
I’m listening to a biography of Calvin Coolidge
at the moment, which I’m enjoying. The more I learn about him, the more I
relate to Coolidge: the quiet, introverted, bookish lawyer who made friends
slowly and eventually rose to be an extremely successful President. He also had
an amusingly deadpan sense of humor, as in the famous anecdote where his
response to the lady who informed him that she had made a bet that she could get
more than two words out of him during the evening was “you lose.”
Oh, and I find
this picture of him and his wife to be an absolutely hilarious image of the
principle “opposites attract”:
 |
| She looks like she's about to start flirting with the cameraman, he looks like he's severely constipated. True love, ladies and gentlemen! |
4.
By the way, there’s one particular set of
invoices at work that have been the bane of my existence for months and now are
possibly almost done. There are three
of them (all for the same PO), two of which are released for payment while the
third and largest sits there with no word on what the holdup is. Interestingly, the numerical designation of
the company they come from starts off with “666.” Coincidence? I think not.
5.
This week I learned that some people can not get
around to reading emails for months on end. I honestly didn’t realize that.
See, since e-mail is more or less my equivalent of Stephen Hawking’s voice box,
I have my email up pretty much all the time as a matter of habit, whether at
work or home (sad, I know). So the idea of missing an email for months (heck,
more than a day or two) is completely foreign to me. This actually makes me
feel a lot better about the oft-long waits between correspondents’ replies
(“they’re not ignoring me! It’s just that they’re just normal and I’m not!”).
6.
Today I
once more indulged my odd habit of making dark jokes out of historical figures.
Gives you a pretty good idea how my mind works. Here are a couple samples:
“Startling new evidence has emerged
proving that the hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole was actually
created in a fit of bitterness by Robert Falcon Scott as one final "F
you" to Roald Amundsen.”
“Well, that could’ve gone better.”
-J. Bruce Ismay upon landing in New
York, April, 1912
7.
And we’ll round out with an actual quote:
“Some
people misunderstand evil, and believe it will relent. And because their
misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers
and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent. It must be defeated. And even
when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed, that
will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood.”
-Odd
Thomas, Odd Apocalypse
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