Overheard at Star Market yesterday:
Customer: Do you have a paper cutter?
High School Student Clerk: (annoyed) What, like, scissors?
Although I’m disappointed in an education system that’s left a high school student unaware of what a “paper cutter” is, I should perhaps be giving her the benefit of the doubt. Random House defines it as:
n. any device for cutting or trimming paper…
(She gave the guy some scissors, which he reluctantly accepted.)
Heard at lunch:
I think I would be a great form of torture.
I recently asked our resident database administrator if our database server was experiencing any problems, since my applications were getting particularly slow responses.
He opened some system monitoring tools — complete with various graphs of system activity — looked pensive for a moment, and then responded:
I don’t see any spiky bits.
I always thought server administration was more complicated than that.
I’m really beginning to like the nights that I lie down early and hear Sophie’s nighttime routine happening in the other room without seeing anything. Tonight, Mommy walked out to check on her and I just heard this:
Take off the purse. Take off the poodle. Take off the backpack. Take off the horses.
The purse and the backpack I get, but I’m afraid to ask how she was wearing a poodle and two or more horses.
We lost some of our student offices to reconstruction this summer, and with limited space one manager briefly toyed with having staff share their offices with students. Though we managed to make better arrangements, the memory of this plan seems to linger. Today, someone in another department remarked:
I keep trying to clean my office, but I’m afraid I’ll get students in here.
I laughed, but he went on:
Well, the last time I cleaned, I got Kenny.
He gestured toward another desk in the corner, clearly once used by Kenny (another member of our staff), but now overrun with equipment so as to be unusable.
It’s like an infestation!
After a delicious dinner at Zoe’s last week, we took Sophie through the Harvard campus on our way back home. She was unimpressed at first, barring some occasional questions to confirm that we were visiting a college, that colleges are where people get smart, and that she can go to one once she’s bigger.
Her interest grew, however, upon seeing the towering steps of the Widener Library. She lept from her stroller and bounded up to the top in seconds. “I want to stay here!” she announced when she got back to the bottom, and shot right back up again. When she tired of those steps, she sat in the stroller only long enough to cross the yard to another building with fun stairs, and then another.
It was a great outing, though I joked at the time that we might have inadvertently taught her that colleges are places with a lot of stairs.
Tonight, we took a trip to White Mountain Creamery in Brighton for some ice cream, and strolled through the Boston College campus on our way home. (Campuses tend to be tranquil places when not overrun by students.) The moment she heard the name of the place, she asked, excitedly:
Can we look to see if Boston College has any steps?
Come to think of it, I do remember walking up a lot of flights of steps while I was in college. Maybe she’s on the right track!
Following are reasons strollers are excellent inventions:
I watched about seven separate people today give me the dirtiest looks I’ve ever seen, glance down, notice the stroller, and then smile and walk by peacefuilly.
Nice Guy = Creepy Guy + Stroller
Mable the Monkey was born when I was a child on a trip to Estes Park. She was sitting on a shelf in Geppetto’s Toy Shoppe with a variety of bears, horses, and several other monkeys of different colors. Mable and her sister Julie were the only white monkeys in the shop, and we immediately bought them both to take home with us.
Julie stayed with me in my room, making friends with my other stuffed animals, getting constant attention, and finding her fur ever more matted and in need of grooming. Mable stayed in a bird cage atop our foyer closet (living arrangements for which I never got an explanation I considered adequate) in my mother’s attentive care. Her fur stayed a shiny white, and she stayed in excellent health.
When inevitably it came time for Julie to go to the Great Stuffed Jungle in the Sky, I was old enough to inherit Mable, and she continues to sit in a corner of my apartment with her gorilla friend Ian, fur still white, posture still perfect, and smile still endearing.
Naturally, Sophie has adopted Mable as her new friend. I introduced them almost the moment she walked in my door.
This is Mable, the monkey! And this is Ian, the gorilla! They’re friends.
Sophie nodded, hugged them, and ran off to play.
Today, when I came home from work, Sophie brought Mable out to the couch and announced, “George is hungry!’
When I naturally answered, in Sophie-friendly language, “Who the heck is George?,” she just replied, “George! He’s hungry!” and offered Mable for my inspection.
“No, Sophie, that’s Mable! She’s a girl monkey.”
That was three hours ago.
She’s still George.
While I lay in bed at the end of the day, I heard Sophie’s bath running as Mommy tried to talk her into taking one. This is what I heard from the other room:
Sophie: I don’t need a bath! I’m a superhero!
Mommy: You should be Bubble Bath Girl! You can kill monsters with bubbles!
Sophie: No!Mommy: Look how many bubbles you can kill monsters with!
(long beat)
Sophie: One… two…
Longest… bath… ever.
Having loved Firefly so entirely that I’ve watched the entire fourteen-episode run about eight times in a row, I thought I’d try another highly-recommended seven-year-old show with a somewhat longer production run. I’m speaking, of course, of the five season run of The Wire.
I’m only three episodes in and the jury’s still out, but I already love the star drug dealer’s tutorial on how to play chess:
Now look, check it, it’s simple, it’s simple. See this? This the kingpin. A’ight? And he the man. You get the other dude’s king, you got the game, but he trying to get your king too, so you gotta protect it. Now the king, he move one space any direction he damn choose, ’cause he’s the king. Like this, this, this, a’ight? But he ain’t got no hustle.
…
This the queen. She smart, she fierce. She move any way she want, as far as she want. And she is the “go get shit done” piece.