bowlinger qua bowlinger

My most exciting discovery at work has been the Flavia coffee/tea/latte/chai/choco machine. (Yes, the hot cocoa is called choco). I became instantly attracted to its ability to make hot drinks with the touch of a button. The little packets go into the tray and you put your cup underneath and presto! A lovely hot beverage to help you be productive during your day!

Now I have found out that many people have these at their offices and they are pretty common. My brother has one at his office. My friend had one at her old office. I am done thinking it is really special, but I still am semi-obsessed with it. I love it so much that I am thinking of getting my own personal one at the end of the summer for an unmentionable price. Ridiculous, I realize.

My Flavia addiction is so bad that I have to limit myself to going twice a day. At 10:30 a.m. I have an English Breakfast tea and at 3:30 p.m. I have a chai latte or a choco. This is my life now.

Lately, I seem to get everything confused - replacing “Verdana” with “Veranda” is really just a sign of a more systematic problem. I almost always transpose syllables between adjacent words when speaking. Any derivative of “hypnotize” causes a sure fire phonetic meltdown. But my errors in ordering of letters and symbols have now transferred to a lack of general comprehension. Last week I noticed every time I saw “shift” on a road work sign, as in “lane shift ahead,” I would think it said the four letter swear synonymous with poop. During my last gig, I kept playing individual measures backwards instead of forwards. And at work this week, I numbered things with 6’s instead of 5’s. I used to be so meticulous and orderly. I guess old age is creeping up on me. Good thing I learned about conservatorships today.

(in chronological order)

1. Apparently, two of Judge Posner’s favorite fonts are Century Schoolbook and Veranda. I was not really surprised by the first, but the second was a bit mind-blowing, especially since he used Veranda specifically for manuscripts about intelligence reform. Intelligence reform is no nonsense and brutish and whatnot. Veranda looks too fluffy for the subject.  The name even sounds wimpy - Veranda is more Gone With the Wind than Economic Analysis of Law.  Then I realized that all my typed notes for the last year were taken in that exact combination - Veranda for the header and Century Schoolbook for the text. Creepy.

2. Never, ever, ever assume anything. Just ask, even if it makes you seem stupid or pesky or whatever.

3. Don’t make chili while wearing a white shirt. This is self-explanatory.

I am sure I’ll learn more later this evening - the night is still young.

We’ll miss you.

So I visited San Francisco recently. As recently as last week. I had some fun there. Let me tell you about one place that I went that I found to be awesome.

There’s a speakeasy there called Bourbon and Branch. It has all this potential. It could have been totally stupid, but also totally awesome. It turned out to be awesome. You have to go to the website and make a reservation for this bar. You then get the password, which you use when you show up at the door and ring the buzzer. Then, you are led though this amazingly dark space to your tiny table and given your enormous cocktail menu. This is the most adult thing you’ve ever done: you may someday feel older, but you will never feel more mature.

Anyway, everything there is not totally lame, it is totally awesome, especially the drinks. Take your significant other there and impress them by knowing the password to get in. Then get them totally plastered.

Order the cucumber gin gimlet. That’s also awesome.

i’m hanging out in the suburbs of CT before i start my summer gig and my dad has kept me busy with yard work. i spent the better part of the last day and a half replacing the hedge around our front garden with a brick border. i’m seriously considering a career in masonry (not that freemasonry mumbo-jumbo either - the real brick-laying kind).

A place on the Oregon Coast:

The trip is going well. We flew into a rainy northwestern city and drove down the coasts of two rainy northwestern states. The rain didn’t bother us. We eventually arrived in the northern part of sunny western state, where it didn’t rain. We saw a lot of ocean and rocks in that ocean. It turns out that everything is falling into the ocean, very slowly.

I just got the best spam ever:

I don’t think I need to explain why this is so awesome, but if you’re having trouble understanding, check out that expression on the elephant’s face. There’s a guy whose cock doesn’t geek it into a bed.

1. You can get a box suitable for shipping a bicycle in at most bike shops. They’ll be happy to give it to you. Bikes arrive at bike shops in boxes but very seldom leave in them.

2. It is hard to remove pedals yourself. You are likely to be confused about how to do it, and you might even find your knuckles gashed open by the chain ring. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a small puncture wound that doesn’t bleed very much. You may wonder when you had your last tetanus shot. You might be better off just taking your bike to a shop and having them remove the pedals. You could also have them show you how to do it, and then just go ahead and buy the special wrench.

3. It is hard to fit your bicycle into a box. Bicycle boxes are for new bikes, and used bikes are bigger and bulkier, somehow. You will take all kinds of things off your bike and twist it this way and that, and somehow you’ll get it to fit. Then you’ll notice that the box is completely bowed and it’s rubbing in five places and your bike will not even make it to Toledo, let alone Seattle.

4. You need a helper. This is not a project you can do with one person. Also, cursing loudly in your garage so that it echoes so nicely is just not as fun unless someone else is there to hear you. You’ve been working on these creative swears, it would be a shame to waste them on an empty garage.

They say that some tens of thousands of new blogs are created every minute, and this is just another one. I’m really not sure where they get those kind of statistics, and if they’re including MySpace blogs as blogs, or what. I’m not even sure who ‘they’ are, or why ‘they’ care about all of these new blogs. All I know is that if this kind of growth is going to continue, we’re all going to have to do our part. Google’s not going to do it for us.

I’d like to think that some of my friends have interesting things to say, and wouldn’t mind getting together to talk about them. Hope seems to spring eternally on the internet. Let’s blog.