A few days ago Dani told me that his company, for no particularly-obvious reason, was replacing all their office chairs, with the old ones to be hauled away...somewhere. Some of his coworkers, noting that their current chairs were in fine shape, asked if they could salvage them. The powers that be said ok, anything with a "reserved" sign on it ( Read more... )

Yesterday morning on my way to work, someone pulled up behind me with his left blinker on. As I proceeded straight or right through intersection after intersection I wondered when he would either make a turn or turn off his blinker. He followed me for two miles that way. As we reached Second Avenue (the only four-lane road of the trip) he passed ( Read more... )

We went to alaricmacconnal's and Elsbeth's yesterday for a New Year's Day party, which meant more gaming. I had fun playing more Dixit (blackpaladin, which expansions were in there?), and Dani played Constantinopolis, a resource-management game that sounded similar to Puerto Rico but is twice as long (or thereabouts). I haven't played it yet.
2013 was getting off to a ( Read more... )

Going to the eye-doctor and having my pupils dilated seems to cause the day to become bright and sunny. But this is Pittsburgh, where sunny days are relatively uncommon. Does this mean that most people in Pittsburgh never have their eyes checked this way, or are we all mysteriously choosing the same few days for this?
I posted the preceding on the ( Read more... )

There was a Halloween pot-luck at work today. Late last week we had a spectacular fridge purge -- things years past their expiration dates and quite a few "science experiments" and containers of green fuzzy...something. These ideas seemed like they should go together, so in a then-locked entry (to maintain the surprise) I asked for suggestions. ( Read more... )

Household mystery #1: Dani and I both take multi-vitamins so we just share a jar. (And by the way, do you know how hard it can be to find "just plain vitamins", as opposed to vitamins for men over 53 or menopausal women or left-handed couch potatoes or... but I digress.) I've been noticing that the level in the jar is going down more quickly than ( Read more... )

I interrupt preparations for the class I'm teaching next week at the music and dance collegium (gosh, I hope I have this calibrated right...) to pass along some random short bits.
Dear Netflix: I appreciate the convenience of your recent change to ( Read more... )

This shabbat was our congregation's annual retreat. We had several ( Read more... )

At work, two coworkers were standing near me discussing a problem of ( Read more... )

I was surprised and a little weirded out, the other night, when I typed ( Read more... )