(no subject)

I just spent much of this morning reading through old journal entries -- one of the regulars of the Cafe is doing a deep-down exploration of Boston in the sixty days he has left. He asked if I would impart some of the knowledge of Boston I gained from my summer there, so I went back and paged through. It was fun; I look back on that summer, five years ago now, with nothing but affection and fond memories. I love Chicago, but it's a very different city to Boston and I'm at a very different place in my life, and Boston will always be special to me.

Anyway, it was fun. And if you're interested in the project itself, check it out at http://www.bostonin60.com/!

(no subject)

FOR GRATE WIN, office is closing at 2pm tomorrow. YAY THREE AND A QUARTER DAY WEEKEND!

In the meantime, here is a toy I forgot all about: googlism.

I could spend hours on this site, entering random words. Basically, it uses google to find all phrases where the word you enter is followed by "is". So, for example, I entered "Sam". It tells me that:

sam is carbon neutral
sam is leading in r (uh....)
sam is in big trouble
sam is sexy
sam is really sexy (Well!)
sam is usually portrayed with a goatee
sam is missing a story arc
sam is on the injured list
sam is indeed more beautiful in person than on tv

Which is pretty funny to begin with, but then you enter random fandom words and get stuff like:

ianto is available as a solo artist accompanying himself on electro

( O RLY? )

(no subject)

Oh man.

The insanity that is R has suddenly become much clearer to me.

So, remember the giant hole in the ceiling of my bathroom? Well, the plumber came out today to fix it. But because I couldn't be there (and had an after-work dentist's appointment) and the Bluesmen were, well, typical Bluesmen, R's mum came up from out of state to be here with the plumber and supervise the fixit herself.

The ceiling itself looks great.

But, so. She took off before I got home and left the housekey in the grill, and I took the housekey and let myself inside, and...

Wait, where are the mud-mats for wiping of feet?

Why does it smell like lemon in here?

What the...hell?

Yeah, she cleaned. She cleaned a lot. A lot. She mopped the floors, including getting up all the little dried macaroni in the corner of the kitchen that I can never reach, and she wiped down the counter in the kitchen, cleaned the stove, cleared up all of R's debris in the living room, rearranged the couch cushions. All of which I'm fine with, in one sense, because hey lady if you want to clean my flat you go right ahead.

But...she moved stuff. She put a set of car mud-mats on top of one of R's sample chairs, which we're not even allowed to sit in, so I moved those, and then in the kitchen, you know, where are my frying pans? Or, in a grander scheme, where is my bread machine? Where'd you put the crock pot, CRAZY CLEANING WOMAN?

We also had a little island of debris on the kitchen counter, it was kind of our dumping-spot to put stuff, thoughtfully outlined by a puzzle of Jack Sparrow that Mum sent me and I assembled and thought hey, this'd make a great mat to put stuff on. There was a jar of hard candy and a CD case and some other junk on the mat. Anyway, rather than put that away or leave it the hell alone, she just...moved all of it over to the other side of the counter, where my bread machine was, and put the bread machine in the pantry, and put the food that had been in the pantry on top of the fridge. She cleaned my bathroom (thank god she didn't clean my room) and moved all of the stuff on top of my toilet into a box which she put on my bed, for some unknown reason.

And then, staring at our sparkling clean but subtly, insanely reorganised home, I had an epiphany.

R and his mum have a cyclical feed of insanity going on. For one, I now understand much better why R goes nuts when his mum comes over and wants to, say, wash a cup, because obviously she can't stop at a cup. So now I get that he's nipping her urges in the bud. More than that, however, I get why R is so monumentally unable to clean up after himself. If I'd grown up in a house where wiping down the counter led to an alphabetization of the spice rack, and I never learned that the floors didn't magically become clean every few days, I'd probably be completely incapable of keeping my room clean too. At this point I'm beginning to believe I'm lucky that he manages to wash out a pan after he cooks in it. Sometimes.

And of course when she sees the reasonable mess that two adults living together make, she can't help herself. Especially if there's nobody around to sit her down and suggest perhaps some kind of medication might be in order.

Also it totally explains why R dated That Girl for even as long as he did, but I'm not gonna go there until I've put the bread machine back on the counter and the food back in the pantry and managed to locate the frying pans.

God, I'm afraid to even look in his room.

(no subject)

OH AND ALSO.

The dental hygenist said to me, "So, we're going to clean your teeth with a Sonic Scaler today."

Now, I don't usually dork out in public, I'm quiet about my fandom, but before I could help myself I said, "Not the Sonic Screwdriver?" and then totally expected to get an empty, blank stare. But instead he looked at me for a second and then burst out into peals of laughter.

"It gets better," he said. "It's official brand name is the Cavitron. Which I believe was the original name for the Daleks."

And then we geeked around for like twenty minutes while he cleaned my teeth and confirmed my theory that the only possible reaction to last week's episode is WHAT? WHAT. WHAT?! and many, many tartar/TARDIS jokes were made.

(no subject)

She cleaned out the microwave and...

Where did she put the toilet paper?

And why did she turn the spice rack so the labels are facing the wall?

And where are the tea towels?

She didn't clean R's bedroom, per se, but she cleared a path (and mopped it) to the bathroom and I think she sanitised the bathroom. Everything on the counter is GONE. On the plus side of this, she cleaned out...

...the jacuzzi tub.

Which to my knowledge has never been used, but also never been cleaned, so it was grotty and I wasn't going to clean it myself just to get, you know, jacuzzi tub, but now that it's clean, you may find me in the bath.