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T minus 1 day on the countdown to doomShore Leave, and I'm surprisingly confident. Today I pick up the last odds and ends for the repair kit and the sign up table - paper, staples, that sort of thing. Tomorrow (which I'm taking off from work), I pack and go.

I keep wondering what's wrong with me that I feel in control instead of hysterically rushing around.

In other good news, Poohcifer is back home; while the people I bought it from never returned my last phone call, the local repair shop fixed the loose connection and got the machine back into my hands in slightly less than 24 hours. For less than $20. Happy camper! (I also found out that the shop, which is under new management and making several changes, now sells older machines on commission. So if I'm ever tired of the Pfaff, I can sell it through him. I'm not tired of it *yet* even with Poohcifer around, but it's nice to know.)

And I am amused to see yet more proof that everything old is new again - USA Today has a huge article on the medicinal uses of leeches and maggots. I'd heard that both were having a resergence, but this is the most unsensational and concise article on the subject I've seen.

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Glee! The Story of the Baby continues!

A while back, I discovered The Story About the Baby in which a snarky, somewhat unconvinced man became a father and wrote about it. (My favorite bit is his picture of the baby - balanced on a roasting pan garnished with a sprig of rosemary.)

At the end of a hilarious year, he said he was going to stop, and I thought no more about it, until today when I got clued into The story About the Toddler.

A sample:
I’m the sort of unreconstructed smartass who leaves “funny” answering machine messages. Why not? Nobody calls us but telemarketers anyway.

Up until recently, this was our message:

“Hello. You have reach the home of Jeff Vogel, Mariann Krizsan, and Cordelia Vogel. Since we are only ever called by telemarketers, we never answer our phone. If you are calling regarding the ad we placed, yes, the baby is still available. Please leave your cash offer in U.S. dollars and bear in mind that the shipping price given in the advertisement is non-negotiable. Beep.”

So some telemarketer calls us, hears this message, freaks, and, get this, calls 911. So I get a call from a cop who is really annoyed by having his time wasted with shit. He asks me to change the message, so that he doesn’t get called again. I do:

“Hello. You have reach the home of Jeff Vogel, Mariann Krizsan, and Cordelia Vogel. We are trying to keep our baby from jumping off the coffee table, so we can’t come to the phone right now. If you actually know who we are, leave a message. If you are a telemarketer, we hope you get a skin disease. Nothing fatal. Just something that really makes you ITCH. Beep.”

I strongly recommend using a similar message on your own machine. In the last few weeks, I have found that when you get one of those rare telemarketers who call and actually try to leave a message for you offering their vacation homes or soap or whatever, the disturbed tone they get in their voices is worth it.

I need a good laugh because you aren't allowed to eat at your desk at work. It's a rule around here. No meals at your desk, no snacking. Only drinkables (coffee, coke, water, juice, etc.)

Mind you, there is snacking, but it has to be something that can't be smelled (or at least smells like coffee, coke, or juice) and can be quickly hidden. Since I was running around all during my lunch hour, that's why I'm eating pretzels with the bag hidden behind my monitor and drinking unheated "Soup at Hand."

Bleh.

When I was a kid, I taught myself to eat chow mein and spaghetti-os out of the can as a self-defense mechanism - all they gave you at school for lunch on weekends was the world's most disgusting hamburgers and you couldn't cook in the dorm room. But my stomach was stronger when I was a kid, nor had I been dealing with a weeks-long stomachache.

Creamy tomato Soup at Hand tastes like you're slugging back spaghetti sauce straight out of the jar. And after all those spaghetti-os, I know exactly what I'm talking about.

Again, bleh.