Friday began with snow. Lots of snow. Nobody was willing to run the risk of driving me into work, so I stayed home and (as is usually the case if I get the chance to stay home) got a lot of work done.
Other than that, on Friday we went to the diner and ate some food. Then we went to buy Rio some shoes, and on the way we found a scarlet towel that Rio said she liked. The shop person said, “I have a towel like that at home. You’ll never guess what I like to put in it.” I said “What?” and bit my tongue to stop myself saying “Yourself naked?”, since although it seemed the obvious answer it was presumably not what was meant. (The answer was actually kitchen supplies in an entirely red and black kitchen.)
I also wrote a poem in a trochaic form I don’t usually use.
Welcome to the adult world!
Feel a clumsy failing fool.
Living is a tricky game,
Harder than they tell at school.
Every day beyond your means:
Hide it from the public view.
All around must never guess
What it is they’re hiding too.
Conquer bedrooms, conquer boardrooms,
Build your mountain to the sky.
Have a resume to die for:
When you get it, then you die.
Yet the children play in dirt,
Heedless of a pointless star:
“Never ask us what we’ll be:
Know that we already are”.
Conversation at the dinner table on Saturday:
Rio (eating the last of a tub of tin roof ice-cream): My ice-cream is crumby. I mean, I don’t think it’s crummy like it’s no good, it’s crumby like it has peanut crumbs in it.
Marn: But your ice-cream is also cool. I don’t mean like, whoah, it’s awesome, I mean cool like you got it out of the freezer.
Rio: That’s true.
Marn: And your ice-cream is also sweet. I don’t mean like sweet, like, SCHWEEET, I mean sweet like it contains sugar.
Rio: I don’t get it.
Fin: You didn’t grow up in the eighties.
I have also been refactoring Metacity’s parsing of gconf options, and it has been very satisfying to regularise the code. Other Metacity bugs I’m working on: GNOME bug 460018 and GNOME bug 509530. Moreover, I have been playing with launchpad; Gnusto is now known to launchpad and known to ohloh. I may add other such things later.
Conversation at the dinner table on Sunday:
Fin: So we’ll try to alternate beef and chicken.
Me: But we’re having pizza on Wednesday.
Alex: What are pepperonis, anyway? Is that cow meat?
Me: No, I think pig meat.
Alex: Wow, does that mean Jewish people can’t eat pepperoni pizzas?
Rio: I think they have to eat them because they have a rule that says they mustn’t.
Fin: That’s Discordianism, love, not Judaism.
Rio: Oh, yeah, like how they have to eat hot dog buns on a Friday.
Today Rio and I went to Alex’s church. Rio has a bit of a cold and was sniffling through the sermon, and a kindly Mother’s Union-type person (or whatever the RCs have instead) sitting behind us offered her a tissue. Shortly after the acclamation Rio attempted to kneel, slipped off the kneeler and hit her face on the pew in front. She bled copiously all over her clothes and hands. The Mother’s Union woman asked whether she was all right and handed us the whole packet! I asked Rio if she was okay to walk and she nodded, so we scrambled out of the building, down the stairs, past some Girl Scouts who appeared out of nowhere to shout “Girl Scout Cookies!” at us– we shouted “Nosebleed!” back at them. I think they were the boss monster– and we ran back to our house. Fin cleaned Rio up and soaked her clothes and I found her an icepack. She curled up and recuperated by watching every rerun of MythBusters she could find.
Link soup:
- Abstinence-only drivers’ education.
- The most sad slogan on tech show swag ever
- An overview of The Perishers, an underappreciated strip, I think.
- Explaining death to toddlers these days (triggers: death, obviously)
- There was a website about prison art but it had to close down; some of its contents are at the link. You might be able to help.
- Not the Nine O’Clock News sending up every eighties music video ever (yes, it’s old, but it’s still excellent)
- Ms Pac-Man, Feminist Hero.
