Aliens Among Us

Hello World,

Ah, for those halcyon days of yore, when normally I would be wishing everyone a very happy SuperBowl Weekend, but alas, that was then and this is now. We all realize now, and some with regret, that they don't play the SuperBowl on the last Sunday in January any more, so the only thing we have to remember this weekend for now is the yearly donnybrook that we call our Annual Congregational Meeting at church. I don't claim that it's the Cowboys and the Dolphins, although some years, it would give the Browns and the Redskins a run for their money, at least when it comes to name-calling and throwing things. And so we have that looming ... er, I mean, to look forward to on Sunday, and not even a gridiron spectacular later as a reward for our labors. Honestly, what is church coming to these days, I ask you that.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to thank you for your wonderful Christmas card, which was very much appreciated in the holly jolly spirit of the season. I loved the decorative holiday ribbon, and that adorable picture of Daisy all dressed up in her festive garb. That was such a great card, and one of our absolute favorites of the entire bunch we received from all and sundry. Thanks so much for thinking of us and sending it our way to lend its merry glow to the Yuletide. Ho ho ho.

Everyone knows how I aim to be helpful, so just in case you were lounging around and looking for something to occupy your time, I have found just the thing. It combines a love of adventure and travel, with technology and gadgets, plus a bit of cloak-and-dagger mystery thrown in for good measure, and it all accomplishes absolutely nothing, giving it a negative productivity rating that would be hard to match. Feel free to give it a try at www.wheresgeorge.com, where you can enter the serial number of any denomination of American currency, and if it's listed, find out where it's been before you got it. (You have to register on the site if you want to follow its progress afterwards, but you can see its previous journeys without registering.) I stumbled over this at church, where one of the bills in the collection plate had the URL written on it, and when I looked it up at home (of, for crying out loud, of course I put another dollar in the plate to make up for it, sheesh!) they said it had traveled 743 miles in 254 days, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 5/13/05 to New Rochelle on Sunday. How cool is that! I think this is such a nifty idea, I was thinking of writing the URL on all of my bills, and registering them, so that the next person who gets them at the store or from the bank would be able to play along. After all, there's such a thing as too much productivity, you know.

Speaking of productivity, ours at work took a real nose-dive today when the telephone service tech was in our offices to re-program our phones. Even with our new temp, who has made tremendous inroads on our weeks of piled-up paperwork, I seem to be falling farther and farther behind, in spite of routinely coming in early, staying late and working through lunch. Part of the problem is making sure the temp has enough to do, that is simple enough to do by herself, while still being something that's important enough to be helpful. But the biggest problem is the phone, which on some days never stops ringing long enough to take a breath, much less get any work done. When I complained to our Vice President, he suggested forwarding the phones to my voice mail for a few hours so I could do some work uninterrupted. I pointed out this was like the Three Stooges bit where they say the dresser is too heavy to move with the drawers in it, so they take the drawers out and put them on top of the dresser and then move it. Instead of answering 100 calls coming in one at a time over the course of the morning, I would have to answer those same 100 calls all at once by playing them back from my voice mail. What I wanted to do was reduce the quantity, not just shift the same quantity to another time of day. He spoke with the Telecommunications director, who recommended a menu greeting on our main number, so callers could simply press a button to reach the person they needed, without every call going through me first. The other people in the department would get their own calls directly, and I would only get those calls that were for me (or general inquiries) which is how all of the other departments have been doing it for years, except us. So today the phone guy was climbing all over and under and around our desks while we were trying to work, and we all had to stop and record new greetings for our voice mail, including day greetings and night greetings, internal greetings and external greetings, and deal with the people who wandered over from other areas to say they couldn't reach us on the phone in the interim. Of course, after he left, we found out that the main menu greeting was set up incorrectly, and people who tried to reach our receptionist would have found it fiendishly impossible. Fortunately they solved that problem, but it's just a matter of time before we discover other bugs in this arrangement. But at least one of us is hopeful that this will make life worth living again, because right now, I don't have time to even go to the bathroom.

In fact (and I certainly hope this is one of those stories that becomes funnier in retrospect) on Tuesday, I left work so late that when I walked down the street to pick up the Tempo from the mechanic's, I found that it had been entirely blocked in by local residents using the property as a free after-hours parking lot. I didn't want to walk all the way back up the hill to the hospital to call home for a ride, so here I was, walking around in the dark looking for a pay phone in an unfamiliar neighborhood. I didn't find one at the deli or the gas station (although people assured me there was one there) so I walked around the block looking for anything that was open where I could try. I struck out at the nail salon, record store and dental clinic, and crossed the street to try the next open place, hoping for better luck. This turned into one of those sitcom moments, where the middle-aged suburban housewife inadvertently wanders into the Latino pool hall and bar, to the strains of the "Mexican Hat Dance" blaring out of loudspeakers, and everyone can't help but stop and stare as if a three-headed polka dot space alien had just landed from another planet. They were so dumbstruck that when I made the universal sign of "telephone" with my hand, they just gaped at me and had to pull someone from the back room who could understand Anglo hand gestures. Fortunately, the helpful young man steered me in the right direction, and I found the pay phone, although it was with some screwy telecom service that wouldn't accept my calling card, so I gave it a quarter instead and hoped for the best. And poor Bill, who is not always recognized for his saintliness, but should be, came to my rescue, and even came up with the idea to pick up something to eat on the way home. Naturally, the place we decided on was closed, but what else could you expect from the way things had been going? And later, even though I didn't watch the Rangers play, they lost anyway, so I even managed to jinx them by remote control. Obviously, this is not a three-headed polka dot space alien to be trifled with.

Everyone knows that you take your life in your hands trying to cross the street to the employee parking lot, which is part of the hospital's nefarious plot to drum up more business for their emergency room, by having the staff run into by cars. Especially after 5:00 when it's dark, and even in the pedestrian cross-walk, it's a chancy proposition at best. I like to try and cross along with a doctor in a lab coat, or better yet, a pregnant nurse, figuring that they have the best chance of getting the traffic to let them pass unmolested. Tonight, when I left work late (again) and in the dark (again) I came up to the intersection at the same time as a young man of African American descent, who was wearing nothing but camouflage from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. I couldn't help but blurt out, "I shouldn't cross with you! You're entirely dressed in camo and no one can see you! They're going to run you over because you're camouflaged, and then they're going to hit me because I'm behind you!" He laughed. You'd think he'd never seen a three-headed polka dot space alien before.

Out of Luck

Hello World,

And so here I am back again, and about the only person among the local populace not complaining about the weather, which is not to say that it's not worth complaining about, because lately, it has scaled new heights in complainability, and that's putting it mildly. In the space of 6 days, we had just about every kind of weather condition that's possible on the planet, and some that are only possible in far distant galaxies on the outer reaches of the universe. Of course there was rain, and it came down in torrents. Then there was snow, which in some areas, was blowing so hard sideways that there was more snow on the walls of the buildings than on the ground. It was also 60 degrees and sunny, except for when it was 19 degrees with sleet, and sometimes, on the very same day. Not to be left out, one day was so foggy that you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, while another one greeted us with howling winds of 60 miles an hour, that uprooted trees, knocked down utility poles and turned over tractor trailers on the highways. It would be possible for someone to look back on this and find it amusing in retrospect, except for those unfortunate residents who have been without electricity, telephones or cable television all week. We weren't one of them, or even two of them, although our cable was out for a couple of days, and so I consider us among the lucky ones and don't want to complain about the weather.

It was on Friday of last week that I brought RaggMopp to the animal hospital for a follow-up visit, when the fog was so dense it was a wonder that we got there at all, and was pleased to get a clean bill of health for the new kid on the block. Bill came home from work early, and we packed up the car with all of our belongings, to visit our friends on the outskirts of Albany for the holiday weekend. We drove north through fog, drizzle and glowering clouds, with snow clinging to the rocks and ground along the side of the road. Then we passed through a high elevation area, and came out on the other side to find it was 50 degrees and sunny, and all the snow had melted and everyone was having a beautiful day. We were glad to leave the bad weather behind us (or so we thought) and arrived at our destination without incident. Our friends have a new and very decorative Christmas tree with all the trimmings, and we were glad to see it and their other decor looking very festive. We unpacked, much to the chagrin of their monster cat, who obviously has sold his soul to the devil, because at 21 years old and crabby, he's still going strong. We had dinner at the diner in Hudson, and then came back to open belated Christmas presents in front of the fireplace, which was more for ambiance than heat, since it was still 50 degrees up there. We turned in early, because we had a big day planned for Saturday, and anyone could see how things going so well on Friday had obviously lulled us into a false sense of security that would not only come back to haunt us, but do so repeatedly.

It all started out innocently enough, as these things so often do, when we went to the 76 Diner in Latham for lunch with two of our other friends. It was here that the storm clouds started brewing on the horizon of our plans, although we didn't realize it at the time. I casually mentioned that I was hoping to squeeze in a trip to my favorite consignment shop in the area, only to be told that Repetique had recently gone out of business. I was disappointed, but our friends said that a trip to the train store would cheer me up, as it featured an impressive layout with G, O, H-O and N gauge trains on different levels. It started to rain just as we got there, and when we walked in the door, all the lights went out. We puttered around in the dark, and actually did some shopping, for almost 30 minutes, but the electricity never did come back on so we could see the trains running. Obviously learning nothing from the experience, we headed off to the train show at the Schenectady Museum, and arrived just in time to see them packing up for the day. It should have become clear to us at that point that someone at the 76 Diner had heard us discussing our itinerary for the day, and had called ahead to all the places that we wanted to go, and make sure that we couldn't do anything that we intended to do. In fact, leaving the museum, someone joked, "Well, which place do we want to jinx next?" We figured that just by virtue of us going there, our next destination would likely be having a plague of locusts, or get hit by a meteor or something. With the temperature falling steadily, and freezing rain pelting us from every side, we trudged hopefully to another pleasant consignment shop, the Peddler's Wagon that we have enjoyed on previous visits, only to find them closed for inventory on this particular day. At this point, we were getting so punchy that I admit, at this turn of events, that we just stood out in the parking lot and laughed. In the dogged spirit of hope springing eternal, we set off for our final stop of the day, Hewitt's Nursery where we generally avail ourselves of their post-holiday sales on Christmas merchandise, and found them not only closed for the day, but we couldn't even stand in the parking lot and laugh, because the parking lot had been chained. You wouldn't think it would be possible that of the five places we wanted to go, we absolutely struck out at all five of them, which is a record of failure unprecedented even in our misadventures, and we've had some whoppers, I don't mind saying. And don't think that our friends weren't afraid to go back to their own houses after all this, in case the jinx continued to follow us around, and they found themselves fighting off raining frogs or boils.

After a frustrating day of fruitless driving around in what turned into cold and wet conditions, we decided to pick up pizza and salads to eat in, rather than taking our chances at jinxing more local businesses. (And it was a heart-stopping moment, after everything else, when we drove up to the pizza place and found all the lights out, but they gave us our food just before they closed up for the night.) We had a very nice dinner and managed to relax and laugh about the events of the day, in spite of it all, until we wished our other friends good night and good travels as they headed off back to their own residence in Latham. Not so fast! It wasn't much longer when we looked out and found them right back in the driveway, this time covered with snow, and they said that between the wind and icy conditions, it was impossible to drive. Our hosts, who graciously offer us their hospitality for the weekend, now had to scramble to put up two more overnight guests unexpectedly, and we realized ruefully that the jinx had indeed come home to roost.

It turned out to be a lot of fun anyway, sort of like a spontaneous slumber party, and everyone was in good spirits and determined to make the best of a bad situation. After all, it was all we could expect from a day like that, and it was probably lucky for us that it wasn't even worse. We managed to keep ourselves amused, and you know sometimes you have to make your own fun. At one point, I was enjoying some Snapple Kiwi Strawberry, and was reading the trivia on the inside of the lid, which is not only printed in very tiny type, but is also dark gray on a pale gray background, making it even harder to read. It appeared to say, "The largest fish is the whale shark, which can be over 50 feet long and weigh two tons." Of course I can't see anything anymore, with my eyesight getting so bad, and so I handed the lid to Bill to ask him to verify that what I was reading was actually what was printed in the lid. He looked at it and said, "In 1761, Benjamin Franklin invented the ... " We all laughed.

Sunday was a beautiful day, chilly but with brilliant sunshine, and the snow making everything look like a glittering fairyland of enchantment. We hoped that our luck had changed for the better, and sure enough, we had a wonderful meal at Denny's that was worth the trip, followed by souvenirs and old-fashioned sweets at Cracker Barrel, and taking another swing at Hewitt's Nursery, this time with excellent results. I suppose the jinx must have moved on to some other unfortunate group of people, and good riddance. It's true that our holiday weekend had more ups and downs than usual, but we were still sorry when the time came that we had to pack up and leave for good. Our trip home was uneventful, and we were glad to find just a dusting of snow here instead of anything more serious. The "ho-hum" attitude that our cats greet us with on our return has a refreshing honesty that we've come to expect, and this was no different. And we had Monday off from work (thank you, Dr. King!) to unwind and recuperate from our excursion, and a good thing, too. Although, everyone already knows what I think of those short weeks at work, and this was going to be my third in a row!

Speaking of work, I am here to tell you true that miracles do still occur in this mixed-up crazy world. When I got to my office on Tuesday, I was amazed and delighted to find that arrangements had been made to have a temp help us out while we're short-staffed in the department, which is something that I have never heard of the hospital doing before. I don't know how they managed when I was on Jury Duty last year for two months, but they never brought in a temp, that's for sure. I suppose they might have realized that I was just on the verge of blowing my brains out, and of course since there isn't anything left up there any more, the bullet would have gone right through and out the other side, and might actually hit somebody important, so probably they didn't want to take that chance. After all, Workers Compensation only goes so far.

After Midnight

Hello World,

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend, and may I say, in all sincerity, that I have a dream. Actually, it was the late and lamented Dr. King who had the dream, and it was a doozy, as I recall, something about not judging others by the color of their socks, but by the color of their children's children's socks, or something along those lines. I'm thinking I might not have hit that right on the head as accurately as I'd like to, but you can believe me that in 1968, this was the bee's knees of dreams, and it continues to stand the test of time, no matter what color your socks are. Feel free to quote me on that.

I must confess that my plan to roll away our little table-top Christmas tree at work into a spare office certainly solved one problem, while managing to create a host of others. Seriously, this empty office had been just laying around deserted for so long that it literally had dust all over everything in it, and you couldn't force anyone into it at gunpoint. Now that the tree is hiding in there temporarily, suddenly the place has turned into Grand Central Station, and every Tom, Dick and Harry in the Queen City wants to get in there. The day after I moved it, Housekeeping sent over a fellow to vacuum our offices and hallway. The last time someone came to vacuum in our building, it was a Hoover, and here I'm talking about President Hoover during the Great Depression. So I move the tree, and out of the blue, they send someone over to vacuum for the first time in years. I had to lock the office so he didn't go in there and bump into the tree. After that, I went to file some year-end reports in that office, and realized that I had put the tree in the only place that would make it impossible for me to get from the door to the cabinet where I needed to file them. I left them on the desk for "later" which at this rate could mean the next millennium. Then we had a meeting of six people in our conference room, and when two of them needed to break apart and meet separately for a few moments, in they went to the spare office with the tree. If I do this same thing next year, I'll remember to print up tickets I can sell to this prime spot on the Purchasing map, because it certainly turned into the destination of choice, once I had a reason to keep people out of there. You know what they always say in real estate: Location, location, location.

Ever since that fateful day of the Christmas Tree Caper, we have all had to listen, long and loud, to the unending complaints of people coming down our hallway in the face of that horrible fun-house mirror that we've got at our end of the corridor. We would honestly get fewer complaints if we left Santa Claus taped on the wall all year long, month in and month out, than people having to look at themselves in that mirror. You can see yourself in it all the way from Payroll, which is all the way at the other end of the building (and is depressing enough in a non-profit organization!) and as you walk towards Purchasing, you can just watch yourself getting smaller and fatter, wider and more mis-shapen with every step. It's a good thing there's no windows nearby, or people would just jump right out on the spot. Of course, as I once remarked to a co-worker who said he was going upstairs to throw one of the secretaries out the window, the building is only 3 stories, and not nearly high enough to do any real damage. You'd have to carry them all the way across the courtyard to the main building, and throw them out the 9th floor, and let's face it, who has time for that?

One funny thing happened after I finished last week's note, and it was much later than it usually is when I finally wrap things up and go to bed. I had gotten home late, so we ate later than usual, and then ran some errands, so by the time we got back, I was way behind schedule. So at long last, I walked out of the den into the hallway, and this is what I'm thinking to myself as I head toward the stairs: "Will you look at that dark spot in the middle of the floor there. It's amazing that you can see, even in this dim light, that one spot is so much darker than everything around it. Even though the floor is all dark wood, and should be all the same kind of brown everywhere, you can see this one spot is just so much darker ... " and then it blinked at me. Why, hello there, Captain Midnight! Yes, it was indeed our very own inky black stranger, The Invisible of Invisibles, the guy who puts the "stealth" in "stealthy," the one and only Captain Midnight, fresh from his hiding place under the kitchen sink and out here in the wide open spaces of the front hall in the middle of the night. And I can tell you true, if he hadn't blinked at me, I would have walked right past him, because it really is true that his coat totally absorbs light and you just can't see him at all. If he ever gets a pair of sunglasses, we're in big trouble.

Normally, this is where I'd be telling you what's new and exciting in the wonderful world of higher education, because everyone knows I'm in favor of the use of hallucinogenic chemicals in school children. No, no, no, that can't be right. That isn't at all what I meant by the term higher education, but rather, the Spring 2006 course offerings at the New School in the heart of Greenwich Village. (Wait a minute, maybe that WAS what I meant by "higher" education after all!) They say that nearly 1,000 courses await me in 10 curriculum areas, taught by scholars, artists and other professionals, and which will open me up to an exhilarating new educational experience. (Hmm. That sounds more like that other definition of "higher" education again.) Anyway, I would be telling you about these exhilarating new curriculum areas, except that they didn't provide any examples of these exhilarations, just a postcard that I could mail for their course catalog. That seemed like a little too much deferred gratification for my liking, especially after that build-up, and we all know that people who believe in better living through chemistry have notoriously short attention spans. I can repeat that for those of you on drugs. I said, I can repeat that for those of you on drugs.

Speaking of people on drugs, here's a story from work that probably makes more sense among those members of the high society, as it were. For years, every week I would call to have one of the hospital's trash containers picked up and emptied by our waste company. Finally I asked them if I could instead have it picked up automatically every week on Wednesday, and in the Dispatch office, they said they couldn't help me with that, I needed to speak with Abigail in a special department. So the week before Christmas, Abigail and I had this conversation and she said that we could have the container picked up automatically every week without me calling, but it would be on Tuesday and not on Wednesday. I said that was fine and wished Abigail a merry Christmas. I was off from work after Christmas, so in the middle of last week, I figured I should call and make sure the container was picked up the last week in December, when I had called for it, and also the previous day, when it was supposed to be picked up automatically. In Dispatch, they told me it was picked up on the 28th, but they had no call for it on the day before, so they didn't pick it up. I told them the story about me and Abigail having this conversation where we made these arrangements, and they said I would need to straighten it out with her. I reminded Abigail of our conversation in December, and she looked it up and agreed with everything I said, and then she started talking to me like I was the Village Idiot: "I ... SAID ... I ... WOULD ... SET ... IT ... UP ... FOR ... EVERY ... TUESDAY ... SO ... IT ... WILL ... BE ... PICKED ... UP ... ON ... TUESDAY ... TODAY." (With this sense of "you moron" implicit in her comments.) Everyone knows I'm too polite to laugh, but even I had to say, "Today is Wednesday." I have to say, in Abigail's defense, this completely threw her for a loop, since apparently she had no idea that it was actually Wednesday and not Tuesday, because she literally gasped when I said that (I'm thinking she would have been surprised on Friday when she didn't go in to work because she thought it was Saturday, so it was a good thing we got that squared away on Wednesday instead.) Anyway, she called me back later and said that they had actually picked it up on Tuesday, even though Dispatch told me they didn't, so to say that I have no confidence in this whole scheme would be putting it mildly. Don't think that I'm not going to call them again next week and probably have the same conversation about whether they actually picked up the container on Tuesday or not, and at this rate, things are going to get pretty smelly around the hospital if not. I'm sure glad I came up with this idea to save time on my part, so I don't have to call them every week!

Tempting Fate

Hello World,

So how is 2006 shaping up for you so far? At the hospital, we had Monday off for New Year's, and everyone already knows what I think of those short weeks at work, and this was no exception, in spades. It also seems, with Christmas on a Sunday, that Martin Luther King Jr. weekend turns out to be right around the corner, so there's another short week staring us in the face. I'm thinking right about now, they can't be liking the look on my face all that much, and the people I work with, probably even less. Fortunately after that, there shouldn't be any other short weeks until Presidents Day in February, which would lead those of us operating in a delusional state to harbor fantasies of actually catching up on things around the office. Yes, I realize that might seem impossible to rational people, but it's my delusion and I'm sticking with it.

Something else we have to look forward to next week is Friday the 13th, which is one of two that will occur in 2006, with the other one being in October. There's a solid black cat who frequents our yard for hand-outs, that we call Smokey Joe, and I figure he should fit right in with the famously bad luck day of lore and legend. Of course, our own Captain Midnight has an inky blackness that makes him almost completely disappear, and in fact, if he closes his eyes, you simply can't see him at all. So when it comes to black cats, we've got that part of the day covered, and also in spades. Inky black spades, that is.

Like millions of other people, Bill and I rang in the New Year watching the festivities in Times Square on television, and by golly, you've got to give that Dick Clark credit. There he was all dressed up and giving it everything he's got, and doing a heck of a job, considering the health problems he's had recently. I was impressed with his determination and endurance, and I give ABC a lot of credit for giving him the opportunity to do the show, when anyone could see he wasn't the Dick Clark of yesteryear that we all know and love. It was an inspiring example of courage in the face of adversity, and he certainly showed those young whipper-snappers out there a thing or two about professionalism and dedication. After what seems like only 150 years in show biz, he's obviously not giving up without a fight. Good for you, Dick!

I don't know about other people, but we don't find the entertainment choices all that appealing after midnight on New Year's Eve, so after the ball drops in Times Square, we usually toddle off to bed not that much later. Besides, Bill likes to get up early in the morning to see the venerable Tournament of Roses Parade, a time-honored tradition of New Year's Day, and broadcast for countless years from scenic Pasadena, California. Surprise! The first day of this shiny new year found no roses, no parade, no floats and not a Grand Marshall in sight. Hmmmm. Could 2006 be The Year The Grinch Stole The Rose Parade? We couldn't ever remember this happening before, although as we found out later, it must have, whenever New Year's Eve was on a Saturday previously. Apparently the parade organizers have a long-standing superstition that having the parade on a Sunday tempts the Fates into calling down the rains from the heavens, in perverse contrast to the usual conditions in sunny Pasadena. As it turned out, I'm thinking that the Fates must have been laughing their heads off, and they were probably the only ones, when the parade slogged on through a steady downpour on Monday instead. It drenched the onlookers, pelted the marching bands, soaked the floats and made a sloppy, soggy mess out of the whole proceedings. I thought it was a shame, after the innumerable hours spent on the event and all of the displays, and you especially have to feel sorry for the musicians and cheerleaders and horses and everything, out there marching in it. I suppose the lesson to be learned in all of this is not only don't tempt the Fates, but also to watch out for Comrade Mischka and his infernal weather machine, da?

Speaking of weather, last week I had every reason to believe that I would personally usher in a new era of global warming, and we would see record high temperatures during the winter in our area, because I put the new birdbath heater into my fountain to keep it from freezing. This is not technically a birdbath, but rather a decorative fountain, and I'm sure that the manufacturer expects you to disassemble it at the end of the gardening season, clean it and carefully pack it away some place safe and warm for the winter, and put it back up in the spring after all danger of frost is past. I have no doubt that my using it as a (gasp!) birdbath is in direct contravention to its avowed purpose, and likely voids the warranty in no uncertain terms. I found out the hard way that because it's cement, it doesn't want to be full of ice, because part of the support bracket cracked last year when the water froze, and I didn't realize until too late that the heater wasn't working. So this year, I wanted to put the new heater in before it froze, to hopefully prevent any more damage. Okay, so that was a delusional idea, but it almost happened. I tested the new heater and it worked fine, and I admit that I plunged it into the frigid water of the fountain and under the rocks to hold it down, with an almost gleeful jauntiness. Talk about tempting the Fates! It was the very next day, when I went outside to pick up the newspaper, that I noticed the fountain was completely frozen, although like those "Wet Paint" signs that make people invariably go over and put their fingers on it to see if it's really wet, I had to walk over to it and knock on the ice to make sure it was really frozen. (It was.) Fortunately, it turned out to be a simple thing to fix, because somewhere along the way it had tripped the ground-fault interrupt outlet that it's plugged into, and I just had to press the reset button and we were back in business. The ice-breaker business, that is, because it melted the ice in the fountain in a matter of minutes, which was wonderful to behold. And so, dear friends, if you're within the sound of my voice, you can count on having warm weather from here on out, at least as long as my birdbath heater is working, and thank you, Comrade Mischka and the Fates. (Which, as Dave Barry always says, would be a great name for a rock band, nyet?)

For people with a lot of time on their hands, and an Internet connection (and that can be a dangerous combination!) some of life's simple pleasures can be found at www.jacquielawson.com, where this talented artist shares her exquisite animated greeting cards (featuring the irrepressible Chudleigh!) with an adoring public. There are greetings for all occasions, and also no occasion, but mostly I find people sending them my way at Christmas, and they are each one a special joy and treasure. One that I received recently had a very entertaining animated representation of The Twelve Days of Christmas, which in Jacquie Lawson's world, winds up with 12 drummers drumming, 11 pipers piping, 10 lords a-leaping and 9 ladies dancing. After that, the maids, geese, swans and the rest of the birds fall into line quite as expected. But in the versions I usually hear in seasonal recordings, it's 12 lords, 11 ladies, 10 pipers, and 9 drummers, not the other way around. Meanwhile, Bill and I happened across a Christmas special of Bing Crosby holiday shows from the Hollywood Palace, and when he sang the classic carol with his family, he ended up with 12 fiddlers fiddling (which was a new one on me) and then 11 lords, 10 ladies and 9 drummers, while leaving the poor pipers out in the cold completely. So even after four centuries, this song still seems to be something of a work in progress, at least in terms of the shifting demographics for each day.

As long as we're back in a Christmas frame of mind, I said to Bill that today being Epiphany, it was a perfect time for me to have an epiphany. I have had no spare time at work lately, since my co-worker has been out on disability (I'll have to ask you not to repeat that, for HIPAA compliance) and I've been trying to do two jobs while already being behind schedule due to extra tasks involving year-end reports, payroll, updating files and document storage. At this rate, I knew I would never find the time to take down the Christmas decorations around the office, probably until who knows when. But suddenly it occurred to me that while it's true that I'm time-poor at work, I'm also space-rich, and I had the brilliant idea to just roll the little table-top tree, with all of its ornaments and accessories, into an empty office down the hall and leave it there, until I could spend more time on it. Luckily, the tree is on an old patient bedside cabinet with wheels, although you wouldn't notice that, because I cover it with a decorative holiday tablecloth. I had never tried to roll it before when it was fully loaded with the tree and everything, but I went in to work early this morning and pushed it down the hall and out of sight, with no trouble at all. Everyone who came in later would have believed that I actually took down the tree and put all the decorations away, when nothing could be further from the truth. This is just a little fiction that I have perpetrated to buy myself some time, and it worked like a charm. Although Bill said that I should just let it stay decorated in the empty office all year, and just roll it out again this Christmas, but I know better than to tempt Fate. After all, the last thing we need in our office is rain.