Hot Air
Hello World,
And so here we find ourselves, already past the Ides of January, and if you're anything like me, nothing to show for it besides. Of course, there’s no point in complaining about snow in this area in the middle of winter, but it does seem to me that we've had more episodes of snow, going back to November even, than we usually do around here. Some years, we have fewer snowstorms but with higher accumulations in each one. This time around, it seems like we've had a lot of small storms instead, and although it’s not usually a lot of snow, each one is its own little nuisance, and no thank you so very much not. Last week, we had another one of those storms that begins as powdery snow and then changes to freezing rain, so Bill said that there was no point in cleaning the snow off the Escort, because after that, the windows would just be solid ice. To that, I replied that at least I knew where the ice scraper was, and we had a good laugh over that. But I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me sooner that I should just move the ice scraper from the door pocket to the seat organizer I have on the passenger side, which has many useful pockets for just this very purpose, and is extremely handy for loose objects like maps, sunglasses, tissues, umbrella and even the squeegee. So now the ice scraper has a place of its own, and everything is in its place, and it goes without saying, all’s right with the world.
Alert readers could be forgiven for being justifiably skeptical at my assertion in my previous note about taking down the holiday decorations at work, especially in light of literally years worth of stories about the “wandering Christmas tree” that simply moved from one office to another, for weeks at a time while still decorated, and in and out of the closet besides. In spite of my best intentions, I would have to admit that the claims of taking down the decorations could be considered somewhat premature, or perhaps preliminary might be a better description. The truth of the matter is that the decorations were in fact taken down from the various walls, windows, file cabinets, refrigerator, mirror and assorted whatnot where they had been placed in early December, but have not yet reached that stage where they have been actually put away in their respective bags, boxes or protective containers to this point. In reality, anyone walking into my office, as our retired co-worker did yesterday, would find a dizzying array of decorative items, including the tree, all jumbled together in a haphazard manner along the credenza and windowsills in my office, and looking very festive indeed. My explanation is that this is preparatory to them being put away for real, although whether that would be in the short-term picture or more of a long-term project may be difficult to ascertain and remains to be seen. Or this may be what they refer to in technology circles as “vaporware,” which are things that are planned, and even publicized, but which never actually come to fruition. Which, as Bill will tell you, is a small town in New Jersey, and one that I know all too well, that’s for sure.
Speaking of work, it was earlier in the week that I was sitting at my desk busily moving piles of papers from one place to another, when I heard the unmistakable “whoosh - clunk!” of a window letting go of its moorings, and crashing down to the bottom of the frame, thanks to the remorseless pull of gravity and for which the friction holding it in place was no match. This is a good sized double-hung window with heavy metal frames in the back of my office, which I don't open because it has no screen, and I'm sure that my office would be over-run with pigeons in no time. I have another window by my desk, which not only has a screen, but has the added advantage that it will stay open by itself with friction, so you don't have to hold it up with a stick, or worry about losing your fingers when it comes crashing down, like most of the other windows in this old rickety fire-trap of a building. The back window has an air conditioner installed at the top, so the top part of the windows only goes up as far as the bottom of the air conditioner, and it was taped in place, and propped up with a piece of wood, countless years ago. Apparently, the years took their toll, as years will do, the wood disintegrated, the tape let go, and suddenly here’s the window slamming down to the bottom with nothing to hold it up, and nothing behind it but the great wide world outside, on the eve of predicted record-breaking freezing temperatures to come. Probably in a normal business with 50 people in their Engineering department, a person could call and have someone hurry over to take care of this problem, but even I'm not delusional enough to expect that kind of service here, where I already know that it takes 4 weeks just to get a copy of a door key. So I climbed up on the little file cabinet in front of the window, removed the mini blinds and surveyed the situation, which was the first that I have ever really looked at that window since I've been in this office. My original plan was to use the bottom window to prop up the top window, but the window frame didn't have enough of a lip on it to brace anything against to keep it up. Apparently these new-fangled windows won't go past each other in the tracks, so that in order to raise the front (bottom) one to get to the back (top) one, you have to lift them both together, which is certainly a handful for one small person standing on a file cabinet, and I ought to know. Since neither window would stay up with the friction that it was designed for, it was basically a three-handed job, trying to hold up both windows, while at the same time, build a 16-inch tower of scrap wood in the rear window track to support the back window snug against the bottom of the air conditioner, and believe me, that third hand would have come in very handy at a time like that. By the time I left, I was grimy and sore, but I had gotten the window back to within a half-inch of where I wanted it, and not only didn't break anything, but didn't get hurt in the process. And even more luckily, it was a good thing that the air conditioner has its own bracket holding it up, and is not depending on the window to keep it in place, or we really would have been in trouble when the wood and the tape let go, and not to mention the people below it, even more so. That’s the thing about gravity, by golly, it works whether you want it to or not.
Speaking of new-fangled things, our local newspaper had a listing in among their Best Bets from the TV Section that had me shaking my head. “LOST: The wait is almost over, and since it’s been a while since we've been to the island, ABC reairs last season’s finale to refresh fans’ memories in anticipation of next week’s season premiere.” Reairs? REAIRS??? What kind of a word is “reairs,” I ask you that? I realize that there’s a seemingly insurmountable compulsion nowadays to eliminate hyphens under all circumstances, regardless of how confused and muddled it makes the words as a result, but heaven help us, you can't just go around using words like “reairs” and “deicing” and “reignited”with no hyphens and expect anyone to understand what they're reading. Somewhere along the line, the Anti-Hyphen Brigade has lost sight of the fact that the purpose of written language is to communicate, and eliminating all of the hyphens, whether necessary or superfluous, has the effect of making things even more incomprehensible, rather than less so. They're so busy throwing out the baby hyphens with the hyphen bath water, that they've left us all up to our “reairs” in nonsense like “deionization” and “coequals” until you're just about ready to have your head reexamined, if not worse. And don't even get me started on rearranging.
While we're on the subject of television, we were watching The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson last week, and he mentioned that he was having problems ever since he dropped his cell phone into a cup of coffee. The way he described it, now his cell phone is jumpy, and his coffee tastes like porn. That may not make a lot of sense, but it is much funnier when you say it with a Scottish accent, believe me. I think it was on the same program that he had as his guest, the comedian Richard Lewis, who complained that his wife’s real name is so ill-suited to crying out at passionate times of ecstasy, that once in the heat of an intimate moment, instead of using her name, he found himself unaccountably yelling, “I love you, ladies and gentlemen!” That may not make a lot of sense either, but at least you have nothing to worry about from the Anti-Hyphen Brigade, blast their dastardly little reairs.
Elle
And so here we find ourselves, already past the Ides of January, and if you're anything like me, nothing to show for it besides. Of course, there’s no point in complaining about snow in this area in the middle of winter, but it does seem to me that we've had more episodes of snow, going back to November even, than we usually do around here. Some years, we have fewer snowstorms but with higher accumulations in each one. This time around, it seems like we've had a lot of small storms instead, and although it’s not usually a lot of snow, each one is its own little nuisance, and no thank you so very much not. Last week, we had another one of those storms that begins as powdery snow and then changes to freezing rain, so Bill said that there was no point in cleaning the snow off the Escort, because after that, the windows would just be solid ice. To that, I replied that at least I knew where the ice scraper was, and we had a good laugh over that. But I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me sooner that I should just move the ice scraper from the door pocket to the seat organizer I have on the passenger side, which has many useful pockets for just this very purpose, and is extremely handy for loose objects like maps, sunglasses, tissues, umbrella and even the squeegee. So now the ice scraper has a place of its own, and everything is in its place, and it goes without saying, all’s right with the world.
Alert readers could be forgiven for being justifiably skeptical at my assertion in my previous note about taking down the holiday decorations at work, especially in light of literally years worth of stories about the “wandering Christmas tree” that simply moved from one office to another, for weeks at a time while still decorated, and in and out of the closet besides. In spite of my best intentions, I would have to admit that the claims of taking down the decorations could be considered somewhat premature, or perhaps preliminary might be a better description. The truth of the matter is that the decorations were in fact taken down from the various walls, windows, file cabinets, refrigerator, mirror and assorted whatnot where they had been placed in early December, but have not yet reached that stage where they have been actually put away in their respective bags, boxes or protective containers to this point. In reality, anyone walking into my office, as our retired co-worker did yesterday, would find a dizzying array of decorative items, including the tree, all jumbled together in a haphazard manner along the credenza and windowsills in my office, and looking very festive indeed. My explanation is that this is preparatory to them being put away for real, although whether that would be in the short-term picture or more of a long-term project may be difficult to ascertain and remains to be seen. Or this may be what they refer to in technology circles as “vaporware,” which are things that are planned, and even publicized, but which never actually come to fruition. Which, as Bill will tell you, is a small town in New Jersey, and one that I know all too well, that’s for sure.
Speaking of work, it was earlier in the week that I was sitting at my desk busily moving piles of papers from one place to another, when I heard the unmistakable “whoosh - clunk!” of a window letting go of its moorings, and crashing down to the bottom of the frame, thanks to the remorseless pull of gravity and for which the friction holding it in place was no match. This is a good sized double-hung window with heavy metal frames in the back of my office, which I don't open because it has no screen, and I'm sure that my office would be over-run with pigeons in no time. I have another window by my desk, which not only has a screen, but has the added advantage that it will stay open by itself with friction, so you don't have to hold it up with a stick, or worry about losing your fingers when it comes crashing down, like most of the other windows in this old rickety fire-trap of a building. The back window has an air conditioner installed at the top, so the top part of the windows only goes up as far as the bottom of the air conditioner, and it was taped in place, and propped up with a piece of wood, countless years ago. Apparently, the years took their toll, as years will do, the wood disintegrated, the tape let go, and suddenly here’s the window slamming down to the bottom with nothing to hold it up, and nothing behind it but the great wide world outside, on the eve of predicted record-breaking freezing temperatures to come. Probably in a normal business with 50 people in their Engineering department, a person could call and have someone hurry over to take care of this problem, but even I'm not delusional enough to expect that kind of service here, where I already know that it takes 4 weeks just to get a copy of a door key. So I climbed up on the little file cabinet in front of the window, removed the mini blinds and surveyed the situation, which was the first that I have ever really looked at that window since I've been in this office. My original plan was to use the bottom window to prop up the top window, but the window frame didn't have enough of a lip on it to brace anything against to keep it up. Apparently these new-fangled windows won't go past each other in the tracks, so that in order to raise the front (bottom) one to get to the back (top) one, you have to lift them both together, which is certainly a handful for one small person standing on a file cabinet, and I ought to know. Since neither window would stay up with the friction that it was designed for, it was basically a three-handed job, trying to hold up both windows, while at the same time, build a 16-inch tower of scrap wood in the rear window track to support the back window snug against the bottom of the air conditioner, and believe me, that third hand would have come in very handy at a time like that. By the time I left, I was grimy and sore, but I had gotten the window back to within a half-inch of where I wanted it, and not only didn't break anything, but didn't get hurt in the process. And even more luckily, it was a good thing that the air conditioner has its own bracket holding it up, and is not depending on the window to keep it in place, or we really would have been in trouble when the wood and the tape let go, and not to mention the people below it, even more so. That’s the thing about gravity, by golly, it works whether you want it to or not.
Speaking of new-fangled things, our local newspaper had a listing in among their Best Bets from the TV Section that had me shaking my head. “LOST: The wait is almost over, and since it’s been a while since we've been to the island, ABC reairs last season’s finale to refresh fans’ memories in anticipation of next week’s season premiere.” Reairs? REAIRS??? What kind of a word is “reairs,” I ask you that? I realize that there’s a seemingly insurmountable compulsion nowadays to eliminate hyphens under all circumstances, regardless of how confused and muddled it makes the words as a result, but heaven help us, you can't just go around using words like “reairs” and “deicing” and “reignited”with no hyphens and expect anyone to understand what they're reading. Somewhere along the line, the Anti-Hyphen Brigade has lost sight of the fact that the purpose of written language is to communicate, and eliminating all of the hyphens, whether necessary or superfluous, has the effect of making things even more incomprehensible, rather than less so. They're so busy throwing out the baby hyphens with the hyphen bath water, that they've left us all up to our “reairs” in nonsense like “deionization” and “coequals” until you're just about ready to have your head reexamined, if not worse. And don't even get me started on rearranging.
While we're on the subject of television, we were watching The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson last week, and he mentioned that he was having problems ever since he dropped his cell phone into a cup of coffee. The way he described it, now his cell phone is jumpy, and his coffee tastes like porn. That may not make a lot of sense, but it is much funnier when you say it with a Scottish accent, believe me. I think it was on the same program that he had as his guest, the comedian Richard Lewis, who complained that his wife’s real name is so ill-suited to crying out at passionate times of ecstasy, that once in the heat of an intimate moment, instead of using her name, he found himself unaccountably yelling, “I love you, ladies and gentlemen!” That may not make a lot of sense either, but at least you have nothing to worry about from the Anti-Hyphen Brigade, blast their dastardly little reairs.
Elle
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 7:44 AM
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