To work, back, and to work again; the idiom police; a hellbent task completed; & melon criteria fail

~Wednesday~  I was ready for work with a lot of time before the next either city or university bus would arrive, so I decided to take a chance and drive to work. But when I got to the few spots relatively near my work that don’t have a two-hour limit to them, they were all taken.

I drove back to the curb-side parking on Kaplan that’s close to both a city bus stop and a Wolfline stop, and because I could see—via GPS on my CrackBerry—that the next Wolfline bus was close, I made the short walk to that stop, boarding upon its arrival in a couple of minutes.

A student sitting across from me was studying from flash cards that looked like they were for a chemistry course. They weren’t homemade out of those 3×5 index cards, but about 5×7 with a glossy, professional finish to them, as if they might have come with a textbook or something.

Across from me and a little bit to the left, an adorable guy sat, basically just looking good and chewing breakfast gum, which he accidentally “popped” or “snapped” one time. At one point, he looked down at an email or text on his phone and got a big, adorable grin on his face.

I like the driver who was driving this morning; she’s nice, but she could use some work on her braking skills. Can you say customer necks and torsos being thrown to and fro upon decelerating and accelerating?


I had a meeting-less work day, thanks to the cancellation of that UITC meeting this afternoon. The thing that’s best about that meeting being canceled is not that I don’t have to take the minutes for the 1.5-hour meeting (although that’s a relief, too), but that I don’t have to clean them up and distribute them before the next meeting, which as I’ve mentioned in my blog before, is the most tedious task I have to do in my job.

My boss’s boss caught me walking by his office at one point this morning, and said, “I had to cut out this comic, because I thought of you immediately when I saw it.”

A Candorville comic
A Candorville comic about grammar

Love it! Nothing like an overly enthusiastic pedant.

I received a response today from the person at gotriangle.org that I sent my b*tchy email to yesterday saying, “John, I requested that sign to be corrected a month ago. I will follow up and find out what the problem is.” No mention of the shelter design issue.


Arriving at the bus shelter on Hillsborough Street for my ride home, I found this artifact of yesterday’s exchange:

Hello! A pair of glasses (purple) found here. Please call TT office. July 12, 2011

It’s kind of inconsequential, but you know I’m going to mention it anyway. Personally, I remember the glasses being brown. Oh well, hopefully she got a good night’s sleep after completing this Good Samaritan task that she was hellbent on doing.

I got off the bus, into my car, and drove directly to the grocery store, where my most important purchase was a watermelon. It was interesting to me that: 1) they had both seeded and seedless watermelon (lately they’ve only been carrying the seedless), and 2) that they were both the same price, with the seeded ones being much bigger than the seedless ones, which makes sense.

I followed all of my new found how-to-tell-if-a-watermelon-is-ripe information, but was still a little disappointed when I finally sliced it open. I mean it was okay ripe, but it still wasn’t as sweet as I would have liked it to have been, especially after following all the “rules” to get a ripe one. Oh well.

I bought the seeded ones, just because they tend to be riper, and I was bringing it to a party of about 75 people, so the more the merrier (for the same price), and I spent an hour slicing it and picking out the seeds. Yes, it’s tedious, but I’d still rather do that than those minutes of that work meeting I just b*tched about above.


Dancing was fun tonight. We had a good number of folks, and I got in a good amount of exercise.

Michael, Phil, and Joe were back, which added to the fun, and of course, helped to populate the dance floor.

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