Category: General

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My dresser is an IKEA kit and was something of a bear to assemble. The second drawer down has recently developed the annoying habit of not closing on the first go, and I feel a strange obligation to fix it but I’m not sure how. It’d be nice if the stuff would come with more instructions for maintenance.

So this gets me thinking: IKEA furniture is Lego for grown-ups. You go to the store, look at the cool pictures, and pick up a box of parts to make the model you want. When you get it home and open the box, sometimes the picture inside doesn’t look like what you saw in the store, but you think, “Oh, what the hell, I’ll make it anyway, maybe I’ll figure out how to make the other thing later.” So you count up all the little pieces and lay them out and once in a while there’s some stuff missing but you always have extras around because every other set you have included the same interchangeable parts and didn’t need them all. When you start assembling it, you’re just about guaranteed to miss a step or do something out of order and have a tough time getting the pieces apart to put them back together right. And when you’re done, part of the enjoyment of having the finished product around is looking at it and thinking, “Hey, look what I made!”

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Via WebWord:

Do You Speak American? is an upcoming documentary about the many dialects that make up American English.

Some interesting observations include:

  • Major cities’ dialects are actually diverging, not converging as people predicted with the spread of TV and travel.
  • Another “great vowel shift” is underway in the Great Lakes region.
  • Most Americans consider the midwest accent closest to “normal” English.
  • Southern is the largest dialect group in the country.

And for local flavor, the writeup mentions that they interviewed teenagers in Irvine, obtaining slang terms like “uber” and “tight.”

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We got home tonight, after a good round of beer therapy and poking fun at the evil that is casual dinnerware, and found that we now live in Aliso Springs. They didn’t change the city name, mind you, just the name of our apartment “village.” We’d been wondering how they were going to handle having painted over the metal number plates affixed to our doors. Now we know: artsy little ceramic number plates affixed to the stucco, using slightly eastern script for the “Aliso Springs” and that much-too-popular raggedy calligraphy one for the numbers.

Gag me. These people need to get a clue. This place was never high-class and it’s never going to be. And, considering how frelling expensive it is to live in the kind of place they want to turn this into, it shouldn’t be, not in this area.

I think I need more beer therapy.

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I’m aware that I’ve been grumbling for a while that my drama-queen examiner (who has reappeared, by the way, and pretty much kept from disappearing again) would get more done if she’d delegate stuff to me. However, I don’t think that the week we’re cleaning up in the wake of a major system upgrade when all the examiners are trying to close files for month end and I’m handling the work of a guy on his honeymoon is really the best time to start…..

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It seems like every time they try to get on track with painting the apartments, it rains. They actually started shrouding everything in plastic yesterday and primer-coated the balconies, and some of the stucco got painted. I’m interested to find out how much they got done before the clouds let loose today. And how long it’s going to take them to regroup. (At least the plastic on the bushes and satellite dishes will have served some strange purpose…)

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I just about had a heart attack this morning when I noticed that not only had they put in the cubicle divider I’d been wanting since getting this desk, but my iPod was sitting on my desk waiting to greet me.

Yep, I needed the 3-day weekend.

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One of my co-workers has disappeared. She called in yesterday and said she was waiting for the electrician, and then didn’t show up. Today she called in and said she’d be in at noon, then didn’t show. She’s done this sort of thing before, but never two days in a row after being 3 hours later than usual the Friday of the week before. (Didn’t put a battery backup in her alarm clock.) Now there are reports that her cell phone was stolen and is no longer in service, and that she was in tears when she called this morning. And she won’t tell anyone anything, which is diametrically opposed to her usual TMI-inducing self. Depending on who you talk to, this is either scary or a complete sham.

So here I am, her underling, trying to make sense of the overdue messes she’s left while our supervisor is on vacation, and watching the number of voicemails on her phone creep up. Soon it’ll be full and the calls will start coming to me. What with the flu doing its KO on personnel, I’m already busy by way of being the only healthy person not on vacation. (Whee.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if this keeps up, I’ll be hard put not to ask for a raise.

ROTK review soon. I promise.