The Thing That

Tomorrow is our department's holiday potluck party. For some reason it's from 2-4pm. This means I have to bring lunch, which I'll eat at noon, then somehow find the appetite to eat a couple hours later. Well, if you know me you know the appetite thing won't be too hard but it still seems silly. Anyway...any ideas about what I should bring? It needs to be something I can put in my knapsack and take on my bike - assuming I've fixed my friggin' flat. Preferably cheap and easy to make.

Cycling home from work yesterday I got my third flat tire in about as many months. This time it was a big, fat screw that poked through the inner tube and out the other side. I put off fixing it until I was good and tired. By now I've got the tire patching thing down. Spoons, bucket of water, rubber cement - yeah, I'm a pro now. The holes were so big I didn't even need the water to find them. Slopped on three big patches. Put the tube and the tire back on the bike. Pumped it up. Heard the unmistakable sound of air rushing out. Swore a lot. Went back to square one and repatched it. Pumped it up. Seemed promising but I figured I'd check again in the morning. And wouldn't you know it, today it was flat as the proverbial pancake. So I walked to work.

I used to like walking. Now it feels incredibly slow. I guess I should buy another inner tube.

Judging from the comments, more people are interested in ziplock bags than in Howard Dean. This may not bode well for the Democrats in '04. Unless maybe they draft the Man from Glad to run. Remember him? Albino-ish freak in a white suit who pitched sandwich bags to a grateful nation? Whatever happened to that guy? Clearly he doesn't live in California or you know he would have run for governor.

Well, so much for Howard Dean's chances.

This one falls under the category of strange coincidences that may portend death.

On Saturday it was a beautiful day, so I was determined to stay indoors, at least until nightfall. When the mail finally arrived there was a new DVD from Netflix - The Opposite of Sex, which I'd never bothered to see. I sat down to watch it in the early afternoon while MDM puttered in her office. At one point in the film, Christina Ricci steals the ashes of her half-brother's lover from an urn and holds them for ransom in a ziplock bag.

Flash forward a few hours. It's now 9pm and MDM was off having dinner/drinks with Graubarian. I decided to watch another DVD, something from our library collection. The Shipping News seemed like perfect crap to pass the time until it was ready to go to Charlie's party. It was. But how odd was this: early in the film, Judi Dench steals the ashes of her half-brother from an urn, and keeps them in a ziplock bag.