Multiple Departments Department

So my mom made it home safely.
I have to admit, I felt kind of guilty when I left her at the airport, as though I were abandoning her, but of course I couldn’t go any further than the security checkpoint.
Though we didn’t do anything terribly exciting or touristy while she was here, she had a good time anyway, being content simply to be here and to have the opportunity to meet my friends.
Sunday we went out to West Virginia to Charles Town Races and Slots. We watched a horse race, but didn’t bet on it.
We went out there again yesterday evening for a few hours, though we both would have been better off if we’d left right after we ate, as we were both up at that point.
But oh well.
After bringing her to the airport I went in to work. My password was expiring last week and I forgot to change it before I left, so I wasn’t able to access my mail from home. I was kind of dreading what might be in my inbox.
With only 91 pieces of mail – and two voicemails on my phone – I was actually somewhat pleasantly surprised. I’d expected a lot more.
I spent about an hour and a half there before heading to Ashburn for a dental check-up. On my way into the dentist’s office, I did my random cell phone check and found that it was not in its case. As I hadn’t heard it fall anywhere, I assumed that it had come out in the car, and went in for my check-up and cleaning (“You’re doing a great job of taking care of what you still have,” my dentist told me.).
Before checking the car for my phone, I checked the area where I’d walked and didn’t see it. When I couldn’t find it in my car, I hoped that it had fallen out at work.
Nope.
At that point I decided that maybe I’d neglected to take it with me in the first place, and so, fearing that something had gone wrong with her flight and my mother was leaving frantic voicemail messages for me, I drove home to see if it was there.
Nope.
At that point I took my home phone out to the car and called my cell, hoping that maybe it had fallen into some sort of cranny and that I’d be able to locate it.
Someone answered.
It seems it had fallen out of the case on my walk from the car to the dentist’s office – on the grass, which is why I didn’t hear it – and the person who answered had just found it.
Per my request, he brought it into my dentist’s office, where I picked it up on my way back to work.
So, to Jim Clark, wherever and whoever you are, my thanks and are now officially on my (very short) List of People Who Don’t Suck.
With all of the quick trips to and from work, today was rather expensive, as most of the trips, in the interest of speed, involved taking the Greenway.
Once back at work, it took under a half hour to settle back into the routine, though I did have difficulty adjusting my head to the notion that today is Wednesday and not Monday.
On Sunday night after my mom and I got back from the racetrack – the place quite possibly had more slot machines than any one place I’ve ever been to, even in Atlantic City – Kathleen took us out to dinner for my birthday.
She asked our waitress if they did anything special for birthdays. The waitress replied, “Ice cream,” then, after asking whose birthday it was, turned to me and said, “And we sing! So there!”
And they did.
The song they sang included a line about hoping that all my wishes come true.
Let’s just say that they were lucky that my wishes almost never come true.
I’d ordered a shake with my meal, so with the complimentary sundae, I was kind of ice creamed out.
Despite my antipathy towards the singing, I couldn’t help but feel a bit cheated when I heard them doing a much more involved and elaborate performance for someone else’s birthday.
I took the balloons that they gave me home, with the intention of taking a picture, but I neglected to do so that night, and by morning they were no longer lighter than air, simply languishing on the floor in the kitchen, so I didn’t bother.
I should have sent them to balloon heaven instead of taking them home.
(The other day I was in the parking lot at Giant when two kids lost their grips on the balloons they had, and one of them, a boy, as the mother said, began “making a scene” about the loss. She then said, “The balloons are gone to heaven.” The slightly less upset girl said to the crying boy, “Balloon heaven.”)

The Case For A New Case Department:
Sometime after I bought my cell phone, I bought a fancy aluminum case for it. Besides looking sharp, the case was durable, and provided protection for the screen as well as the body, all while leaving the various buttons accessible.
There were, however, two problems with it.
For one, it would frequently come loose from the belt clip and fall to the ground, which is why it was a good thing it was so durable.
However, the second problem couldn’t be addressed by mere durability, as the latch on the case would, at the slightest touch, pop open and eject the phone.
After it betrayed me for the last time, I decided to replace it with something cheaper and less prone to popping open and falling off my belt. However, the problem with that case – as was evident today – was that it was simply a sleeve that the phone slid into and which remained open at the top.
With the swiveling clip, this meant that, like today, the case would sometimes turn upside down, or at least sufficiently close to upside down, and let the phone slide out.
I looked at some other cases online, but decided that I didn’t want to have to wait for shipping, so, given that it was new comics day and Best Buy lies between the comic shop and home, I went in and looked for a case that could meet two criteria: it would have some kind of latch so that it was closed on all sides and would have a belt clip that does not swivel.
In surprisingly short order, I found just such a case.

I Remember Doing The BLT Warp Department:
At lunch time today I ordered a BLT wrap. When I got back to my desk and sat down to eat it, I noticed that it had the words “BLT Warp” written on the wrapper, or should I say warper?



It made me wonder if a BLT Warp is like a time warp, only with a smokier flavor.
Scott pointed out that it has been posited that putting bacon bits on bacon could very well allow you to travel through time, so it seems like a definite possibility.

I Once Could See, But Now Have Blinds Department:
Yesterday I had an appointment with a friend of Kathleen’s who does window treatments, and ended up dropping a pretty penny – in fact, 133,000 pretty pennies – on some new custom blinds for my living room, office, and bedroom. Somewhere along the line I’ll get new blinds and additional window treatments for the rest of the house, but as a start it made sense to me to have it done in the rooms I spend most of my time in.

A Taste Of Home Department:
One of the birthday presents I neglected to mention is the case of Baroni’s spaghetti sauce that my mom gave me. It may not be the best spaghetti sauce in the world – though it could very well be the greasiest – but it is very good, and is what I grew up on. So, since it’s unavailable out here (although I could order it), it was a good present, as it will be the basis for many a pan of lasagna.
My mom also provided a taste of home in the form of a dozen pasties.
Pasties – pronounced passed-dees, and not at all useful for providing minimal coverage for somewhat bashful strippers in the way that their homonym paste-ees are – are a sort of meat and vegetable pie and are a Cornish dish brought to the Upper Peninsula by immigrant miners and later heartily adopted by the Finnish population. They’re pretty much a staple of Yooper cuisine.
I’m honestly not as crazy about pasties as some of my Yooper brethren and sistren, but they are a convenient and filling meal, and my mom’s are much better than most, so, while she was here, I figured I’d put her to work.
(For anyone who’s read Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods, pasties are what Shadow ate every day at the diner when he was staying in the town of Lakeside.)