Thursday, August 16, 2012

Happy Birthday, Ms. Jones! + Miscellaneous

Today is Diana Wynne Jones's birthday. I suggest you celebrate by reading - Archer's Goon, say. Or Drowned Ammet, which does some things in the plot and character interrelations that'd make Dickens gasp in admiration for the way she makes none of it feel at all contrived.

Speaking of birthdays - the older I get, the less I want to pick up the phone. This bugs me. For instance, since our Paypal and Amazon accounts were set up by Damon, I need to protect us from confusion and potential legal and financial difficulties by getting a separate e-mail account to anchor my business use of those companies. The simplest thing to do is pick up the phone and ask our internet provider what the easiest way to do that is. But I keep putting it off.

And, a house-repair mystery: In the mud and powder rooms downstairs, we have developed two sets of absolutely straight, parallel seams of paint bubbling. It looks like a bad tape and float job along the borders of a drywall panel. But when the workman took the paint off, he revealed no tape and no abutting panels, but an amazingly straight and consistent crack in the drywall. He suggested that the crack and the paint bubbling were due to a leak; but the plumber finds no trace of such a thing.

So what the heck have the Borrowers been doing in my walls to create this effect?

I have concluded that real life exists to keep us from being too productive.

2 comments:

  1. You could just sign up for a gmail account. Or Hotmail. Or one of the others.

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  2. Yeah, I wound up with g-mail. It can just use the blog password and stuff, so it was simple. And I didn't have to pick up the phone.

    It still bugs me that I've gotten like that. In soul-sucking day job days, I was a great phoner. In temp jobs, when a difficult phone job had to be made, the other temps would gang up on me to do it "because you sound like a supervisor." It must have been part of my work persona, discarded unnoticed when I shed the useless baggage.

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