I think of my mother as really nice, but surprisingly formidable. Not nuts at all. I'm not sure what to make of fleaMom's suggestion.

My suspicion is she still feels guilty about the divorce, and the kids' resulting distant relationships (though in fact those are my father's fault and not the fault of the divorce - we lived with him 3 months a year until age 18).

Or, you know, she could be nuts, which has other points backing it up.

So we sent a client some new progams and SQL scripts, etc. The client called and said the script was erroring. My boss spent an hour trying to figure out what was wrong. I came over, and after ten seconds of looking at the script made a guess what the problem was. My boss dismissed my guess, but it turned out to be right. Yay team me!

Oh, I love moments like that, tommyrot. (Rare though they are for me.)

[link]

The more the men talked up "Crash" and its wizardry with interlocking plots about race, the less exciting this year's Oscar celebration came to seem. Serious movie people trying to inject themselves into that glorious narcissist's bacchanal just doesn't work. It's better to cede the laurels to the sexiest spray-tanned people alive; it's their night.

Touche, New York Times.

I love that David Carr is all over the Oscars. I love David Carr!

I would like them to remember that when I say "regular tea latte in a large cup" I want extra space not extra milk, but other than that...back off the familiarity.

Lately, I usually order a grande (can we call a medium a medium, please?) Earl Grey tea, with two teabags, only steep one of them, please.

At least 50% of the time, I have to explain what "steep" means. At least 50% of the rest of the time I have to stop the person from putting the second teabag in the water because, while they didn't understand the word "steep," they were good with that and required no clarification.

Ugh, flea. That sounds messy and complicated and really the kind of thing your mom should have just thought about and never actually said (I do feel oddly protective of the name Toby, as it's the name of one of my most beloved cats, but your history with the name sounds infinitely more complicated and less beloving). That's really an email your mom really should have written and just never sent. Not sure which is worse, that she sent it at all or that she sent it to all three of you.

ICompletelyON, Stephen Colbert was brilliant as usual last night. "Those cowboys sure admired each other's pistols!" Slashtastically delicious.

Quite often, I tell them to put the teabag in the cup first, and then the water, which they then proceed to completely ignore.

Quite often, I tell them to put the teabag in the cup first, and then the water, which they then proceed to completely ignore.

Talk about living dangerously. People take their tea seriously. Somebody could lose an arm that way.