My Pho never comes with a cream puff.

mine either. But, I left tonight stuffed to the gills and spent $15. Happy.

Gah. Grueling week. Not over.

Project 1: My coworker spent the last 20 minutes of today ripping apart the thing thing I'd spent all of the past two days working on. And now I think I forgot to bring that thing home with me to do what's needed this weekend. Getting this project ready to submit on Monday is going to be a

Project 1 B: Client asked for pt. 2 to follow three days after pt. 1 - usually we have a couple of weeks. Have to have it done early because of crazy meetings next week. Forgot about it altogether until about an hour ago.

Project 2: Short timeline. Extra short timeline because, while on a conference call at like 10 pm, I promised some material to people earlier than I meant to - fucked up the time zones. They're in Singapore, so saying I'll have it to them Monday really means Sunday.

Project 3: I'm sure there's a project three. I just can't think what it is right now.

Project 4: Profit! Drink.

Random Reading Report:

I'm currently whiling away my tedious commutes with Beautiful Jim Key, which could maybe be a touch more crisply written and carefully edited, but is just a vast amount of lovely wondrous fun anyway (the true story of the great equine late-Victorian celebrity, a stunningly gorgeous "educated" Arabian-Hambletonian who could spell, count, tell jokes, and run a cash register). And I'm currently in love with the description of the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition of 1897, at which Beautiful Jim Key made his professional debut.

Specifically, I long to visit the Exposition's primary entertainment area, Vanity Fair:

There were the gondolas to be ridden, a flight up in the sky for several hundred feet in Barnard's Airship, the nearly naked belly-dancing coochee-coochee girls of the Streets of Cairo, Italian immersion at the Blue Grotto (modeled after the Isle of Capri), rides on camels named Alibaba and Yankee Doodle, sword-playing tumblers, clowns on stilts, magicians, the Cuban and Chinese villages,the Moorish Palace, the Café of Night and Morning, inspired by Dante's Inferno (where restaurant tables were made from coffins), and food and drink to be sampled from a dozen different ethnic cuisines.

If MM and Gud ever get their acts together and finalize those time machines, I'm totally proposing Vanity Fair as our next F2F site.

What is carambola??

Wow, I've had plenty, from my own tree, but didn't know the real name. And here I thought I was going to get through the day without learning something new.

Don't know if I have had pho. Have passed on many a cream puff because not my thing.

See, Laura gets it.

That is ingenious, meara.

I will add this to my list of reasons to visit Seattle.

That week is too hard, brenda. I think project 4 may need to be interspersed with the other projects for retention of sanity.

Bad fiction contest winners: [link]

This is the "Vile Puns" winner:

I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized -- he was killing me softly with his sarong.

This one (in the "Purple Prose" category) is good:

She had curves that just wouldn't quit, like on one of those car commercials where a stunt driver slides a sexy new sports car around hairpin turn after hairpin turn while some poor musician, down on his luck and having been forced to sell out his dream of superstardom for a lousy 30-second ad jingle, sings "Zoom, zoom, zoom" in the background.

I have a lot of research to do to figure out if I can afford to work at a place like USC, though. I'm unsure of the pay range for administrative staffers.

One thing about USC is excellent benefits. Another thing is that I would be able to have lunch with you once in a while.

ita, there is yummy--and cheap!--pho in your old neighb on SM Blvd. Mmm, now I want pho, except my body is having some weird water-retention thing going on and I suspect it may be the won ton soup I had yesterday.

the sick did not leave overnight. shocking. so I am still a giant snot monster, the throat is sore and the glands at the very back of jaw kinda under my ears are sore as hell - I think this means infection. I have flushed the sinuses - ugh - and taken both cold medicine and expectorant and am sucking down the nast zinc losenges since they make the throat tolerable. in 20 min I have to head out to the Y, I am dreading outside. Working out while mac is in class is right out, so I guess I'll take a book, but I bet I fall asleep.