I am so happy to be working in a neighborhood with food trucks, you all have NO IDEA

::sigh::

Ah, well, I have leftover sort-of-pasta carbonara for lunch. (I sauteed green beans with sausage and tossed that with the pasta before adding in the lemon-and-egg mixture. Yummy.)

That sounds dire, Conseula.

Yeah. I just don't see how it's going to work, frankly. Eeyore doesn't even want me doing the projects I've been hired to do: he wants me on other stuff. And although I keep bringing this up, nobody involved in the reorganization is willing to consider putting me anywhere else. Bah.

I can't figure out if it's worth replying to that email. ::sigh::

I'm beginning to wonder how long it is until Eeyore retires. He's not young.

People don't retire anymore, is my feeling. Which is sometimes too bad... Sounds like an impossible situation, Suela.

Yay msbelle!

Ugh, Suela, that sounds miserable. Is there anyone else above you who supports the project who you could talk to about the situation?

Yay msbelle! And yay Kathy and Cashmere for sharing their fantastic pictures!

Jessica's waffle is giving me lunch envy. My lunch is leftover homemade egg salad, which I was all excited to make, and then made several minor errors that resulted in it being just barely edible. But here I am, eating it. I'm proud at least that I made my own mayo, even if it's not that great.

WTF, Suela? That's just ridiculous. I can't believe they've been sitting on that project for 18 years!

Thanks for all the support, everyone! I knew I could count on some kind words here, because I didn't get them at my dad's yesterday. (I didn't expect much there, but I would have liked to have heard a "OMG, you look fantastic!" But, nada. Maybe they were afraid I'd be sensitive about it, I don't know, but I would have liked something.) When I looked at those pictures in the back of the camera, I really didn't see much of a difference from February's set. But, after I downloaded them and saw them on my computer monitor, I felt much better about them.

Speaking of food and lunches, the Chicago Tribune's food critic has a huge rave for Grant Achatz's (he of Alinea) new restaurant, Next. Sounds delicious, and impossible to get tickets (yes, tickets, not reservations).

I can't imagine doing that. Maybe I'm not sufficiently discriminating.

I wish I could afford to take full advantage of this restaurant trend. (I do plan to get to What Happens When at least once before it closes, but I would have loved to have tried all the menus!)

I can't believe they've been sitting on that project for 18 years!

Well, there were several attempts to get it done. But the great burden of my program is that while what I do is considered valuable, it has very little immediate return, so projects supporting it tend to get ranked low when it comes time to allocating funding. Other stuff is more urgent. But, yeah, 18 years. Kind of like to get it done.

And Kathy, I saw your pictures yesterday: congratulations on all the hard work! Brava!

Thanks!

And, a fun article on the true origins of the play Grease.

So, a few weeks ago I bought a new digital watch. I tried to figure out how to set it without reading the manual, but failed. Then I read the manual and I still don't know how to set it. I think they included the wrong manual, as they show a watch like mine that has four buttons, but my watch has no buttons.

This is the watch: Starck ph-1110

So far my google-fu has failed. Might have to call Fossil and/or the store I bought the watch from....

A contest for bad analogies: [link]

The first five winners, printed below, pocket £18 each; the rest get £10.

The state of the bathroom could only bring to mind the surface of a remote planet in which dungheaps and memphitic swamps co-existed with the entire toiletries and fragrances range of Galeries Lafayette.

The accountant had the world-weary air of a ferret that had been up so many trouser legs that life held no more surprises.

How to describe this novel? Picture it as The Aeniad meets Othello meets Moby Dick meets Peter Rabbit meets Mein Kampf meets the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus meets The Highway Code. In that ballpark, anyway.

His morals were as twisted as an expensive Sicilian corkscrew that had been used as a way of extracting the pith from a bad apple before being driven over by an Eddie Stobart truck.

She gazed at him as lovingly as if he were her ear-lobe, replete with a diamond-encrusted earring, as reflected in a Parisian mirror.

She spoke as throatily as if a frog and its family had got into her throat and smoked a few packets of Peter Stuyvesant before growing claws and scratching at the inside of her thorax.