Bits and Pieces

A few humorous anecdotes to turn up the corners of your mouth.

We don't celebrate Halloween, so I'm always trying to come up with tactful but humorous ways to express my lack of Halloweenity to all the people who ask. Today on the bus, one of the young gentlemen asked what I was going to dress as for Halloween. I thought for a moment before replying, "A bus driver!"

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Have you been wondering what happened to Elsie, the adorable calico kitten that I got to hold before Tina? I left the poor baby wailing in the darkness with only food to comfort her, since Jack had said absoLUTEly no more cats. When he got home that night, I showed him the blog post, including the photo Devon took of me holding Elsie.

"You mean you can HOLD her??? Pick her up? Well, go get her and bring her in!!!" She has been inseparable from the house since then. She does have the naughty habit of going to the bathroom in my FLOWER POTS, which makes my eyebrows turn down alarmingly. So today I gave her a litterbox filled with potting soil. So far she has snubbed it, so Tiggy suggested planting some basil in it. Dat little girl is a smart cookie!

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Damon had a report due this week, from his field trip to Medicine Lake. (A brief digression: if you have not read the early blog posts, Medicine Lake is a wildlife refuge. This time of year it's a birdwatcher's wonderland, since our part of the country is where the western and eastern flyways intersect. It's even on the birding.com top 200 birdwatching spots in North America.) He decided to do it the hard way, to "save time". Of course.

He could have painstakingly re-typed his final draft. It might have even taken him several hours. Instead, he decided to use Windows Voice Recognition/Speech to Text software. And he got done in a fraction of the time it takes an elephant to reach full gestation. See, he would say what he wanted his report to read, and the speech to text program would recognize his voice and translate it into nearly every word in the English language besides what he actually said.

His Waterloo arrived in the form of the innocuous sentence, "The cooks made us sandwiches." The program just couldn't wrap its little binaries around the word "sandwiches". After 20 or so tries, Damon had improved it to read, "The cooks made us pan with sheep." After a jillionty more tries, he finally gave up after it read "sand" and "witches".

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Tonight's final storylet is brought to you courtesy of Potto. I have mentioned to friends that Potto and a home office don't mix well. Today was the best example of that I have seen yet.

First thing this morning, Jack was on a business call before he even started to get dressed. With bare legs, he sat there, chatting along. "Well, that way won't work, but I have some ideas for how we can OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ~stop it!!!~ fix it for you anyway."

The sudden, deafening, high-pitched cry of pain would have given famed soprano Jenny Lind a run for her money. The Swedish Nightingale, and the Native American Morningshriek.

Potto, neglected and abandoned and alone, had crept up near those alluring bare legs. No one, no one at all, would pay any attention to him, and he is very small. Finally, he sprang into a daring leap, both front paws catching and holding on the top of Jack's thigh. There he hung, hind legs dangling like a wind sock in the doldrums, until I dove to his rescue.

No, Pottoes and home offices do not belong together. Not at all.

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