- I was cleaning my apartment and found a receipt from
1999.
Whaaat?
That was six apartments ago!
How…?
- Driving on the 80/580 I saw that up ahead
traffic was veering around a large piece of roadkill.
When I got closer I saw that the dead creature was a vulture.
Physician, heal thyself
- Every so often I will get home from work after the stores have closed
and discover that I have no vegetables in my fridge and therefore have to
make something really simple like spaghetti with parmesan and pepper or
with garlic and olive oil.
These meals are often better than the ones that involve spending
45 minutes making a complicated sauce.
- Speaking of food, the ninth season of Masterchef Australia finished up this
month; the winner was my fifth‐ or sixth‐favorite out of
24, so I guess it worked out reasonably
well.
For a while I kept up with the #masterchefau tag on Twitter because there
were a few people making funny jokes along the way, but those jokes were
buried among the usual 140 Characters
Hate.
The bottomless venom directed at Tamara for the crime of being cheerful
and getting a lot of screen time was disheartening.
Really, Oglaf pretty much captured how I feel every time I read a Twitter
thread:
- This month’s Australian dessert: lamingtons!
I was looking forward to this one, because while I had never had a
lamington before, they looked like the sort of thing I would be into:
cake, often with a stripe of jam running down the middle, coated in
chocolate and dusted with coconut.
And… maybe I just made a bad batch, but eating these was like
tucking into a pack of Hostess Sno Balls.
The judges and guest chefs on Masterchef Australia are
constantly going on about how food can transport you to another time and
place, and these lamingtons sure did the trick: they transported me back
to when I was ten years old and concluding my dismal school lunch by
eating a dessert made of space‐age polymers.
Anyway, here they are:
- Lunch comes to $8.49.
I pay $20.49 so I won’t get any coins back.
Cashier: “Oh no! I put in $200.49 instead of $20.49! What do I do?”
Co‐worker: “It doesn’t matter—just give the right change and it’ll still balance.”
Cashier: “But I don’t know the right change! The screen doesn’t say!”
Co‐worker: “You put in an extra zero, right? So just knock a zero off it.”
Cashier: “But it says $192! There is no zero!”
Me: “The change is $12.”
Cashier: “I can’t go by you—I need something official! Does anyone have a phone?”
A smartphone is found and only with a digital screen assuring the cashier that $20.49 minus $8.49 is indeed $12 do I get my change
- OCD symptom of the month: Every time I give someone my business card I
am seized with paranoia that I have written personal notes to myself on
the back of it and have now potentially embarrassed myself.
So far as I can remember I have never written embarrassing personal notes
to myself on the back of a business card, but I keep thinking that maybe I
did and just forgot.
- So this month I took the CBEST again as part of my application for a teaching credential and so I could rack up some more hours as a substitute (another requirement for the application). Once I received the email certifying that I had passed, I went straight to the web site for my local school district to apply to be a sub… only to be reminded that, whoops, there was the intermediate step of getting an emergency credential. I looked at what all was involved in that, and despaired at all the hoops left to jump through: three letters of recommendation, transcripts from every school I ever had attended, etc., etc. Then I noticed that there was a renewal link. And I had held an emergency certificate back in the ’90s… but that was before this web site even existed. Would it have my records on file? I figured it was worth a shot. So I entered my SSN and my birthdate, clicked the Submit button—and up popped the reply: ADAM CADRE, 771 STILLWATER LANE, ANAHEIM CA 92807. Gadzooks! So after updating my address from, again, six residences ago, and submitting the renewal fee, it looks like I have at least a couple fewer hoops to jump through. Good job, archivists!
