New flowers
To go with the new fuel pumps.
What kind are they? Orange.
Meanwhile, I’ll be replacing my fuel pumps
Captain OCD often surprises me with pretty little flower arrangements, most of the time just a few blooms in a tiny vase with a bit of ancillary greenery that wouldn’t have occurred to me to use. Usually they’re composed of flowers I don’t even know we have because he’ll take them from a hanging basket or a weed or a tree that I didn’t know had flowers, so they’re that much more of a pleasant surprise. He’ll go outside in the morning, sometimes with a flashlight, to find a flower he remembers seeing at the end of a clump of ornamental grass. His eye is what I wish mine were: organic and natural and creative. I try to do what he does and the result looks like something the dog might have tossed together while wearing boxing gloves.
Yesterday I came home to this on the bathroom counter:
Not till tonight did it occur to me that we don’t have any rose bushes. His sister, however, who lives next door and left for work before he did yesterday, does.
The reason I’m replacing my fuel pumps and not him? Because the same guy who composes beautiful flowers into such delicate, happy arrangements doesn’t see why one needs anything more than muscles, a pry bar, an adjustable wrench, and a ten-pound sledge to work on a car.
It’s the little things
My grandpa, a hard-working guy who always had a funny story or joke to share with everyone he came in contact with, used to say, “You have to carry your head around with you all day; you might as well make it as light as possible.” Or something like that, in a German accent.
Grandpa’s philosophy at work, from a guy behind the deli counter, several generations removed:
I’ll take it
This morning I got out of bed some time after dawn. While still in bed, Captain OCD told me to call C1 when I got up. Just as I walked out of the bedroom, I answered a call from a number and a happy voice I wasn’t sure I recognized:
Time to get out of bed, sleepyhead!
While C1 would not have been surprised to know that I hadn’t gotten up at the crack of 8:00, he is not likely to call me sleepyhead in an endearing tone. But how did this possible stranger know I’d just gotten up? Then:
Happy Birthday, sweetheart!
Now I was even more confused in my half-awoken state because C1’s birthday was a few days ago. A moment later when I realized that I probably didn’t know the caller, I told him that he must have the wrong number, but thanks all the same. He apologized over and over for bothering me, but I told him to please not be sorry because there are worse ways to begin the day than being called sweetheart by a stranger.
Proof that evil exists
This profile of Carl Icahn and his company-raiding ways is not from The Onion, but from Forbes “The Billionaires Issue”:
. . . saw the company as part beauty, part beast. The attraction was its rare-disease drug division: Therapies like Cerezyme (which treats Gaucher’s disease) were cheap to make ($3,000, he guesses, for a year’s worth) and expensive to buy ($300,000 for an annual dose); if patients didn’t take them, they’d die. Here was a perfect monopoly with margins likely on the order of 95%.
The ugly side of Genzyme [one would have thought there could not be an uglier side than what is represented in the preceding paragraph]: a jumble of noncore drugs, including less specialized oncology treatments, and surgical and diagnostics products with no connection to the lucrative rare-disease therapeutics.
Good to know: a “perfect monopoly” is one in which people die if they can’t play your very expensive game.
Bertoni, Steven. (2011, March 28). The Raider’s Radar: How does Carl Icahn choose his targets, then pounce? A rare look inside his head. Forbes, 110–116.
Shit my dad would have never said, but my husband does
Dad, your CD player is broken. The drawer won’t shut.
What’s that thing?
Your CD player.
Whose is it?
It’s yours. It’s broken.
We have a CD player?
This explains why all of my spontaneously generated electronic gadgets are rarely noticed. And why there’s no need for a data package on his cell phone line.