a wolf angel is not a good angel

I am coming down with a cold. My throat hurts and my head is getting achier by the moment. And tonight I need to go to my sister’s graduation ceremony, then quickly do laundry and pack — I forgot to wash bras and bathing suits! Will they dry by tomorrow morning? Do they have a choice? Can I get to the library tonight?

At least tomorrow I will have a lovely 5 hour car ride during which I can begin to catch up on sleep. And then a few days of ocean and summer festivals in New England.

This morning, I was patting Sammy and I noticed something horrible.

No collar!

Is it because he feels emasculated by the sweet pink colour of his collar?

But he’s already *been* emasculated. And pink looks really good with dark grey.

I was supposed to go out to see improv tonight, but, alas, it didn’t work. Oddly, I was tired all day and uninterested in going; when it turned out I couldn’t (plumbing issue chez my friend), I was disappointed.

I have been entirely convinced that an undivided coownership is a bad idea, though, what with a story of fights about whether the top floor apartment should pay more for fixing a roof than the first floor (I guess the first floor would pay more for a foundation? Stupid), and then lots of rain recently and, hey, water damage, let’s all go to court! Plus the way higher interest rates.

Maybe I will go to sleep now.

I love when things get decided for/without me. For instance, place I have been thinking about for a while now has an offer, which is higher than I’d've been willing to go, and lower than the owners are willing to go. So I can cross it off my list! Either they will accept something more than I would spend, in which case, good for them, or they won’t, in which case, maybe they’ll be willing to go lower in a few months. Or whatever.

Now I can just drift along, waiting for something, without putting much more effort in beyond “looking at the houses that show up on my alerts service”. I still feel vaguely guilty about how much time I’m taking to get nowhere, but so it goes.

I really really really need a vacation.

I finally got home, which is nice. I’m very tired, so I quit working, since I was being too slow to be useful. But I can’t go to bed, because it’s my littlest sister’s graduation dance tonight (she’s starting high school next year, already), and I promised her I would see her new hair. (Incidentally, jo(e), my mother says she was pretty much the only girl there in running shoes and not sandals, though she was in the minority in wearing a skirt instead of jeans.)

I made the dessert which I had wanted to make the other day, but we were out of sweetened condensed milk. This is possibly the least healthy dessert I make; it’s certainly the sweetest. For reasons I no longer entirely recall, I call it Kamchatka Gold. Baking relaxes me, makes me happy.

Of course, my other sister decided she had to come in and talk to me. And fairly early on, she said “You don’t want to talk?” and though I think it was mostly her being snarky (how could I not want to talk to her! whenever she wants! even if I’m doing something else!), I said something like no, or later. And then she KEPT ON TALKING. And then when I continued not to be talking to her, she got angry at me. In my usual calm manner, I yelled back at her and have I mentioned how little I am interested in the one drive from Maine where it will be just the two of us in the car?

My lovely squares are cooling now, so I am going to have chocolate and milk, then my sister will be home and I will be able to go to sleep.

Whee! How joyously not!

On the other hand, I get to feel zero guilt about leaving at 3 on Thursday. Maybe I’ll feel zero guilt about leaving earlier than that.

Do you love to do chores?
Do you find happiness in cooking great foodstuffs for others?
Do you have rich, beautiful friends?

If so, why not consider moving in with us??

2 students looking for a roomate on B– St., large 5 1/2 with a nice view of the Dunkin Donuts. 320$ monthly per person, hot water and heating included. Available July 1 or earlier.

That’s right, heating. Because it’s just never hot enough. Karla Homolka welcomed. No smoking.

It took me almost two hours to get to work today. I got to the metro, it went one station and . . . stopped. First you wait a bit: sometimes it only stops briefly. And you wait more. And more. Then they turn off the power to the metro — they don’t say anything, but the lights go off and everything goes quiet — and usually that’s when you give up and file out.

So, out I go: I’m a few blocks away from the bus that will take me downtown. And I wait and wait, with a zillion people: we just missed the bus, and it’s only every 25 minutes or so. I can’t make it onto the next bus; it’s too full. I get onto a bus eventually, but since the two main metro lines are shut, everyone wants to get on the same bus, so it stops at every stop, and waits a bit for people to fight their ways on and off. Sometimes no one wants to get off, and the bus glides past the stop entirely: the looks on people’s faces is annoyed, until they see how full the buses are. Then it’s shock, and a little horror: will *I* make it on? Most of the people go in through the back, since the front is always more crowded.

In the bus, though, people are in surprisingly good moods, given the close quarters and heat.

On the plus side, it means my Monday will be a remarkably short workday.

Jeff at Quid Nomen Illius? points me to OxBlog’s fisking of that idiotic article about law students going into debt for caffeine: it’s like heroin, only much cheaper and legal, or something.

Beyond those arguments, I was also amused by the idea that without the horrors of 3$ lattes, students wouldn’t spend any money whatsoever on anything frivolous (or coffee beans and milk and electricity at home: anyone want to estimate the cost of the same latte at home? I don’t feel like bothering, but how about some of the mathematicians in the house?).

What world do all these people who are arguing against these things live in where they don’t have any small luxuries at all? If I budget, for argument’s sake, 200$/month in random small crap, and half of it goes to coffee instead of whatever luxuries they prefer (alcohol? expensive perfume? cigarettes? extra gas and insurance for your big-ass SUV?), what does it matter? But of course, only their own small luxuries are acceptable ones: if you’re at all short on money, you should never ever have anything nice.

Update: everyone’s making fun of this! Some highlights:

What about laundry? Perhaps students, instead of wasting money on machines, could just get a washboard and do their clothes in the kitchen sink. That’d save more money. (Murphies: NB: I know lots of people who brewed their own beer in school.)

Suppose they didn’t buy the coffee and, because they were less than perfectly alert, they failed their classes. They would still owe a lot of money right? (Less whatever they spent on lattes, assuming they didn’t just substitute some other expensive habit.) Only by passing the classes they are more fit to pay off the student loans. (Antigravitas)

Because the premise, in brief, is that law students who incur debts of over $100,000 to complete their degree do not realize the true cost of their Starbucks “addiction” over this time, a habit that presumably is spiraling out of control. (Ahab’s Whale)

Lots of people agree with my contention that Starbucks does not make very good coffee, so you should go elsewhere for your fix.

Denial is proof there’s a problem: clearly, this frontpage article was *important*.