Monday, February 05, 2001

Worked all weekend on the site, cleaning up linkrot. A very nice reader named Dan George scoured the site for me and sent me a huge list of broken links, which saved me approximately ten years of time. Thank you, Dan.

Being unemployed gives you so much time to catch up on chores and errands. Who knew I had so many chores and errands? For instance, I finally sent out our Christmas cards this weekend, though it is now the beginning of February. This is probably some atrocious breach of etiquette that would make Miss Manners shoot milk out of her nose at a formal banquet, but I did it. I'm not ashamed. Just unemployed.

Also: our kitchen is constantly spotless. The moment a tortilla chip or spoonful of yogurt falls from the counter, my hand shoots out and silently snatches it up before it hits the ground, like Chow Yun Fat in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I am the ninja of tidiness. I am Crouching Taco, Hidden Dannon.

So Jade and I made little Christmas cakes for our relatives, to send out with the cards. Jade dropped some cake crumbs on the floor while wrapping the cakes, and I immediately sprang into action, doing some complex and beautiful acrobatics with a broom and dustpan, but was unable to get to the crumbs in time. "My clean floor!" I yelled, and chased her across the rooftops in our neighborhood, flying from house to house with the aid of a portable vacuum cleaner strapped to my back.

What is it that possesses us to take ownership of a floor after we have cleaned it? Jade soils it, and suddenly the floor is mine. Hey, wasn't it exceedingly generous of me to let my wife walk on the floor, which belongs to me? Perhaps next time we get in a fight, I will revoke her right to walk on the floor. "I forbid you to walk on my floor!" I will shout, commanding her to traverse throughout the house using grappling hooks and wires. Perhaps she would respond by claiming ownership of the room's oxygen content. Via Zug.com