In which we provide the punchline here to help you out: "Mr. Schwartzkopf."

I just got two pieces of junk mail, the first with the subject line Anti-Aging, and the second with the subject line Burial Insurance. Tough choice which one to open first.

Also Feedly is down, suffering a DDoS attack. Sigh. RSS is my lifeblood, or at least it’s the blood I chew on (that doesn’t sound right) when I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing, like working. And work is sucky because I have not read anything usable all week, which is very frustrating. At least one of the books was good, just not for us. Not that I can spend much time with such an animal, but it does help a little. Add to this that today was the second of three in a series of root canal sessions, and you’ve pretty much got my life in a nutshell.

I went to the school yesterday because of some new finance system everyone has to learn, and in a shocker of shockers, it turns out that 95% of the whole thing is irrelevant. We will have to handle candy table sales differently in the future, though, I think, because the school has to pay sales tax to the state. Yeah, I know. There may be a loophole, if we only sell certain things. I’ll see. Anyhow, the people running the meeting were imports from some company that has nothing to do with the Sailors specifically, so when I talked to them about what I do, they looked at me as if I had just landed from Mars. Which, being in Speech and Debate, is a look I have long ago gotten used to. I did get the chance to catch up with Kathy S, our speech coach. Neither of us is sanguine about getting access to the Middle School for recruiting purposes in the next couple of last school weeks, but that’s par for the course. And kids who have joined the team over the years regularly report that, if there was MS recruiting, it was never the reason they had showed up. So though one wants it, one can live without it.

For those who were wondering, the Lexwegian job comes with the Palmer curse. This is good news, of course. He clarified it on FB. And if you don’t know what I mean by the Palmer curse, remind me not to swap old jokes with you any time soon.

I ran into my Nostrum fan at Jake on Saturday, by the way. There may be more than just the one, but he’s the only one I’m aware of at the moment. For those who are wondering, other than him, that is, I’m up to about 120 of the 170 or so in Series 1. I’m still targeting September, although admittedly, I need to get on the stick a little bit. The thing is, when I read an episode that depends entirely on, say, the vagaries of dial-up, I get distracted by, first, how old all this stuff is, and second, how it doesn’t really seem all that long ago. Last night I heard some techies prognosticating that 5 years from now we won’t recognize today, tech-wise. Probably true. 15 years ago? We had barely emerged from the primordial tech ooze.