home...improvement?

A few entertaining things for this Friday afternoon...

I like my landlord and all, but every now and then she amuses me. On Wednesday night I got a call from her telling me that Tom, the handyman, would be stopping by this weekend to install shower doors. To install WHAT?! Shower doors. I'm not quite sure what this means, but I'm guessing something like this...except not quite so nice-looking.

There's nothing wrong with getting us shower doors (although I'm not sure how they're going to work with the one shower that has a window that intersects the place where the shower curtain currently is...), but it's just so...random! And I must say that the first thing that came to my mind when the landlord told me was "Could I please exchange the shower doors for a new window that actually closes and seals and locks because sometimes I get scared that it's going to rain and snow inside the house or someone is going to open that window and climb inside?" Or "Would Tom please look at our dryer first, because it's been broken for 2 weeks?" But I didn't say those things, and to be fair my landlady doesn't have any idea about those two items because we haven't brought them up. It's one of those situations where the wonderful American habit of complaining about the problem all the time makes it seem like it's obvious to everybody, even people who aren't in the house, what the problem is.

Hm, on second thought, that wasn't really so funny. Sorry.

This isn't super funny either, but I'm tryin':
At about 1:10p.m. (13:10 for those on 24-hour clocks) the fire alarm went off in my building at work. Grr... This happens quite often - probably one a month or so. Usually false alarms (or small, contained fires that would be better dealt with using, oh, maybe water - or a few minutes of waiting for the combustion source to be consumed). So all 500 or so of us emptied ourselves out onto the lawn and waited...and waited...and waited... It turned out that one of the steam pipes under the building burst and the steamfitters and facilities management people now needed to reroute the steam and figure out what to do to fix the problem. We ended up having to stay outside for at least an HOUR!! Ugh! Not the quick-fix false fire alarm we're used to.

That wasn't so funny (random, yes...!), but the fact that today is orientation day for all the new students to the Graduate School of Public Health was. These poor people step into their new surroundings only to be ordered out and told to sit outside! Some were pulled from their orientation lunches. :-( Some of the faculty finally decided that orientation needed to go on, so they gathered the new students from their departments together and started talking all about the ins and outs of the program - on the lawn. Poor students! Perhaps the most memorable orientation they've ever had!

Still not entertained? Visit Piled Higher and Deeper, especially if you are a graduate student. It's comics for and by grad studens, although they're pretty good even if you're not a student (I would assume). Comic number 20 is one of my favorites, answering a question I've always had about those fancy-schmancy calculators! Hope you enjoy!