Flotsam

According to my highly sophisticated temperature detection system, which involves stepping outside and timing how long it takes me to crumple, whimpering, to the ground, it is now 215 degrees Fahrenheit. Obviously the only sensible thing to do on a day like this is to stay home with the lights off drinking iced tea in a hammock in front of the air conditioner (preferably naked), but we have entered the season of mandatory overtime at work, so I am stuck at my desk for the foreseeable future. Ah well. We don’t have a hammock anyway.
After waking up this morning feeling hot and unpleasantly moist, I thought back to my honeymoon, and came to the conclusion that I would like to have a house with a pool. I added it to my list, right between “Maid” and “Magical automatic pie-baking oven.” I haven’t made much progress on this list, believe it or not, though I was able to cross off “Dishwasher” (a sort of precursor to “Maid,” I tell myself), and despite all the talk about money not buying happiness, let me tell you that a nicer apartment does indeed act as a powerful mood elevator, and I see no reason my mood would not be even better with a personal chef and a masseuse. It is all very well and good to insist that the best things in life are free, but my research has not entirely supported that hypothesis. While I managed to procure “The love of a good man” without substantial financial outlay, I am counting rather heavily on money for “Baby.” Other things that have substantially improved my quality of life and were purchased with cold, hard cash:

1. Food processor
2. Ativan
3. Lobster ravioli in saffron cream sauce
4. Victoria’s Secret wireless IPEX bra

So there. Snap my suspenders and call me Michael Douglas, but I am fond of money. Perhaps if I get to the point where I have enough of it that I don’t have to check my bank balance before buying a cookie, the allure will not be so great.

Last night I finally finished Harry Potter while Scott glared pointedly at the unpacked boxes all around me. (That’s right, we’re still not finished unpacking. WHAT’S IT TO YOU?) I am congenitally unable to let a story unfold without understanding every detail, reference, and allusion, so as I read book seven I referred back to the other six books, sometimes rereading whole chapters at a time. Scott already finds the Harry Potter phenomenon mock-worthy in the extreme, so this sort of meta-nerdiness nearly sent him over the edge. I finally retreated into the kitchen where my periodic exclamations of “Oh MY!” or “Oh dear!” or “This doesn’t look good at ALL!” were muffled enough to avoid comment. Mostly.

Does anyone else watch Psych? It can be a little uneven, but the season two premiere was hilarious. “A curious cocktail of inbreeding and type-II diabetes” has jumped to the top of the Most Uttered Phrases list in our house. And speaking of television, we got new cable when we moved, and ever since then I have been convinced that the color was off. It was fine when we watched DVDs, but otherwise it just looked…wrong. “It looks like the seventies” was the most specific I could get, and there was quite a bit of bickering for a while as I insisted that something was amiss and Scott foolishly tried to convince me that things looked just the way they always had. Which, please: I think I would have noticed if everything on television looked like one of the filmstrips we used to watch in elementary school.
Well, after one particular vicious bit of sniping, I stormed over to the box and started fiddling with things only to find that Ta DA! one of the color cables is faulty, and if you move it a certain way and prop it there, suddenly the picture returns to normal, and the seventies recede into the past where they belong. I felt vindicated and a little disoriented, actually, because it turns out that everything that had been appearing green on screen is actually blue.
My god, I can’t believe I just wrote a whole paragraph about television color. Don’t you wish I’d go back to talking about my ovaries?