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What is pond scum?

It's one of those things where you can't really define it, but “I know it when I see it.”

When a university's credit union is sold off to a corporation, and this corporation later sends a commercial solicitation which is designed to imitate the university's employee benefits mailings (though the credit union no longer has any connection to the university), well, I feel pretty sure that's pond scum.

I guess I'm looking for another bank here soon.

Wednesday morning I backed out of the garage and noticed a notice taped to my front door — Code Violation, Remove that downed tree branch.

This was the first I'd heard of a downed tree branch so I looked around and sure enough my Russian olive tree had split at the base and a huge branch was down in the road. Someone had shoved it to the side so cars could go by, but it was still in the way.

I went off to work and asked around for references for a tree service, since I had about 12 days to get it removed before fines started kicking in.

But when I came home, ready to start dialing up tree services, the downed branch was gone. Poof!

I knew we had a little bit of a bunny rabbit problem, but I've never seen a beaver dam in the neighborhood.

“Welcome to the Museum of the History of Computer Torture.

“This model is one of the original, armless roll-abouts. Its curved bottom was designed to maximize the divergence from the actual shape of every possible human buttocks. Listen to the lovely creaking noises that the unpadded back makes. It almost makes you believe it will snap off and impale you, should you dare to recline.

“And over here is the Swedish Blue. Said to resemble slightly the comfortable Captain's chair from the original Star Trek's alternative universe, this model claims to have been padded on both seat bottom and back. (Clonk, clonk.) It sounds more like cheap lumber, doesn't it?

“If you will all come back this way...”

I think I really need to throw out some of my older computer chairs.

This needs to be back dated to October of 2008, because that's when these events unfolded.

I was sitting in the Programmers' Meeting at work. We had covered old business and were going around the table bringing up our new business. I'd had my turn early and my new business had prompted a bit of a discussion. We wrapped it up finally and went on to the next person.

We reached an old friend of mine in the group. He started off with, “Did you just say, ‘Half of one, six dozen of the other?’”

SCORE!

Some moments in life are just too precious.

Now I have to find some way to start working in the phrase, “Running around like a chicken with its legs cut off.”

Konnichiwa. It's really too bad that I'm so lousy with languages, because I do like to study them. I can generally learn the grammers pretty well, but despite having a decent vocabulary in English, I don't seem to be skilled at picking up basic vocabulary in other languages.

Guten Tag. It may be due to a quirk in my personality. I don't like to appear unconfident, particularly if I have been studying hard and feel as if I ought to be further along.

Bonan tagon. So I end up being reluctant to do exactly the sort of drilling that I need — actually talking with someone else in the language I'm supposed to be learning.

Bonjour. That's what leads me to be able to recognize many more languages than the few that I can stumblingly ask for the time of day.

But I'm fluent in American war movie German. And my sister took high school French. And I've seen one movie in Esperanto. And I've read through lesson 3 Japanese.