Meet Frankie

 

I worked on campus today, and when I got home, Frankie was waiting for me.

When Travalon got home, he put Roy Jr. on Frankie's lap.

Frankie came with that name, but look at the eyes - she's a girl! So I am saying her name is Francesca and we just call her Frankie. She is a weighted stuffy, so she is supposed to help a person relax. I debated between her (she's a cat) and Quinn the Koala, but Travalon said Frankie was more original. A blue cat? She's almost the color of my old rabbit Cashmere.

I forgot to tell this crazy story: I ordered some books from Germany for a professor in December, and in early February it said they were finally going to arrive... and then it said they were lost. I requested replacements but they said we had to request a refund and reorder the books. We got the refund very quickly, I'll say that, but due to the exchange rate it was a lot less than we had originally paid. Then in mid-March the books arrived - was it the old order? the new one? Who can say? The books were all there... and so were three bags of tomato paste.

Good thing these didn't burst and get all over the books! The plot thickens, because this brand is made in Nigeria. What the heck? Did our box of books travel via Nigeria? One of our grad students said that her parents will send her packages from Germany, and sometimes stuff is missing, but weirder, sometimes stuff is added. She got one box with a really ugly necklace in it, and she sent a photo to her mom and said, "Thanks, but this isn't really my style," and her mom was like, "The heck? I didn't put that in there!" So apparently receiving packages from Germany is always an adventure.

Tonight Travalon and I went to Lola's because it was the last day they would have the pelmeni that he got on Mardi Gras that was so tasty. We each got an order of it, and then I did get a drink with gin and pear and lime that tasted like drinking a flower, and I even had a few bites of Travalon's blondie a la mode, so there went my Lenten resolution today. (The only one I hadn't broken yet - not eating sugar.) But oh my goodness, the food there is so good, and today was Motown Monday, so the DJ was playing excellent R&B and soul music. Tomorrow I will get back on the wagon. I wish I'd realized there was a bluegrass jam at the music club - that would have saved us some money and calories. It wasn't mentioned in the club newsletter, but they posted a video of it on social media. Hopefully they have another one sometime soon.

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Benton's Beatles Connection

 

Today I worked on campus again, but I felt more faded, like the lack of sleep caught up to me even though I thought I'd caught back up. I took a walk at lunch, but it was cold and drizzly, so I made it a little shorter than usual. However, I discovered a wonderful thing in the cantina in the next building: caffeinated chocolate bars! That helped me get through the rest of the workday, plus the Union meeting afterwards.

I forgot to mention that yesterday as my colleague and I walked on Library Mall at lunchtime, we saw a guy walking another guy on a leash. The guy being walked was walking on all fours and barking like a dog. My colleague asked me what that was about, but I was just as clueless as she was, even if I did grow up in this country.

Another thing I keep forgetting to mention is that the postcard that I sent from Bimini to the Work Gang arrived on Monday, while I was out chasing the eclipse. I had totally given up hope that it would ever arrive! Like the one Ma Hat got, it was postmarked 16 February, and hers arrived exactly a month later, but this one took almost two months. Did it go on its own vacation on the way to Madtown?

Part of the reason Travalon was happy to go to Benton to see the eclipse is because it has a Beatles connection: George Harrison's sister married a guy who lived in Benton and moved there herself, and George came to visit, so everywhere in town you see Beatles stuff. There was a little park off the town square with this commemorative sign:

There were vintage Beatles photos at one of the antiques shops, but they didn't appear to be for sale. And outside of town there is a big monument to the Beatles. So it was the perfect place for Travalon, besides being right in the center of the eclipse's path so that we saw maximum totality.

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Postcard Design Flaw

What a crazy day it has been. This morning I found out I got a raise over two weeks ago, so all this time I have been working for more money. That was a happy surprise! Then a bunch of postcards I sent out got returned to us, but they didn’t have any message on them like “insufficient postage” or “return to sender,” so I contacted the mailroom manager, who asked me to send a scan of the postcard front and back to him. This is what happened: it was a design flaw! Last year when the grad students designed this postcard (for a department Christmas party), they put the address of the party very high on the postcard, so when the automatic address machines at the post office looked for an address, starting from the bottom, the lowest one they found was the handwritten one on the back of the postcard, where we actually wanted it to go. This year the grad students designed the postcard with the address of the party in the lower part of the front of the card, as part of the design, but the automatic address machine didn’t know that was part of the design – it just found the lowest address on the postcard (it didn’t care which side it was on) and sent it to that address. So, in effect, we mailed a bunch of these postcards to ourselves because the party will be in our department. It’s too late to do anything about it now – the party is tonight – but had I known, I could have forewarned the grad students when they copied me on an email with the final design. Now I know for the future. And now you, my readers, also know about this hidden danger. The mailroom manager said we are not the only ones – one department got thousands of postcards mailed back to them for the same reason! If he sees this design flaw, he will contact us before mailing the postcards, but he was not in the mailroom the day ours got mailed. The biggest mystery is why only a fourth of these postcards came back. Will more trickle in? Did the grad student who handwrote the addresses write most of them lower on the postcard than the address in the design on the front? Or are they just lost in the mail?

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Strange Mail

The other day I got some strange things in the mail, including a request for money from an organization directly opposed to my beliefs, and a small plastic statue of Obama that says “Hoax” on his shirt with the O from his “Hope” campaign. Why I should receive either of these things are beyond me, but the request for money came with a postage-paid envelope, so I sent them the statue. Let them pay the postage for such a heavy piece of mail. Maybe this will get me off their mailing list.

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'Tis the Season for Free Junk in the Mail

It's that time of year again, between Labor Day and December 25th, when we should all be thinking about what to get our loved ones for Christmas. And just in time for the holidays, my officemate and I received a very special catalog in the mail: the 2008 Apoptosis Catalog. For all those hard-to-shop-for people on your list, why not get them some cellular self-destruction? For some reason we found this so funny that we laughed until we could hardly breathe. Not that cellular suicide is a laughing matter, and this catalog actually has useful products for the lab, but the timing just struck us as hilarious.

Just when the hilarity couldn't seem to ensue any higher, the next day we received a very useful thing in the mail: a new Department Chair. (We work at a medical school which truly is seeking a new department chair.) The quarter is to give some perspective; I scanned the chair for the enjoyment of all four (welcome, EM!) faithful Famous Hat readers. Some drug company sent us a tiny squeezy rubber stress couch, or chair, or actually maybe more of a love seat since it would only seat two people, if they were about five inches tall. Why anyone would need something like this is beyond our ability to comprehend, but it does have handy holes, one on each arm, for holding pens.

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