I’ve seen enough cockroaches lately. Big ones, small ones, with wings, without wings, dead, alive, in various cities. I don’t want to see any of them. Especially not near my toothbrush. To that end, I have finally come up with a fly swatter that will work on cockroaches:
patent pending (not)
There’s also a 40-pounder for you people below the Mason-Dixon line.
Goodnight people.
Technorati Tags: cockroach, flyswatter
I updated the image at the top right of my blog to be more in line with how I look/dress. I gave up on wearing the name tag. It was annoying and, while interesting, the effect wasn’t profound, so I stopped wearing it. I also made sure that the image has sideburns and I fixed the hat to look like mine. I also tweaked the glasses to look more like mine. If you don’t often look at the front page, the image is here:
Oh, and that’s a powerbook under my arm. It actually had the Apple logo, but it’s hidden by my arm.
Technorati Tags: author, avatar, powerbook, puppy, south park
I’m back in St.Louis, but not for long. I’m going to Nashville on Thursday, then returning Saturday. I leave for Mandeville once more the following Thursday or Friday.
In the mean time, there’s a ton of work to be done.
I’m pretty tired today because of the drive. I came home to an apparently-empty apartment, a messy kitchen, a lack of dishes and an empty fish bowl. Alan Hodgkin (the fish, not the scientist) had snuffed it during my absence. This was actually expected. He seemed days away from it when I left. He lived for about a year and a half, and survived five weeks alone in the lab during Katrina. I felt really bad about that — I thought he’d be dead in three weeks. He looked so pathetic when he got here. Anyway, he’s gone now. He was my buddy at my desk in the lab, and he’ll be missed.
I’m in the middle of reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and it’s due at the Wash U library next week, so I’d better get cracking on it before bed.
Tomorrow – work like it’s going out of style.
technorati tags: work, betta, St.Louis, Mandeville, Louisiana, Missouri, driving, fish, death
Ah, Chai. It means ‘Tea’, and so using the word chai (Wikipedia def) to refer to a particular type of tea feels a bit confused. It’s derived from the Chinese word ? (cha). I just noticed that’s in the Wikipedia entry, but believe it or not, I knew that from my year of Mandarin Chinese classes. Whatever. Generally it’s used in the US to refer to an East Indian style of spiced tea latte, which has gained popularity in about the last five to ten years. As you may recall, I made a post or two a while back about a favorite Indian tea shop of mine, Indonique, located on Magazine Street in New Orleans.
Unfortunately, due to Hurricane Katrina, the café is not currently open, and I haven’t been able to go in for my fix. However, the shop is still operating via the web, and I ordered some masala chai and some lung ching green tea from the site. Due to a UPS snafu (something that’s becoming more and more familiar to me lately), they don’t have any lung ching in stock right now, so they sent me some white monkey (after checking with me) instead. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.
I’m drinking the Masali Chai, and my have I missed it. It’s as wonderful as I remembered, though not quite as sweet as they made it in the café. I went easy on the sugar. If you like tea, especially if you like chai, I strongly encourage you to place an order with Indonique. The café was a great part of Uptown New Orleans, they do good clean business, and I hope to see them back in a storefront in the near future. Additionally, Indonique is now donating 10-20% of the purchase price for most teas to various charities, so not only do you get great tea, but you support various charitable groups by purchasing from them.
Finally, if you’d like to subscribe, Indonique has a blog. There’s something wrong with the theme on the blog at the moment, but he has a bunch of pictures of damage from Chalmette. I’ve been trying to get the owner to blog about the various types of tea and such, but so far to no avail.
technorati tags: tea, masala chai, chai, indonique, new orleans, charity, katrina, hurricane katrina
I’ve left New Orleans, and just finished catching up on blog posts and email here in my parents’ house in Mandeville.
New Orleans was fun, and it felt good to be back there for a while. I’m looking forward to returning soon. I was going to leave first thing in the morning for St.Louis tomorrow, but I’m pretty tired and I’d like to do some laundry and stuff before going back, so I’m going to leave Sunday morning instead. That brings me back in time to start work Monday. I’m also going to do some work here tomorrow.
Some of you may recall the little fiasco I had with my FedEx package a few weeks ago. After calling the manager of the regional distribution center, I finally got an answer. It had been delievered to the Quadrangle Housing office. Noone from Quadrangle had called me, and I had no way of knowing that “COME PICK UP” as written on the door tag referred to that office. There were a few failures of communication there, but at least the package was safe, and I finally received it.
There’s a whole new situation brewing with Amazon.com and some things I ordered, but I’m going to wait until the shit hits the fan before I try to sort that mess out. I’ve already called Amazon.com only to be told conflicting things by people with various heavy accents over their english, and I anticipate it will be a bit easier once they get some red flags internally saying that they’ve screwed up.
I don’t have stats for you today. I’m going to estimate that stuff tomorrow. Lack of internet and structure in New Orleans have derailed my logging a bit.
technorati tags: Amazon, Amazon.com, FedEx, New Orleans, Quadrangle Housing, wustll, Wash U