Month: March 2011
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Oishii desu!
It’s not like Madison needs another restaurant, but we’re pretty happy that Umami opened on Willy Street anyway. We stopped there for dinner after work today and each slurped up a bowl of ramen the likes of which we’ve not enjoyed since we left Japan almost six years ago. We’ve tried ramen at a few… Read.
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Dickishness
My favorite language school story: As you may or may not know, I learned to speak, read and write Russian at the hands of some pretty ruthless teachers hired by the military to make me learn it or die trying. Or maybe it’s not entirely fair to call them “ruthless.” My teachers were pretty wonderful.… Read.
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Farnsworth
I remember only the very last part of the dream I had right before the alarm clock began to bleat: I was at a dirt-strip airfield waiting for a hop on a plane out of some little banana republic, and when it finally came and I climbed aboard I took one last look out the… Read.
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Cutting a rug
Did a little foxtrotting last night, a dance that turns out to be almost entirely different from the foxtrot we learned when we started taking lessons about a year ago. Turns out there are two versions of the same dance, our teacher says, a “slow foxtrot,” the step we learned originally, and a just plain… Read.
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Ride the Elephant
While I was out for my lunch-hour walk around the neighborhood, I stopped in at a local bakery to pick up an after-lunch snack and heard the gal behind the cash register, who was talking with the guy ahead of me, pass a disparaging remark about Republicans. I knew her from previous visits, so when… Read.
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Tractors. Cows. 14. A Monk.
My Darling B and I spent all day yesterday in downtown Madison and all we saw was a lousy two hundred thousand union supporters rallying around the capitol! Man, did we feel ripped off! We started off the day normally enough, washing up and heading into town to stock up our pantry with various and… Read.
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Mad Union
It’s hard not to sit down and start typing out some drivel without wanting to babble about what’s happening lately in Mad Town, so I might as well surrender to the urge. You must do what you feel is right, of course. My Darling B’s at an emergency meeting of her union as I type… Read.
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Don’t call me Shirley
There is surely some weird-ass shit going on in Madison tonight. You might’ve heard that the senate passed the part of the so-called budget repair bill, the part that does away with collective bargaining. I don’t know understand the legislative system well enough to know how they can pass part of a bill, or how… Read.
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Timber!
On my morning break I happened to look down at the palm of my hand while waiting for the microwave to boil water for a cup of tea and I noticed that there was an impressively large chunk of wood sticking out of the side of the pad at the base of my little finger.… Read.
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Clamp this!
Cleats! Millions of ’em! I’ve been gluing these little bastards to the benchwork all week long, five at a time, because I have ten two-inch C-clamps and that’s all. I could go buy more, but I’m such a cheapskate that I haven’t been able to bring myself to bust open my wallet and spend a… Read.
This Is Drivel 