Can You Dig It?

I'd have written sooner, but I've been busy tunneling my way out of my new office. I've started digging through the floor under my desk with a coffee spoon from the kitchenette. (I return it each night because I'm sure the spoons have all been counted. It goes back looking a little less like a spoon and a little more like one of those miniature shovels 18th English squires used to use for snuff, but i've bought some snuff, and if I have to, I'll start taking it. It would be a good excuse to get away from my desk, too. I could go hang out with the smokers in front of the building on my snuff breaks.)

I've taken my cue from Clint Eastwood in "Escape from Alcatraz" and ordered an accordion to cover the growing hole. My only fear is that I'll be called upon to play it at some company function and be exposed as a fraud. On the other hand, I may just be exposed as a really bad accordion player, and rather than becoming suspicious, people will just pity me and applaud and buy my CD.

If I make it through my floor, of course, it will only get me to the floor below, and I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to dig a hole under somebody else's desk, but I figure I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

In the meantime, I have to attend a seminar on how to talk about my company in my free time. Apparently, bitching about being overworked and underpaid, speculating about how much each of your colleague's makes, and quoting promotional materials and laughing and laughing and laughing JUST ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH. I'm rusty, I worked for the People's News Agency for six years and they were so unconcerned about their corporate image, they let a retarded guy from a Communist weekly appear at press conferences all over Prague wearing a shoulderbag emblazoned with the People's News Agency logo.

Anyway, if I sound all gungho about my job the next time I write here it will either mean the pod people have got me... or I've been fired.

Care to lay any bets?

9:46 And I'm Outta Here

The pie is done. I think it will be edible, but the crust will not be the best. The freezer is almost usable (it had literally drifted in) and the bathtub is filled with snow we're considering forming into balls and throwing at the passers-by. (May have to pop back online to blog that, if it really happens).

I've turned off the BBC in favor of watching The Kids in the Hall, but the U.S. elections won't really be decided until dawn anyway, and what am I? The OECD? You want some election results? Daniel Ortega won in what the plummy-toned BBC announcers insist on calling "NicaragYOUah" (the capital of which is, apparently, "ManagYOUah.") It's like when George Forman won the world heavyweight title again in 2004 or whenever it was and I felt like I had actually traveled back in time...

Speaking of time, it's 9:53, and did I mention? I'M OUTTA HERE!

8:51 and All's as Well as Can Be Expected

I bought the wrong kind of flour. This is a terrible faux pas for a self-styled pie expert (putting the "I" in PIE!). I've gone ahead and made it anyway (it entered the oven at 8:48, I used the ensuing three minutes to double check the cooking time - 45 minutes - and make sure my ipod cable was free of telltale toothmarks - it was, in fact, the ipod is charged and I can get back to rendering myself prematurely hard-of-hearing tomorrow).

My eye in Okmulgee spotted my opening post and supplied a handy link for following the election returns: http://www.swingstateproject.com/frontPage.do. This is good, because the BBC has reverted to its usual programming and I've been listening to the Persian poets of Manchester (Birmingham? Damn, neither, actually, the city where they had the race riots five years ago. I'm clearly not at the top of my monitoring form tonight. I think it's the multitasking, I still have to clean the kitchen and the fridge defrosting is not exactly proceeding apace, although I believe I've discovered one of those frozen corpses left over from the Franklin Expedition

More to follow...

Live From the Home Office...

Greetings! I'm back! I stepped out for smokes and was gone for almost two months! Crazy, that, especially given that I don't smoke. Or perhaps not so crazy...

But enough of explanations! Tonight is not about explaining things. Tonight is about doing things. Many things. And live blogging the whole shebang.

Things I am doing tonight include:

Making a strawberry-apple pie. Never heard of one? Me either. But the rhubarb I froze last summer has come down with terminal frostbite and I wouldn't feed it to a pig, let alone my good friend John Lowe for whom the pie is being made. (You'll note I've made no effort to disguise his identity. That's because he only uses his computer to admire his own new site -- plonk.cz -- and he'll never see this. But just in case he does, JOHN I'M KIDDING! The site is actually vineyards.cz and it's where you should all go to buy wine. He'll deliver. He might even bring you smokes, which, I gotta tell ya, would have saved me some heartache.)

But anyway, besides making this pie, I am defrosting the refrigerator and recharging my ipod nano (which does require a certain amount of human intervention -- I have to keep the cats from chewing through my STEVE JOBS YOU OWE ME SIX HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-FIVE FREAKIN' CROWNS USB cable -- pictured above in all its deceptive simplicity) and monitoring the U.S. mid-term elections (via the BBC World Service) and cleaning the kitchen.

To find out how it all ends (I'm betting tears!) ... stay tuned!