Last night, before the school board meeting, I came home briefly, and found an Unholy Funk had taken up residence in the apartment.
It was a smell that I might remember from somewhere. It has elements of other smells, including burning machinery, a metallic smell and, well, feces. What it is, I can’t figure. The garbage has been taken out, the dishes, if not all 100 percent clean, don’t have anything that would produce a smell like that (especially after they were rinsed off as a result) and there’s no other obvious sources of the smell in the kitchen, and I’ve looked. The fact that the apartment apparently got pretty hot during the day yesterday didn’t help. (If you don’t glance at the weather icon on this page when you visit, it’s been over 100 more often than not recently, and it’s in the 90s until relatively late at night.)
I’m thinking now that there’s some gunk stuck in the sink drain below the disposal teeth. Of course, I have no idea how to test this theory or get rid of it if that’s the case. Yuck!
The funk appears to have been a culprit in the dairy family, hiding dried (hitherto unnoticed) on a dirty dish in the sink. All better now.
It’s the Summer of Babies around here.
My brother and his wife just brought the newest Yarbrough into the world this morning (afternoon in New York): Katherine Madison Yarbrough has arrived, a little early, but in good shape and eager to start networking and reading the Wall Street Journal. She was 7 1/2 inches pounds and 19.5 inches long.
Now, given the fact that Joel is the white sheep of the family, this puts my little brother forever in my power. Katherine can always get a gift of a drum kit (and not one of those wimpy electronic drum sets that can be silenced by plugging in a pair of earphones, either), she’ll want her ears pierced earlier than her parents will like and there will always be rock concerts.
I look forward to seeing her in September and congratulations to parents and child!
Things have clearly changed in New York City.
When I returned to America from Egypt, years ago, my brother met me at the airport. He asked me what I wanted to do first.
“Chinese, Italian and Mexican food.”
The first two were no problem in New York City. In fact, we took my suitcases directly to an Italian restaurant. And every block in Manhattan has a great Chinese restaurant, it seems, so that was sated quickly enough.
Mexican food, in the summer of 1995, proved to be a bit more tricky, if you weren’t interested in having Taco Bell. After weeks of looking, I was finally told about a burrito place in the village. I went with a friend, and we pulled up a pair of chairs, ordered some burritos, and prepared for bites of heaven.
Then I bit into … something.
“Excuse me,” I asked a waiter. “What’s this?”
“That?” The waiter brightened up, clearly proud of this. “That’s squash!”
Needless to say, it took leaving NYC and going to another city (Washington, DC, of all places) before I could find some decent Mexican food.
But that may all be changing, if this article in New York Magazine is any indication. Joel, plan on Taco Chulo this September. And if there’s any squash in those tacos, someone’s getting a smack.
Well, I picked up my new sunglasses on Wednesday evening before the city council meeting. I had eyestrain due to my eyes getting used to the first new prescription in years, but nothing too bad — it’s not a dramatically different prescription, but things do seem clearer.
OUT WITH THE OLD:
My old glasses are a pair of beat-up old Lancetti frames that I got in Egypt in the mid-1990s as my regular glasses, and they’ve been trying to spit out their screws and fall apart for years now. Jenn calls them “Harry Potter glasses,” which suggests that she and I have very different visions of Hogwarts when reading the novels. In any case, they weren’t meant to be sunglasses, don’t provide any protection from the sides, and other than having UV protection, aren’t much in the way of sunglasses at all.
IN WITH THE NEW:
In contrast, the new sunglasses, with fancy RÄ“vo frames, are curved around the sides of my face, have polarized lenses — which helps some, but is mostly just cool when looking at polarized windshields, cell phone and iPod screens — and strangely seem to make things brighter, not darker, when I put them on, thanks to a brownish tint. It’s like I’m wearing the Blue Blockers that used to be advertised on TV for so many years.
My new regular glasses will be available in a week or so, as the LensCrafters facility I went to can’t drill through lenses at that site, and had to send away for them to be made.
And yes, I need a haircut. It was also threatening to rain at the time the pictures were taken.
My eyes are exhausted right now. Apparently the perk of going to an actual optometrist with an office not in the mall is that you get a lot more tests done (and with only a $25 copay, thanks to my vision insurance from the Daily Press). So I had, in addition to the air-in-the-eyeball glaucoma test (which I secretly believe is just a way to screw with patients), I had vertical beams of light slid back and forth across my eyeballs, did the obligatory “is this better or this better” flippy lens selection, endless eyecharts at various distances and so on.
The upshot: My distance vision is actually getting better, although it’s not back to my early high school days, when I was better than 20/20. On the other hand, age is beginning to show its gray head: My eyes are beginning to show the deterioration that will eventually mean reading glasses for me.
Prescriptions never seem to be written in actual English, so instead of “left” and “right,” my eyeglasses prescription has “O.D.” and “O.S.” Maybe that’s Latin for “left” and “right.” My prescription:
O.D. spherical -0.50, O.D. cylindrical -0.25, O.D. axis 110
O.S. spherical -0.50, O.S. cylindrical -0.25, O.S. axis 080
If anyone knows what that actually means, tell me.
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