The house is reasonably clean. That is, the living room doesn’t have any dog hair balls. But now self notices that the hardwood floor is badly in need of refurbishing. And the house plants by the window facing the street look a little peaked.
Instead of cleaning further, self will water (Later, when it cools down a bit). And then she will do laundry.
Self did a couple of errands, which took her to Menlo Park (Guy Plumbing & Fixtures, El Camino Real; the dry-cleaner’s), then to Sequoia Station in Redwood City, where she:
- Looked up Yasmina Reza’s novels in Barnes & Noble: nope, they don’t carry any of them (Self knows of two)
- Went to Safeway and bought a bag of mesquite charcoal briquets in preparation for next week’s visit of sole fruit of her loins (She also bought four huge avocados: $5 for 4. Self loves these, mashed with evaporated milk and drizzled with sugar. BTW, there goes self’s diet!)
Self discovered that Safeway no longer stocks The New York Times. This presents a small problem because now she will have to get her Times from either: a) Starbucks, and they only carry about five copies a day: If self doesn’t go early enough in the morning, they are usually sold out; or b) Whole Foods, which she has avoided like the plague since getting back from Bacolod, because the cake display is right by the entrance (!!!@@##)
Well, self does make it to Whole Foods. She believes she deserves a pat on the back for restricting herself to buying only one small dessert (fruit tart), which she is saving for the husband.
And then she opens the Times, and in short order discovers the following:
- The name of Michelle Obama’s initiative to counter childhood obesity is “Let’s Move.” The whole country is very admiring of how slender the Obama girls are, and we are constantly reminded of this by Mrs. Obama’s emphasis on how unhealthy fat kids are. Not to mention: un-attractive. Self speaks from personal experience because she was once a Fat Kid herself. And she had no dates in high school. Though that may have more to do with the “nerd” factor than with her weight.
- The Kurds, according to an article by J. Michael Kennedy (p. A6), “are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state.”
Here are the countries featured in the rest of the “International News”: China (missing persons; a British national dying in Chongqing under suspicious circumstances), Palestine, and Egypt.
Self is mighty interested in the case of the dead British national. His body was cremated before post-mortem, his friends described him as a “light” drinker (even though Chinese authorities attributed his death to “excessive alcohol consumption”), and the prime suspect is a local politician’s wife, who the British national had inadvertently angered by – – – doing what, exactly? Self reads almost to the last paragraph, and she never discovers what the British guy did to make the wife of the local Chinese official so angry, angry enough to want to murder him.
And then there is an article about the trial of the Norwegian mass murderer. Thankfully, this doesn’t show him raising his fist in some kind of Nazi-like salute, which self finds extremely sickening. In some photos, he is even smirking. But she has only the utmost respect for the Norwegians, who did not “tighten up” their security restrictions in the aftermath of the tragedy, even though the number of murder victims (77) is horrifically large, particularly for a country whose entire population is only 5 million.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 