Waiting for Gouda

The house in which the Lovely Wife™ and I were renting an apartment was recently put up for sale. As we do not have the approximate half-million dollars that is the asking price, it doesn’t seem that we can continue to live there. It turns out that Illinois law doesn’t allow the [...]

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It seems like only yesterday when, in the course of retrieving the usual pile of garbage that the inept tools at the US Postal Service so kindly thrust into my house every day, that I noticed a rather official looking envelope addressed to yours truly. It appeared to be from the Cook County Court [...]

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There is a small post-it note stuck on my computer monitor that says, simply, “Don’t Forget.” And while I have no idea to what this basic directive refers, I still think it is pretty good advice. I seem to recall a time when there was something that I never wanted to forget, some [...]

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I remember the winter of ’86 like it was just a decade ago. I had just turned twelve years old and was able to look back over the last ten years of my life as I made the transition from reasonably cute little toddler to somewhat clumsy and awkward child to incredibly and [...]

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Escalators really are a trouble area for me. Well, not the escalators themselves, but rather ninety-nine percent of the people who I encounter on, near, or around escalators. This is something that I have discovered about myself relatively recently, as escalators were a rather rare experience for me in all the other places [...]

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My teeth have been slightly achy lately, and so I finally broke down and did what any respectable adult would do about it. I whined and cried and stomped my feet until some reached down and gave me a piece of Melba toast. Okay, actually, I went to the dentist. I was [...]

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I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned that one of my duties here at the front desk is to answer the telephone. Ha, I kid! Anyway, a lot of people in the business community apparently are so damned busy with very, very important work-type tasks that they cannot possibly free up either one of [...]

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One of my many duties here at the front desk is making travel arrangements for some members of the sales team who fly around the country, trying to get people to give us their money. In theory, this is a fairly simple procedure: they tell me where they want to go, I give them [...]

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No self-respecting citizen of our fair city wants anything to do with the strangers they might meet during the course of their day, whether it be at the supermarket, in the elevator, or especially, in that lower level of hell known as public transportation.
We don’t want to talk to you. We certainly do not [...]

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I had noticed that over the last couple of weeks a tiny little trickle of water would appear around the edge of the toilet. It was really just a tiny little bit. One of those things that, if you actually owned the house, you might be compelled to investigate further, to fix as [...]

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