Our carpet was replaced! Hurray!

I feel bad for the basement boys, it stinks of new carpet down there right now, and they are mostly underground so they don't even have windows to open. _

_

I took Sam out right before the weather started getting bad again and stood there and said "is the sky green? Or is it just twilight?"

I suspect it wasn't tornado green. There is no wind, just lots of rain, and lightning lighting up the sky. _

Also worth noting, the Kindle panic is why I was wary of getting a Kindle. The frequency with which I lose things is alarming. (I always find things again, although sometimes it takes several months of going "why aren't you under the bed?! Come back missing book!"

But, if you lose a book, it tends to not cost a fortune to replace. Kindles are expensive. _

My Kindle has gone missing. I mean, I have looked for it for about ten minutes this morning, but it's not on my desk, which is where I was sure it was. I feel all antsy and nervous, like I don't have anything to read. (I do have things to read. I can't find my Kindle because after I finished a lent ebook of Abandon, I have been only reading things made out of real paper, and I have several hundred pages left in The Once and Future King.) I'm sure it's around, everything is around somewhere, but I am out of sorts. _

Last night, my garbage disposal stopped working. And it made the sink drain slowly, and poorly. I checked the circuit breaker, and nothing was tripped, so then I checked Google for tips on how to deal with this. And I fixed it! I am so proud of myself. I am so incredibly non-handy, I make other people hang curtain rods for me (they fall down when I try to do it myself, often with a loud bang in the middle of the night.) I mean, all I did was press a reset button. But! It is fixed! I did it!

I should email the landlord again, let him know that it's taken care of. _

Poppies!

_

Marshmallow experiment of the day: replace the water with orange blossom water. I thought about using rose water, but decided to do that sometime when Julia is around.

The lady at Whole Foods was very curious about the orange blossom water. "What is it? What do you do with it?" Me: "Well, I've had it in perfume, and I've had it in cocktails. So I'm going to put it in candy and see how it turns out."

(Also, the Whole Foods in Central has orange blossom water and rose water. Somewhere. I was looking for water chestnuts and stumbled upon those first.) _

My newest bag of sugar proudly announces that it is "Now carbon free!"

I'm not really sure what this means. Does sugar usually have carbon? Is carbon a bad thing in food? Or is this like "Atkins friendly water"? _

My office: it might make you Jewish. _

In a meeting this morning

person x: As we move away from the shore.

me: I'm sorry, did you just say "move away from the shore?"

someone else: You know, like if we're in a boat and we're taking off.

me: Oh! The shore! Not some Yiddish word I've never heard before. _

At some point in early April, there was a giant rain storm, and our basement leaked. Our finished basement, with carpeting and two bedrooms. (Not mine. I am up a floor, and have hardwood.) Our landlord was heading out of town for the week and said he'd come look at it when he got back. I am vaguely sure he never actually came over, since he said he would be over during the days my office was closed for Passover and I was skulking around the house knitting, watching TV, baking peanut butter bread (not nearly as exciting as I'd hoped), and not actually reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. But he agreed to recarpet, and to try to fix things up outside to prevent further leakage.

Home Depot was supposed to come by tomorrow to remove the old, moldy carpet, and install nice new carpet. But, apparently they are all backed up because of the horrible weather in Boston. They are going to be here next week. I'm annoyed, and I'm amazed at how ridiculously patient the basement boys are. (I guess Subhash has been out of the coutry for basically all of May, so that would probably help a lot.)

It also means that the other things we have asked him about, like replacing the old washer and dryer in our unit that sound like a flying bomb with the things I found in his storage area that look nice and new and energy efficient, and getting the rotting boards and poison ivy out of our back yard have gotten pushed to the back burner of things to ask him to deal with after he has made the basement a pleasant place to live. _

I think one of the things I love best about Twitter is that occasionally things will happen like "Zombie Apocolypse" will be one of the top national trends. _

When I was in fourth grade, there were four Jasons in my class. In my classroom class, there were more Jasons in the other fourth grade classroom. I don't know anyone named Jason anymore. Was it not actually a popular name for boys my age? _

If you type "difference between" into Google, one of the first things it guesses you are looking for is "difference between affect and effect."

Which is what I was looking up. I am _

Katherine asked me once, recently, if I could live in the fashion of one era, what would it be.

I've decided. I want to live in the fashion of a Nero Wolfe episode, a sort of mash-up of all the prettiest bits of the 30's-50's.

(Guess what I watched tonight. It's really a very hard guess.) _

It's not often that I am so completely brain dead that I don't even have the willpower to make pasta. But, tonight...I now have pizza on the way. YAY, pizza. _

Watching the presidental address last night, when he started talking about how they'd been working on the mission to get Osama for a week, I was sitting there thinking of the brouhaha with the birth certificate and the Press Correspondants' Dinner (at least, I'm assuming that is what it was) and Obama making fun of Trump and showing bits of The Lion King as his official birth video. I wonder if the birth certificate was released last week to distract any potential news about Pakistan and Osama, but I was thinking "my god, this man has a poker face. I can't imagine going out in front of everyone and joking, I would have been wanting to sit at home, drumming my fingernails and waiting for the phone to ring."

Anyway. That is all. I don't have fully formed thoughts about this in anyway. The celebrations make me extremely nervous, and I suspect it will be like the hydra, removing the head won't actually do much. _

Because of some mixture of lime juice, corn syrup replacement (1 c sugar, 1/4 c water per cup of corn syrup) and some of the gelatin apparenly deciding to sit at the bottom of the kitchen aid bowl instead of mixing in with the rest of the mixture, my experimenta lime-ginger marshmallows are much stickier than my marshmallows usually are. But also, absolutely delicious. _

Last night, at Krysta's, I concluded my incredibly long search for ink like Sabine's in Gryphon and Sabine. We'd talked about it briefly, that I was looking for it forever, and then she had the books on her bookshelf and I said there! Let's look! She pulled it out, and then said "wait, I think this is just Pelikan brown" and came back out with a bottle.

Yup. Pelikan brown it is. Maybe if I had tried Pelikan's brown a decade ago when Noah had said "I think maybe it's brown" instead of the other random browns that I got my hands on, I wouldn't have been on this quest for so long. _