Alien Spouse

ARG! Milk!

It's Thursday?  Really?  How the hell did that happen?  Babies really are the most incredible time drain, who knew? (I know that really everyone including myself and Doc C "knew" that but we didn't really know that, you know?)

Anyway...

Today Doc and I went for our initial check-up with our new doctor, who seems very nice and we both got flu shots whilst we were there.  Obviously we had to take Eva with us, because Edith and Nancy are really not stepping up to the task of baby sitting in quite the way one would hope.  I prefer to take a bottle of milk with us to this sort of thing, so that if Eva gets hungry she can eat immediately.  To keep the milk cool I like to use the coozy we got at the first Appalachian Rollergirl exhibition we went to see.

So useful! So cool! Love it!

The Proverbial Till.

I promise that I was only inside the Franklin Fountain long enough to order a ice cream sundae, have it made for me and then pay, before heading to the tables outside to eat it - So what's that? Probably less than ten minutes? Not long anyway, but it was thoroughly enjoyable to be in a place where there was so much to look at and admire for it's charming attention to detail.

Even the cash register was appealling - and inspired a short photo essay!

As you can see it's a gorgeous vintage till, with pressed tin sides and a big glass display for the prices - except the prices on the tabs have been removed, so instead when your total is rung up you get a proverb! The family standing a couple of people ahead of me in the queue got "Search Others for Virtue, Thyself for Vices".

The men in front of me (covered in tattoos and clearly both tough as nuts, but still in the mood for some ice cream with hot fudge sauce) got "A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned"

Mine was "Talk is Cheap Because Supply Exceeds Demand", which I quite like.

I also very much like the soda jerk uniform for the Fountain, although I feel bad about referring to them as "Soda Jerks" because everyone there was lovely despite a line of customers going out of the door meaning they really didn't have a second to even turn round between customers! Still, aren't the uniforms great? I particularly love the classic combination of the little hat and the bow tie.

My Coffee Knife's Former Life.

The reason I have a scalpel-like craft knife on my desk : It was unearthed during the clearing out of a retiring professor's office.

The reason an English professor had a scalpel-like craft knife in his office (along with many other very sharp things) : Unknown.

What I use the scalpel-like craft knife for : It's my Coffee Knife. I use it to enlarge the air hole on the disposable plastic lids of my take-away coffee or tea. In my experience with these lids the size of the sipping hole is uniformly fine, but the air hole (which is necessary to avoid creating a vacuum in the paper cup, thanks rudimentary knowledge of physics!) is often too small to be effective, and then each sip taken is far too much work. I used to use a paper clip for this task, but this is not ideal.

What the English professor used the scalpel-like craft knife for : Unknown, but then he also had half a dozen letter openers; perhaps years of working with paper makes you just want to slice it into little pieces?

My Point: None, other than I use that craft knife fairly often, and I always wonder about it.