Brittle Road

This is different. Another post just hours after the last one. And the third in two days. Maybe I'm getting back in the mood to blog, instead of diddle around on Facebook.

I woke up very early this morning, long before daybreak, but I let myself go back to sleep and didn't awaken again until 7 o'clock. After making a pot of coffee, getting last night's dishes in the dishwasher, and frying some turkey bacon, I saw down here to release my fingers of the words they stored. But almost immediately, I was interrupted by the sound of shuffling slippers; my wife had awoken. So, I took a break from blogging to halve a cataloupe, remove the seeds, pare the skin off, and slice it into bite-sized chunks. I'm eating mine now, the already-wonderful flavor improved with a dash of salt and some cracked pepper.

There's more work to be done at the office, but we agreed we'd relax here a bit before going back into the salt mines. Except on the actual days of the events, my staff never works weekends; there's something to be said for being an employee.

My wife announced yesterday that she wants to go to her high school reunion in September. She hasn't been to one in years and years, having missed the last two for one reason or another even after planning to go. So, sometime in September she'll wing her way to San Francisco for a few days with old friends. When she's away, I will indulge myself in some way, though I don't know how. There's really not much I want to do that I don't do now...nothing comes to mind. Except packing it in on a whim and hitting the road. And that's on the agenda in awhile.

For some odd reason, my coffee today tastes odd, like it has been flavored with something distinct, though I don't know what the flavor is. It's the same coffee I always buy, and I'm getting near the bottom of the pound of beans, so it's not new. Maybe it's the water, which is filtered, from the refrigerator door. Maybe I didn't grind it quite the same way I normally do. Maybe a serial poisoner broke in, unbeknownst to us, and poisoned my coffee. Maybe my taste buds were injured in a bad burger incident. Time will tell.

I did not wash my hair yesterday. I almost always wash my hair every day. I always have, for as long as I can remember. But I didn't yesterday because of sometime my wife told me about hearing on NPR (she washes every other day, sometimes less frequently). The NPR piece claims washing the hair too frequently is bad because it removes a beneficial oil, called sebum. The reason frequent-washers don't like to skip a day is that the oil glands compensate for frequent washing by producing too much oil. According to this NPR piece, European wash their hair half as often as Americans. And until shortly after the turn of the century in the early 1900s, Americans did not wash but once a month, on average.

I read an article in the Globe and Mail this morning that echoes my sentiments about greed and who among us helped create the current economic nightmare. I like the way the article begins:

As we examine the entrails of Wall Street's still rotting corpse, it doesn't take the gifts of an augur to foretell our postcrash future. It will, at least temporarily, be one of asceticism. Conspicuous consumption is the new smoking. Wealth, and the desire for it, have become character flaws.

OK, I'm done for now. I'll be searching for my own character flaws (not hard to find) and attempting to correct them (a much more difficult task).