I see your cunning plan

Geekman, via text message: "Do you want some coffee and cake?"

Me, "What sort of cake?"

Geekman, "Actually, I don't have any cake."

Me, "That's okay. I'll just have coffee. Shall I come over to your office?"

Geekman, "Yes. Can you bring some cake?"

Win-win

Geekman, while I am massaging his feet: "This is a win-win situation!"

Me: "I don't think that word means what you think it means."

Geekman, waves one foot: "Win." Then the other. "WIN."

Random bullets of 'If I don't blog in bullets I probably won't bother at all'

• Geekman's new deodorant has a scent I have christened 'feral citrus'. (If you'd like to hire me for your marketing department, just shoot me an email.)
• Actually, you should probably hire Geekman for your marketing department too. I can't get his marketing slogan for Super Cheap Auto* out of my head: 'More better faster. (Cheaper)'.
• The advantage of there being no part time teaching budget whatsoever this year is that I don't get to have to, you know, like, teach. So I can feel superior to all the poor sods currently stressing about enrollment numbers and syllabi and "learning management systems" and best practice and shit. (Plus, it means I'm available for your marketing department. Feral citrus: remember.)
• Also, I don't need to teach because I totally have other options. Like, four of them. And they each pay quite a lot a pittance that is slightly higher than what teaching would have. And only one is boring and unrelated to linguistics.
• Totally not at all even a little bit connected to that last point: I have finally worked out why, while I was editing a collected papers volume last year for the last four fucking years, senior academics would chide me and tell me it wasn't so hard really and I must be doing something wrong. It's because said senior academics, when they "edit" a volume do so by hiring someone like me to actually do the, you know, EDITING. And formatting. And hassling of contributors. It turns out it IS quite easy to edit a volume if all it involves is managing research assistants and the occasional phone call to the publisher.
• I can't even pronounce 'Obamabilia'.

• Hmmm... what else? It rained a little bit today. And Geekman and I took the afternoon off to eat doughnuts, drink coffee, and do a jigsaw puzzle.**
• The End.

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* A company name that I swear we did not make up even though it totally sounds like we did.

** Which is not a euphemism, but given the context, it sounds as though it should be.

Weather watching: ur doing it rong.

Me: "Look at that rain!"
Geekman: "Yes, I'm watching it on the rain radar."
Me: "I'm watching it OUT THE WINDOW."

***

Geekman: "Are you ready to go for that walk yet?"
Me: "It's still raining!"
Geekman: "Not really. The rain radar says it has basically stopped."
Me: "The window says otherwise, but if you think it's clearing, we could go in a few minutes."

***

We're outside. It's raining on our heads. That is to say, I have an umbrella and appropriate clothing. Geekman is wearing a t-shirt and shorts and getting soggy. He keeps pretending he wants to cuddle, but really he's trying to steal my umbrella.

Me: "The rain radar says you don't need an umbrella."
Geekman: "I don't. It's practically stopped."

The rain increases in intensity.

Me: "Let's just go back to the house."
Geekman: "Good plan. We could stop there briefly on the way to the rest of our walk."
Me: "See, you DO want to get an umbrella and a raincoat."
Geekman: "No, I just need to check to see whether the rain is clearing yet."
Me: "It's not!" (Drip, drip, splash.)
Geekman (sighs): "On the RADAR."

Clearly we have different definitions of 'formality'

Geekman: I think my talk at [conference] went pretty well. But I'm worried that it was maybe too informal.

Me: Informal talks are great! I much prefer to listen to someone talking about their research like a real live person than someone standing stiffly behind a lectern and reading off a script.

Geekman: Maybe... but all the same, next time I think I might wear shoes.

At least this way I can imagine it was a charity I actually support

Me: "I just talked to my mother. She said she didn't know what to get me for Christmas and kind of ran out of time, so she donated some money to a charity instead. But she's forgotten which one."

Geekman: "It's the thought that counts... The problem is, she doesn't think."

Geekman the Romantic

"I missed you while I was at my conference."

"I'm surprised you had time to miss me."

"Why?"

"Well, you were so busy, and all your friends were there."

"But you're a different class of friend."

"I'm classy."

"You're the thief class."

"What???"

"You steal bits of me... Like my heart."

Social networking: ur doin it rong.

Geekman enters the room. Cackles. "Someone else has tried to friend me! That will show them!"

"Have you ever thought that you might want to accept a friend request now and again rather than just hanging out in your own corner of Facebook all by yourself?"

"But it's so much fun watching them queuing up for my attention. And being DENIED!"

One begins to wonder what the point of a lock-up garage is.

Me: "Goddammit! The bastards broke into our car again.*"
Geekman (showing an astonishing lack of observation): "How can you tell?"

I point at the window right in front of him that has been smashed in, and then the little door that covers the petrol cap—except that technically I'm NOT pointing at the door that covers the petrol cap, since it is missing.

Geekman: "Oh, right."

We giggle. Because we are deranged.

Geekman: "It's funny. I'm not even mad this time. Just resigned."
Me: "Yeah, me too. It's like, that's just what happens to our car."

We resignedly inspect the car for further damage, and find that the lock to the boot also no longer functions. Nothing's been stolen. It would appear that the morons removed the petrol cap door without actually stealing the petrol (despite a full tank). They tried and failed to get into the car through the boot (obviously not registering that the front passenger door no longer even HAS a lock thanks to the last break in). And then they smashed a window, but didn't take anything.

They did, however, thoughtfully leave the lock from the petrol door thingy sitting on the back seat, just in case we need it for later.

I briefly consider starting a museum of all the loot car thieves have left us (current count: two pairs of scissors, a screwdriver, some paper towels, and a lock).

Me: "Do you think we should still take the car to the gym, even with the broken window?"
Geekman: "Why not? If someone steals it, at least we won't have to pay for repairs."
Me: "But you know how we were going to pick up the case of beer left in your department?**"
Geekman: "Yeah, let's do that after the gym, not before."

Because clearly it doesn't matter if someone steals our CAR, as long as we still have a case of beer. You see, then we can drink until the pain of being carless goes away, right? The logic is flawless.

I'm going to spend the afternoon making a sign to put in the car window that says, "Please don't break into this car (you bastards). There is nothing worth stealing inside, and we are not insured."

That'll work, right?

____________

* When searching to find this earlier post to link to, I googled StyleyGeek + broke into our car. Google helpfully suggested, "Did you mean: StyleyGeek broke into your car?" For the record, I would like to state that StyleyGeek has not broken into ANYONE'S car. Thank you.

** The case of beer was left over from a physics department LAN party on Friday night. I think this means we have now joined the inner geek circle. Geekman in particular seemed proud of his mastery of the 1337 lingo, as demonstrated by the glee on his face when, with a look of concentration, he looked up from his computer and tried out phrases like, "I fragged your dudes!" and "Pwned, noobs!"

Expect the unexpected

Yesterday we had our final counselling appointment for egg donation. This one was a half-hour session each for each couple (Rob and Claudia together, then Geekman and me together), followed by half an hour with all four of us.

The counsellor's Topic of the Day (aka "I couldn't think of any real issues") was "anticipate unanticipated problems".

We pointed out that, by definition, the unanticipated was not something you can anticipate, but apparently this wasn't good enough. The counsellor posed some made-up scenarios and asked us how we would react: "StyleyGeek, what if after the baby's born, you come over all possessive and want to steal it?" And we pointed out that, actually, we discussed these possibilities last session, so they are technically no longer unanticipated. (Although still highly unlikely).

Then the counsellor pressed us to come up with a "generic" plan of action for any unanticipated problems. Geekman politely refused, since he pointed out that any action would depend on the nature of the situation, and the situations she was talking about were... unanticipated.

(Afterwards, he suggested we should have offered to role-play what we would do in the event of a meteor strike.)

Then we sat in near silence for twenty minutes, with the occasional reiteration of, "Well, you sound like you have thought about this all pretty well, really. I'm not sure what else we need to discuss" [her] and "Hmm... so... yeah"* [us].

The only other topic we discussed in the group meeting was whether we were all comfortable putting our feelings on the table and diplomatically expressing our needs, rather than bottling things up. Geekman demonstrated his competence in this by putting his feeling of overheatedness on the table (the office was stuffy and he had just been running beforehand) and diplomatically expressing a need to remove his shoes. He stretched out his sweaty naked feet in the middle of the counsellor's elegant rug, and for some inexplicable reason, the session ended quite soon after that.

The counsellor promised to write a report certifying that none of us are nuts (except maybe Geekman, but I don't think that barefootedness is a "danger sign" on her list), and this means that at the next doctor's appointment on 13th October we sign a contract and hopefully can then begin the treatment.

______________

* Translation: "Can we leave yet, or does the IVF clinic require you to state that the session was 30 minutes long"?

A virus is forever, not just for Christmas

Geekman: "I nearly opened a virus today. It was very clever. It pretended to be one of those e-greeting cards, except that the "link" was an attached .exe file."

Me: "Good thing you noticed."

Geekman: "Well, it's not like it would have mattered anyway. I was using Linux. Although... I think the way I've set things up, it would have automatically been opened under Wine. [a sort of virtual Windows system that runs under Linux]"

Me: "So you could have emulated the virus."

Geekman: "Ooh! This could be fun! I could run virtual viruses in my virtual Windows!" (Scurries off to try this out).

Yes, folks, we are living in an XKCD strip.

He actually thinks this makes him look better

Geekman claims I maligned him in the previous post, where I wrote:

You can't get theoreticians like Geekman to fix a car, since the first thing they want to do is model it as a sphere, or solve the problem for two dimensions, or for conditions of absolute zero with no gravity.

He would like you to know that, although he usually models things for conditions of absolute zero with no gravity, he does it in ONE dimension, and as a parabola. Not a sphere.

Geekman fails to distinguish relative from absolute time reference

Me: "Oooh! Fresh pasta in the fridge! I love you because you eat pasta with me. And because you don't say, 'Are you sure you want to eat so much pasta? It'll all end up on your hips tomorrow.'"

Geekman: "Well, we aren't eating it until tomorrow. So it would have to be causality-infringing pasta."

I have a blog so I don't have to think for myself

I have so many questions. So. Many. Questions. Which means it's time to enlist the wisdom of the internet.

First, one for the gardeners. It's the end of June. That's roughly equivalent to the end of December for Northern Hemisphere types, I guess. It's definitely winter. We've had a few frosts. We use the heating most nights. You have to wear a coat and scarf outside. The ski season is about to start. I have a tomato plant in a pot on the balcony that I gave up on around two months ago when winter was starting. We pretty much stopped watering it. But it's still producing flowers and tomatoes. And they are still ripening. I guess my only question here is WTF? And, when will this madness stop???

Secondly, I am going to a conference next weekend, and a colleague whose mother lives in that city has said her mother is happy for me to stay with her as well. I have never met the mother before. I will be staying two nights, and will hardly be there except to sleep. What is a nice little gift I can give as a thank you? My usual standbys are chocolates or a bottle of local wine, but my colleague says her mother is on a diet and doesn't drink.

Finally, Geekman and I often disagree on what is socially appropriate. Last night at a party, he polled all his friends, who he claimed agreed with him. So since I have no friends, I'm going to poll the WHOLE INTERNET and see if you all agree with me. (If you don't, you are henceforth banned from this blog.) Of the following list of things we have disagreed on the acceptability of lately, which do you think are okay, and which do you consider inappropriate?

1. Bringing a half-empty bottle of wine to a party
2. Asking to borrow someone else's nail scissors to fix a hangnail. (And does your judgment here change if the person is a complete stranger? If the nail is bleeding?)
3. Helping yourself to food from the fridge in the middle of the night when staying with people you've only just met
   
4. Cutting and eating a slice of a cake that hasn't been cut yet, without asking first
5. Commenting on a woman's outfit (either favorably or neutrally, e.g. "I haven't seen you wear those trousers before"), when you are her male colleague. And what about if you are faculty and she is a student?

Geekman's opinion on the hijab

"The thing about those head scarves is that you can never know if the person you're dealing with is Muslim or a ninja."

Another example of why they don't often let Geekman interact with students*

Geekman: "What have you been up to this afternoon?"

Me: "Lots of students came by to talk about their assignments. Most of them wanted to know how to get more marks in future, and I politely explained that they should try actually reading the questions and answering them, rather than making up their own random unconnected tasks. But then as usual there were a few students I feel really sorry for because there is no way they will ever pass the course. They are just terminally dim. I have tried explaining the material over and over, and they have spent lots of time and effort on it, but they are still so far from understanding even the simple concepts that there's nothing else they can do. I have no advice for them at all."

Geekman: "I do."

Me: "What?"

Geekman: "Don't breed."

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* See also examples one and two.

This has nothing to do with the falafel on the ceiling

Watching Outrageous Fortune (best show EVER):

"Those are the cutest pajama bottoms! Geekman, did you see those pajama bottoms Pascale was wearing?"

"Yes. Actually, I was watching her arse quite closely."

[Pause]

"You know, you really don't give me enough credit for attention to detail."

I'm not sure who's at fault in this exchange

Geekman: "What are you eating?"
Me: "Cheese and crackers."
Geekman: "Can you make me one?
Me: "Sure. How many?"
Geekman: "Two."

How's the vegetarian experiment going, you ask

Me: "What should we have for dinner tomorrow, do you think?"

Geekman: "What food have we got in the freezer?"

Me: "Uh, spinach..."

Geekman: "That's not a food! It's a colour!"

How geeks spend Saturday morning

Geekman enters the room, wearing camouflage cargo pants.

"You look so cute in those pants," I say. "You look like you're off on a mission through the stargate."

He brandishes part of an encyclopaedia at me, volume Aust-Blin. "I'm on a mission to the BATHROOM. I'll let you know if I find any aliens."