"Nab him, grab him, jab him, stab him!"

While listening to Brazlian music on bagpipes with my headphones, I noticed Mrs. Smith gesticulating animatedly. When I took them off, he said, "Do you have another plastic cup?" Rather than waiting for an answer, though, he upended a recycling bin and topped it off with a binder. "Mine's bigger than yours!" he trumpeted and then removed the bin for an instant so I could get a glimps of the fat, shiny roach he'd just captured. "I don't know about that," I told him, "It's definitely fatter." "Well, it's been eating," he replied. Then he asked me if anyone had ever shown up in response to my capture and set off to speak to the department head.

The dead roach is still there on the windowsill, of course. My boos came by on Friday and told me an exterminator was going to come. Meanwhile, I'm imagining a time when every open container in the area will be use, overturned in order to keep one beastie or another (I myself have used a recycling bin to catch a mouse here in the past) from escaping.

Edit: Just as my boos came by to discuss the roach with Mrs. Smith, the doorknob fell out again for like the tenth time in a week. She's been calling the engineer almost every day trying to get it fixed, along with the year-old dangerous leak above one of our workstations. And he's nowhere to be found! I love absurdity when it makes me laugh.

Update: Doorknob fixed! Plus, the guy impressed us by explaining what he did (replaced the broken spindle and a stripped screw that was holding it in) in such a way as to make us believe (a) that he actually knew what he was doing and (b) he might not actually have to return this week to repair it again. As an extra-special bonus, he was a white-haired bear in an orange t-shirt!

Oh, and the building engineer finally showed. His idea of fixing the leak was shoving the bag of stagnant water up above the suspended ceiling where boos could not see it and promising that some guy will be here next Saturday to inject epoxy into the space above it. We shall see!

Today's Engrish

Excerpt from a spam mailing originating with a straw hat company in Guangdong, China:

The hats are made of push, that is fine natural plant (without any pollution), surface innocuous coated; The push is very soft and toughness, knitted by a special technology method( about80 years history), being able to stand wear and tear.

Most of the product labels we were reading last Saturday sounded like that.

Unclear on the Concept of...Lutheran cuisine

Today's as nasty as yesterday was beautiful. Outside, it's pitch dark and raining. My hungering for some comfort food brought me back to the seminary cafeteria and a meal of beans and rice, baked mostaccioli, and beef-vegetable soup. While I was spooning up my entrees, I heard a South Asian woman ask a cafeteria worker "What here is spicy?"