A jumped up country boy

Nuphy's been trying off and on to get me to come to one of the classical music concerts in Millennium Park. I've been reluctant because I've become so curmudgeonly that I can barely stand the misbehaviour at paying venues, let alone free events. (It's not so much that free events attract more dilettantes but that good sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie don't value something they're not paying for as much as something they are.) However, now I finally can say that I've heard Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 in D major for orchestra, children's chorus, pita chip bag, and emergency sirens as it was always meant to be enjoyed.

The Old Man was unhappy with the conducting, but one of the nice things about having such an uneducated ear is that it all sounded fine to me. Perhaps that was the witbier speaking. (I admit, there's something refreshing *hic* about a classical music venue that allows you to get a little pickled.) It certainly had something to say in the final movement, when one of my seat neighbours knocked over his bottle with his foot and we heard it roll across the pavement until some thoughtful woman three rows down put a stop to it.

Afterwards, Nuphy hurried off (to The Gage, I later discovered), but I hung around for a while with some of his UIC colleagues who were going in search of dinner. It was charming to see that, even as the seats emptied out, the lawn behind them burst into a flourishing block party; all that were missing were barbecue grills. Surprisingly, everyone deferred to me on the question of an eatery. I rattled off some possibilities and we settled on Oysy, a mile's stroll due south.

We took it quite leisurely since the Anglophile Italian Linguist's Brummie Economist Boyfriend was only visiting for the week and had to be allowed some sightseeing. Add in that the Bearish Mancunian Slavicist turns out to be more of a magpie than even I and we were stopping at least once every block to collect one or the other. So, yes, in the end I found myself eating Japanese tapas with three Oxbridge academics, having the kind of conversations my fellow alumni and I would term "so UoC".

For instance, I mention that I'm from St Louis and the BMS volunteers that he didn't realise until recently that such important literary figures as T.S. Elliot and Kate Chopin were from there. I bring up my recent discovery of Chopin's work and he starts telling me about a parallel tradition of female writers tackling local colour fiction in Eastern Europe around the same time. And all of this with the unselfconsciousness that Northwestern graduates could muster for discussions of the best place to go for pizza on the North Shore.

And on the other hand, there were jests about me opening a British pub called "The Whingeing Pom" and anecdotes of student cluelessness and Oxford life and what-have-you. Perhaps my favourite moment was standing on a crowded train (forgot about the Sox game!), mentioning the video Bernard Manning sings The Smiths, and having the BMS ask, "Oh, what songs does he do?" "'This Charming Man'" I say. So BMS launches into a dead-on imitation of Manning's Morrissey that had me jackknifed with laughter. Even in my cosmopolitan crowd, I can think of few people who would even get the reference and at most one (looking at you, niemandsrose!) who could pull off the accent.

Sadly, the AIL failed to get tenure and so is off for a fellowship in Berlin, where at least he'll be a little more convenient to his BEB. The BMS is, even as I speak, dining with the AIL's cousin in Florence, but hopefully was amused enough by my rough American charm (knowing the English love of deflating pretentiousness, I decided to play up the folky Midwestern charm and it seems to have worked--at least, I didn't pick up any archness aimed my way even with the gain set at maximum on my sarcasm detector) to invite me along again sometime after he returns. (Nuphy says it's just as well about the AIL, since apparently his adopted Englishness doesn't wear well with repeated exposures.)

Every Monty Python stereotype confirmed

Oh, the other moment Friday evening where I was absolutely helpless with laughter was after the AIL related something which happened to him at a resale shop in Oxford. It went something like this:

AIL comes to the front counter. There's a gown lying across it, apparently abandoned there by a previous shopper. A middle-aged lady arrives and begins to ring up his purchases. She lifts the gown and asks, "And the gentleman would like this as well?"

"No, that isn't mine."

She regards him for a moment, "Are you sure?"

"Yes, quite."

"So I should take it away, shall I?"

"Yes."

She places it to one side. Then, in a slightly more conspiratorial tone, "It would be all right you know."

He regards her quizzically.

"We do get a lot of that here, you know."

FIN

If Poirot met Marple

monshu and I got an odd surprise the first time we cooked a meal after coming back from Florida. I was here, typing at the computer, when I heard him roar from the kitchen, "Dammit! Do you know where the hot pads are?" We searched the kitchen and found them nowhere. They had been on the windowsill, but the cleaning ladies had come a few days earlier, and they have a habit of stacking or stowing anything that gets in their way. We first checked their favourite all-purpose hidey hole in that room, the cabinet under the sink. Not there and not in any of the other cabinets. Not in any drawers. Not in the pantry, not in the bathroom, not in any other room in the house. It was baffling.

Today I'm doing the laundry. Loading the washer, I see that the load size has been set to "Small" and the water temperature to "Warm/Cold". Now I always wash in cold and never a smaller load than "Medium" (and that rarely). For a moment I wondered if perhaps the neighbours who'd come in to fed the cat had washed something without a telling us. A stained mat or something? But just for a moment since it was only a few more minutes until the start of the World Cup Final. At halftime, I rushed to the laundry room to shift the load

...and found every one of our hot pads piled in the bottom of the clothes dryer. Yes, they were pretty filthy. But they've been filthy since we moved in. What was it about them that sent the ladies over the edge a week and a half ago?

New mystery: Where are the rest of the black pillowcases?