Avoidance

I'm not really sitting here writing this entry... really what I'm doing is sitting here and reading all about sockets and Being Productive... honest guv'nor.

I'm back in lovely State College, sitting in my little cubicle hunched over my laptop, trying to work out why my right hand is hurting so much (no sniggering at the back). I'd like to blame it on the fact that I've been working so hard... but really? Nevertheless it's hurting, right in the bit between my thumb and index finger. Hopefully, it will stop hurting in a little while.

I wrote a cheque (or is it actually a check that I wrote, being as it was from my American bank) and signed a lease agreement and, hopefully, I'll be able to move into my apartment sometime at the start of July. Somewhat inevitably I ended up plumping for the place above the bar. Or more correctly, it's actually above a sewing shop which is next to a bar. The bar is a cafe-bar and is pretty good as bars go. It has some sofas, which are always very good things for a bar to have. It also has a very new age-y paint job, lots of swirling colours and that sort of thing. A couple of days before I saw the flat above the sewing shop, I went to the bar with a fairly old Israeli professor who used to go there to play chess. It's not really the kind of place one expects to find an aging physics professor.

Slowly and not entirely surely, I am revising my opinion of Columbus. Maybe it's more of a city than I was giving it credit for. I suppose after a couple of months of living there my opinion will have grown some roots and decided what it wants to be when it grows up into a belief or an assertion. But for now it's just bobbing about in a pool of uncertainty.

Quick update: my hand is still hurting. A lot.

I spent Sunday afternoon being licked by a very cute dog and being barked at by another cute dog. I also ate a veggie burger. It wasn't as bad an experience as I've been led to believe the veggie-burger-eating experience can be. But on the other hand, it wasn't as good an experience as eating a genuine — made with real meat, not mushed up bits of cow unpleasantness — burger. Still a fun time was had. I got drunk, played people the FCC song by Eric Idle, and told them how I have a propensity to write naughty words on things (in particular, how I wrote "a word which was rhymes with a kind of boat you find on the river Cam" on the empty television box that sits beside my sofa-bed... and how I did this just before my mother spent two nights sleeping on the sofa-bed). It's all part of my "get Americans to use more colourful language" program. I'm starting small, but there are now a few pockets of Americans who understand Big girl's blouse. The revolution will continue.

Oh, by the way circumlocution involving the river Cam is just me trying to avoid some of the strange words people are using to find this site. If you search using msn (boo, hiss), it is possible to find this page whilst searching for the word pretty combined with the afore-unmentioned word. In fact this site is the 12th, and first non-pornography link. Not to mention the hordes of people who arrive at my blog after searching for a misspelling (or should I say alternative spelling) of the word meaning: Unnatural connexion with a <meaning: A quadruped, as distinguished from birds, reptiles, fishes, insects, etc., as well as from man.>.

Well, I think I've avoided so well that it is now time for lunch.