Making a pate sucree I break an egg directly into the mixture in my usual sloppy way and it's rotten so I have to start all over again

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ARG, rotten eggs.

Today I went on a vast decent-butcher finding/shopping mission, only to return home and discover that I'd locked myself out. I had to leave the meat with a neighbour while I went in search of my fellow householder.

I don't know, can I?

Never had fish (other than plated)

I wish I could help, but I know nothing about fish outside catching/eating them. Isn't there some sort of strange alchemy to caring for fish? Not putting tap water into the tank, etc?

joke, Kiku, joke! please don't kill the poor little fish. can't you get another fish man to do the job?

Printing a long document on two sides using my consumer laserjet. Now, I consider myself a reasonably bright guy, but this is melting my brain, and combined with the fairly crappy printer and annoying software glitches, it's becoming impossible

General idea: print all even pages forward, then turn over, put back in paper tray, and print all odd pages backward so you end up with double-sided document and p1 at top.

Problems have included:

• Crappy printer and not-great paper ends up with slight curving post-print, which then screws up paper feed on going through again, which then causes pages to get out of sync;
  
• Have managed to print on the same side twice (own idiocy);
  
• Both application and printer driver allow you to specify 'odd pages only'. If you accidentally set this in both you end up with every other odd page, again fucking up sync;
  
• Specifying, say, page range '2 to 30' as well as 'even pages only' screws system, as p2 becomes first page, hence you get odd pages after all;
  
• etc etc etc

PS considering putting fish through printer, thereby ending all my problems in one.

Hey for once, something computer-related I can do that Kiku can't

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College friend with limp taste buds has decided we'll eat at Sea tonight - a place where my husband described the food as "loathsome farang pabulum". There's no gracious way out of it. This is my only triathlon training-free night this week. It's always annoying to not be able to negotiate for a better dining option, moreso when it's my only night out. Grrr.

Also annoying: buying cheese at Murray's in GCT with heavily armed soldiers (U.S. Army) poking about.

I fear that Washington, CT is becoming the next Easthampton sans Mer.

Flood control.

People who board public transit conveyances while wearing enormous backpacks (apparently containing all their worldly goods) and then proceed to act as if they are not. It's bad enough when someone tries to shimmy in next to you on the subway while sporting one of these---I usually get up and say, smiling , "You know what? We can't both fit in that space, so I'll stand." Worse is what happened to me yesterday when I was seated on the Fifth Avenue bus---a clueless German teenaged girl hit me in the head four times with her knapsack. I let her slide the first couple of times, figuring I should cut a foreign tourist some slack. Then I gently pushed her away. She apologized. As she was disembarking she did it again. It's not growing out of your back, it's luggage!! Please, remove it and hold onto it in a crowded space.

Hired a mover to bring a nice library table from an office two blocks away to my office. I arrived at the lobby of my building to find he and his wife throwing a fit and saying that it won't fit in the elevator. They left the table in the lobby w/o even trying to see if it would fit. Morons, total f*cking morons.
Thankfully, my building maintenance guys are going to bring it up this afternoon.

My wireless cable connection has been on the blink. I just spent over an hour on the phone with a roadrunner techie, to no effect. Then I turned on the air conditioner, and, voila.

This "end of summer" concept. Surely I can get one more day at the beach. Indian summer, anyone? And is that term politically correct? What's the derivation? Don't mind me, I'm just one of those people you avoid at parties...

Wow. No-one really knows. To complicate matters, it's a term which has been in common use as long as I can remember in England too.

"The Meteorological Glossary (published by HMSO) is usually taken as the definitive guide on such definitions. It offers the following: 'A warm, calm spell of weather occurring in the autumn, especially in October and November. The earliest record of the term is at the end of the 18th century, in America, and it was introduced to the British Isles at the beginning of the 19th century. There is no statistical evidence to show that such a spell tends to recur each year.'

Some sources think that the phrase stems from the North American Indians who relied on a spell of fine weather anywhere from late September to November for harvesting.

You may also hear the theory that merchant vessels plying the Indian Ocean would have one of their load lines marked 'IS' (for Indian Summer), to show the maximum load level for ships in the post monsoon fine weather period in the latter part of the year. There is much doubt over this derivation of the phrase as it has been traced to a time before Samuel Plimsoll's standardisation of such marks in 1875."

A busybody manager at work with ambitions beyond her station is getting antsy about Internet usage, so I have to tread carefully

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Hardly an original plaint, but it's bugging me and I feel the need to vent.

During an otherwise glorious sojourn in Bermuda (a Reason to Be Cheerful) the absolute inability to find on a menu any of the local goodies outside of the eponymous onion, soft shell crabs and fish chowder (all very good where I sampled them). Snorkeling, I saw bream,snapper,chub, grouper and hogfish which I have never tasted but which a dive instructor told me is delicious. September 1, the first day of the lobster season, we were relaxing on a little island where we had pulled up our kayaks during a guided tour of islands, wrecks, reefs, etc. The father and grandfather of our guide, who told me he had been diving for lobsters that morning and gotten two, came alongside in their boat and displayed two gorgeous specimens. I spent the rest of my trip in a futile effort to taste one of these beauties. The captain of our dive boat, who said he visits New York frequently and very much likes Craft, GT, Veritas, told me that Bermuda is so prosperous that it does not pay the locals to fish for profit and they keep all the goodies for themselves. Waaaah.

Also, wine was a bloody fortune. Insultingly so.

Having spent a week house/cat sitting for a colleague in Jersey, most of which was spent grilling stuff and sitting by the pool, my legs are covered in insect bites which itch atrociously.

Bought a toasted bagel with Vegemite at the gym this morning. Stupid moron Australian server said "Geez mate, where is yah learn about Vegemite?". I told him "Australia, 1972-2000". He said "Oh Geez sorry mate, I didn't realise. You sound Scottish, ya know?".

I had the cheeky and inaccurate bugger shot obviously.

It happens to all of us, Adam. Every expat reaches the stage where they know they're a REAL expat...at home the accent's wrong, in the new country the accent's wrong, and ultimately you sound foreign wherever you go.

I met a guy yesterday who sounded Dutch or possibly German. It turns out he's actually French, but has spent so long in Finland, the US and the UK his English has no French characteristics at all. Very confusing.

The cruddy late night supermarket + nextdoor long defunct bank by the station where I live are becoming a Tesco

This is really depressing. There was a crying need for something on those premises, but not a fucking Tesco

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if a Tesco opened near me I would be happy - a sign that the area is up and coming!! but I suppose Kew has already arrived.

We have a Sainsbury's and an M&S within 10 minutes walk, we have an excellent wholefoods shop and Indian-owned 'corner shop'. The last thing we need is another Tesco clone to join the Starbucks clone opposite That site would have been perfect for a large brasserie type operation and they would have made a mint from all the Kew Gardens visitors.

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The apparent flooding of the entire NYC subway system this morning.

Me too. Two hours and ten minutes. At one point, I found myself headed downtown instead of uptown. Since I had a seat and the car was pleasantly air-conditioned, I decided to go with the flow and read some Nabokov. I started feeling guilty in Chinatown, and turned around again. A strong temptation, though, to head to the end of the line, somewhere the other side of Brooklyn.

Make daiquiri
Think 'hmm, this is a bit sweet'
Go into kitchen later and find halved lime untouched on the counter



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Reminds me of: Make cosmopolitan. "Hmm, this is sweet." Notice open bottle of grenadine, inattentively used instead of cranberry juice.

I used to have a boyfriend who was born in NZ, went to university there and in Scotland and included German in his studies, lived in North Africa where he spoke French most of the time, then returned to Scotland for a PhD. I first met him on a plane, flying from Seville to London on a flight which he had boarded in Marrakesh. (I sat down next to him and woke him up ). When we started to chat I embarrassed myself by inquiring if he were Swiss or German. I'm usually pretty good at placing accents but I did not realize that English was his native tongue! He later blamed it on the fact that he had a hangover, but believe me this guy had a most unusual way of speaking.

A pal of mine (English, but a language student with several under his belt, and a specialty in Thai irregular verbs) worked for years as an American Express tour guide. He was perpetually out of the country, on the road somewhere, and he ended up sounding like some kind of weird cartoon character. Accent from everywhere and nowhere.

On my flight from Michigan to Paris Monday night, I was seated in the children's section. I was surrounded by about nine of the little beasts under seven years old. The one right behind me kept kicking me in the back of my seat, until I went to her, said hello, and asked if she'd do me a real big favor. She asked what it was and I told her. She said, "Whadif I don't." I told her I would drop her out of the hole in the tail of the plane. Kicking stopped.

Five of the children were part of an extended family of about ten, made up of at least three races and admixtures. I sat in their midst. There was much passing of children over seat backs throughout the flight, mainly screaming or whining children, or those who'd just finished defecating. The boy next to me, nine or ten, poured half his 7-Up on my right arm and leg.

The airline, Northwest, added its own little insults. "Dinner" was Pasta or Chicken. I asked for pasta and got chicken. I calculated it would take about a week and a half to exchange it, so I dug in. God-awful little chunks of dry, stringy chicken breast with something vaguely sweet poured over it. Grayish haricots verts decomposing next to the dead bird. Iceberg lettuce and shredded carrots, referred to by the airline as "salad." A small piece of Canadian Tillamook Cheddar provided some relief. Dessert was of such horrendous aspect that I left it entirely alone.

Red wine from Chile. Legend on the label said that the local populace lit fires all along their beaches to scare Magellen off as he was rounding the straits. Led geographers to call that land Tierra del Fuego. ?? I haven't taken time to look, but is wine really made right next to Antartica? In the great hierarchy of world wines, this one would fit in the category just below plonk.

To top it all off, the featured movie was "Troy." Gadzooks! When I was learning Greek in highschool, we had to translate some Homer every night. I do not recall Agamemnon, Menelaus, Priam, Nestor, Achilles, Hector, nor even Astayanax uttering such fatuities as came out of these actors' mouths. And they kept referring to Menelaus as "Mini-louse."

My favorite scene: One of the women, Helen or a slave perhaps, is with one of the men, Paris or Achilles perhaps. Some seduction is transpiring. Woman reaches to her throat and undoes the clasp of her cloak. It drops to the floor. She is naked. She thrusts herself into her lover's arms and he grasps her enthusiastically. He is wearing his full battle armor. I was the only viewer on the plane laughing my arse off.

An annoying and wide-awake flight.

How miserable, although the one thing worse than being pestered by the herd of children would be having the task of looking after them. You can't win. I made sure my toddler was tired enough to sleep like a log from Seattle to New York. She did so, with her legs draped over mine, twitching and kicking periodically. I didn't get a wink.

Can't you check them into the hold, like you can with pets?

or get 'em drunk?

Tranquiliser blowdarts?