16 Oct, 2007
When did hair styling (and other personal) products start smelling so bad? I mean, I never was a fan of the flowers and lavender and vanilla, but lately the stuff all seems to smell like medicine.
My hair is getting a bit long and unruly, so I tried to control it by using some sort of “style paste” Plagioclase had which looks and smells like car wax. He doesn’t use it, preferring some sort of glue-like product that looks for all the world like Elmer’s. Being the buyer of the ill-regarded paste, I figured I’d use it, except it made my hair look like I had badly buffed the wax in my hair. (All the time I’m writing this, I can’t get the “I’m a Dapper Dan man!” line out of my head.)
I happened to get a small bottle of hair spray from a salon prior to the wedding (a plan for Plagioclase’s Mother to have her hair done turned into a styling session for me), and started using it, and boy does it ever smell like something you wouldn’t want to smell. I mean, it doesn’t smell like rotting meat, it just smells like somebody took all the herbs one would use to cover up the smell of rotting meat to make this stuff.
And it’s not just this spray. The hotel had some chichi “products” that made me long for a good strawberry scented candle to counteract them (in case you don’t get the irony of that statement, I can’t abide scented candles). Is this the latest trend? Everyone is so insensitive to sweet-smelling gunk that P&G and its ilk are trying to stand out by smelling like some 19th century Patent Medicine? Or perhaps the opposite — everyone is now “allergic” to strong scents, so these “natural herbals” must be better for us?
I need to find some essential oils, pronto, and doctor this stuff up. It was too spendy to throw away.
14 Oct, 2007
Plagioclase and I have been together for, what, a couple of dozen years now? (We met in the crib, of course.) Though those years we’ve worked out many of those little details one has to take into account when living with other people that you never think about until something happens to bring it to your attention.
For instance, toilet seats. Recently Plagioclase’s eldest brother and his wife visited us, and we gave them a bathroom all their own to use. I had to pop in to get a Dixie® cup (I felt like I was interloping, but I really needed the cup!) and noticed they had the toilet lid and seat up. How weird! It took all my willpower to keep from running over and dropping the lid. I’ve been wondering if this habit of theirs is a result of their old-fashioned ideas about the relative status of husband and wife (easier for him, she does the work)? It could just be that he was last to use the toilet, and she knows to watch out for dunking. It could be they never discussed it. But this episode reminded me that early on in our cohabitation Plagioclase and I agreed that toilet seats and lids are to be down when not in use. This means we both have to raise and lower the lid (at least) every time; neither person gets the opportunity to just rush in and pee without doing some work.
Here’s another example, again drawn from the bathroom. Plagioclase and I share a lot of things, but not toothbrushes. Since we could never remember which toothbrush was whose (and we are not picky about brand, style or other features except for bristle softness), we finally started buying two toothbrushes at the same time — one in pink and one in blue. (”Pink is for boys.”) I think about this every time it’s time to get new toothbrushes.
Do you live with someone that you didn’t grow up with? How did you decide between “my family’s way” vs. “your family’s way” vs. “figuring out our own way”?
14 Oct, 2007
(paraphrased)
There’s a country name that’s eleven letters long, which has an “r” in it. Replace an “r” with “k” and rearrange the letters to form three makes of car.
This one is incredibly easy. The “k” itself is a hint, but if you need more, the name of the country is two words.
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13 Oct, 2007
From Albert Haddad, “Coloured Cubes”
In the following statements different capital letters in bold stand for different digits, with the same letter standing for the same digit.
I have a collection of cubes in three different colours: red, blue and yellow. Their sides are all whole numbers, and furthermore I can tell you that the volume of each red cube is NIL, the face of each blue cube has NO area and the volume of each yellow cube is ZERO. Obviously the total volume of all the cubes is NOTHING. As for quantities, if you arrange the cubes into three distinct piles according to colour, you will find that in one pile there are NO cubes and in another pile there are NONE.
How many cubes are in the remaining pile, and what is their colour?
I don’t often attempt these puzzles (not the least because we only recently resubscribed), but this one I thought I could do. (Too frequently I find the puzzles to be too enigmatic.) And I was right! Including time wasted for a transcription error, it took me about 45 minutes to do this one. It took a small amount of puzzling in the beginning (no harder than Sudoku), and then I just did the second half brute-force, which is easy enough to do when there are only a few options to test.
I will admit to using a spreadsheet to do the calculations for me, but I didn’t use anything more sophisticated than multiplication with it.
Answer below the fold. I was disappointed to learn that the number didn’t spell anything.
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12 Oct, 2007
As I’ve mentioned, Plagioclase and I are starting a business. Unlike our other ventures, this involves leasing some space that it nice enough to bring clients to (unlike our home office, which, frankly, is a rat’s nest). With new space comes new ideas and new routines (habits? norms?).
One routine that we’ve agreed to adopt is the afternoon break. We’ve each had good experiences at former workplaces that had the norm of afternoon tea or koffeetijd. This is a break at a set time of every day where the people in the office get together to have tea (or coffee), cookies, and informally talk about what they’re doing. It could be a chat about anything, but often it turns into a way for people to talk through their blockages, get a different perspective on their problem, or help their colleagues with a sticky situation. It doesn’t last very long (say, one or two cups worth), but it gives everyone a chance to remind themselves that they’re a member of a larger society.
And the cookies are often tasty. We had speculaasjes today.
