Nothing funny about feldspar

Dear Citibank Online Customer:

It has come to our attention that your Citibank account information needs to be updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. Due to your recent account activity, we are kindly asking you to confirm that ONLY you manage your Citibank account, and the recent money transfers were made by you.

If you did not effectuated the money transfers, you can confirm by logging to your account and filling up the verification procedure here:

[redacted]

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Thank you for banking with Citibank.
Citibank Security

I wonder how many people were involved in writing this message? The grammar and word choice is ok in Paragraph 1, awful in Paragraph 2, and moderately bad in Paragraph 3. I’m guessing our intrepid phisherman plagiarized the first paragraph.

A few years ago I remember reading (or maybe I heard someone talking about it) about a woman giving a lecture on stuff that’s “OK” or not. One of her examples involved thinking about your saliva, how it feels pretty good when you swish it around your mouth, it’s natural and ought to be there, but once you remove the saliva to a cup, it’s suddenly gross and you don’t want to have anything to do with it. All you did was move a teaspoon of liquid from your mouth to a cup and it became yucky and somehow unsanitary.

I’m reminded of this by a small pitcher of milk that is now in our fridge. Plagioclase’s mother has difficulty lifting gallon milk jugs, so I put some milk in a pitcher for her breakfast. This morning she didn’t use all of the milk, so I put the pitcher in the fridge.

Is the milk in the pitcher still acceptable? What if I added some milk from the jug which has been open in the fridge for 4 days, the jug which originally filled her pitcher?

Frankly, I don’t have my own answer for this. Part of me wants to throw out the leftover milk because it was on the table. Another part of me says “It was on the table for all of 5 minutes; it was out of refrigeration longer when I brought it home from the store.” A third part (which tends to agree with the second) says that milk is getting too expensive to just wash down the sink. However, the first part is really really strong, almost a half part!

But not quite half. Frugality wins today.

I’ve been using Twitter (and now Plurk) quite a bit. (Not nearly as much as some, but more than I ever expected.) And while I’ve been told I write in a “telegraphic” style, I do tend to write long sentences (much like this one).

I had a bit of a shock last night when I had an IM conversation with the travelling Plagioclase. I could use more than 140 characters in that little box! But I really found it difficult — even though there’s no character count, I have a good feeling in my fingers for how many times I can hit the keys before the numbers start to go negative.

It felt really weird — I wonder if people’s emails & blog posts are going to get shorter as a result of Twitter/Plurk/whatever overuse? I hope they won’t devolve into txtspk.

I’ve just started to learn to drink cocktails. Nothing fancy — just vodka & tonic and vodka martinis (and lemon drops, yum!). This is due to some unfortunate experimentation in my youth… I really can’t stand the smell of most liquors. Vodka is easy, because it’s relatively odorless. (Yeah, I know, connoisseurs can discern flavors, but I can barely tell the difference between two rieslings, let alone two vodkas.)

Anyway, instead of trying to clean up our vintage bar set (which has been in various basements for the past 40 years) I went out and bought a cheap cocktail shaker & some martini glasses. I also bought some vermouth. Now I can try to figure out what kind of martini I like.

I mixed my first homemade martini using the proportions on the vermouth bottle — 1 part vermouth to 3 parts vodka shaken with ice, and threw in a few olives. Oh, wow, they must want to sell vermouth. It was, I dunno, too much. I don’t have the experience for talking about dry vs. sweet or whatever martinis, so all I can say is that next time I’ll reduce the vermouth by half. I’ve read the wikipedia entry suggesting that vermouth shouldn’t be closer than in the same room with the gin (vodka in my case), but in my opinion that’s not a cocktail, just a large shot.

Of course, I’m also learning about vermouths, and realize that they’re all “family recipes” so it may be a while before I find one I like.

I hope my liver will be able to manage all this experimentation.

My mom’s birthday and my parents’ anniversary was a few days ago. I once asked my mom why she got married on her birthday, because that just limited prezzies — was it for romantic reasons?

“No,” she said. “It was the last time we were going to try.”

Apparently, they’d made arrangements to meet at the courthouse several times, but for some reason or another, it didn’t happen. It nearly didn’t happen the last time, either, as Dad was running late (as usual) and Mom, pissed off that he seemed so casual about it, nearly walked away. Grandma hid Mom’s keys to keep her from leaving.

What a couple they must have made early on — a feisty little redhead, smart and a bit of a hellion, together with a tall, laid-back agitator…

I’m glad they managed to work it out.