Failing with style for 23 years

Sometimes it amazes me how hard I can work to screw up really simple tasks.

Take laundry, for instance. I haven't done my laundry in ages, and by today I'd completely run out of clothes, including clothes that were 'clean' enough to be worn twice. So I trudged on down to the laundry room around 9:30 PM, dragging three giant loads of clothes. And, in a great stroke of luck, exactly three washing machines were available.

However, one of the open machines had a jammed coin slot. Not to be deterred, I managed to use my mail key, a kitchen knife, and an LED flashlight to fix the machine. This took about ten minutes, but had an added benefit: I got a 50 cent discount on my laundry.* I thought I was soooo very clever.

What I forgot is that people had been attempting to use that same machine all day, and possibly all week, and the soap buildup in the dispenser was phenomenal. So of course, when that load finished it was still covered in a thick slime of detergent. By then it was about 10:30 and there wasn't a chance I was going to get to bed at a decent hour if I ran another wash cycle.** I made a half hearted effort to rinse the worst of it out in the bathroom sink, but the soap was even harder to get out than if I'd just washed them all by hand to begin with. So finally I dumped the botched load in the dryer and hoped that I don't have sensitive skin. Or that I won't need to wear any jeans or darks for a while.

* Yes, I know how to hack a coin slot, but I am far too straight-laced to exploit that.
** Plus I'm cheap.

Sunrise, Sunset

The weather was perfect so we went up to East Rock to catch the sunset before dinner.


I came to East Rock my first day in New Haven. I was missing the mountains really badly and this rock is the closest thing to a mountain in this forsakenly flat country.


WOP boys? Uh oh.


Happy graffiti.



I have such incredibly beautiful friends.