Random Babbling

Have a Holly Jolly Christmas... but watch out for the knives.
One of the clients where I work sent us a two foot tall chocolate Santa. The first day it came he stood at the reception desk in all of his delectable glory. But there were so many other tempting treats around, Santa wasn't even bothered.

Yesterday morning that all changed. As I walked to my office I saw that Santa had been taken out of his plastic and a murder weapon was stuck in his back. Poor guy. Rather sick group of people I work with, eh?

Changing tracks:
The strangest thing has been happening to me of late, and I'm just weird enough to have noticed it. As I come home on the subway in the evenings I realize that as the train I've just exited prepares to leave, the train coming from the other direction is just pulling into the station. After the third time this happened I started paying attention to it, now I am up to seven consecutive occurrences. With trains coming every five minutes or so, and only sitting still about 30 seconds, I would think the odds are really low for this to take place so often.

It is not as though I notice this at the same time every day. My timing is always rather varied. Sometimes I get off work on the hour straight up, sometimes 10 minutes or even an hour late. It even happened to me this last weekend. Surely other people experience such random coincidences. The question is... are they abnormal enough to have actually noticed that it was happening to them? Reminds me of something I did a long time ago about the 20 most amazing coincidences.

I am a personal assistant at my job. This means I do all kinds of things, my job is always changing. No, my boss is nothing like "The Devil Wears Prada", she is a sweetheart who is almost apologetic when she needs to ask me to do something. Just recently she's been horribly busy with the job and with life and was talking about how she needed to buy a Christmas present for her young son. She hinted at it a bit, and then I ran with it... I suggested that I could pick it up for her. The cool thing... I got to go buy a Wii and a game and some other cool gaming stuff. AND I didn't have to PAY for it. But then I don't get to play with it either. Dammit.

Interesting side note:
About four months before I bought my baby-blue Vespa (Mimi) my boss had asked me to prepare an information sheet on a gift she was buying for her boyfriend. It was a special edition baby-blue Vespa very much like the one I ended up buying just a short time later. Maybe history will repeat itself? Maybe Santa will bring me a Wii too? Eh, something makes me doubt it.

Speaking of presents. How well do you have to know each other to not only decide to secretly buy the exact same present for each other... but to figure out that the other person has decided to buy it for you? N. sat me down a few days ago and by process of elimination confirmed her suspicion that my present to her would be tickets to a show starting soon at Theater Des Westens, "Der Schuh des Manitu". After she came to the conclusion, she mentioned that she too had been working on that same plan. Oh man. Coincidence or just cool? I hope that my request for tickets to see the Eagles at the O2 Arena in June will not fall on deaf ears.

The average German's nose turns up at the mere hint of an objectionable smell. The ironic thing is that the average German toilet seems to be purpose-built to hold any solid waste open to the air and thus spread any smell. My office toilets thankfully are the "normal" kind which can be found almost anywhere else in the civilized world. BUT, the whole German nose thing comes into play nonetheless. Why MUST we open the windows in the water closet in the middle of winter?

May I just say that when the temperature outside is hovering in the freezing range that it isn't such a nice thing to walk into a toilet stall with a wide-open window? This allows the super-cooled outside air to proportionately super-cool the marble on the walls in the room. Not to mention the feeling of being close to a sub-zero "Porcelain God".

Another track:
It sucks to be on the eastern edge of a time zone in December. The shortest day of the year is approaching and I can't wait to get beyond it. This crap of sunrise at 8.30 and sunset at 4.00 is bad enough. BUT! Remember that the sky is completely gray most days in this part of the world, which obscures what little sun we might get. This makes it FEEL like sunrise is about 9.45 and sunset 3.15. Yes ladies and gentlemen, that is a SHORT day.

Thanks for letting me bitch babble.
Now on with your regularly scheduled programming...

Been reading:

• Bush brushes off shoe attack - Bush is such a goober. Inauguration Day can't come fast enough for me.
  
  
• Adam Walsh case is closed after 27 years - This is so sad. But the death of his son lead John Walsh to help change the way crimes are solved in America. This is a good thing. His show was in my regular rotation for years. I'm happy for the family that they now have some closure, but sad that the killer is long gone.
  
  
• Joe Paterno's story at Penn State never gets old - Give 'em hell at the Rose Bowl Joe!
  
  
• Berlin Gay Memorial Vandalized - I guess that I don't even know WHAT to say to this. I'm just sad.
  
  
• Drunkenfreude - This article is interesting on many angles. Not the least of which is that the word itself is based off of a German word which is becoming more popular in English circles, Schadenfreude.