Daily Office: Tuesday
¶ Matins: Friday’s plans have firmed up: we’re to be at Balthazar at ten. (Yes, Fossil Darling, that means you. I didn’t want to wake you up with the news.) Then we’ll troop down Centre Street to the Municipal Building and get hitched, those of us what aren’t. (I hereby promise: the next time Megan refers to our destination as “City Hall,” I won’t correct her.)
¶ Prime: My reward for going through all the mail this afternoon was discovering that I’m two weeks late to ensure that, when I renew our Orpheus subscriptions, we’ll get the same seats. I almost broke down and wept. First thing tomorrow!
¶ Tierce: I was going to bore you to death with remarks about Bob Herbert’s column in th Times (Dept of Idiocracy), but LXIV sent me a very entertaining link.
¶ Compline: The server that stores this site was down for a few hours this afternoon. When I was assured that The Daily Blague was “intact,” I shuddered to think of my extremely underdeveloped backup procedures.
Regular readers may want to make a note of Portico in their browsers’ “favorites” folders, because Portico runs from an entirely different server. If the outage had lasted much longer, I’d have posted a message at Portico. These things happen from time to time, and it’s when they do that the virtues of redundancy shine.Oremus…
§ Matins. The bride-to-be is one very centered young woman. She is unfazed (at least on the phone with me) about not having a thing to wear, where “a thing” signifies “a nice daytime dress.” I’m sure that she’ll have something to wear by Friday. Which is to say that she’ll be wearing something, I’m sure.
Rings, they have. As for the marriage license, it hasn’t had time to expire. And who remembers Wassermann tests?
What will I be wearing, you ask. The groom will be wearing a dark suit. I don’t own a dark suit. I don’t, as it happens, own a suit of any hue. That has been my defiant gesture of retirement for twenty years: no suits. My theory is that a suit, on me, is too much of a good thing, where “a good thing” signifies any fabric you care to mention. No one has suggested that I wear a suit on Friday. But I am thinking about it. It has been so long since I’ve had a costume (when I went to school, they were called complets) that it might actually be fun to have one. I know I’m crazy, but I could really go for a three-piece in pearl grey.
§ Prime. Somewhere between five and ten years ago, I was feeling very impecunious around renewal time, so I put it off, and I put it off so long that we were bumped two seats to our left. From our fine aisle seats, T1 and T3, we were pushed to T5 and T7, and, to compound the wretchedness, the couple who got our seats were [description deleted]. We have regained our original foothold, but [anxious complaint deleted — at least until the subscription has been renewed]. I repeat: first thing tomorrow! I have tattooed the phone number on my wrist.
And now, back to work: A quarter of teenagers tested couldn’t identify Adolf Hitler. Yikes.
§ Compline. While the DB was down, I wrote up this week’s Book Review. As for the far more interesting day out that preceding my homecoming discovery of server failure and the drudgery of combing yet another issue of the Book Review for signs of literary life, see the forthcoming Nano Note — server permitting.