Today in the lunch line...

Today at work, I was feeling cranky for no reason. Usually when this happens it means I'm hungry. When I took stock of the situation today, I realized that this was the case. So I go to the Cougareat. (Hateful place. But I hadn't gone grocery shopping in weeks.) I'm about to get into the Taco Bell line when a huge group of people right in from of me makes the split decision to do the same. I move on. Italian looks fine. I get in line, and the guy at the end of line gives me a weird look. I probably give him a weird look back. A few moments later he explains: He had gotten in line while it was really long, and for ten minutes or so no one had gotten in line after him. He thought he was the last person on campus who wanted Italian until I came along. Ah. I nod understandingly. He then proceeds to flirt vigorously. My responses are monosyllabic (i'm cranky after all), but I can see that he is not totally disingenuous. And he is kind of cute, I finally notice. He is too busy flirting to notice that all of a sudden it is his turn to order (oops) so he lets me go ahead. Chivalrous. I'm still cranky, but not as. And i'm about to eat a calzone. how bad can life be.

As I walk away with my tray, I secretly hope this isn't the end of our brief association and that we will magically sit at the same table or something or, or... But it is, and we don't. And I eat alone. And it is probably for the best since I was cranky anyway.

If my life were a movie, we'd run into each other again randomly. I'd drop my books, and--and there he'd be to help me pick them up! Alas, i don't carry books in my hand. And my life is not a movie.

(Damn.)

Being Boaz

The number of people staying at the Thomas household this holiday season necessitated some unusual sleeping arrangements. John and Mary had to sleep with Finnegan in their room, which meant a lot of interrupted sleep. The four other older kids all crammed their skinny little bodies into another room. And since the two rooms upstairs (formerly bedrooms) have been turned into studies, that left the smallest bedroom in the house to be split between three adult girls. Hmm...

The bed is a trundle bed; that took care of two people. So, at the foot of the bed, into the like two square feet of floor space that was left over once the trundle bed was rolled out, we pinched and squeezed and squished one more green pad to accommodate a third party.

And thus we slept: Christina on the main bed (because she was there first), me on the trundle (which is a little hard, but reasonably comfortable) and poor Sue relegated to the poor pinched, squeezed and squished green pad at the foot of our beds. On Christmas Eve, when the three of us found ourselves for the first time in this, shall we say, inelegant arrangement, it was hard not to draw biblical allusions. "You're just like Ruth," I tell Sue as she lays herself down on the pad at my feet. "Well, goodnight, Boaz," she says.

(I decided not to remind her that by ancient Israel's standards, she was actually proposing marriage.)