Bill, my favoritest essayist, has posted a new one:
As with all of Bill’s essays, it’s as worth-reading as it is long…
…I could spend a lot of money, and plan to at least spend a little money, at magnatune.com…
I have to take a few minutes out to gush about how nice it is to spend a quiet evening at home:
Fun dinner with Kelly (chili, home-made cornbread muffins, green tea)…
+ Chilling in the office and brainstorming in a bathrobe and slippers…
+ Enjoying some fine conversation with Andy over IM…
+ Enjoying some diggable groove-jazz from Drop Trio… (check them out if you like MM&W)
+ Enjoying some port from Lakewood Vineyards in a stemless glass…
= A thoroughly enjoyable evening… Cheers!
In an effort to finish off a project at work today – one which I refused to allow to overflow into a third straight day – I ended up staying at the office until about 7PM. While I did indeed finish the project, I ended up getting really hungry right around 6 o’clock. Imagine that … dinner time!
By that time, there were only about 4 cars in the parking lot, though at least two of their owners were working in cubes near me. I could hear keyboard tapping and paper shuffling, and muffled calls home to confirm approaching departures. Without thinking, I grabbed the (rather large) apple that I’d set on my desk at lunch time, and took a bite. Slurping a bit to catch the juice, I continued typing as I documented my activities over the preceding two days.
I got most of the way through my document – and most of the way through the apple – before I realized just how much noise I was making. When I’m really pushing through a task, I can get pretty zoned in on what I’m doing – and it wasn’t until I had been intermittently repeating my bite-slurp-chew cycle for about 10 minutes that I actually stopped to listen to myself. Ordinarily, during the day, there’s enough of a din that such a sound would surely go unnoticed by all but perhaps my immediate neighbors. But at night, when the building is quiet enough that you can hear the test engines running their cycles a story below, it’s a different story.
I didn’t have a chance to apologize to my fellow late-nighters before they left, but maybe tomorrow will present some opportunities for some good-natured self-deprecating humor… “Hey guys… you staying late tonight? I brought chex mix today!”
Or maybe it would just be better for everyone if I just stayed hidden away in the electronics lab where I belong… 
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