[The parentals are in England rubbing elbows with the stinking rich at a posh society wedding and then touring the old stomping grounds in Belgium. The following is submitted by faithful commenter and mother of Net Dumplings, Pour The Wine and Kate and Mike Abroad: J Le.]
We're here and our livers are the worse for it. We ate last night in Jean and David's garden (back yard) and it was sooooo warm and calm. Then a storm hit like a wall at about 2:00 a.m. and their basement/garage flooded. It has rained all day. We went by our old house yesterday. A young man was mowing the lawn. His family bought the house in 2001 and completely renovated it and painted the outside and put in a pool where the pond used to be.
You wouldn't believe the wedding and the old money. All the men on Gina's side were in morning suits. I was in two fabulous heritage protected mansions. On the second day we had lunch in Boxted Hall which is Gina's uncle's house and it was on a heritage garden tour and people had to pay for a ticket to go and I was on the inside at a table set for twenty having lunch. I wasn't on the outside looking in......I was IN!!! Heard of The Barclay Bank in England? Gina's mother is a Barclay. Their house, built in the 1500's has it's own postal code...they have a postal code all to themselves!
Hopefully tomorrow it will be nice and we can go down to the Grande Place [in the center of Brussels]. The following day we go to Paris on the train and I can honestly say that walking the streets of Paris is one of my favorite things to do in the world as is sitting at their cafes and then eating in a cafe. Love love love. Haven't done it for two years and I miss it.
Send this on to your sisters as my skills are dodgy on a foreign computer. If you reply in, oh, say, 36 hours, I will read it.
Love
Mom
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
I Bet You Never Knew That A $13 Appliance From Wal-Mart Would Save The World
We print an insane amount of drawings for our contractors here at site. It’s unusual if the plotter isn’t smoking by the end of the day. The amount of paper we distribute in a month could wallpaper West Edmonton Mall, including the paint store. The company that pays us would be wise to have shares in the tree re-forestation industry.
But yesterday we ran out of toner and it has literally ground most of our operation to a halt. We tried to order some but the supplier said it wouldn’t come before an undisclosed amount of time. We tried to get some couriered from a sister office in another city, they were out too. We found a Montreal-based distributor but they had a mere 13 bottles left but were shipping them out to someone else. Then it was confirmed today – there is no where in North America that has toner. That’s right, the entire continent is out of toner. The well is dry. And the down time is nurturing visions of dystopia. Entire construction projects from coast to coast will be put on hold because no printing means no plans from which to construct. Cityscapes will remain unchanged, urbania will stop sprawling, the lack of new homes and businesses will no longer be able to accommodate the increase and moss-like spread of world population. A restriction will be put on the number of children a family can have. The fertility drug market will crash. John & Kate (Plus 8) and Octomom will become posthumously canonized by a woeful, spawnless society. Strange dogs and cats will have to live together.
Enter the humble coffee grinder, the one that’s in the lunch room. With it we can grind all the toner we need. All we need is a nice blend of dark matter that can be found around the site and we should be good to go. Let’s see, some coffee beans, some pencil leads, if he’s willing, some dandruff rubbings from that black safety guy, some floor dirt, a few of those black spiders that runs across the floor of the office, welding dust, butts from the ashtray, some pepper packets and some of that crap on the floor of the raw ore building. That should do it.
Document control: preserving the advancement of the human race, one blend at a time.
But yesterday we ran out of toner and it has literally ground most of our operation to a halt. We tried to order some but the supplier said it wouldn’t come before an undisclosed amount of time. We tried to get some couriered from a sister office in another city, they were out too. We found a Montreal-based distributor but they had a mere 13 bottles left but were shipping them out to someone else. Then it was confirmed today – there is no where in North America that has toner. That’s right, the entire continent is out of toner. The well is dry. And the down time is nurturing visions of dystopia. Entire construction projects from coast to coast will be put on hold because no printing means no plans from which to construct. Cityscapes will remain unchanged, urbania will stop sprawling, the lack of new homes and businesses will no longer be able to accommodate the increase and moss-like spread of world population. A restriction will be put on the number of children a family can have. The fertility drug market will crash. John & Kate (Plus 8) and Octomom will become posthumously canonized by a woeful, spawnless society. Strange dogs and cats will have to live together.
Enter the humble coffee grinder, the one that’s in the lunch room. With it we can grind all the toner we need. All we need is a nice blend of dark matter that can be found around the site and we should be good to go. Let’s see, some coffee beans, some pencil leads, if he’s willing, some dandruff rubbings from that black safety guy, some floor dirt, a few of those black spiders that runs across the floor of the office, welding dust, butts from the ashtray, some pepper packets and some of that crap on the floor of the raw ore building. That should do it.
Document control: preserving the advancement of the human race, one blend at a time.
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