BuggBlog

Bite me

Hey, it's an invitation, not an insult. At the top of the left hand column you'll see the return of Bugg Bites, which I had previously boxed like an emotionally unstable Three series due to Twitter's unnerving habit of locking up my site. When you're looking to increase your regular readership beyond a number you can easily count on your fingers, toes and one other appendage, you really want to make sure the damn page will load in a browser.

But, all things considered, the Twitter feed seems to be playing a little nicer now, and maybe when they finish their maintenance later today it will work in the beautiful, seamless way in which the Internet is supposed to bring us all together through the magic of technology. Except when it doesn't.

So, let the navel gazing (re)commence.

The chair up there

I wanted to do something romantic with Cavin on Sunday afternoon, given that we had made such progress cleaning the house the day before. So I asked him to go out with me to shop for a new office chair.

Such is the life of gay, married* suburbia.

Although it did have it's romantic moments -- I suppose that's what you would call Cavin spinning me like office-supply dervish in a faux-leather executive chair -- the trip ended up more of an odyssey. To start, I trekked over to the local Office Depot, where I spent about 40 minutes or so carefully perusing the selection, comparing prices and determining exactly how comfortable my ass would be if ensconced in one for hours on end. I ultimately chose one of the most expensive models that, while ugly as a deformed pig, offered some seriously superior comfort. The plastic-envelope that contained the price tag bristled with tickets to be taken to the register for purchase. Satisfied, I snatched one and headed to the front.

Where after some confusing back-and-forth on the store radio, the cashier informed me that the chair I desired was not in stock. And how was I, a simple-minded customer, supposed to determine that the chair was not in stock when it was essentially plastered with "buy this chair!" tickets?

"Um, we don't have that chair in stock."

Okey dokey. Time to go to Staples, where I found a near perfect replica of the brown leather Jean Luc Picard chair that I used at the magazine office. Was it in stock? Of course not.

So, off to a different Staples where the Picard chairs were in stock. At least, that's what the computer said. How could that be wrong? Was the chair in stock? The nice Staples employee -- I mean nice in the non-ironic sense, given that this guy was the friendliest person I'd met all day, Cavin included -- couldn't find the boxed chair in the store room.

"What about the four of them sitting up front?" I asked about the floor models I'd seen when entering the store.

"Oh, those are for sale pre-assembled."

Finally, a breakthrough. Plus a challenge: Getting a pre-assembled, high-back office chair into the back seat of a 3-Series BMW is akin to one of those challenges on The Amazing Race that often augur the end of a relationship. But we persevered, and now I sit in my home office, occasionally spinning around and declaring "Make it so!"

I may even get some work done soon.

*Cavin and I aren't married in the legal sense, as we live in Virginia. However, we had our own Buddhist/agnostic ceremony with our families out here in Falls Church, and that's good enough for me to say I'm married. It's not like the Virginia police can send a SWAT team to break us up. Yet.