Author: Steve Cavers

And speaking of shopping (see the previous entry), I recently took the plunge and bought myself a brand-spankin’-new monitor. This is something that I’ve been planning for a dog’s age. Actually, I’m not exactly certain how long a dog’s age is, so let’s just say that the dog in question was born about the same time that LCD monitors first came on the consumer market.

So now that the dog is a few years old, LCD monitors have come down in price enough that I decided to take the bull by the horns (to add another cliché to my post). I unpacked it, cleared a nice spot on my desk, realized that I did this in the wrong order, then placed the pretty new monitor in its new home. Oooh, real purty.

That was last week. Because I’m a technical writer, I naturally didn’t read the user manual until this week. That’s when I discovered something that wasn’t in any of the product specs. My purty new monitor rotates. I had no idea.

This is like buying a car and then discovering that it has a button labelled Turbo Boost. Well maybe not that cool. Hold on a sec… I’ll be right back.

Okay, I’m back. My Civic doesn’t have a Turbo Boost button.

Anyway, thanks to the nifty Pivot software, which was included with the monitor, I can rotate my monitor. This is surprisingly perfect for browsing the web. And when I’m writing, which I do almost every day, it feels amazingly natural. (You can see the whole page!)

I’d highly recommend this Pivot stuff to anyone. You don’t need any special hardware — you can rest any monitor on its side. I’m seriously tempted to buy a copy of Pivot for the office before any dogs become much older.

This ends my unsolicited product endorsement.

Agent Q and I were hanging out in the pit of despair  my living room when my old friend Simon and his girlfriend Rebecca dropped by. Things were great until Rebecca turned to me and asked, “Can I borrow some tomato paste?”

Huh? The gears in my brain ground together for a second or two over this non sequitur. “Uhhh, no. I’m sorry… I don’t have any.”

“You don’t have tomato paste?” She stared at me incredulously.

I made a show of checking my pockets. “Nope. No tomato paste. Why? Should I?”

According to both Rebecca and Agent Q, tomato paste is just one of those staples one has in one’s cupboards. Simon and I glanced to each other for moral support as the womenfolk (oh, I’m going to get comments about that one) explained to us that if you see tomato paste on sale, you just pick up a few cans.

“I don’t know,” I said, unconvinced. “I just buy things when I need them for something specific.”

“Yeah,” said Simon helpfully.

“I pretty much just buy the stuff when I’m making something like pasta sauce,” I explained, “and then I buy only enough to make it.”

No, I’m not the smartest shopper out there, but I’m an efficient shopper. I buy only what I need, when I need it. And like ninety percent of the male population out there (I’m obviously picking that number out of the air), I don’t spend extra time shopping for something that I didn’t know I needed that happens to be on sale.

“Ach. Men,” was the gist of their response.

Over at And for my next trick, Townie has written an A to Z of her past weeks. I thought I’d steal her idea and do one of my own. Anyone else want to do the same?

So here it is… the a to z of end of line (and I should remind everyone that because I’m north of the 49th parallel, “Z” is pronounced “zed”):

A is for ale, of which I drink many.

B is for burgers, but I haven’t had any.

C is for car, which is getting quite smelly.

D is for doughnuts that squirt cherry jelly.

E is for end of line, now going strong.

F is for fone, which I always spell wrong.

G is for GroupWise’s dependable crash.

H is for Honda, which eats all my cash.

I is for Internet, rotting my brain.

J is for jelly, a setting red stain.

K is for Konica taking a pic.

L is for lunch, which made me feel sick.

M is for monitor, the new one I bought.

N is for negative, the cashflow I’ve got.

O is for octopus, also called “tako”.

P is for pamplemousse as a nice snack-o.

Q is for quickly, which is how fast I type.

R is for relentlessly writing this tripe.

S is for Shabusen all-you-can-eat.

T is for tofu in place of red meat.

U is for uselessly writing this list.

V is for valuing all the time missed.

W is for walking along the sea wall.

X is for xerography to copy it all.

Y is for yearning for summer to come.

Z is for Zoodles, and this list is dumb.

Message from headquarters:

At 1730 hours, be at the rendezvous coordinates to make contact with Agent Q. From there you will proceed with the mission: locate and demolish the best beer in the city. You and Q are mission experts now. With a little luck and your instincts, you may come out of this with only a headache in the morning.

This tape will self-destruct in five hours. (We had some budget cuts at headquarters.)