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shattered German drinking cup
Wednesday, January 11 2023
I wanted to buy myself the ability to drink alcohol today, so, in keeping with my self-imposed rules, I painted a walrus on an old credit card. I was Chase Sapphire card and contained enough ferric steel in it for a magnet to stick to it. This came in handy when I wanted to quickly dry a layer of paint by putting the painting near the air coming from the laboratory split (which, at this time of year, blows hot air). I have a clip hanging on a string from the ceiling for this purpose, but when the whole surface of a painting is wet, it's nice to be able to hold it by just sticking a magnet to the unpainted back.
At noon, I drove into town mostly because I had completely run out of Hannaford-brand black tea, which I always get in hundred-count boxes. While shopping in the Ghettoford, I also got taco shells, plantain chips, tempeh, ice cream, green beans, corn, and various Goya-brand canned bean products.
Then I drove out to the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I found nothing I wanted to buy. I'd been wanting to crack open a road beer for most of these errands, but I didn't do it until I got to Hurley Mountain Road's intersection with Route 28 on the drive home. I was driving the Forester, which hasn't been street legal since the end of 2022 due to an expired inspecting sticker. Normally I wouldn't fret too much about this, but one is especially vulnerable to being pulled over if one lets a December inspection sticker lapse, because the color change from one year to the next is something a cop can see at a distance, and cops will be looking for inspection stickers with a color that cannot possibly be valid. Normally you can drive on Hurley Mountain Road without much worry about cops, so I felt safe with an open container for the rest of the drive home.
Late this afternoon, the four of us web developers had a meeting to install a very difficult-to-install house-developed web application on our new Amazon Workspaces (virtual machines we're supposed to use like work-issued laptops). Surprisingly, the installation was successful for all of us. [REDACTED]
After work, a took a nice hot bath. When it was over, I used our water-powered dental pick. It has a little reservoir that needs to be filled at least once per session, and I was using a little handleless ceramic cup (which we got back in Germany back in 2019) that serves as the upstairs bathroom utility cup. But then the damn cup slipped out of my hands and went crashing against the hard tile floor of the bathroom, shattering into ten pieces. I'd been fearing this would happen since we began using this cup, though I'd always assumed it would break from someone pawing it over in the darkness of an unlit bathroom in the wee hours of a morning.
When Gretchen got home, I broke the news of the broken cup, and, perhaps not surprisingly, she said it was one of our material possession she has any attachment to (saying, "We got it on that island in Germany!") and then asked if I dropped it because I'd been fucked up on whatever I was currently on. Yes, she'd noticed that I'd been drinking. I said it had nothing to do with that and was irritated that she was making it about my alcohol consumption (though it's possible that she was right). I said I'd been worried about that cup from the moment Gretchen had put it in the bathroom. This irritated Gretchen, because now it seemed like I was blaming the broken cup on her. I then tried to make the best of the situation by trying to glue the cup back together with superglue. But the only glue we had was old and clotted and wasn't working very well, ending up all over my hands. And the second piece I tried to stick with it ended up slipping out of my hands, falling on the painted OSB laboratory floor and snapping in two. It was hopeless. If we're going to have a nice cup in the bathroom, it should probably be made of metal.
Today's walrus painting.
The German drinking cup after my aborted attempt to glue it back together.
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