Commuting Squirrels

So, I had a highly scientific and verifiable thought this morning while cycling through the City on the way to work. Women pedestrians and squirrels exhibit some similar behaviour when crossing the street. Both have a tendency to dart into the middle of the road, realise suddenly that there are fast moving objects hurtling toward their general direction, then engage in this little dance... "Backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards, freeze! " Squirrels, however, don't tend to carry coffee cups, which seems to add an extra distractional element to the dance. I would be surprised if there weren't scientific papers written on this very subject...

In other news, I did my level best to vanquish the Thanksgiving monster on Saturday night at Adrian's (by eating it, of course). My non-Mrs Smith's pumpkin pie turned out to be a huge hit, which it damn well should have been, at £18. (Though, to be fair, in the grand scheme of things (if one imagines that US currency somehow counts for the grand scheme of things), it did get cheaper. Last year, said pumpkin pie was retailing at $36, whereas this year, with the collapse of the pound, it cost me 'only' $27). I still think the Triscuits at £5.25 will go down as the most outrageously overpriced food item I've ever bought, however!

Surreal moment from the party: I had a lovely conversation about the merits of different types of pie crusts (flaky vs not, shortbread vs graham cracker), as well as the types of spices used in pumpkin pie with a couple of queer punks, decked out in (admittedly fairly subtle) punkwear, including matching chains and padlocks (they were a couple).

Anyway, not much else exciting at the moment, and it seems I might have to shuffle some paper here...

Oh, I would like to add, however, that with the addition of the third thermostat, a small part of the air conditioning war has been settled. Now it's just me vs. my particular part of the office, as I try to crank the temperature down, and the wonderweenies with whom I work try to crank it up. Have to say though that the cooling power of the air conditioning is nearly balanced by the radiators--council efficiency at its finest. And I probably shoot myself in the foot anyway by encouraging Steve, the useless manager of the LLPG team, to hack away, given that he has a draft running down his terribly delicate back. Ah the wonder of local government office politics!