Dammit, Commander Sue...

You just start posting again after three months and you hit me with a MEME? Shame on you. Oh, well, since you're aces, I'll hit you with the seven random facts about myself thingy...

1. I failed my driver's test first time around. In New Jersey. That should tell you how skilled I am as a driver.

2. I know a little French. You can't put that on my list of faults...

3. High brown belt in judo in college. Finished third in the North Atlantic Championships in 1992. Got the shit kicked out of me MUCH more frequently.

4. Discovered Usenet in 1992. Have been wasting time on the internet ever since.

5. Tried to learn bass in high school, but bought a 3/4 scale which never worked. Lost interest after that...

6. Definitely beer over wine.

7. Love dogs, and pretty much all animals, but I'm a cat person.

But I will not forward this meme. Memes are like roaches, you have to kill them as soon as you can to stop them from spreading...

You never know when your childhood will catch you...

This post will probably be a little more sunshine and rainbows than should be for a blog with the word "sewage" in the title, but a little something happened recently which was a nice little gift.

I was in the supermarket Sunday morning, getting the weekly groceries, when I looked down the counters and saw a girl, maybe four or five years old, in pink flip-flops. She was focused like an athlete, and for good reason. You see, the floor of the supermarket was primarily white tile, except for an occasional red tile, staggered in two columns across from each other, about four feet apart.

This girl, obviously sensing the importance of the geometry, was jumping from red tile to red tile, her flip-flops landing slapklomp as she made every attempt to nail each one dead center.

What an AWESOME kid thing to do. And I broke into a grin, because when I was five, I had done almost the same thing. Since I had recently learned chess (I think I peaked around that age), I knew the moves of the pieces, so my rule was I had to step on the tiles in knight moves, two up, one over. And of course, I did right one time and left the next or next thing you knew I'd be walking in circles in the store for eternity.

I never found out what would've happened if I missed the pattern. You don't challenge laws like that. I'm glad that girl didn't miss, too, because if she did I think all of the white tiles would've fallen away and we would've all floated into darkness, our only points of bearing being the red tiles, suspended on their infinite towers of turtles.

Time travel is possible. I spent thirty minutes in that store, but my smile stretched back thirty years.