Drink Bacardi Like It's Your Birthday

To make a mojito, first put several sprigs of mint and two slices of lime in a glass, and muddle them with a - a muddler, I guess. It's a longish implement with a spiked, flat piece at the end, and you use it to squish the limes and the mint together and get the juice out of them. I guess you could also use a meat tenderizer, but you'd have to have really good aim.

Then fill the glass with ice and add a dash or two of sugar syrup and a shot or two of Bacardi. Top it off with club soda and voilà! you've got yourself a pretty tasty drink.

To make potato salad, boil the potatoes about five minutes longer, use more onion, and don't forget to thin the dressing with a bit of vinegar so it's more piquant and not so goopy. Otherwise, perfect.

To make drunken conversation with a stranger in your friend's backyard pool, try to avoid the subject of death.

It was late, and Robbie and several of Diane's other guests had already left. Tony and his friend Larry, Diane's husband Mark, and a few other people were lounging idly in the water. A fine sprinkling rain had begun, and the sensation of tiny droplets of cold water on my face contrasted deliciously with the warmth of the pool. It was full dark out. Another party guest remarked that we weren't so bright, swimming around during a rainstorm - we were just asking to be struck by lightning.

"What are you talking about?" laughed Mark, "it's not thundering."

"It's raining," pointed out the swimmer.

"Yes, but it's just a little rain, there's no storm," said Mark.

"I'm more worried about dying of cancer," I said.

My fellow party guest was taken aback. "Why would you worry about that?" he asked.

"Well, it just seems like the most likely thing to kill me," I reasoned. "Well, that, or I get cut up into pieces and stuffed into the trunk of some stalker's car."

"Cut up into pieces?!" he repeated, sputtering slightly. "Where on earth did that come from?"

"It could happen," I said.

"The trunk of a car??"

"Well, not loose, of course," I clarified, "I'd probably be in a plastic bag."

"No offense," he told me, "you're fine, and all, but that seems very unlikely."

"Oh, you don't have to be super fine to have a stalker," I said, "there are plenty of crazies to go around."

"I want out of this conversation," he said.

To impress men, just shut up and drink your Bacardi.

Guarded

They're installing a new badge-reader system at work, which will, theoretically, eventually work with the new badges we were issued a few months ago. So far it doesn't, so today they just turned off the alarm and propped all the doors open.

But we're safe! Because, remember, we have that extra security guard posted at the end of our hallway.

Of course this extra guard was posted there several months ago, shortly after a somewhat deranged older employee, who had been stalking my cube neighbor A., got fired.

The guard is still there, though A. has been gone about a month now. But there were always two or three days a month when the guard's station would be empty. We never could figure out if there was a pattern to this. But this morning, Robbie and I were speculating that, long-term employees being largely creatures of habit, perhaps the former stalker is organized enough to call in and indicate whether he's planning to be a threat each day.

It's been going on for quite a while, so I imagine the conversations are professionally jovial. "Hey Rick, how's things? Thinking about coming in with an Uzi today?" "Nah, it's gorgeous out today, nice weather to enjoy a few cold ones out by the lake." "Well, have a great one, talk to you tomorrow!"

Turnover is pretty high for the extra security guard position. These people - hourly contract employees - must get incredibly bored just sitting there in one spot, day in and day out, on perpetual watch for someone who almost certainly will never come in, not that they'd have a chance in hell of recognizing him if he did. So there's a different guard about every other month. The last one was a woman, but the new one today is a guy.

He caught my eye pointedly as I walked past on the way to my desk this afternoon. "Well, hello there," he said, "how are you today?"

I smiled and nodded and looked away and mumbled something, but he kept his eyes hard on me, and I could feel them sticking to my backside all the way down the hall.

So today I got sexually harrassed by a security guard posted to protect a woman who's no longer there from a stalker who most likely was never much of a threat to begin with.

Your tax dollars at work!

Flirting with Disaster

When I went to lunch with former coworkers yesterday, I tagged along with a current one, J. She's cool, but I've never really gotten to know her that well. She's sort of an on-and-off member of the three-martini break group - she often doesn't come to break; and when she does, she hardly ever finishes her third martini.

On the drive to the restaurant, we got to talking about stalkers, of all things. Don't ask me how we got on that subject. She was telling me about one she used to have a few years ago; and of course shortly after I started there, my cube neighbor A had a huge incident with some poor crazy bastard who became convinced that they had a tacit, but serious relationship, just because she once asked him conversationally if he weren't cold without a jacket on. A's stalker pushed things a lot farther than J's, who apparently backed off not too long after he should have; A's lost it completely and got fired, and to this day we have a security guard stationed in our hallway, every single day except the second Tuesday and last Friday in odd-numbered months that contain the letter E. (Or something like that. I have not yet actually figured out the pattern; but then, I'm not much of a stalker.)

"Damn," I said to J in the car. "It seems like, where we work, every girl gets a stalker. Where's mine???"

She laughed, but looked at me a little oddly. Nobody understands me.

She had to stop on the way and get stamps, and from the post office parking lot I got my first glimpse of the newly demolished Intel Shell. I stepped out of the car to snap a picture with my phone.

It looks pretty messed up, but not, perhaps, quite as thoroughly demolished as I'd expected.

The demolition charges went off this past Sunday, early in the morning, and I heard the booms from my house. Being mostly asleep and not remembering that the demolition was scheduled for that morning, I didn't know what they were. They didn't sound like anything I could identify - sort of like very loud thunder, but without the rumbly dying-away bit. The house that backs up to ours is steeply uphill, and they have a huge, somewhat rickety-looking addition that comes right up to the fence, looming over our backyard. We keep thinking that one of these days, it's just going to give way and slide right down the hill and crush us. I thought perhaps Sunday was that day.


But it wasn't, so I'm still here, and will still be going back to work on Monday, more's the pity. Perhaps I'll see about posting a job requisition for my very own personal stalker. My division is rife with likely candidates. Must have skin.