So, sitting under the tent today, waiting for my teammates to gather for our team shout-outs, I grabbed Linda's nail polish bottle. Becky loves shout-outs, and I'm, admittedly, becoming a fan also. Basically, a shout-out is a vocalization of a highlight moment of another teammate, in front of the whole team. Each shout-out is typically accompanied with a hearty swig of an alcoholic beverage that's being passed around in the group, and followed with the person receiving the shout-out giving the next shout-out.

To my surprise today, I received five shout-outs. I usually manage two, but this time managed five, one actually for a spectacular play (a thunk catch about 6" off the ground, for which, according to Kris and Brynne, I'm famous). Two of the shout-outs were from teammates who I was going to shout-out for the exact same event, just the opposite way. At one point, I actually received a standing ovation from the whole team. I nearly cried.

Before all of this, however, I sat waiting for the team. Waiting next to Linda's nail polish, and bored with nothing in particular to do. So, I did what most any other person would do: I started painting my nails.

This painting took a little more effort than normal, as the brush didn't stay attached to the lid when I unscrewed the top. As Linda says, "Cheap crap." She's allowed to say that, it was her polish.

I managed to paint one nail, the thumb nail of my left hand, before the team showed up. When they started filtering into the tent, I stopped painting, in order to help organize all of us around the table. I didn't think much of the polish after that, except when Linda also had trouble with the bottle's brush and top.

Later in the evening, after dinner and the dancing and the ice luge drinking by Kris and Alice, I drove to the Honolulu airport to drop a very drunk Lori off for her midnight flight home. She managed half the drive awake and talking a million miles an hour about life and love and drinking and ultimate. The other half was spent in silence, as she dozed, in and out of consciousness with the starts, stops and turns of my driving.

On my drive, I was annoyed with my fingers, and kept picking at them with an surprisingly uncharacteristic intensity. I thought I had finally broken myself of the habit of picking at my nails and the skin around them, certainly within the last six months.

It wasn't until the drive home, under some street light at a stop sign, when I looked down at my fingers, that I realized the nail polish on my thumb nail was the cause of my finger focus. The feeling of polish on my nails is so foreign, that I managed to pick off half the polish on the way to the airport.

Good thing it was the cheap stuff.

Why is it that Microsoft Word produces HTML that when emailed to someone who uses Microsoft Outlook to read the HTML email, that person sees only a blank page?

What is it with Microsoft that their products don't flippin' interact? Is it that they're clueless, or do they just not talk to each other?

A client had an email newsletter to mail out this week. It was supposed to mail out last week, but wait, wait, they're not sure it's quite done.

So then it was supposed to go out on Monday. Then Tuesday. Oh, wait, it has to go out to everyone with an account last year, as well as this year.

And the server was having issues.

And I'm in Hawaii.

And the email displays as a blank page in Outlook.

It reads fine in Hotmail and Gmail and Yahoo. It reads fine in my mail reader. It reads find in Yahoo email beta. I can't figure out why it doesn't render in Outlook, but it doesn't, and it's due, and the server is barfing, and won't send more than 300 emails out at a time, and I'm frustrated.

But, well, I am in Hawaii. It's sunny. And tropical. And the tournament starts tomorrow.

How bad could it be?

Two Fridays ago, Kris and I went to Seattle and visited with Ben, Lisa and Jake. Ben, at one point, showed us Jake's Michelin Man legs and arms, where his baby fat rolls jiggled and folded. At some point soon, Jake will hit his second baby growth spurt and lose all of the jiggles. Until then, however, Ben is showing it off.

On Wednesday night last week, at communal dinner, I mentioned we had journeyed north and seen Jake, and wasn't he just the most adorable butterball? Beth commented that, look, everyone has a line on his arm, just above his elbow, where his roll of baby fat made a permanent crease in the skin. No, really, look, look.

We all looked, and sure enough, we all had those lines. Sure, some were really faint, almost invisible, but still there.

So, today on the drive from the airport with Kris and Heather, we talked about this fact when Heather and I were catching up. When I said everyone has this crease, here, look, look, Kris chimed in, "No, not
everyone."

Well, the man with less than 4% body fat could be right, but I wasn't going to admit it any time soon. I pulled up his shirt sleeve and tried to find his crease. "It's there," I insisted, looking.

We found Heather's really fast, and mine was findable. Kris' not so much. "Well, it's there."

"No, it's not."

"Yes, it is. You just can't see it."

"If I can't see it, doesn't that mean it's not there?"

"There's a subcutaneous crease that isn't visible from the surface. So, yes, just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there."

"Okay."

"Okay? That's it? I won the argument? I can't believe you're giving up that easily."

"You used 'subcutaneous' in an argument. How can you not win?"

Heather piped up from the back seat, "You two are such geeks."

Sometime last month, I stopped paying my bills.

I hadn't intended to stop paying them, per se, I had just run out of checks on my personal checking account, and hadn't wanted to write checks from our joint account. Not that I had actually used all of the checks I had for my account. More like, I couldn't find them.

I know that the last check I wrote was numbered in the 1700s. I also know I have a couple checkbooks lying around with checks in the 1800s. They were around here somewhere, I couldn't find them anywhere.

Two months ago, I lost my passport. Over the next two months, I've lost maybe another half dozen things, the loss of which have only frustrated me more, the more I lose.

Now, here was the worst part about losing those checks: I knew they were around here somewhere. I know, because I hid them.

I was so clever with my hiding spot that, well, even I couldn't find them.

So, I had a hundred checks around here somewhere, and I wasn't paying my bills until I found them, and I couldn't find them.

Not that I haven't looked for them. I've found two stashes of checks for the other accounts we have, but not for my personal account. I found checks from accounts closed years ago, but not those checks.

Nothing like being so clever that you fool even yourself.

Quite accidently, and incredibly loudly, I found the stash of checks this evening. Happy, happy, joy, joy, I can pay my bills.

Or, rather, keep the bill collectors at away.

So, when watching West Side Story, I have always wondered how strange that people on the street would suddenly burst into a brilliantly choreographed dance and perfectly harmonized song, and the people around them don't immediately run away in fear of the singing freaks.

However, today, except for the choregraphed dance, I did exactly that. I spontaneously burst into song.

I can't say I've ever done that before in my adult life. Well, never outside private moments with Kris, that is. And certainly not without unbelievable amounts of personal embarrassment.

I've been memorizing the periodic table recently. I've found a lot of patterns in the table that have helped me memorize the elements, and have created several mnemonics to further help the memorization (CoMe BacK to CaliForia ESpecially if you're FroM MarylanD, and lead (PB) makes you BI POlar, are two).

To really help, however, I've started writing a song to help me out.

When a client saw the periodic table on my clipboard today, she asked how the song was going. I chuckled, then burst into song, singing it as far as I could, as far as I had written it.

Afterward, I realized how embarrassed I should be about the whole episode. Other than as the fat lady in the Viking Opera, I don't think I've ever sung in public before.

Yet, I wasn't embarrassed at all. What is this world coming to when I can burst into song without embarrassment?

Of course, you haven't seen me dance.