One (and so far the only) idea I have for RDC's stocking this year is a kitchen timer. He is perfect and so doesn't need one, but still, the kitchen has that hole in it. I told Kal of my difficulty in locating one: in addition to desiring various visual aesthetic points and no battery, I don't want a really obnoxious ding. I said I didn't want to alienate the entire staff in Sur La Table and while the effect sounds no better than if I were Oliver with his sheer joy at the noise of it, I'm just comparing buzzers. She got it, hooray (what the fuck kind of profane cover is that, though?!). We were at work, and went our separate ways in a moment, with me saying I had to go investigate Tribble Customs in the Sudden. That she didn't get until I clarified it was Tribal Customs in the Sudan (such being one of Dot Org's chief investigative topics).
Tonight we--Kal, Neal, AEK, and I--went ice-skating. At least, that's what it was called, but of ice there was little, either in area or in surface. For a rink in the middle of a faux town center, it wasn't as puny as the one in Cherry Creek, but neither was it a hockey rink or even the size of a decent pond. The real problem was the surface. I didn't see where a Zamboni could have been parked nearby, and one certainly hadn't serviced the surface in some time. It was bubbly and chunky and covered with shaving. These flaws makes pond-skating charming but a rink should be free of them.
The four of us were equally clumsy. Kal and I, having grown up with water and cold, owned our own skates; AEK and Neal, who didn't, rented what they said were decent skates from a booth (where maybe there was a miniature Zamboni). I haven't skated since maybe 1994, and it showed. When I began to learn to ski, I was told you do not ski like you skate, and maybe you don't, but here I applied skiing to skating. When I found my feet, I kept my blades parallel and tried to push off from the inside front of either skate. Apparently the perfect incline for me is more tilted than flat ice but less tilted than your average mountain. I'm picky. And if I could skate at all, I would have only one foot on the ice at a time and get more glide off each push. Whatever.
My point is that I can't skate. At the beginning, I picked up one skate and put it down, picked up the other and put it down. "Look, Kal! Guess who I'm being!"
"Me!" she guessed.
"No! Oliver!"