the mock-up.

Try it at home!

First, a flashback.

When I was four or five, my great uncle's step-daughter (which I believe makes her my first step cousin once removed, although Wikipedia is ambiguous on this point) told me a killer joke:

A family of three tomatoes are walking down the sidewalk, and the little baby tomato starts falling behind. The daddy tomato walks back to the baby tomato, stomps on her, and says, "Ketchup!"

Despite the disturbing themes of child abuse and Veggie-Tales-style ambulatory tomatoes, I found this utterly hilarious. However, the message behind this morality tale was not completely lost on me, and to this day I feel a lingering pressure to generally keep up with things. To that end, please allow me to play some catch-up here.

The dearth of material is mostly due to work, which is purely insane but not without its entertaining moments. Remind me to someday tell you the tale of my two lovestruck co-workers who adamantly insist that they are not lovestruck, while making incredulous, exaggerated facial expressions and throwing around words like "awkward" and "crazy" and something about there being "no love for a Jedi." (My mad eavesdropping skills are fading with age.) Anyway, it's providing a nice occasional distraction from the improbable deadlines I have this month.

Speaking of things that are simultaneously amusing and horrifying, my college reunion is this weekend. Instead of going through the whole "So what have you been UP to?!" conversation and repeating the same basic facts six dozen times, I'm going to write those basic facts on a stack of index cards. So when someone asks me, "Where are you living now?" I'll just tell them to draw a card. It might say "Breckenridge," or "Porter Square," or "Watching Heroes" or "Andrew Bird" -- if it's not accurate, it'll at least confuse them long enough so that I can make a stealthy escape towards the bar.

I've spent the rest of the time scouting real estate in Second Life, frying avocados, and getting in peak shape for the Lawn Olympics. (Future blog entry alert!) June will be no less hectic than May but I'll try to dig up some summery pithiness for your reading pleasure.

Next week brings some way overdue outdoors time in Arizona. No coworkers. No classmates. No e-mail. Just this. Awesome.