Cloud Factory

          Today, I amused myself at the post office by observing people's waiting habits. The system is simple: walk in, hit the button and receive a number, go up when your number is called. Beyond that, it's different every day. Sometimes people wait in line, and sometimes they fan out across the room. There is some seating available; at times people will occupy it, but at others there will be twenty people standing and no one sitting, even though they're going to be there for a while. I enjoyed a few conversations at work: I talked with Jeff about Boston and Cleveland sports, and Abner, the Citizens Bank teller I work with almost every day, told me that I'm basically an omen of the end of his shift. Harold also said that I'm "amazing" at transcribing his notes; he writes short abstracts of each new U.S. Supreme Court and Mass. Supreme Judicial Court decision, and I do my best to decipher them. Any words that I can't make out, I leave a blank line and he fills in the missing material so I can get the whole thing in order. I'll grant that Harold's handwriting is what you might expect of a nonagenarian, but it's not difficult to look up a case and try to find context for words, something the co-ops before me apparently never thought to do. Example from an old transcript I found: If you find yourself writing that the topic of an SJC case is cartilage, stop and think about it. A two-second search by case name will tell you it's "curtilage".
          After work, I sat on the couch with Alaric and decided that it was now or never with the hookah we've been talking about buying since last year. First, we visited the hookah shop next door, where the clerk was being harassed by three young and rambunctious children. We found nothing suitable there, though I did pick up some charcoal. Next, we took a walk to Kang's, a hole in the wall off Huntington, and purchased a dark green hookah with two hoses, a butane torch, a bottle of gas, and four types of shisha: guava, watermelon mint, white grape (my choice) and jasmine (Alaric's choice.) For any purchase over $6, Kang is known to hand out free lighters, and he gave us two. We broke the hookah in with the watermelon mint and had a ball with smoke rings, a dish of ice and our imaginations. Also, I received a signed 8x11 photo of Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel in the mail today.
          Quote of the day:
Me: "Scallops? More like Skill Ops."
Alaric: "Want to play Counterskill Ops Force?"