Whoa. Haven't seen these text boxes in quite some time. My watchlist is a mile long, but if I catch up before I write this I'll never post again.

Kellnerin-on-public-transport teaser: On Friday, on the way home from work, a man got on the T carrying a tuxedo on a wooden hanger (with no cover or even a plastic dry-cleaner bag) and a folding step stool (white painted aluminum tubes, black rubber-covered steps) in one hand. He had to hold his arm at an awkward angle, elbow jutting out sharply, his hand a few inches above his waist, so that the corner of the vest wouldn't drag on the floor. It came close a couple times, but never touched as far as I saw. He got off the train one stop before me.

I've had that image of him in my head for days.

Because the last time I wrote a story from the point of view of an inanimate object, the object in question was a second-century Roman glass bowl,

and because I am always trying to write something I haven't done before,

and because I often end up writing the same kind of story anyway ...

Because of all these things, when CRwM announced that the theme of WFC Eye Ex was the It narrative, I decided that I was going to write a version of the classic phone meets boy, phone mistakes gratitude and infatuation for love, boy turns out to be member of a terrorist conspiracy, phone loses boy story.

D and I went to vote first thing in the morning on Super Tuesday (which is when I started writing this). Despite the hoopla around the presidential primary, at our precinct it was the Lamest. Election. Evar. Sure, there was cold rain falling and this nasty slush everywhere that morning, but there wasn't a single person holding a sign out in front of the school. "Where's the bake sale?" we exclaimed to each other by the door to the gym. "This is why no one bothers to vote anymore."

The whole right side of the ballot was taken up by the candidates for Town Committee. The instructions stipulated that you must "Vote for no more than 35 choices." So I counted the number of candidates. There were thirty-five. So, I guess they were just being thorough.

In other voting-related news, another WFC has come and gone. I meant to write a crime story, honest, but I wrote "Wheel Man" instead.

A friend of D's recently re-opened her deviantART Gallery. She does a lot of fractal-based compositions that are pretty cool (we have a couple framed around the house) and besides, one of them has a title that sounds like it was inspired by a song by The Cult.

I like my new phone quite a bit (yes, I really did just say that, mostly because I haven't used it much as a phone), but not this much.

Inside, my New Year's gift to you.

As I was saying to bo the other day, "New Year's comes but once a year." So does the annual bout of consumerism, thankfully. But toys make it a lot easier to get through the shortest days of the year.

The other day, on the T, there was a pamphlet tucked into one of the advertisement frames that asked, "What if you knew that you could find a refreshing that surpassed any experience you had previously?"

I had to admit, I do not know what would happen if I knew that.

Train, work, and train.

Cookie fortunes from Friday night:

Mine: Today you should be a passenger. Stay close to a driver for a day.
D's: Your problem just got bigger. Think, what have you done?

"What have you done?"

"I don't know. I thought all I did was open a cookie. See if I ever do that again."

Inside, notes from Kellnerin-on-the-T (if only I lived in a different city, it could have been Notes from Kellnerin-on-the-Underground), and fortuneless cookies.

Now that would have been a much better title for a WFC story than "Broken Glass." Damned if I know what it means, though.

Two conversations belatedly related by your Kellnerin-on-a-Train representative (Kellnerin).