Creatures of habit, redux
Jan. 16th, 2012 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceHeh. On an ordinary rice-day, it would be my habit to cook the rice at 5.00pm. This gives it time to cool off thoroughly before I fry it up for dinner, and means that I can listen to the opening minutes of PM (ah, the dulcet tones of Eddie Mair) while it cooks.
On an ordinary day, 5.00pm is also the time I let myself start drinking.
Today? Not so ordinary; I need to be in town by 7.30 for a meeting of the Third Monday Club. Which means I need to eat an hour earlier than usual, which means I wanted to cook the rice an hour earlier, which means...
Which means that I just came upstairs from draining the rice, sat down at the keyboard and all but reached for my glass of wine, all but tasting it already. At 4.00pm. Clearly I'm that far attuned, that the smell of fresh-boiled rice makes me expect alcohol on the instant. Ah Pavlov, thou shouldst be living at this hour...
In other habituations, Lord only knows what Mac is going to do in California. There'll be no decent games of golf, and positively no geysers at bedtime...
Hmm? I should explain? Oh, it's all the fault of Karen's bathtub.
Heh. I may have mentioned before that Mac likes to start the day with a game of bathtub golf: knock the soap into the tub, and see if he can get it down the plughole while I'm cleaning my teeth and so forth. It's a good game, but it just won't be the same in CA, as K's tub is barely deeper than a shower-tray.
That's the mornings ruined, then. And then come evening, as soon as I turn the computer off and emerge from the office, he and I head straight for the bathroom, and again he jumps into the bathtub while I clean my teeth. Obviously, one does not play golf after supper; this time he just wants to stare warily into the plughole, because bath and basin drain into the same shallow-sloping pipe, and if I time it right I can make the bathtub plughole first gurgle, then spit, then positively regurge water from the basin. He finds this delightful, in a shriek-OMG-wet-paws! kind of way. And my betting is that he will assume this to be true of all bathrooms, and bitter disappointment shall be the poor boy's lot when he learns that 'tis not so.
I only hope that Californian sunshine will prove some poor compensation. He may be the first ever to migrate to America and find less golf.
On an ordinary day, 5.00pm is also the time I let myself start drinking.
Today? Not so ordinary; I need to be in town by 7.30 for a meeting of the Third Monday Club. Which means I need to eat an hour earlier than usual, which means I wanted to cook the rice an hour earlier, which means...
Which means that I just came upstairs from draining the rice, sat down at the keyboard and all but reached for my glass of wine, all but tasting it already. At 4.00pm. Clearly I'm that far attuned, that the smell of fresh-boiled rice makes me expect alcohol on the instant. Ah Pavlov, thou shouldst be living at this hour...
In other habituations, Lord only knows what Mac is going to do in California. There'll be no decent games of golf, and positively no geysers at bedtime...
Hmm? I should explain? Oh, it's all the fault of Karen's bathtub.
Heh. I may have mentioned before that Mac likes to start the day with a game of bathtub golf: knock the soap into the tub, and see if he can get it down the plughole while I'm cleaning my teeth and so forth. It's a good game, but it just won't be the same in CA, as K's tub is barely deeper than a shower-tray.
That's the mornings ruined, then. And then come evening, as soon as I turn the computer off and emerge from the office, he and I head straight for the bathroom, and again he jumps into the bathtub while I clean my teeth. Obviously, one does not play golf after supper; this time he just wants to stare warily into the plughole, because bath and basin drain into the same shallow-sloping pipe, and if I time it right I can make the bathtub plughole first gurgle, then spit, then positively regurge water from the basin. He finds this delightful, in a shriek-OMG-wet-paws! kind of way. And my betting is that he will assume this to be true of all bathrooms, and bitter disappointment shall be the poor boy's lot when he learns that 'tis not so.
I only hope that Californian sunshine will prove some poor compensation. He may be the first ever to migrate to America and find less golf.