Friday Frankenpodge

1. We head to St. Louis for a few frenetic days of house hunting, with a job interview and some extra work for a client tossed in for me. Posting here tomorrow is out, hence this weird hybrid between a Friday and a Saturday post.

Also, I may be scarce here and even slower than usual to reply to comments and email until Thursday.

Oh, and as usual, our landlord has, just before a trip, scheduled people to go into our apartment with no time to spare for us. (He wants to show the place today, and left a note on my door yesterday, which I didn't get until my sitter had been gone for two hours.) We have a baby: With all the chaos that can entail on top of the attendant packing job from hell, you might appreciate my chuckle when I went over today's schedule.

The sitter arrives. Mom and Pop Van Horn both have dental appointments early. We (read: I) will probably start packing around half past nine at best. (We've let the place go a little lately and there will be suitcases on top of every flat surface.) The showing is at eleven. We (I?) could leave for that, but we'd lose the time and I have a noon call that can't wait with a client. We can't extend the sitter past about 1:00 because she has time constraints of her own, and we're in dash-to-the-airport territory by then, anyway.

I hope this is some devilishly clever strategy on his part to dissuade some less-than-desirable tenant from renting our unit -- or that the note I jot persuades him to reschedule.

It is astounding how much of this mess is caused, directly or indirectly by how small our Boston apartment is. We can't wait to pay much less for much more room!

2. Weekend Reading

"Like the traditional New Orleans ... funeral, the Bethany [end-of-summer] event is a celebration of life, set squarely in the context of death and loss." -- Michael Hurd, in "Turn Loss into Opportunity" at DrHurd.com

"Ryan has been called an 'extremist' for wanting to tinker with the way government funds a couple of programs and seeking to slow the growth of government spending." -- Harry Binswanger, in "Ryan's Economic Plans Aren't as Ayn Rand-Based as You Think" at Yahoo! Finance

"Like her views on domestic policy, a Randian foreign policy would be guided exclusively by the goal of protecting the individual rights of Americans, and only Americans." -- Elan Journo, in "Galt Goes Global" at Foreign Policy

3. I got a chuckle out of reading these "Ten Rules for Shared Working Spaces". Regarding Rule 1, I like the counterintuitive use of Twitter as a means of enforcing etiquette.

4. With Arsenal's sale of Robin van Persie during the off-season, I have gained an appreciation for what must be the world's greatest rumor mill: the European professional soccer transfer window. In that vein, some wag compiled an A-Z list of all the players that have been "linked" by to my favorite team.

-- CAV