is it just me or is it really hard to clear the dA message center? Miscellaneous, journals, and polls clear with a click or two, but the comments list seems to require manual click, delete, refresh, click, delete, and so forth. So if i'm at all lazy the message thing says like 8 hojillion before i know it and my brain seizes up.

work is really ominous lately. the excavation company next door is grinding their pile of busted concrete that accumulates over the course of several months, and the enormous apparatus that breaks the stuff down runs constantly and shakes the whole immediate vicinity like a low-level earthquake. This grinding ritual takes several days and it's kind of surreal to clock in every morning to a shop whose light fixtures are constantly swaying. My glass of drinkin-water looks straight out of Jurassic Park.

it also makes detail painting kind of a bitch.

Last night my wee-est sister dropped by and woke me up from a VERY nice nap. But she brung cookies and so i can't hate. My place constantly looks like an explosive device recently detonated but she could care less, as she don't keep house too well either. I've seen it. But the one thing she did raise an alarm about was the batch of tomatoes sitting on my table.

"Gah! Tomatoes!" she cried, like they had sprouted teeth and claws. "You could get salmonella!"

I'd heard about that, actually. We'd gone for quite awhile without someone trying to scare us with tainted asparagus or lettuce, and so a handful of people getting poisoned by tomaters (how long until bananas? HOW LONG, he cried) seems par for the course. There's nothing like people crapping their pants over possibly maybe tainted food to shatter your false sense of security.

It's important to be aware of what can kill you. No argument there. When faced with a hungry grizzly and nothing but a sharp stick and the clothes on your back, the statistical unlikelihood of being mauled and eaten by a bear is likely to offer little comfort, but let's be real here. If millions upon millions of Americans were keeling over as bad tomatoes made them defecate explosively until their intestines spun out like silly string, we'd have a debacle on our hands. Such as it is, proportionally very few people have succumbed to food poisoning, and alarmists need a good thrashing for trying to panic people every time someone eats some bad food.

And i've HAD food poisoning, not a life threatening case but a cold-sweat, delusional, all-cannons-are-go experience, and it's not fun, but if every time i had a bad encounter with a Chinese food vendor i pulled the national panic alarm we'd never leave the house.

Anyway, i've already eaten a bunch of my tomato collection and they're fine. Better than fine. They've been laced with some high-grade stuff. Try one. You'll kiss God.


ja, mata