Faint Waft of Failure

Once again, a holiday season is coming to an end, for the second time in six weeks. The kids will be back in school on Monday.  I checked online but today, Saturday, it is still an official holiday in China, so we will not be heading to the National Museum or any other such edifying facility.  It’s still too “cold” to talk the family into a walk in the countryside, or a stroll through a neighborhood.  What the wife suggested and I’ll likely settle for is a ride down to the Fangcaodi mall that has all the installation art work laid out inside and some restaurants, which I hope will be open.   

My colleague suggested I sign up for Streak, a new Google product that lets you track leads and business contacts a bit like some other commercial software such as Yesware, does.  The name is unfortunate, to my reckoning, reminding me of the 1974 song about nudists with the selfsame title, or the marks one might find on ill kept undergarments, but someone no doubt spent many millions of dollars to determine that those associations needn’t derail the launch.  It’s free.  I downloaded it.  Now when I reply to an email a large, expectant column of white space appears to the right of my Inbox.  I can’t collapse it.  I went into the settings and unclicked every Streak box listed, but the gaping vacancy is still there.   It shouldn’t matter, but I (and you, certainly) spend so much time staring at our Inbox, that it's jarring to have it unexpectedly reconfigured. 

I thought I had it all timed right last evening.  My wife would be home from the airport about 7:30PM.  I had a call at 7:00.   I could put the rice on, go out and get some groceries and whip something up before this call started, that we could eat together once the Mrs. returned.  I set the rice to boil and went to check just one email.  Soon I could smell the faint waft of failure.  If there was a light aroma of burn in my office, it must smell like charred log in the kitchen.  It did. I watched the second pot rise to boil and set it down low so I could make my bike run, considering as I set out about the almost magical quality of smell, that lets one know about something, like "there's a fire!" when it is out of eyesight, or earshot or immediate memory. 

Soon though I was knocking away on a pair of closed doors.  Lights were on, but no one bothered with me.  I thought I had the holiday schedule at our local market down:  closest market closes at five and the larger one, further out will be closing at eight.  But at six-forty-five I was heading home empty handed, trying to recall what, besides two potatoes and an onion was still in the fridge to go with all that rice. When I got the girls didn’t like the idea of papas con arroz and threatened to order out for dinner, till I reminded them they couldn’t.  No one would be open.  Besides, there’s always something else in the fridge.  Give me a minute here.  I'll make this work. 

Saturday, 02/09/19