Don't Do This

I answer the phone at work. "Human Resources, Susan Rudolph."

"Hello, Ms. Rudolph, how are you?"

"[What?] I'm fine, thank you. [miniscule but censorious pause] Who is this, please?"

"Oh! I'm ... well, my name is ..."

So goes yet another encounter wherein I chew somebody's nose off for making a faux pas. Since it says right there in my "About" that I'm trying to stop doing this, let's move along to the nature of the faux pas.

When you make a business call, or any call to somebody you don't know, you're in the position of asking a favor. In the tiny social contract that the other person agrees to by answering the phone, you're the bottom.

So you're obliged to get to the point. You want to start things off with a pleasantry? Give me your name, say whom you're affiliated with, and describe concisely what you want. That's what I call pleasant.

But throw me off guard by deviating from accepted telephone etiquette, and I hate you already. Though later I will forgive you.

p.s. No, seriously. After I spit out the chewed nose, I feel bad, and I'm super nice and helpful for the rest of the conversation.

Clean, Classic Hat

This one's for Mel. Family of four, not including three dogs -- things are usually flying around all over the place, amirite? Under those circumstances, can you have too many hats?

When everybody's scrambling out the door every morning, you need a generous supply of warm that your two-legged darlings can grab, put on, and go with. Here's one from Purl Bee you can crank out in multiples all through September.

Oooh, I love the colors. And no itch! It has a clever cashmere lining around the bottom for soft and cozy (only 23 rounds -- one skein of cashmere will be enough for several hats.)

It's hip. I love it. Pattern here. Make it in colors that kiss you on the lips.

Smitten: Google Books

Today I finally got around to this --

Book paradise! And not just books, but magazines -- old magazines. I could look at vintage advertisements for hours at a stretch.

Evidently, however, there are significant problems with the way Google is cataloguing the books it images. Laura Miller writes about it at Salon.com:

People at Google are also saying, "Let's crowdsource this," but that is a stupid idea. You and I are both smart, knowledgeable people, but I wouldn't trust either of us to do the skilled work of cataloging a 1890 edition of "Madame Bovary." It's very difficult. It has to be coordinated by uniform standards... And metadata is hard to fix if you don't get it right in the first place. Someone has to spend a lot of money to properly catalog a research library, and I don't know if Google understood that going into it.
 
Well, those are macro problems; Google Books will give micro me nothing but joy.

Here I Am

This is my desk.

Didn't clean it up, didn't edit out shameful details. (Click on the photo for a closer view.)

Better After

Very nice chair re-do from Billie Monster, via Better After.

I think I would have tried to do the piping on the seat. Piping makes everything better. But shut my mouth. These things take a lot of imagination. I would have been stuck on the gold and orange fabric which, as Better After puts it, "could actually be quite stylin' if it wasn't decomposing." I probably wouldn't have seen this chair so light and pretty in blue and white.

Now That's a Shower Curtain

Gorgeous! But $118 price is silly. Would be a piece of cake to make.

Curtain Alternative

Curtain, schmurtain. Do like First Home Makeover, and etch a design on the glass.

Before ...

... and after.

Genius! Reminds me of this, which I also love.

Can't Have Too Many Tea Towels

This one's for Anna. Gotta love a lotta coral.

Jenny Hart of Sublime Stitching does it again.