Potty Break
Just when you think you have absolutely, posivitely, utterly NOTHING to blahg about, and you are about ready to throw in the towel, your computer makes a little dinging “You’ve got mail!” noise. Whatever noise you’ve told your computer to make. You think, “oh, it’s just spam or list/group email.” But you look anyway. And BINGO! It’s your cousin. In a TOILET PARADE!
My cousin Jay is an engineer for the Sammamish Plateau Water and Sewer District, which is somewhere around Seattle. I have probably asked her the details of her job about ten brazillion times but I am not an engineering type person and I can never remember. If I have everything totally wrong, I hope she’ll correct me. I do know that she’s an expert about water and soil and mud and clay and toilets and god only knows what else. Although my cousin Jay is female (married, two college kids), I would *never* call her a “lady engineer,” at least not in any kind of a serious way. A high school friend of mine who turned into an engineer — a good one, no doubt — used to call herself that. Jay is simply an engineer and “good” is the only adjective needed. I once chauffered tagged along with Jay as we she tried to figure out how to save the family land from one o’ them thar shark real estate developers. That whole story is too long for this post but suffice it to say that, under Jay’s direction, I made MS Word do things I had no idea it could do. And I am pretty much a power MS Office user. And then we beat up on copy machines at Kinkos. To this day, when I’m fighting with technological beasties, I find myself quoting her: “be smarter than the machine.” I try. Sometimes I win and sometimes I have to call in my own personal engineer. Sigh.
Anyway, that’s Jay there in the front, waiting on her toilet for the parade to start. For reasons I cannot remember, I used to call her “Nurse Octopus” when we were kids. She was two years younger than me (and her sister Pooh) and played with my little brother and I was a BRAT (!) so my intentions could not have been good. But we all grow up, don’t we?