No, I am not dead

or, as Mark Twain used to say …


“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Now it may seem from my relative inactivity online that I have departed this realm, the reality is that I am still here. I’ve just been enslaved by my National Novel Writing Month project. I had a couple of big piles of papers to grade that ate into my NaNoing time, and then I had a bad case of writer’s block that left me six days behind on my wordcount. Then I had an inspiration, and now I’ve been cranking out the words maniacally with the goal of catching up, which I have almost done.

For the Thanksgiving holiday, we’re all up at Five O’Clock Somewhere – me, Pat, Tadpole, and even Dulce. When we got here, we found that tons of messages had been left on the answering machine. Most of them were responses to a help wanted ad in some newspaper: “I’m interested in the full time, part time EMT positions …” Apparently, some newspaper, somewhere, ran the ad but misprinted the phone number, so potential job applicants were calling us. That’s rather a pity for whoever was doing the hiring – I know that there’s a shortage of good EMTs.

That reminds me of another instance of a misprinted phone number. A very long time ago, Pat and I lived in a small town. There was much rejoicing when a Domino’s Pizza franchise opened. But the Domino’s Pizza phone number was only one easily mistaken digit different from ours (I believe the last 4 digits of the numbers were 7700 and 7770, or something of the sort).

Worse, the local newspaper had a typo in the big ad announcing the Domino’s grand opening, so our number was there in inch-high digits. This was before we had an answering machine, and it was hugely bothersome. I took to answering the phone, “Hello, this is not Domino’s Pizza.”