A lotta shit in there...

The air in the new Passat is now phenomenally cold, thanks to me spending a few hours out of the last 24 pulling the old dead compressor out and replacing it. There were a few eerily Saablike things about the way that Volkswagen engineers their cars... situations where you could clearly see that a particularly part was engineered by someone who never imagined someone might have to remove it someday in an environment where physically removing the entire engine and hanging it up like a beef carcass isn't really possible.

Saabs are like that, too. Older Volvos are much more considerate.

Today was another one of those hypersonic women-only whistle days. Many, many attractive women out in complementary styles and dressed just on that nice edge of tarty that I tend to like far too much.

Not to change the subject (which, as you know, is one of my favorites) but I just realized that I have a lot of extremely odd things in my office. Here's just a sample:

In my office, I have...

• three Beanie Cows atop the flatscreen monitor, two of which actually can moo
  
• A pair of scissors severely damaged when the previous owner apparently cut through a live power cord with them
  
• An original 1984 Macintosh 128, which is actually the oldest microcomputer in existence at my large government agency... the agency history museum incorrectly reports that a 1985 IBM PC is the oldest. Nope.
  
• A picture of Suzanne in a frame
  
• An advertising button pinned to the cube wall that, when pushed, says, "DiSaronno... try on the rocks to light a fire!"
  
• A platter from an old 12" hard drive, circa 1982, all scarred up due to severe servomotor failure
  
• A large stuffed cat
  
• A key lime tree
  
• A tacky cast knick-knack in the shape of a crotch-rocket motorcycle, with a small clock in the hub of the back wheel
  
• Many, many power cords
  
• An anodized-brass sign that says This is a critical component. Don't touch unless authorized by LAN administration staff." It's on the 1984 Macintosh.
  
• Some fake mistletoe
  
• A teddy bear wearing and American flag sweater that I bought the day my divorce was final, and thus is called "Freedom Bear."
  
• A loose 1994 Intel Pentium 60 CPU, the rarest of all the Pentia.
  
• An otter calendar that still displays June, 1999
  
• Lots of funny shit from The Onion, Fark.com and I Love Bacon, all sites which have been at various times blocked by our firewall and then later unblocked.
  
• A salt shaker I swiped from the cafeteria downstairs two years ago
  
• A sign that used to live in the old closed-circuit TV studio here that reads "ONE MINUTE REMAINDING" (sic) on one side and "STOP" on the other
  
• Four empty plastic pretzel barrels. I figure if the tsunami comes, I'll shove them in my pants and float out of here.
  
• A copy of the software and manuals for Lisa 7/7, the 1984 ancestor of what is now AppleWorks
  

Mind you, this isn't even all the shit that's in here. I've been collecting this stuff for far, far too long.

You should see my house.