We're back in Romania and after some frantic days, we're even back online, as of today. (Long story, and yes, it involves Astral and a threat of going to another service. How'd you guess?)
Blogging shall resume shortly. Really. I promise.
(I have lots to tell, indeed. Like, how my flight to the US had to turn around halfway across the Atlantic for a medical emergency. How I got the flight attendants on the shuttle from NY to WAS really, really nervous. How USCIS, formerly known as INS, has become efficient and yet, not. I also have about 30,000 spam messages accumulated in my inbox and important bills and things hidden in-between. So, first things first. But: we're back, and we're online. Yay.)
Posted by claudia at April 8, 2005 09:07 PMOh, thank God. You don't want to know how close I was to describing my sock collection.
Posted by: Carlos at April 8, 2005 11:58 PMWelcome back! We were starting to wonder if Carlos was going to stoop to describing his socks. The INS story should be good. (Did I mention I have a cousin, an attorney, over at immi...never mind.)
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at April 9, 2005 01:29 AMBernard, I have two kinds of socks, white and black. The white ones are athletic socks collected over the years, sometimes from street vendors but usually from more formal stores. There is a high correlation between athletic sock quality and locale of purchase, I've found. Brand name athletic socks do wear much longer than less specialized ones, which last longer than the ones which presumably fell off a truck on the Jersey Turnpike. And the blood washes out of them better, too.
Now, the black ones are usually from The Gap or Banana Republic. But there is a contingent of Filipino made, Filipino sold black socks, which my sister's boyfriend got me when I was bitching about the insane laundry conditions in the equatorial Third World. To wit, nearly every damn piece of clothing I had with me reeked of mildew. No amount of lavender could disguise it. So Mike, the next time he went down to the bazaar, got me a six pack of "large" black socks. I have larger feet than ninety-nine percent of the Philippine population, but it's the thought that counts. I gave him my last clean black T-shirt in exchange.
There are also one or two pair of black socks that are over ten years old, maybe even closer to twenty, a kind my mom would get me for the holidays. I wish I knew what brand they were; they wear like iron. They're nearly navy blue now, they've been washed so many times. They're a little thin now, so they're never my first choice, but wow. They are some tough socks.
Posted by: Carlos at April 9, 2005 05:37 AM