From Russia, With Love

There are ghostly cat paw prints on the floor. You have to look at just the right angle to see them on the hardwood, but when the sun comes in through the sliding glass kitchen doors, like it’s doing today, they are as obvious as dinosaur tracks on the marble tile. There are dust bunnies, large enough to generate their own paw prints, under the bed. There are greasy finger print smudges on the fridge door. There are ice-melter granules holding a conference in the corner of the front hall. My vacuum cleaner sits idle in the dining room, with its cord in a tangle. Of course I have no excuse so I won’t offer one. If I wash the floor today, I’ll just have to do it again in a week or two, so why bother? Oops. I guess that was an excuse.

There is never a time when the dishwasher is truly empty. My proven, best practice, technique is to open the dishwasher door when the wash cycle is finished, and pull out the racks so the steam can evaporate. This is a process that can take up to a day. There is nothing to be gained by being too hasty. Haste might mean I’d have to wipe water marks off the cutlery. So what happens is the dishes that get generated in the mean time accumulate on the kitchen counter and in the sink. When the clean dishes finally make their way back to the cupboard, there is a dirty contingent ready to take their place.

Do not despair, however. There have been some triumphs this week. In particular, I have vanquished the Russian spambots. I don’t know what I did to get Russia’s attention, because as far as I know, I have no influence whatsoever on any elections, but my Russian fake-fan club has been bombarding my website with hundreds of comments a day for several months now. I go in and delete them every so often, but they behave exactly like the dishes: a nanosecond after I manage to clean out the spam folder it fills up again. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but there’s this thing called the internet that has all kinds of answers for all kinds of questions. Questions like “how do I get rid of Russian spambots?” And voila. They are gone. The solution apparently works for any spambots, in case the Russians start impersonating North Korean dictators or Nigerian princes.  But now that the Russians are gone I kind of miss them. There’s no longer an email ping on my phone every five minutes, revealing the glaring truth of the level of my importance to non-Russians. My website comments have dwindled to few and far between. My hit rate stats have plummeted. What I think I’ll do is disable the spambot net every so often.  Just to check and see if Russia still loves me.