Wowie.

Sunday afternoon my friend Elisa rang our phone:  could she drop by for a few minutes, she was about to head back to Dallas after a weekend conference and she had a box for us.  We’re always glad to see her, of course; she’s one of our oldest friends in Mensa and really cool people besides.

In a few minutes, the door knocker goes and here’s E with the great big box FULL of clothes.  Her husband has lost fifty or sixty pounds in the last couple of years, so they had all these clothes that fitted him then and swallow him now, and he and I are sorta of a size, so they figured they’d give them all to me.  Then she goes back out to the car and brings in another huge armful of suits and jackets.  We were suitably surprised, and I was plumb down delighted.

I was even more delighted when I finally got around to trying everything on for size tonight.  A lot of the clothes do indeed fit me, and some of them are even big on me (Liz Claiborne cuts her men’s shirts bloody ENORMOUS in the body).  A few things need altering, which L is certainly capable of doing, and a few others weren’t really my style and will go to the women’s shelter thrift shop (our preferred place these days over Goodwill), but even after taking the things out I didn’t want, I got:

• Two wool suits, one summer and one winter-weight
• A long tweed jacket
• A heavy wool blazer (Oscar de la Renta, no less, and I’m surprised that it fitted me, given how unlike my body type most costura ’uomo design is)
• Two pair of wool slacks
• Two Hawaiian, four golf, and eight casual shirts, various
• Seven silk ties
• Three dress belts

I mean . . . wow.  Once I was through, I was able to weed out a whole stack of other clothes I can’t fit into any more, and still not feel as though I’ll be naked if I don’t do wash weekly.  This kind of generosity flabbergasts me when it happens.  And now I gotta think of something really cool to do for E and her husband as thanks.  It gives me a subject to ponder.

And in the rest of the world:  tomorrow is the final day on my current assignment.  I’m still afraid I’ll have trouble paying the mortgage fully by month’s end, although L is working lots and lots so she can hand another big invoice to the director of this play, and the school he works for appears to pay pretty quickly.  I doubt I can find anything for Thursday and Friday only.

(But of course, nothing can go smoothly around here . . . L just came in to announce the sewing machine’s drive belt broke, so she can’t do any more construction until it’s fixed, which means I gotta get to the Bernina shop tomorrow somehow.  At least she can still cut out the patterns she hasn’t yet done.)

Pledge drive at KUT starting on Friday.  This drive makes twenty-eight consecutive years I’ve worked on them.  L and M are going to work phones for Folkways on Saturday, and T will join them once she’s through taking the PSAT.  (I would be there too, since Folkways is my favorite program on the station, but instead I have to administer a Mensa admission test that day.)  I’m supposed to do a phone-bank captain shift on Sunday, and I think I may pick up the split just to help out—seven to ten in the morning, then eight to eleven in the evening.  I’m also supposed to do a shift Wednesday evening on Paul Ray’s Jazz, if the drive runs that long.

Oh, yeah—and I think I may end up selling out to the Empire.  I have an interview at Dell a week from tomorrow for a 90-day up-or-out contract position, doing call center support.  The pay is still far below my experience level, but I can’t afford to haggle.  I only hope I can discipline myself enough to endure the Dell corporate culture, which way too many people assure me is bureaucratic to the max.

The intergalactic chair assassinates the smoking bowling ball.  Fnord.