There was a fascinating new episode in my continuing dispute with the fellow who took offense at my e-mail reply to him, because it appeared in blue letters. Today I got another email from him, in which he demanded that I apologize for sending him a blue email.

The customer is always right, of course, so I immediately responded with an apology.

However, due to the way our email operates, the apology was in blue letters.

I expect he was not placated.

If this were a thriller novel, this would be the point at which I start to notice strangers following me, and to receive cryptic, threatening phone calls.

I realized long ago that I would never survive a thriller novel. I’d be one of the hapless bystanders mown down in a spray of blood by the psycho, on his way to the big showdown with Somebody Who Knows How to Handle Himself. My friend Ragnar, perhaps, or my friend Michael Z. Williamson.

Had an interesting phone call this evening. A fellow in California had seen my name and address in the Sons of Norway magazine (I’m Vice President of my lodge now), and called me to find out if I possibly knew a fellow he knew long, long ago, when he lived around here. He had a family memento he wanted to give the fellow, if he was still alive.

Alas, I didn’t. Nor did the better-acquainted district officer I checked with immediately afterward.

Too bad.

Aside from not being Somebody Who Knows How to Handle Himself, I’m also not much of a private investigator.

For the record.

A Wednesday Loom (hat tip to Roy Jacobsen)

That snow we expected yesterday turned out, on closer acquaintance, to be rather more than expected. I had to use the snow blower after all, but the job I ended up doing was pretty marginal. Relatively high temperatures meant wet, heavy snow, and in some places it did more than just jam in the chute—it obstinately refused to be augured into the works at all. I expect it will be mostly gone in a week, but it was one of the harder snow removal jobs I’ve had this winter.

I’m having temporal trouble, it appears.

That dinner I told you I was invited to tonight? Turns out it was last night. The host called me about twenty minutes after the stated time, wondering where I was. I had stood facing his wife, as she made the invitation, and dutifully noted it down IN THE WRONG SPACE ON MY POCKET CALENDAR! My shame is unbounded, ubiquitous and ineffable.

Also. At work I have one of those “atomic” clocks that readjusts itself based on a radio signal from an observatory somewhere out west. This one is an analog clock, the old fashioned kind with a face and hands. It didn’t change the hour when Daylight Savings Time overtook us, so I moved the little hands myself.

Then, sometime Monday night, the clock decided to make the time change on its own. I thought yesterday morning was going unusually fast, but in fact my clock was an hour ahead. I ate lunch at 11:00. Eventually I figured it out.

The obvious conclusion is that time is not on my side.

It’s been spring-like for the past week or so, and most of the snow has melted away, headed downriver to various places that don’t want it. It hasn’t been happy spring, though—it’s been April Showers spring weather. We haven’t seen the sun much. I went out the other night to look at the MegaMoon, but she had hid her face modestly behind a burqa of clouds.

Tomorrow the rain is supposed to turn to snow, and they’re promising as much as three inches of the stuff. Sloppy snow, I expect, and it probably won’t be worth blowing out. It shouldn’t last long on the ground. Public opinion is against it.

Tomorrow has turned out to be a strangely packed day in my personal calendar. You have to understand, I lead—by choice—a notably hapless life, if you define “hapless” as nothing happening (which is wrong, but the thought amuses me). My pocket calendar doesn’t usually include more than two or three notations a week.

And yet all kinds of stuff has landed on my Wednesday, March 23 space, as if some temporal sharpshooter placed his bulls-eye on it. First my semi-annual furnace inspection got penciled in, months ago. Then I heard from a former college roommate, who told me his son would be appearing in the role of a schizophrenic drug addict in an episode of Criminal Minds that evening (I stopped watching CM a while back, when they took an unprovoked narrative shot at homeschoolers, but I’m willing to make an exception for a friend’s kid). Then, just yesterday, someone at work invited me to dinner at their house (why I can’t imagine. I guess I’ll videotape the TV show).

But why all this at once?

I expect I’ll still be able to do a blog post, as I’ll spend the afternoon at home, waiting for the furnace guy.

I’ve been selling unwanted books from our bookstore on Amazon for a while now. Last Friday I got an order, accompanied by e-mail requests from the customer, in which he asked for some special services we aren’t able to offer (I’ll stipulate that I didn’t handle that exchange as well as I might have). But I finally promised to get him a Confirmation number from the Post Office, and e-mail it to him on Monday, when I’d be back in the office.

Coming in on Monday, I found that he’d canceled the order (which was a couple days in the mail by then). He told me that my email response to his message showed up in blue lettering (our system always makes the replies blue, to help the readers tell one mailer’s messages from the other’s). He said he considered those blue letters a threat to himself and his home, and so had canceled the order.

Are any of you aware of any scenario in which blue print is a threat to anybody?