Nothing Says Loving Like Not Really Following the Instructions and Making a Huge Mess

Yesterday Miss Edith had a guest come visit for lunch; very delightful company, a young woman of exceptionally high quality. Smart, vivacious, and she has one important leg up on Miss Edith, which is that she knows how to dance. (Miss Edith is better known for sort of sauntering, which doesn't require actual physical skill.) Our guest enjoys a good cup of hot chocolate, and since it was a grey cold day, I felt moved to produce some for her.

I used a product I'd never tried before, some Nestle Abuelita. These are chunky tablets of cocoa and cinnamon which you melt with hot milk in a blender. What could be easier? (Well, lots of things, but this promised to be better than the easier things. Let's move on.)

I heated the milk and poured it over the tablet in the blender and pressed "puree" or some such button and instantly bespeckled my lovely orange-and-blue-and-green-on-an-ivory-background embroidered tablecloth -- oh yes -- with light brown splotches of hot Abuelita. Hot chocolate on the credit card bills on the kitchen table. Hot chocolate on the estimates we'd gotten for having our beloved cat's teeth cleaned. Hot chocolate on Miss Edith's pink oxford cloth shirt that had the cuffs turned up just so. Hot chocolate on the floor by the water bowl for aforementioned beloved cat. You've never seen hot chocolate in so many interesting places.

"Shit," I said eloquently.

I pressed the blender lid down more tightly and reached for a dishtowel to cover it with while I pressed a less aggressive button. No further disaster ensued, and I poured the frothy mix into mugs, which we enjoyed thoroughly. '

Later, as I began to clean up the blender and hot milk pot and put things away, I noticed a line in the Abuelita instructions which I'd neglected to note before:

"Cover blender lid with towel when blending and only blend on low speed."

Ah.

From the Annals of Idiosyncracy: One Card Catalogue -- The Handwritten Catalogue of the Institute Library

One of the oddities of one of my favorite oddities (The Young Men's Institute Library) is their catalogue.

This library barely has a telephone, so, no surprise, the catalogue is not computerized. No: it is still written on little cards which are stored in those wooden cabinets that now get tossed by more serious institutions. (Incidentally, if anyone has one of those and wants to give me one, let me know. I've always wanted a card catalogue of my very own.) The Institute Library's card catalogue doesn't use the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress system; rather, it uses its own system, which was devised by god knows who, god knows when, but has never changed since the library was founded in 1826. It is my understanding that there is one other library in the world that uses this same arcane system, and it's in India, and the reason that that other library uses it is that some poor schmo saw the Institute Library's catalogue, said, "Great!" and, without doing further research into the matter, went and built his library in India.

So if you want to find a book at the Institute Library (or, I guess, at this place in India), you can either learn their strange, idiosyncratic system, or ask a librarian for help. Having an MLS will do you no good in this joint. Years of service in the British Museum wouldn't do any good here. The Institute Library is just determined to paddle its own way in deeply murky waters.
My method of dealing with the catalogue, which I view as useless, though gorgeous, is to skip it entirely and just browse the shelves. Though the cards in the catalogue are minor works of art (some of the libarians had really remarkable handwriting), I peruse them not for their supposed usefulness, but for their own beautiful sake.

Nicholson Baker would, I hope, approve.