My first inclination on hearing the phone ring is to let it ring, since it's not for me, and the answering machine will take messages better than I do. If I'm off in my bedroom or the bathroom, that almost clinches the matter; clinching it even tighter is that the kitchen's cordless phone has gone missing and while the base unit will ring, the handset doesn't, so there's no way to get it. Where things change is when someone keeps calling; eventually, it gets to be easier to find the sun room's phone and answer.
The call was from my mother's bank, which wanted to speak with her. I played a hunch: ``I'm afraid you can't; she's on vacation this week, in Egypt.'' The bank person said that's what they were calling about. ``You've been seeing charges from down the Nile, then?'' They were indeed, and now with the assurance that this is only to be expected there shouldn't be any credit-based fiascos to close out my parents' holiday. I would start to make a clever comment about how the bank was happy to accept my word that this was not a case of credit card theft without any specific indication of who I was or how I was qualified to say anything about her movements, but it's occurred to me that I accepted the claim that the person was calling from my mother's bank without requesting any specific evidence. Well, nothing untoward seems to have happened so far.
At the risk of turning this into a journal of parental cat oddities: I haven't been rigorous about closing the bathroom door while showering with my parents out since, really, I don't care if the cats see me naked. The middle cat, the one who likes lapping up the water in the shower stall, pushed her way in and at the end of my shower today seemed slightly offended that I hadn't got out of her shower stall already. I suppose she didn't understand door-opening when she's not the one doing it.
Trivia: More than half the Basque population is blood type O. Source: The Basque History of the World, Mark Kurlansky.
Currently Reading: The Garments of Caean, Barrington J Bayley. The magic fibers in clothes from a strange planet can change personalities and may have sinister implications for the universe. If I wanted to pick a book that was distinctly DAW yellow-spine DAW yellow-spine-iness, this would be a good candidate, even if this is technically a reprint from Doubleday.