Deep Knee Bends and Mental Calisthenics

I had a busy, busy day yesterday.

First of all, with the landlords coming over to inspect the flat, I had to clean. So before I went to work I gave the place a quick once-over with the vacuum, dusted the end tables, made the bed and tidied in general. This made me slightly late to work but it had to be done.

Then, in the library, I got launched on a ridiculous project but it's something that's been bothering me for years.

See that little star? Back in the old days, some forgotten librarian stickered up our shelves. There were stars of various colors, little green dots and big white dots. My boss has been there 15 years and all this happened before her. We think the stickers marked shelves that had been inventoried or organized, but we're not really sure.

Anyway, nowadays we don't do anything like that -- it's completely unnecessary with our computer system, which easily keeps track of inventory -- but no one had ever bothered to remove the stickers. Well, I got a little scraper out of our supply cabinet and went to work. It was actually a relatively fast job but it was exhausting, the equivalent of doing about an hour of deep knee bends. My thighs got a workout.

While I was in the supply cabinet I found this little box of paper fasteners -- those brass-colored buttons with wings that you put through a hole in papers to bind them together. I recognized the dog immediately as a Charles Barsotti cartoon -- he used to draw for The New Yorker before he died in 2014. It turns out that the dog was used on a range of products from the now-defunct office supplier Niceday, and in fact was known in the UK as "the Niceday pup." Here's a whole article (quite interesting!) about Barsotti's work for Niceday, which began in the early '90s and ended about 12 years later.

So that was a fun little blast from the past.

After work I raced home for the landlord meeting. They took a look at the damp spot in the dining room (from the upstairs leak), the damaged walls in the hallway (from a slow bathroom leak, we think), as well as our de-enameled bathtub, our warped kitchen floorboards and our battered old stove (or "hob," as it's called here). They agree the bathtub needs replacing, agreed to give us a new stove, and obviously the leak damage needs repair. I'm not sure where we left the kitchen floor, but I can live with that. So they're going to do some research on prices, suppliers and workmen and get back to us.

Then it was back to school for...Quiz Night! (I know this is what you've all been waiting for.) I met up with my teammates, grabbed some wine and some pizza, and spent about three hours answering questions from a long-haired male quizmaster in curious houndstooth trousers. There were nine people on each team, and about eight teams, I think. Everyone on our team had a moment in the sun, knowing something the rest of us didn't. (For example, I knew the Turkish word for lion, also the name of a famous fictional character: Aslan, from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.")

Another high point for me came when the quizmaster played an audio clip of a piece of classical music and asked us to name the composer. I knew immediately the piece was "In the Hall of the Mountain King," but I could not for the life of me name the composer. It was on the tip of my tongue.

My teammates put down Prokofiev, but I knew that wasn't right.

"It's a very short name," I said. "Not Holst. Not Elgar."

"Grieg?" said one of my teammates.

"YES!" I said. "That's it."

So we changed our answer, and we were right. Whew! Teamwork!

I also knew the name of the main character in "The Barber of Seville" (Figaro), but my team outvoted me and we wound up missing that one.

I failed on a picture question when I thought Nicola Tesla was a young George Orwell, and I also had no idea there's a musician named Childish Gambino. (Fortunately, someone else on my team did.) You can't win 'em all, I suppose.

But in the end, with an overall score of 92 percent, our team DID win. Woo hoo! We all went home with an Amazon gift card and a package of Smarties as a prize, and I have renewed faith in my quizzing ability, which sagged several years ago after our 2020 flameout. Like a phoenix have I risen from the quizzing ashes!

(Top photo: Ducks in a swamp along the Thames Path, on Sunday.)