Collected Conversations

[crfriend]

"Independence Day" is coming up in the US of A celebrating the day when our nascent country thumbed its nose at the old colonial power, and that also happens to be when the proprietors of our local establishment take vacation time and the place shuts down for a week. This is a mixed bag, as one might expect; it's been nastily hot and humid and Sapphire hasn't had the energy to cook anything which means we've been prowling old haunts. Last night it was O'Connor's Restaurant and Bar, and tonight it was Choy Lee's. (Yes, I was wearing skirts both times.)

One of the things I tend to do if situations allow is "gather" conversation -- especially if it tweaks interests of mine -- and this evening was no exception at the little Chinese place across the causeway on the far side of the reservoir that drowned the heart of our little town over a hundred years ago.

It started off with a term I hadn't heard in positively years in non-geek surroundings: "Woods Hole". Our little hamlet being a thoroughly working-class town, my initial suspicion was somebody was slagging off on Tiger Woods. Then another snippet breached the filters: "Ballard". At this point, Sapphire mentioned that my ears perked up to the point where they could easily be confused with Mr. Spock's (from Star Trek (the original series)) because the combined references could only mean Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and their astonishing history in deep-sea exploration and pioneering tactics for doing so. The conversation, then squarely in my auditory cross-hairs (I love mixed metaphors) delved into ROVs and the modern use of them in civil society (specifically, in this case, for examining water-towers and tanks).

Conversations like these help convince me that there is hope for the future and that no matter how hard the forces of darkness, ignorance, and outright stupidity try to force otherwise, hope remains. This will help me sleep a bit better tonight just knowing that two blokes I do not know, in a bar I haven't been in for years, broach such things in casual conversation.

[sapphire]

Choy Lee's