I may have forgotten how to blog....but I have full confidence in my ability to remember how this is done with the greatest of speed. Your indulgence, please, as I rediscover my inner blogger.

As a prequel, future posts are likely to revolve around my adventures at work, and the people I am lucky enough to meet there.

My current place of employment is a small jewelry store, owned by a wise, gentle, honest, thoughtful, and very talented man whom I am very thankful for. Business is slow, but life goes on.

Very, very rarely is more than one person in the store at a time, but every now and then, they all synchronize their errand schedules and rush in at the same moment. At which point I quickly become useless as my employer is the only one who can answer most questions about the jewelry, and I glide around trying, and failing, to make graceful small talk with the other people invading the show room.

The aforementioned scenario of crowdedness happened yesterday, actually. A wiry old man, perhaps 70 years old, was waiting with a very small green and silver clock. So I say to him, "Why, this is a wonderful clock. How cute!" Like I said, I fail at graceful small talk.

"CUTE! CUTE? This is not a word I frequently use!!! Why would I use a girl word like that?" I thought he was angry at me, but he went on.

"These GIRL WORDS include lovely -- wonderful -- cherish -- adore!!" With every new word offensive to his masculinity, he parodied a different exaggerated pose of a lady batting her eyelashes.

The UPS guy is watching from behind. He's doing a good job of keeping a straight face, too, but his mouth is twitching and I expect him to laugh out loud.

The gentleman then moved on from "girl words" to rap his knuckles on a display case with jarring resonance.

"Oh! Well, now, don't mind me. It's the Army in me, just tapping out morse code here...." I decided not to ask what encoded message was being sent, or to whom, and just changed the subject.....

Thankfully, the jeweler saved me by coming over to attend to the man, saying "Ok, sir, let's see that watch." Technically, it was a "clock," and the man instantly pounced on this fact. "WATCH! WATCH? You can't wear this on your wrist!! You could wear it on your foot, I guess, if you had good balance --"

At this point he's got the clock balanced on one foot and he's balancing on the other foot, hopping around on one leg.....I wanted to throw up my hands and call a hip surgeon that very moment, I expected imminent doom.

He didn't break a hip, actually, and the UPS guy got a bit of entertainment out of it too.