now picnic

Dean and I are at work at the lab, and Dean has been so kind as to purchase not only tasty coffee and chocolate and cheese, but also a bottle of wine to drink late at night in the office. (It only makes our plots look better! I swear!)

So, we need a corkscrew to open said bottle. (It's the classy kind of $7 bottle with a real cork!) But! There is no corkscrew. I used to have a lovely swiss army knife with a corkscrew, which I lost (surprise!) and replaced with a lovely shiny blue Leatherman with a corkscrew. The corkscrew was the #1 most important item on there - scissors and needle-nose pliers coming in distant two and three. I don't honestly open that many bottles of wine with my keychain corkscrew, but when I could, I always felt badass. There's something nicely dissonant about pocket tools and wine bottles, I think.

So, anyway, I used to carry this awesome multi-tool all the time, for maximum geeking-out ("Who needs a Phillips screwdriver? I'VE got one!") but, alas (alack?) I no longer carry the Leatherman, after one particular incident in the airport where I left my keychain (with Leatherman) in the carry-on luggage and then had to check it or give it up to be sold at Goodwill somewhere. (Look at all those corkscrews!)

So, I leave the Leatherman in a drawer at home where it is not very useful. Sad. And for this, I blame terrorism. In a pre-9/11 world, when I was in a pre-9/11 mindset, I could have carried my Leatherman without fear of it being expropriated (*word of the day!*) by the authorities. Since I don't have it here to open this wine bottle, I feel like there's really no other conclusion to draw: the terrorists have already won.

Wait! A breakthrough! Since the cork is plastic after all, and Dean's Leatherman Juice (no corkscrew) has a Phillips screwdriver, and since he unscrewed a Phillips screw from a doorway and screwed it into the plastic, he was able to use the needle-nosed pliers to pull the cork out. Phew! Take that, terrorists.

Thank you! This has been late-night in the trailers with Kathy and Dean. Please do not worry about us. We are fine.

// posted by kc @  2:48 AM   1 comments