Monday, October 28, 2002 5:52:11 PM

Meshuga is the Word of the Day

I subscribe, via e-mail to two or three word of the day services, one of which is a foreign language mot du jour in four differing languages, including Portuguese. I treat these services as a kind of oracle, reminiscent of your daily horrorscope or perhaps on a more unconscious level the I Ching, minus yarrow stalks or coin divination.

How appropriate that Mushuga should turn up on the penultimate day of a Meshuga week. Tonight I am in Cleveland, tomorrow after a ten o'clock meeting I will, the Meshuga Gods of Ammonia willing, head my fine conveyance toward Pittsburgh and home.

(So that no one is left behind I include here the definition as given by yourDicionary.com
Today's Word:
Meshuga (Adjective)
Pronunciation: [mê-'shU-gê]
Definition 1: Affectionate) Crazy, nutty, absent-minded.)

Further:
A crazy girl is meshuggeneh
while
A crazy boy is meshuggener

Nu? Can a week be crazy, nutty or absent-minded. Seems far to mild to me as I sit here drinking wine, eating organic blue corn tortilla chips and trying to let the tension seep away. Sick of body and troubled of mind.

Al Lerner, the owner of the Cleveland Brown's, passed away a few days ago and today while I was returning from a rush journey to purchase a fifty foot Cat 5 RJ45 network cable, which turned out to not be the problem, traffic at the corner of Richmond and Chagrin started to back up to Omaha. As cars u-turned and honked the congestion ahead began to clear to my sight and stimulated my consciousness. I saw a police car pull in front of the traffic light and block the intersection. A very long, slow convoy of expensive automobiles with black flags that I just knew were not the Jolly Roger gained entry to the cemetery that opened right, adjacent the corner. All sorts of evil imagery began to fill my mind.

I didn't get caught, went my irreasoning, in such an onslaught when Art Rooney, the chief of the Steelers, died. This Cleveland-Pittsburgh football rivalry dies hard even in the mind of someone who is hardly a fan of the sport any longer. How dare they hold up traffic for a funeral. They should arrange for these thing to happen at 2 in the morning not 2 in the afternoon. Didn't they realize that I had to get back with my network cable? Eventually a kind of sanity returned. RIP Al. Like I say Meshuga!

At the job site, we have not only the garble of the failed communication cable, which is now working like a charm, which is to say that if you swing a black cat by the tail in a graveyard, (maybe the funeral was a message to me, like the word of the day) and whisper the incantation mene mene tekel upharsin, a direct and significant connection will be made, but the mystery of the Missing Ammonia.

We pumped liquid ammonia into the Receiver, moved it by hose, pipe and pressure difference to both the Medium Temperature Flash Cooler and the Low Temperature Liquid Recirculating Accumulator, started a Compressor to pumping. At first the liquid level in the Receiver which disappeared at a shockingly quick interval, came back. Hooray! Then it left again. Somewhere lying in wait out in the system. Don't you just love that refrigeration talk. Makes you believe that I know something about the arcane arts of thermodynamics, eh? Meshuga! I know.

Somewhere in the afternooon my biorhythms started to wane. My head stuffed (with straw, alas), my nose congested, my body down down down. The result of a week in and out of the cold and heat, in and out of the aggrssion and tension, a week of down peak up peak. The constant expansion and contraction of hope and despair has left me exposed and possibly physically sick. I head to a drug store for a flu cure, but am afraid to take it because I had a couple glasses of wine.

Meshuga!

Suggested usage says WOTD.
"I may be meshuga but I'm not an idiot,"
Oh yeah?