Early morning IM strange conversation:

ME: Oooh, toast is ready! Bye!
NICK: Oh, of course. Oh wait!
ME: Quick! Toast is going cold!
NICK: We’ve now got 60 gig a month for no more cost from Internode!
ME: That is not urgent!
NICK: Sorry! Bye!
ME: My toast went cold for that?!
NICK: Bye!

You’ve got to admire his desperate attempts to leave the conversation at the end. Well, admire or pity them, I suppose.

(A brief apology: Things have been ever so slightly completely and utterly insane here, culminating in a pile of 93 first-year 500-word blog posts with a five-day marking turnaround and two other equally urgent deadlines, all coming due, oh, now. So the blog has suffered, I’m afraid. But do not abandon me, gentle readers! Not even if you find being called “gentle reader” horribly patronising! I’ll be back into my usual routine in no time—plus, there’s Doctor Who soon. Very soon. You wouldn’t abandon The Circulating Library just before the Eleventh Doctor appears, would you?)

Two related strange conversations.

In the car this morning:

ME: Nicholas, are you reading your iPhone?
NICK: Only Twitter.
ME: Why don’t you talk to your girlfriend instead?
NICK: Well, we have such a deep bond that we don’t really need to converse.
ME: I want a shallow bond.

And this evening:

ME: Shall we have the choc-mint candles for Earth Hour?
NICK: When is it?
ME: In about forty-five minutes.
NICK: I’d better charge my iPhone!
ME: We could talk, you know.
NICK: I know, but, Treen, it’s an hour.

Sigh.

If I tell you (as though you don’t know already) that I’m both a bad winner (I gloat) and a poor loser (I sulk), you’ll understand how much fun Nick has while I play Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures.

ME: Falling off the handrails was totes your fault, though.
NICK: My fault?
ME: Well, once you left the room, I managed to get to the other side of the chasm. Do you deny it?
NICK: I don’t deny that those two things happened.
ME: Actually, I got across twice. But the first time, I panicked and switched out of the character, because I thought she’d missed the last railing. But she hadn’t. Then when I switched out of her, she fell off the railing anyway.
NICK: Damn!
ME: I know! I mean, why would you do that?
NICK: I’ve had a sudden revelation about underwear.
ME: But why would that make you voluntarily drop to your death in a bottomless pit?
NICK: What?
ME: Oh. That statement wasn’t actually related to the conversation, was it?

Melancholic:

Attentive:

Noble:

In which Nick knocks a pile of coins into the sink:

NICK: I thought it was a glass shattering spontaneously at my passing, Sutekh the Destroyer style.
ME: Sutekh didn’t smash glasses.
NICK: I bet he did. When he was on his . . . you know.
ME: Period?
NICK: Druthers.

ME: Honey, can you stop swearing at everything?
NICK: I’m just in a bad mood. I don’t know why.
ME: And that’s fine. Just don’t take it out on me.
NICK: But I don’t take my bad moods out on you.
ME: Nice inflection.
NICK: But I don’t!
ME: I wasn’t objecting to that part of your statement. I was objecting to the second, unspoken part.
NICK: Oh.

After a particularly traumatic glasses loss:

ME: Can you just grab my old glasses?
NICK: Where are they?
ME: On top of the chest of drawers, obviously.
(Brief pause)
NICK: And if they weren’t there, where would they be?
ME: Honestly, why can’t you just remember where stuff is in the house? I remember where all your stuff is!
(Brief pause)
ME: And the fact that they’re not on top of the chest of drawers in no way changes my main point!
NICK: It doesn’t?
ME: No!

The tail end of a four-way argument, coming home from a pub meal:

ME: Sorry, I get the toilet first. I called bagsies.
MY MOTHER: I’ll just play the “I’m your mother” card.
ME: I’ll play the “But I really need to wee” card.
MY MOTHER: No, you won’t.
ME: All right, I’ll race you.
MY MOTHER: Okay.
ME: Not from here! From the front gate.

On why Nick isn’t a satisfactory gossip:

MY FATHER: You don’t have enough Y chromosomes for that, Nick!
(Brief pause)
MY MOTHER: Actually, I think you mean X chromosomes.
ME: Isn’t it men who have a Y chromosome and women have two X chromosomes?
MY FATHER: Obviously, I mean X chromosomes.
ME: That would have been funnier if, firstly, you’d got it right and, secondly, you weren’t actually a geneticist.

Discussing small-town marriages:

ME: Well, it’s good for them if they can work it out. After all, your old neighbours managed it when he had that affair.
MY MOTHER: As far as we know.
ME: They moved to Cooma, didn’t they?
MY MOTHER: I don’t know if there’s much talent in Cooma.

Now, hands up: who hoped they’d never hear their mother say the word “talent” unironically?

MY MOTHER: Oh!
ME: You just tried to enter the shopping centre through the air-conditioning duct instead of the door, didn’t you?
MY MOTHER: Yes. It’s a new talent I’ve developed.

While watching the wonderful adaptations of the Nero Wolfe mysteries with my parents:

MY FATHER: Who’s the British bloke?
ME: The brother-in-law.
MY FATHER: No, I mean is he someone significant?
ME: Yes. (Well, he was the murderer.)
MY FATHER: No, I mean is the actor someone significant.
ME: Oh. No.
MY FATHER: Finally, a straight answer.

What happens when Nick is web-surfing and I’m checking Facebook:

NICK: Matt Smith couldn’t be channelling Patrick Troughton harder if he tried.
ME: In what way?
NICK: Well, body language, mostly.
(Baffled pause)
ME: What are you looking at?
NICK: This.
ME: Oh. Oh!
NICK: Yes. That Matt Smith, not our Matt Smith.
ME: They should have thought of moments like this when they cast him.

Mind, it would help if we just called our Matt Smith “Matt,” but such is life.