Our local newspaper presented the following conundrum of a headline on the front page the other day:
Confusion on sensor
plane's abilities delayed
response in Ohio train
derailment, report says
Confusion is the right word. I've read the whole article and I still can't quite parse the headline's meaning, but here's a hint: the main verb is delayed and its subject is confusion.
Confusion reigned at my house yesterday when a box full of air fryer appeared on our front porch with no label or indication of where it had come from or what it was doing there. Later in the evening a neighbor called to ask whether an errant air fryer had entered our ken. It was needed for a bridal shower (?) but someone had dropped it off at the wrong house. Mystery solved, and I no longer have a big ol' box of air fryer on my sofa. (We kept the air fryer comfy during its brief sojourn.)
Meanwhile on campus, a massive kerfuffle has arisen over, among other things, errant boxes, asbestos abatement, and flooring. Massive amounts of money are being poured into replacing old floors and removing asbestos from the old science buildings. Faculty members have been asked to remove everything from their offices, labs, and classrooms all at once--with no designated location to stash all that stuff. A pile of boxes got dropped off in one department office but they were intended for faculty in both buildings, so people were scrambling to locate their promised boxes. Good thing our science departments get along well or we could have ended up with an all-out science war, with the chemists constructing incendiary devices while the biologists lobbed bits and bobs from the cadaver lab and the physicists created a black hole to suck up all the boxes and detritus piled in the hallways.
Finally, Facebook tells me that I took a photo of a kestrel giving me the side-eye eight years ago this week. (Good thing I've outsourced my memory functions to Facebook or I'd never remember anything important, like the fact that I encountered the kestrel along the side of a road on the perimeter of The Wilds and that it looked stunned, as if it had been struck by a car, but flew off after I'd snapped a few pix.)
I see this kestrel every day--in a photo on our bedroom wall and on my phone's lock screen--and for years it has served as my profile photo on our college email system, because why not? I'd rather look at a photo of a kestrel giving the side-eye than of me looking like, well, me, and besides, it confuses people in a not unpleasant way. If we must live with confusion, let's make it the non-unpleasant kind.