Embellishment might be the stuff of life

Today was a nice, slow-ish day at work. It started out by Mr. Marrone (a.k.a. Jim) and I meticulously counting out hundreds of packets for elementary school kids about the glories of classical music, and sorting them into some stunningly even piles. Then came the "playing cards" of musicians, rubberbanding those too, and then the teacher packets, which had stuff like:

Crossword puzzles
Word searches
Large-font instructions for games
Italicized words

All in all, everything to make an elementary school kid think Mozart is the MAN and that Clara Schumann is COOL.

We ran out of teacher packets. This created a small-scale crisis, easily averted by engaging the services of:

**drum roll**

the xerox machine.

I'll introduce the xerox machine.

It is larger than me, but as demonstrated from yesterday's entry, many things are larger than me. It is enormous, ferocious, and growls when you walk past it. It also looks like it can compose lymericks and prove the Vitali Covering Lemma on its own, which tends to worry me.

When I use this xerox machine, I stick the paper into it, push the button, and scurry to the other side of the room to cower in a corner as it viciously spits out papers, the bodies of small children, and bullets in all directions. Then I meekly gather my papers and go back to work.

The beauty of this machine, as I discovered today, is that you can stick in a packet of unstapled papers, and it will make double-sided copies of the packet, with the papers in the correct order, and then....(wait for it)...it STAPLES the packet together!

Is this xerox machine not magnificent!? Scary!? Super intelligent?! It will one day become the next Napoleon!

Anyhow, today it did not go so well. In fact, today I guess we can say that Mr. Marrone and I had to perform a minor heart surgery upon the xerox machine after its celestial lights stopped scanning and as it started to flash across its face a forlorn little message of having a paper stuck in its innards.

So Mr. Marrone carefully lifted up the top, I kind of sort of tried to roll up my sleeves, and looked into the veritable heart of darkness. There were ANGRY THINGS in there, and there was only one way to solve the problem. I dove in to retrieve the paper. I emerged triumphantly a couple of minutes later with ink up to my elbows,and after having fought the thousands of little Lilliputians residing inside of the xerox machine.

In short, the xerox machine was, well, awe-inspiring.

Afterwards I came home and was confronted with much the same situation. Let's have a looksie.














That is Tix's car, a.k.a. Toots. (I just made that up)

Yes, you see that correctly. There is masking tape holding together the front. We don't mind, however, because we know what's REALLY inside Toots, and we love him.
















Beacuse when Tix starts driving Toots, he actually becomes A MIGHTY BEAST. Kind of like Tix...all cuddly on the outside, but actually an animal on the inside.















Hey Tix! I think there's masking tape on your car!












































Mighty and noble art thou!















There is a hole there.





























Driving off into the distance.

I can fix xerox machines. I can't fix cars.

**EDIT TO ELABORATE**
I think the condition of Tix's car can be explained by Tix getting into 2 accidents within the same week. I have no clue how the other cars fared, but I'm going to say I think they don't have masking tape holding together their vital parts.