How likely is it that I would be fired if I wrote into the small-print publication info at the beginning of the book I’m editing that the reason this book is incomprehensible to anyone other than rocket scientists is because it was funded and edited (and stronghanded) by the very same?

I can’t wait to put this project in a drawer.

I have a coworker who likes to raid my candy jar. Because I also like to raid my candy jar, I tend to keep it empty.

At some point this week, this coworker must have checked the jar and discovered it was empty and, kindly, bought some jelly beans to fill it with.

Now, she’s in my office every half hour to have a snack. Really, they’re just her jelly beans, moved far away from her desk.

Particularly since these jelly beans are spicy jelly beans. They taste weird — orange mint, cinnamon, licorice, spearmint, and yellow, whose taste is not immediately identifiable and is, therefore, the least offensive.

Aloo saag is good when spicy. And pasta sauce. Curly fries, too.

But definitely not jelly beans.

But I want jelly beans to taste like fruit. (Not, of course, that the fruity jelly beans actually taste like the fruit they are supposed to, but they at least taste like the candy flavorings of those fruits.)

So I stopped out at lunch and bought some fruity jelly beans. [As a side note to my one known vegan reader, Confectionery Lane’s jelly beans, which I bought at CVS for $.50, do not contain gelatin.]

They’ve been added to the candy jar mix, hopefully giving everyone who stops by a chance to end up with a good jelly bean.