Tibs What?

Someone dusted the cobwebs off my Ethiopian goatskin lunchbox.

But no one knows who did this good deed.

Who could have been so efficient? Who was such a good houseguest? I don't know.

I'd been collecting cobwebs there, mostly because I was too lazy to go get a ladder since I couldn't reach them (11-foot ceilings in my old Victorian). But someone removed them. Maybe Sean from Oz, or Babc0ck or Kraiger went into a cleaning frenzy while I was busy microwaving Peeps.

I accosted Yancey first. He'd stayed three nights in my place last week (having left JC for San Francisco when his fiancée got a job out there). And he'd worked at the drawing table, right under the offending cobwebs.

"Wasn't me. Try the sweeping Swede."

I emailed the eSwede. He'd been here too. He didn't even know what a goatskin lunchbox was. And when he googled it? It turned up… me.

"Not very informative," he said. "What's an Ethiopian goatskin lunchbox anyway?"

It's not really a box. More like a goatskin coconut that is sliced in half and then the top is tied back on. If I were to use it for its genuine intended purpose instead of just hanging it above my drawing table, I would fill it with injera (a spongy Ethiopian pancake style bread) and tibs wot (spicy pieces of meat) or pureed spicy lentils or chickpeas. And I'd lug it around Manhattan, then find a nice park to open it up in when I got hungry.

I don't know what possessed me to carry an Ethiopian lunchbox out of Ethiopia, then onto the ship from Israel to Italy, where I posted it home. I just thought it was a cool idea, this goatskin lunchbox.

Anyway, I use it as much as I use my drawing table these days.