Staying at Adolph's place has been great, except for the gnomes.

At last count there are about 12 species of gnomes living in or around Adolph's apartment. Most are quite harmless, but some are quite mischevious. Here is an abbreviated list:

• The Faucet Gnome: This meddlesome gnome is short and gnomish even by gnomish standards. He delights in making the faucet drip, especially at night or when somebody nearby is trying to concentrate on important programming details. He has a particular knack for making faucets drip into bowls of water. Solitary, nocturnal, omnivorous. Especially likes to drink 2 day old coffee.


• The Bearded Face Gnome: the Bearded Face Gnome can be found in family groups of up to 20 or more. These gnomes are mostly harmless, their only noticieable behaviour being this- they creep around at night collecting the drool from your pillow and using it to plant stubble on your face. Once the stubble sprouts they tend it carefully so that it grows into a beard. No one is quite sure why they grow beards on people's faces, but many speculate that they use some of the beard hair to make some kind of gnomish beer(d).


• The Crusty Cheese Gnome: The Crusty Cheese Gnome and his cousin the Crusty Tortilla Gnome delight in unwrapping your carefully wrapped cheese and tortillas so that they are exposed to the open air and become unedibly crusty. These gnomes are also suspected of other food related mischief such as: making bread moldy, changing the expiration date on egg cartons so that entire cartons go bad, hiding the butter when you look for it so that you buy more butter only to find the old butter and thus accumulate enormous quantities of butter, most of which goes bad, etc.


• The Dr. Pepper Gnome: The Dr. Pepper Gnome only comes around every once and a while, almost exclusively on the weekends. He has red hair and is covered with freckles and smokes. He is also identified by his extraordinary vocabulary. This gnome cannot resist Dr. Pepper and if left uncrontrolled he will drink all the Dr. Pepper in the house. He likes to hang out and swap bad puns with the G Gnome.

Of course I have not mentioned the Half Empty Beer Bottle Gnome, the NPR Gnome, the iBook Fan Noise Gnome, the Mechanical Pencil Lead Breaker Gnome, or any of the Deviated Septum and Post Nasal Drip Gnomes.