Business vs. Pleasure

I spend many of my days in an enclosed space reading paragraphs like this:

In consideration of the mutual promises and undertakings set forth herein, and of other good and valuable consideration, the receipt and sufficiency of which are hereby acknowledged, X and Second Party, each as a "Disclosing Party" and as a "Receiving Party," may, but without obligation to do so, disclose to the other and receive from the other technical and other proprietary information, such as, but not limited to, business plans, sales and marketing information and strategies, technical solutions to client requirements, trade secrets, system architectures, proposal preparation techniques and pricing policies, know-how, software, methodologies, processes, and financial information related to X opportunity to provide the customer with the best possible combination of performance, cost, and delivery.  

Ya-da Ya-da Ya-da…for several pages.

That makes days like today, spent in a wide open sunny space with words like these, that much more enjoyable:

The man in the pink shirt stopped outside his house.  Four steps forward and he could be out of the pouring Parisian rain, sheltered beneath his stone stoop.  Instead, he took one step back.  The wet paper grocery bag he carried was disintegrating in his hands.  His shirt was plaster-pinking his shoulders.  Miniature rivers burbled and swirled around the cobble beneath his feet.

The man's eyes slid up his front door, up the stone wall, up past the gargoyles spewing rainwater, and settled on an attic window built into the roof.

In front of the glass, a broad spiderweb was bouncing and shivering in the rain.  It hadn't been there when he'd left that morning.  The spider had done her job--just like the girl had promised.  Someone, something was inside his house.

Down one floor, a curtain moved.

For the past year, he'd been afraid of this moment.  And now that it had come, he was frozen, weakly staring at the danger.  

The man turned and tried to move causally up his street.  Ten feet.  Twenty.  Then he dropped his grocery bag in the gutter and he ran.

Behind him, he heard his front door open.

For the first time in four centuries, Juan Ponce de Leon thought he might die.

--The Drowned Vault, N.D. Wilson