Drivel

November 1, 2005

Tragedy! Barb lost her coffee mug. It was orange and had “Margaritaville” written across one side in script. If found, please return it at your earliest convenience. Barb’s having a hard time in the morning without it. [UPDATE: She found it several days later; it was in the trunk of the car. Just in case you were wondering.]

I wrote today’s drivel from a comfy corner of Michelangelo’s café on State Street in downtown Madison, where they offer free wireless access. I finally bought a wireless card with the pennies in my piggy bank (okay, I never had one; it’s a figurative way of saying I charged it and forgot to tell Barb until after she was trying to balance the account; then I had to hang my head and whimper "sorry" in penance). With my own internet connection, I was set do my dirty work while sipping a cup of the very best decaf in town. I know, I know, decaf’s crap wherever you go, but this stuff is so good I’ve returned even after promising myself not to spend a dollar sixty on coffee — too expensive! But no, it's not. A cup of decaf this good is worth it. I can’t make a cup of decaf this rich and tasty at home no matter what kind of coffee beans I use or how high I pile them. I might as well admit to myself how much I like it and keep going back.

Unfortunately it took just about all the free time I had this morning to configure the software for my new toy, so I had to settle for saying the coffee was delicious, the music was great, I was relieved to finally get my laptop running again (there was some concern, still lingering, that it was undead following the installation of Windows XP), and I had to run because I had barely enough time to pee before work.

 

“Point and click, cut and paste, highlight and delete,” I said to Barb in an e-mail, as I took a short breather after I dug my way out from under a pile of paperwork. “What a way to make a living!”

“Beats retail,” she shot back. No flies on her.

 

There was a sneezing fit making a round robin in the office this morning. First one guy would sneeze a couple times, then the next guy would try to outdo the first guy on volume or repetition, and so it went around. I had to fire off an almost unending barrage of “bless you”s that I started to wonder if any of them were atheists, or otherwise, that didn’t appreciate being blessed. Somehow, though, “Go to hell!” didn’t seem like an appropriate response and I’m too lazy for the verbal gymnastics of “gesundheit” so I kept up the “bless you”s until the storm was passed.

 

The radio on my desk played Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears” almost right away when I turned it on this morning. Now there’s an excuse-to-my-girlfriend song if I ever heard it. “If you see me with another girl seeming like I’m having fun, it’s just a show, I’m only pretending, deep inside I’m blue, honest, I’m not having a good time with these other women at all, baby, it’s just a front I put on because I’m so broke up over you.” Riiiight.

Speaking of songs on the radio, here’s an idea I sent to the Federal Communications Commission, the guys in charge of regulating the airwaves: “We Will Rock You” should be played no more than once every day, anywhere in the United States. That’s it. Once. They could chose when and where by lottery. To spread the joy around, let’s say each station is allowed to air it just once a year, to give other stations the honor, but it’s way past time to stop playing it every day on every station everywhere. Enough, already. It was a fairly good song back in the 70’s, but we’ve all heard it.

I also think that every week day the strongest radio station in town should play BTO’s “Taking Care Of Business” at eight and The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” at four fifty-five. Maybe that’ll get old after a while, but I’ll think of something else to play before it does.

Pink Floyd has made a re-appearance in our house, now that Tim’s discovered a whole raft of pirated copies of illegally uploaded songs on the web. He started with “Wish You Were Here” and played it to death every day for weeks, so I was almost glad when he went looking for more music to pirate. Even though I think he’s stealing, and try to talk him out of it every chance I get, it still makes me laugh to see him getting off so much on the same music I thought was so cool twenty years ago.

(“It’s not stealing,” Tim shot back, when I asked him where he was stealing the Pink Floyd from. “Other people are sharing their CDs with me. It’s borrowing.” “Don’t pretend to be such a dimwit,” was the only answer I could think of. Wish I’d said it at the time, instead of making some lame argument about the technicalities of copying CDs.)

November 2, 2005

I print thousands of dollars worth of checks every day at work. (And I’ve been sending them to all the people on my Christmas card list. Check your mailbox! You may already have one!) (NOTE TO AUDITORS: KIDDING! HA! HA!) There’s a special program on my desktop computer to do it, but a store-bought laser printer spits them out, just like any other print job. I’m sure the checks are protected by fancy-pants security stuff like watermarks and laser etching. It can’t be drop-dead easy, but pretty near.

The only trick to printing checks from an office laser printer is timing, because everybody else is printing stuff, too. It’s not normally a problem; at almost any time I stick a blank check in the machine, I’m the only one printing anything. Last week Thursday, however, I stuck a blank in and printed out a check written to the wrong people in the wrong amount. I’ve done some stupid stuff at work, but this was the first time I somehow typed one thing and printed another. Yet there it was.

“That’s mine,” Steve said over my shoulder. As dumb luck would have it, he printed a check a split-second before I did, but because the printer sits on my desk, I stuck my blank check in first.

So what do you suppose are the odds we could ever do that again? Well, a lot better than you’d think, because yesterday I hit the print button and, as I stood up and stepped to the printer, I heard Steve say, “Oh, you’re kidding,” as he came out of his office with a blank check in his hand. We dithered about what to do, and in the end I stuck my blank in and won the coin toss: it printed my check first.

 

The coffee machine at work is free, but stupid. I mean, most machines are pretty stupid, but this one’s dumber than most. It’s got a selector on the front so you can ask for your coffee strong, regular, or weak, but no matter which button you push it comes out tasting like swill. I don’t think there’s any difference at all — weak or strong, regular or decaf. If you ask me, I’d say the inside of the machine is a huge cauldron of boiling coffee and it all comes out of that, but nobody complains because, as I said, it’s free. You can have as much swill as you want.

So now that I've mentioned coffee, on to the weather.

The frost is on the pumpkin, but as of this morning it had yet to snow in the Madison area, although the weather man threatened us with it a couple weeks back. So this morning what does Barb do? She starts going on about how it’s November already and it hasn’t snowed yet. “Where’s all the snow everybody brags about?” she said. “This isn’t so bad! Why, I remember back in Misawa when we couldn’t see over the snowbanks ...” With a jinx like that hanging over the city, we should be buried up to our necks in snow before the weekend and have to resort to cannibalism by Monday.

November 3, 2005

I walked the two blocks to work from the café this morning in my shirt sleeves. The temperature was in the upper fifties, and during my lunchtime stroll around cap square to the library it was in the mid-sixties. It felt uncomfortably warm. In November. In Wisconsin. Isn’t that a violation of about a dozen physical laws? Thermodynamics and all that stuff? I wish I’d paid more attention in high school, because I’d like to be able to explain how it can be warm enough to stroll around downtown Madison in shorts and a t-shirt in November. It’s not a good sign. Something bad’s going to happen, possibly culminating in an attack of unnaturally large, meat-eating vermin with a horrible predilection to jump out of the shadows as menacing music plays in the background. It’s just a thought. You may smirk at it now, but remember what I said when you’re stocking up on shotgun shells and gasoline.

 

My son called me up on the telephone to poop at me. My brother used to call me up to pee at me; what’s the connection? I don’t know. If I were a sociology student looking for a graduate thesis, though, I’d be reading up on genetically-transmitted sociopathic activities as they related to prank phone calls. This has the makings of a PhD, if only I had the bucks to go back to school and fart them away on this, so to speak.

You’ll have to excuse me for that last paragraph; sometimes I can’t help myself. It’s like Tourette’s, except that I write explosively obscene material instead of shouting it. Some day they’ll come up with a little pill or injection or something to suppress it; then the material on this web site will abruptly end, but probably not. I don’t like injections.

November 5, 2005

Tim got hit by a school bus the other day at school. Don’t worry, he’s okay. One of his friends pushed him up against a bus that was passing by, a dumb thing to do but he wasn’t injured any more than if he got tackled playing football. It was less like a hit and more like he glanced off it.

Friday night was fish fry night at the Black Bear, except for Tim, who had the bacon cheeseburger. There’s something that’ll come back to haunt him when he’s thirty answering a lot of nosy questions from a cardiologist.

November 6, 2005

I learned some pretty important information last night. Here’s just a sample:

Jim and Sue treated us to a wine-tasting party at the Madison Club yesterday evening (see the photos!), where we sampled from the 90 or so wines they offered. The party lasted three hours, I didn’t drink anywhere near 90 different wines, and they never poured more than a thimbleful into my glass, but somehow I got lit anyway. Important: Do not drink lots of different wines unless you want to wake up very hung-over the next morning.

About the best way to avoid a hangover is to take two aspirin and drink as much water as you can hold before you go to bed. I remembered to drink lots of water after the party last night, so I didn’t have those endless dreams about being so thirsty I tried to drink water from a fire hose. I forgot to take the aspirin, though. That’s very important. Without aspirin, I wake up tired, confused, hurting and really hungry. Must not forget the aspirin.

I woke up very early this morning, head pounding, stomach growling, somehow convinced that I was in a hotel room. I finally worked out that I was instead in my own bed at home, but it took several minutes because thinking hurt a lot. It’s been a long time since I’ve drunk enough wine to make me forget where I was. I think I’ve lost the capacity to drink lots of wine. In fact, I’m certain of it. Important information again.

I said it before, but I’ll say it again: A bottle of beer, maybe two with something to eat, is about all I can hold any more. That’s probably what I should stick with. Anything more, of beer or anything else, has historically ended in a bad way. Not that I had a bad time at the party, but that wasn’t the end. The end was later, holding my head in my hands to try to make it stop spinning and pounding.

November 7, 2005

The computer network went down at work for a little more than an hour. You know what that means: Everybody was standing around doing nothing, because everything they could possibly do was on the computer. Our work place isn’t the fabled paperless environment that computer geeks once promised us, but without the computers, as my boss so eloquently put it this afternoon, “you can’t do JACK!”

Luckily for me, I’ve got my rubber band ball. It wasn’t my idea; everybody at work has a rubber band ball. I’m the guy in our office who sorts the inter-office mail three or four times a day, and every bundle is wrapped in at least two rubber bands. In my first week or so on the job I had hundreds of rubber bands in a pile on my desk. Then I saw Jason bouncing his rubber band ball off his desk, and I knew what I had to do. My rubber band ball is now somewhere between the size of a baseball and a softball, and it’s only getting bigger. (Yes, I recycle them, but incoming exceeds outgoing by a factor of ten, at least.)

 

I had the spare time this evening to sit in a coffee shop, roam the internet and read whatever caught my eye. I read several opinions regarding “gender-neutral” (mixed-sex) bathrooms on Ann Althouse’s blog, and don’t know what to think because I’ve just come back to the States after living in Japan for four years, where bath houses, called onsen, are separated into men’s and women’s halves, but it wasn’t at all unusual for me to climb into the same steaming tub with several boys and girls so young they weren’t at all shy about staring at me. I’m tall, very skinny, and very light-skinned — I was used to drawing stares in Japan, but I found myself strangely intimidated by the presence of other people’s children in the bath, precisely because fears of pedophiles and other perverts would prevent such mixed-sex bathing from ever happening in almost any setting outside a private residence in the States. Having no idea at all how to act, I jumped into the tub and slouched into the water until it was up to my chin. They didn’t stop staring, but at least I didn’t feel as though I was on parade.

I eventually got used to bathing in the presence of other people’s children (unless they were American children; I never felt comfortable bathing with them; I guess the cultural norm was too deeply ingrained). However, there were not only mixed-sex children in the men’s onsen, but women as well! They weren’t bathing, they were the cleaning ladies, and for the most part they acted as though the men around them were invisible, discreetly planning every movement so that they never had to so much as excuse themselves to get out of the way. The men did much the same. There was one occasion, though, when curiosity apparently became too much of a temptation for a cleaning lady at an onsen in Misawa, and she stared like a little girl. I’ve never felt so naked in my life.

A bath house is not a toilet, but I’ve been in many public toilets in Europe attended by cleaning ladies, and they weren’t at all shy about noting my presence. In a public toilet in Paris, a cleaning lady was apparently so determined to keep to her schedule that she hardly waited for me to step away from the urinal I was using.

I don’t mean to say that my experiences were at all comparable to the kind of intrusion that seems to offend Althouse; I think I agree with her objections to having to share a public toilet with men. I know my mother would have the same objections. But isn’t that a cultural norm that could, and probably will eventually change? The Europeans didn’t seem at all tripped up by mixing sexes in one toilet (granting that the women weren’t actually using the toilets I visited), and the Japanese weren’t bothered by letting their daughters bathe with grown men (or I don’t think they were, anyway).

 

We tried to convince Tim to come with us to see Good Night, And Good Luck by telling him it was a movie about the Red Scare. He made the puzzled-dog face. Didn’t know what the Red Scare was. Couldn’t recall ever hearing about Joe McCarthy, either.

He didn’t go, so I may never know whether or not he would have enjoyed it; it was full of actors everybody’s seen before but would have a hard time naming, starting with David Straithairn playing newscaster Edward R. Murrow in the lead role. George Clooney and Robert Downey Junior were the “famous” actors, and they took rather minor roles. If they were lending their names to draw a crowd, it wasn’t necessary; the theater was full for the two o’clock screening right before we got there, and full again for the four-thirty screening we sat through. A lot of people wanted to see this movie.

It was a movie made to be watched, starting with the decision to shoot it in black and white. That usually marks a film as “arty” from the word go. A lounge singer with a satiny-smooth voice provided all the background music that I can remember, cooing songs like “One More For The Road.” And, as if the movie needed any more atmosphere, the director (Clooney again) decided to film just about everybody smoking a cigarette; thick cigarette smoke curled through the air in nearly every scene. The film included a period advertisement for Kent cigarettes, which got a good chuckle from the audience in Madison, where smoking is banned.

The audience was made up almost entirely of people older than Barb and me, I suppose because of the “arty” quality of the movie, because it was a sort of costume drama (the women wore skirts and pearls, the men gazed from under the rakishly-set brims of fedoras), and because it was largely about how people dealt with the Red Scare. I suppose if Murrow had gone after McCarthy with a pair of forty-five caliber pistols and maybe blown up a thing or two there might have been a few younger faces watching the movie.

The film obviously meant to draw comparisons between America’s political climate after 9/11 and during the Red Scare. There really is no way to say “dissent is not disloyalty” these days without being reminded of the verbal battles fought today in our ideologically-divided nation. Even an audience younger than the one we sat in, many of them old enough to remember the Red Scare, would have easily drawn the intended parallels as Straithairn gravely intoned Murrow’s warnings to protect our constitutionally-guaranteed rights.

Good Night, And Good Luck was perhaps just a little preachy, but we knew that going in. We enjoyed it for its eloquence and presentation.

November 8, 2005

Tim forgot his keys last night

Do dah! Do Dah!

Tim forgot his keys last night

Oh dee do dah day!

I guess he left his backpack at school, and the keys were in the backpack. He wants us to get one of those fake rocks so we can leave a key outside for him in case this ever happens again. Yeh, burglars never look for those fake rocks before they do anything else. (Well, maybe they don’t. Breaking a window would certainly be easier than futzing around, looking for a rock, even though they’re pathetically easy to spot.)

 

Barb did her level best to fix us all a fine salad to go with the spaghetti for dinner last night, and then somehow we all forgot it was there. We hungrily hunched over our plates of pasta, obliviously chowing down while the salad sat on the countertop, going limp. Barb herself didn’t think of it again until she was finished. We’re giving serious thought to having our meals catered and served to us, preferrably by a matronly chef who nags us to clean our plates, to make sure that we eat everything that’s been prepared.

 

I took the very parental measure of unplugging the keyboard from the back of the computer this morning and throwing it in the trunk of the car. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t another one in the house. My reasons were pretty simple. I went downstairs shortly after six this morning to make sure Tim got out of bed on time. He gets pretty grumpy at us if we let him sleep long past six o’clock, making him rush through his morning toilette, even though he’s got an alarm clock, it starts bleeping at quarter to five and he hits the snooze alarm until one of us makes sure he gets out of bed. So I went downstairs at about ten past six, turned on the hall light, and made him answer my calls to make sure he was awake; then I noticed, revealed in the light, that the cat pan looked as though about a dozen cats had been using it for the past three days. Raking it did no good. I had to dump it all in a bag, scrape it out, and refill it. Guess who’s job that’s supposed to be under normal circumstances?

So at twenty past six this morning, I was feeling a tad cranky. I went upstairs to wash my hands and forearms with napalm, and that’s when I saw the sink full of dirty dishes. I know after years of wrong turns that I should never make a decision when I’m angry, but I looked at that heap of dirty dishes and told myself, If those dirty dishes are still there when we leave, I’m going to ... do something a parent would do. And they were still there when we left, and that’s what I did. Disabling the computer in a simple yet completely effective way was about the most punishing thing I could think of doing, but it was such a Dad thing to do, you know what I mean? On one level I knew this was just about the most perfectly pointed way to send my message (and I have to admit I was smugly pleased with myself for having thought of it on the spur of the moment), yet on another level I felt like a low-down, dirty rat for doing it. And it turned out the punishment was far worse than I’d intended: Tim came home early from school today. They had some kind of teacher work day, and let the students out at about noon. Ain’t that a kick in the pants?

He was not very pleased with us when we finally came home at a little after seven that evening. Before he said so much as boo to either of us he asked for the keyboard “so he could so his homework,” and he wouldn’t say much to us after, either. Too much he had to do on the internet.

November 9, 2005

Everybody else tried to sleep in this morning because they were both feeling sick yesterday. I was feeling fine, but I didn’t want to get up any more than they did when the alarm started to bleep. There was a vicious wind blowing outside, making the house crack and pop, an uninviting sound that instinctively made me want to wrap myself up in the quilt until I was a tight little knot of warmth, and stay there, at least until it was light enough outside that a guy could see what he had to deal with.

First thing I did after I got up: Took a shower. (Already covered that in a previous drivel.) Second thing: Put the kettle on to heat water for coffee. No, wait: Turned on the radio first. It’s an old countertop Sony that we keep tuned to a local oldies station. They’re not calling it “oldies” anymore, it’s now “timeless rock.” There isn’t a pop song on their playlist that wouldn’t have been on any radio station on the air when I was in high school. Although Barb and I love to crank up an old, familiar tune every so often, it’s on mostly because it’s the least annoying station we can find, but even this station promotes itself with a series of commercials that almost seem to be engineered to be as idiotic as possible.

Just because we’re a radio station ... [a pause so incredibly, unnaturally long that you think the radio might have just died] ... doesn’t mean we have to sound like one.

If it’s a radio station, broadcasting radio signals that you have to listen to on a radio (unless you’ve got some of that scary dental work I read about every so often), then ... as a matter of fact, I think they do have to sound like a radio station. There’s nothing else they could possibly sound like. Can’t get around it. Physical law.

 

The Kansas State Board of Education approved a new education standard to include the teaching of intelligent design, the belief that life is so mind-bogglingly complex it must have been designed by someone or something intelligent; Steven Hawking, for example. I’m not saying Hawking designed the known universe, but he does seem to know a suspiciously great deal about it. If Hawking didn’t design everything in sight (and a whole lot more), I guess it could have been done by anybody else with a mind the size of a planet. There’s also the remote possibility it could have been something supernatural; I mean to say that if something or somebody designed the natural world, then by definition he, she or it could be supernatural, right? But it’s definitely not a god. That’s completely out of the question, because a huge court case to determine that very idea has just wrapped up, and all the experts agree, almost, that there’s no way this is a religious idea. It’s a good, legally valid, scientific theory and god’s got nothing to do with it, much. At least, not in Pennsylvania. Maybe in Kansas. So much for omnipresence.

November 11, 2005

Barb and I both went to work on Veteran’s Day. I’m more or less used to working holidays; I worked shift so many years and clearly remember trudging through a twelve-hour watch on a federal holiday dozens of times. Here in the world it’s not much different except that the government workers are off all day, so capitol square was only very lightly populated with retail workers and lots of bank employees. (Banks don’t take federal holidays? I guess not. Weird.) Despite being a state employee, though, Barb still had to work. It wasn’t because she was a new hire; DoT doesn’t take federal holidays, either. Really weird. I thought all state government shut down whenever a dark cloud passed overhead, but it turns out I’ve been soooo deluded.

 

I found out the hard way there’s no wireless in the Starbuck’s on cap square (take careful note so you’re not caught with your pants down). I wouldn’t have so much as thought of cozying up to Starbuck’s under normal circumstances; the coffee’s so much better at Michelangelo’s, buying a drink there is supporting a local business and they have wireless access, dammit! But I was walking back from Walgreen’s past Starbuck’s, I had twenty minutes until work, and I’d still hadn’t tried the wireless anywhere else besides Mike’s and the library, so I stopped; just wanted to give it a shot. No joy. I have to admit, though, that the cinnamon swirl was delicious. Too bad about the coffee.

 

I sat in Michelangelo’s coffee shop after work, surfing the net while waiting for Barb to come pick me up and half-listening to the two college students who sat at the table behind me. The one facing me talked non-stop for an hour, pausing occasionally just long enough to give the other one a chance to nod or say, “uh-huh” or “wow,” before she took off again. Either they had just met, or they were the very best of friends; I don’t know how else the quiet one could have put up with that. I could hardly stand it, and I at least had a light at the end of the tunnel.

 

What are the odds that we’d stumble across a book sale on the way home and happily walk away with an armload of used books? Almost nil, right? Barb asked me to stop at a branch of the public library where she had a book on hold, and oh my freaking god the Friends of the Library were selling a heap of books in a back room, most of them no more than a dollar. I just love that! It’s like finding a twenty dollar bill in the pocket of a pair of trousers I haven’t worn in weeks.

November 12, 2005

You’re probably dying to find out: The site was down for a couple days because of an accounting error. It took a few days to fix; I had one of our staffers fire the accountant, which took a whole day because of union rules. The shop steward got involved and we got into a big yelling match because I couldn’t dismiss the accountant without some kind of test of skill first. I chose to mud wrestle him, and I trounced his ass soundly. Then I had to find a replacement, but thanks to the wonders of the internet our staff found several highly-qualified parties who were willing to fly in that day to interview for the position, so I sent the corporate jet to fetch them. I hired a bright young woman straight out of school on the theory that she remembers everything (unlike the other guy who had to count on his fingers), and she still has enough imagination to freshen up the site with new ideas. And she brought her own candy jar filled with Oreos. Always a plus. Took her a day to figure out what was wrong and patch everything up.

 

Internet surfing is either a boom or a bust; when I surfed blogs the other night, all I could manage to find were foreign-language blogs, most of them written in alphabets I had never seen before, or sex fantasies. (Not that I don’t like sex fantasies, but I can practically always come up with better on my own.) (If only I could be a fly on the wall when my son reads that. Odds are good he’ll bazooka-barf all over himself.) This morning, though, I punched “next blog” and, on the first try, I found a driver in England with a talent for photography who shares the photos he takes all over the country. O’course, every “next blog” after that was teen angst or manga. Must’ve blown all the magic on the first one.

 

Unlike last weekend when we laid around the house like a bunch of lazy cats in the sun, this weekend we had plans to go into town. First, we wanted to browse the stacks at the library. I know, I know, it’s a high-pressure, fast-paced lifestyle that’ll probably bite us in the butt one day, but this is how we like to live. But wait — there’s more! We also wanted to take in an art show at the Monona Terrace. Can you stand it?

Step One: Wake up Tim. Not as easy as it sounded. He woke me up at three o’clock this morning because his on-line chat with somebody playing the shoot-em-up game they were in got a little loud. I eavesdropped on their conversation just long enough to confirm he wasn’t connected to sex chat, then went back to bed. Last night he promised that he would be up at nine this morning, but we didn’t hear his alarm, so his mother turned on his bedroom lights at about nine-thirty and began making a series of visits to his room to shout “RISE AND SHINE! WAKEY-WAKEY!” every five minutes or so until he dragged himself to the breakfast table.

The library was sitting on a rift in the fabric of space; we were standing in line at the checkout before we realized we’d been in there for two hours. Brought home an eclectic selection of biographies, travel books, comics, videos and show tunes. In about four weeks, the late charges on this haul are going to be eye-popping.

Tim at Michelangelo's

To satisfy our lunchtime craving we decided to try the sandwiches at Barriques, a coffee shop that opened a few weeks ago on Washington Street in the Lorraine Hotel building. (It’s condos now, but they still call it the Lorraine.) Big thumbs down on the food from the O-Folk. It took them about fifteen minutes to make the sandwiches, which were pathetically small and disappointingly bland (and we were hungry!). Barb didn’t want to pay three bucks to find out their lattes were dishwater, so we walked over to Michelangelo’s after the art fair for a pick-me-up before we headed home.

Tim and I hung out together at the art fair and let his mother go off on her own, which was probably best; I’m not sure Barb would have wanted to put up with the constant heckling we gave almost everything we saw. “I coulda done that,” was all Tim would say about the artsy-fartsy paintings, sculpture and metalwork. I had to agree with him on at least one or two paintings. Tim could have sneezed into a handkerchief to produce more interesting compositions.

After the dinner hour the weather went completely batshit, icy rain began to fall and a wind came along that was strong enough to bash the house like a gorilla tromps on a Samsonite suitcase, but all during the day we had beautiful, warm weather to walk around town. Sometimes the magic works.

November 13, 2005

You want to know what “fat, dumb & happy” means? For yours truly, it means driving all the way to Milwaukee to spend a morning and an afternoon visiting Trainfest 2005, a collection of exhibits spread out across the floor of a huge pole barn. Quite a few people had gone to a lot of trouble to set up dozens of tables built just for the model railroad trains that wound their way across the table tops, which were painstakingly decorated to look like cities, or industries, or wide-open countryside. There were booths for people who sell model railroad trains, tiny little buildings that made up the cities and industries for the trains to visit, and tons of books about trains (although, sadly, not as many books as I would have liked).

Trainfest 2005 in Milwaukee

And there were thousands of people, most of them men at least my age, usually older. Model railroaders tend to be older white guys who have a lot of money to spend on a hobby. A few of them have wives who like to build the tiny houses or paint the trains, but I have yet to meet a woman who played with toy trains or showed any interest at all in trains generally as a hobby. I think I’ve read about one, or maybe two. No more than two. I have no idea why. Some women think they make cute toys, but most seem cold to railroad history, the mechanics of locomotives, or the cool gadgets that make model trains go. The only reason I’ve been able to think of is that, until recently, women didn’t attend university to become engineers. Most men who modeled trains in the early days of model railroading were engineers; almost all of them I can think of had at least some kind of graduate degree. Could that also explain why I’ve rarely seen a model railroader who wasn’t Caucasian?

Kids aren’t “model railroaders” for an obvious reason: Kids love trains. They love them so much that they want to climb right up there on top of the table to play with the trains, but no matter how the adults try to explain it, kids simply cannot be made to grasp the reasons not to touch “model” trains. They’re toys, aren’t they? Well, yes and no. (Definitely “no” to some people.) There are lots of toy trains that were made for kids to play with, but even though plenty of Lionel and American Flyer layouts were at the show, these have become collector’s items that must be carefully handled and definitely not played with. I understand that on one level, but on a purely gut level I think that’s ridiculous, because I’ve got a Lionel train set I started when I was a kid, and added to so my kids could play with it. I’m going to make sure my grandkids play with it, too. That’s what it was made for, and I don’t care how much money they’re fetching on e-bay.

Whenever I go to a model train show like this one, I usually walk away deeply conflicted because I could easily spend two hundred dollars and take home an armload of tools and books and toy train cars, and I’d only just be getting started. But, woe is me, I don’t usually have two hundred dollars to spend. I usually have about fifty, maybe a hundred if I’ve been saving. I hadn’t been. But strolling through the exhibits, gaping at the model rail layouts, and pawing through the books generally makes up for that, in a way. I go home to read the books I already have again, or futz with a model I’ve been working on for weeks, and the regret goes away.

Geeze, they make sure they get their money from you at exhibits like this, don’t they? Parking was five bucks; they didn’t mention that in the flier, but I took it as a foregone conclusion that I was going to pay at least five bucks to park in suburban Milwaukee. I paid ten bucks at the gate to get in, and although I brought along a snack I still broke down and paid three bucks for a soda. Three bucks! That’s almost as bad as a movie theater!

How do you annoy everybody on I-94 between Madison and Milwaukee? Simple: Set your cruise control to 65 mph. Even thought I stayed in the slow lane, I made a lot of people very unhappy because everybody was going at least ten miles per hour faster than me. I kept one eye on my rear-view mirror to watch one car after another come tearing up the lane behind me. The drivers would slow down abruptly as they came to within six inches of clipping my rear bumper, then they’d mutter a few choice words about me to themselves as they searched over their shoulders for a hole in the lane to their left. When they finally got it, they’d jerk the wheel hard over and gun their engines to roar past me. This little drama played out a couple hundred times in the hour or so I was on the road. My ears are still burning, so I guess there are a few angry drivers out there still telling somebody about the moron they passed on the way to Milwaukee.

November 14, 2005

How many times have you walked past a group of people who were obviously watching you and all at once you felt as though you had lost the capability to walk with any coordination at all? At first you feel a little bit gangly and awkward, but with each passing step the feeling grows until you’re sure you’ll trip over your own legs with the next step. (Oh, you did too, don’t be such a smartass.) As I was walking down Carroll Street after work, I noticed a guy who walked as though he was only one step away from tripping over himself. I followed him for almost two blocks, and he never got any better at it. I had to smile from recognition of a kindred spirit; he seemed to have the locomotive equivalent of whatever it is that keeps a coherent thought from moving from my brain to my mouth. I can form the thought, but when it comes time to articulate it, my mouth always seems to be reading not just from a different page, but from an entirely different book in a foreign language.

I was thinking about that and more things that make me so different from normal people, not coincidentally while I was driving to Trainfest in Milwaukee yesterday. Now there’s something that’ll paint you a completely different color from anybody else in the crowd. I don’t follow sports, I don’t watch television, and when I get into a conversation with people who do, which seems to be every other person on the planet, they inevitably ask me, “Okay then, what do you do for fun? Got any hobbies at all?” I can’t recall all the different ways I’ve tried to say, “I like to study the history of railroads and build models of trains, especially steam locomotives and passenger cars.” I haven’t found a way to do that yet without sounding like a card-carrying nerd.

I’m also a Georger. That means I like to play the game at the web site WheresGeorge.com, although it’s not really so much a game as an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Georgers save their dollar bills until they can log onto the site, then they enter the serial numbers from the bills into the site’s database, write “WheresGeorge.com” or some variation on the front or back of the bill (sometimes both), and finally they release the dollar bill back into the wild. If the next person to get the bill in change notices the message, and their curiosity gets the better of them, they might go to the web site, which will ask them to re-enter the serial number. The web site will tell them who wrote on the bill and where. It’s a sort of message in a bottle. As a hobby it’s a little weird, but it’s mostly harmless and almost entirely free.

So far I’ve written “WheresGeorge” on over 1,700 dollar bills, and if that’s not obsessive-compulsive enough for you, maybe this is: Some Georgers stamp their message on dollar bills, but I’ve written every message by hand, which says: “Where has this dollar been? Find out at WheresGeorge.com”. I used to write “WheresGeorge,” but I think the longer message is worth the writer’s cramp because people respond more frequently to it. More than a hundred of the bills have “hits,” responses from people who re-entered the serial number and a short message into the web site. The most well-traveled bill went from Okinawa, Japan, to Misawa, then to Washington state, and last I heard it popped up in New York, New York. I don’t think one will ever go all the way around the world, but you never know.

 

Sabin Willett, a lawyer for one of the captives detained at Guantánamo Bay, wrote an op-ed article in today’s Washington Post that was so bright and impassioned I wish I could have made it. He argued that the Senate made a mistake by stripping captives of their right to trial and should have allowed them access to U.S. courts. Why would I side with a lawyer who was defending terrorists? Why would I give a rip about them? I wouldn’t. The terrorists can go rot, for all I care, but America isn’t supposed to be the kind of country that imprisons people, any people, without charge or a fair trial. Or, as Willet more eloquently put it:

In a wiser past, we tried war criminals in the sunlight. Summing up for the prosecution at Nuremberg, Robert Jackson said that “the future will never have to ask, with misgiving: ‘What could the Nazis have said in their favor?’ History will know that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. . . . The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute of our strength.”

I think that America stands for a fair shake, and we should extend that to everybody, especially fascist lunatics. I can’t think of a better way to make them look bad than to give them an open trial where they can show the world what they are. Locking them away, concealing their whereabouts and keeping secret the fact that they’re even incarcerated in our camps makes America look cruel instead of them. Why would we do that? I just don’t understand the motivation to deny these captives the right to trial.

November 15, 2005

Sean turned twenty-one years old today — legal in every state! (Please write a birthday message to him at lemondragon2003@yahoo.com) I suppose I should moan about how I’m so old that I have a twenty-one-year-old son, or make some vaguely philosophical observation about the passing of the years. Okay. When one of the boys has a birthday, what I feel is happily relieved. They can mark up another year. Maybe not every bit of it was happy but, thank goodness, most of it was and they’re reasonably well-adjusted young men, or I like to think so, and I also like to think that, in spite of all our bumbling mistakes, we might have helped them get that way.

But I’m happy to brag that a lot of it they do on their own. Sean, in his third year at Georgetown, is not only working toward a sociology degree, he’s also helping a local charity provide housing for the poor. By the time I was twenty-one, I think the most socially active thing I’d done was vote, something any monkey can do. I hope he goes out to hoist a couple cold ones with his buddies tonight, because he deserves it.

 

Can there be a better treat early on a winter morning than standing by the furnace grate after getting out of the shower when the heat comes on? I moved the towel rack out of the way to let the warm air get rid of my goose pimples as I toweled off. There’s just one other way to keep warm I could think of to beat that, but I'd have to stay in bed.

When I was just five or six years old, I used to dress for school in a corner of the living room behind an armchair. One of the furnace grates was back there, and the armchair trapped a pocket of warmth just big enough for me. You can tick off a long laundry list of selfish pleasures and you won’t convince me there’s more than one or two better than that.

After toweling off, I dressed in three layers of clothes before I opened the door to the refrigerator, also known as our house, which somehow seems frigid even when the thermostat is set to sixty-eight degrees. At seventy, the house is comfy; at sixty-nine, it’s comfortable but just a little on the cool side; at sixty-eight my fingernails turn blue and I can’t feel my toes. How can two degrees so dramatically take me and everybody else in our family from t-shirts to sweatshirts, from bare feet to wool socks and slippers?

Yesterday’s forecast called for snow today, but this morning there was only a light, crisp blanket of frost on the ground. Even though I know I could be shot for saying it in over forty counties, seeing frost made me feel a lot better than yesterday’s cold, miserable rain. I don’t like to be cold, but I love frost and snow. If that doesn’t seem to make sense, look at it this way: cold and snowy trumps cold and wet.

A very German rain began to fall on Madison at lunchtime, and it only got heavier and colder as the day went on. In my memory, there’s no weather so miserable as the cold-as-iron drizzle that falls on Berlin in the late fall. I don’t know how many nights I stood waiting on a subway platform or at a bus stop while every last bit of warmth slowly drained from flesh and bone by a cold rain that somehow blew all the way through every layer of my clothes, no matter how many I wore or how super-insulated they were. And now the life-sucking Berlin rain appears to have somehow migrated to Wisconsin. My chances of making it alive to the coffee house after work this evening were looking dim, until the hat and the umbrella.

The hat was the result of plain good luck. Almost everything we own in still in storage (Have I mentioned that? Oh, once or twice?), so the wardrobe I had here was mostly lightweight summer clothes. I had the foresight to bring one long overcoat, and we recently bought winter coats, but a serious brain cramp made me forget to bring even one of my dozen or so hats. I’ve been walking the streets of Madison hatless for these past five months; gad, what a naked feeling. Then this afternoon Susan waltzed into the office with an envelope for me: She made a gift of a few dollars from her “finder’s fee” she collected for recommending me for the job I got. It was such an unlikely way to make a little extra folding money that I spoiled myself just a bit and bought myself a quality wool Kangol hat while I was in the State Street neighborhood during my lunch hour. Always wanted one of those.

The umbrella was a result of the good will of my co-workers. As I was tightly wrapping myself in my coat and scarf and pulling my cap down tightly over my head, Steve realized I was getting ready to walk the block and a half to the coffee house in the rain. Steven recalled that Roger had an extra umbrella in his office, so he volunteered it, and Roger, bless his heart, went along with the idea. I sat in the coffee house waiting for Barb warm and dry, instead of cold, wet and desperately trying to rekindle a fading spark of body heat.

November 16, 2005

Barb said the coffee I was making was too weak and asked if I would add a bit more the next time I made it. I think the change she noticed was that I switched from making it in the coffee press to filtering it through a paper cone. I like using the filter because coffee from a coffee press has a lot more flavor, but at the same time has a lot of dregs that taste bitter to me. Apparently Barb’s system got used to the shot in the heart added by the dregs. Was she in withdrawal? I wouldn’t know. When she made the coffee this morning, though, she made it in the coffee press, and I think she may have added a few more beans, too. Talk about a kick in the head; after downing a cup, I felt as though I’d been blindsided. She teased me for not being able to handle my java.

Snow swirls through capital lights

The weather forecast was right! How’d that happen? Snow began to fall last night about nine-ish and temps dropped low enough that the snow stuck in patches on the grass and blew from rooftops until seven or eight this morning. To my great shame, the Wisconsinites that I’ve been so proud of all my life for their winter driving skills got into road accidents this morning — on TRACES of snow and ice! Like a bunch of student drivers! What the hell?! And school buses were running two hours late, as though the snow and cold temps hadn’t been in the forecast for two days. It’s quite a shock to be let down by the people you thought of as experienced dwellers of the Great White North.

“Do you think it would be easier to drive through rush-hour traffic in this weather,” Barb asked me late in the afternoon, “or just wait until six, as usual?”

“Isn’t there less traffic at six than at five?” I asked her. There usually was, so she decided to leave work later and hope that fewer cars on the road meant fewer potential accidents with drivers who don’t seem to realize that the roads get slick when they’re covered in snow and ice. I think the problem might be that, when there’s only a little snow and ice, they think it’s not dangerous. Flurries blew through the city all day long, and traces of snow collected in the corners and up against the buildings. Maybe the drivers figure, “If I can still see the pavement, how bad can it be?” Bad enough to cause dozens of accidents on the beltway, it turns out.

 

If you were to call the credit services department at the bank I work in, I’d probably be the one to answer the phone. That’s what I do, besides send the mail, file the paperwork, balance the ledgers, and so on and so on. (My son, who sugar-coats everything he says, calls me “the office bitch.”) One of the calls I took this morning was from a customer who wanted to talk to my boss, who was out of the office just then. I offered to take his name and number and have my boss call him right back. “Well, I’ve already left a whole bunch of messages, so I don’t know what good that’ll do,” he snapped.

I’d like to say that I snapped right back at him, “He hasn’t returned your calls? I’m going to KICK HIS ASS!”

Or: “So you’re the dweeb he’s been avoiding all week.”

Or even: “You want some cheese with that whine?”

I could’ve said: “You know what? My boss is on the phone all day long. He’s on the phone when I come in at eight, and he tries to speak pleasantly to customers all day long, even the ones who cuss him out. Let’s assume my boss has made every effort to contact you and work from there, okay?”

I’m a believer in the idea that the customer is always right, though, so instead I asked him again to leave his name and number in the most even tone I could manage, and he grudgingly gave it to me.

 

Q: “What software did you use for your blog, Dave?”
A: I didn't. I messed around with several programs, wondering if any of them would help me more effectively produce drivel to the level of quality you’ve come to expect (the standards for drivel are pretty high, you know), but none of them gave me what I wanted, which was absolute control over everything on the page. When it comes to web pages, I’m a control freak; if something doesn’t look just right, I’ve got to fix it or self-inflict brain damage while trying. There are so many different ways to format hypertext that fiddling with it satisfies my OCD in a way that blogging software does not.

I like the organization I saw in other blogs, though, so I messed around with this page until I came up with the look I have now. It looks a bit like a blog a first blush, but it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. Actually, it doesn’t have any bells and whistles. I have to turn the crankshaft with my bare hands, so to speak, to make it go, but as I said I have to be fiddling with it all the time anyway or I’m not happy.

November 17, 2005

Attention, Tailgaters: I’ve got a cruise control, and I’m not afraid to use it! Just ask the guy in the Dodge Ram truck who figured he was sending me some kind of message by following so closely that I couldn’t see his headlights. On these new trucks they’re five or six feet in the air, aren’t they? I didn’t want that guy hugging my bumper all the way to work, so at the first stretch of straight road I slid over to the right and slowed down to about forty to let him pass, but apparently he figured riding my ass was more interesting because he locked in tight behind me and stayed there.

Barb says I’ve gotten pretty darned good at being passive-aggressive. She’s got a degree in psychology so I trust her when she talks like that, even though I don’t completely understand what she’s saying. I figured if tailgating made Mister Ram Truck happy, I was going to give him a morning commute that would satisfy his mood. I set the cruise control at forty-five and motored smoothly across the countryside while I watched him in the rear-view mirror as his ridiculously large commuter truck yo-yo’d to and fro behind me. NOW MY AWESOMELY HUGE CHROME GRILL LOOKS BIGGER, now it’s smaller ... NOW IT’S BIG, now it’s small ... I see, yes, the size of your grille is very impressive, Mister Dodge Ram.

Ah! A red light. I began to slow down about a hundred yards from it, crawled to a stop, and waited two heartbeats after it turned green before I applied the gas, then clicked on the cruise control again so he could stay snuggled up to me. Cottage Grove Road opens up to two lanes in either direction after it crosses I-95, and that’s when Mister Ram Truck opened the throttle of his mighty beast and blasted past me, leaving me to quake at the awesome roar of his hemi engine. We were both really impressed by his display of power, I can tell you. Golly-gee, he sure could go fast. His brake lights flared about a hundred yards on, probably after when he looked down at his speedo and saw he was doing sixty in a thirty-five zone.

Somehow, I know he was late to work. It’s a feeling I got after seeing the way he bolted up the street and got caught behind the same stoplight that got me. It seemed clear that he would hit every red light, find the thickest traffic in town, and ultimately end up waiting ten minutes for a freight train, and it’s a sure bet he blamed it on “that bastard in the Camry going forty-five on Cottage Grove Road!” It only seemed right.

November 18, 2005

News Above The Fold: The latest Harry Potter movie is apparently so scary that parents are trying to decide whether or not to let their kids see it. Attention, Parents: If your kids have seen shootings and car chases on the evening news, if they’ve watch corpses rot on CSI: Miami, if they’ve played any video game besides Pac Man, then there’s nothing so scary in a Harry Potter film that it’s going to scar them for life. Let them see Harry Potter, and save your anxiety for something that matters.

 

We took a small detour on the way home from work last night to pick up Tim, who was stranded in Monona after he finished “after school,” a way of saying “detention” that doesn’t sound so bad. He got put on detention because he forgot to bring his swim trunks to school two days in a row. Seems a little harsh, doesn’t it? I thought so, too. He remembered to tell us the story of how he got sent to the counselor because he forgot his trunks, but he left out the part about being put on detention until he phoned his mom at six o’clock yesterday, as she was leaving work, and then all he would say was that he needed a ride home from school. When it comes to breaking news like this to your parents, timing is so important.

Timing works both ways, though. He phoned again after Barb picked me up from work, as we were picking our way through traffic along Atwood Avenue on the east side of Madison. “Where are you guys?” he asked. He was pretty upset that he’d been standing in the cold waiting for forty minutes while we were poking along. “You told me you were leaving work when I called,” he said. “I can see downtown from the school. I figured you’d be here in, like, ten minutes.”

He’s a bright kid, but there are some things a teenager doesn’t think about and you can’t make him. If it was any concern to him, he’d have taken into account that his mother doesn’t work downtown, but even though he knows Barb drops me off and picks me up, and that she drives at least fifteen minutes between my work and hers, it didn’t concern him until this point. He’d heard us talk about rush-hour traffic every day for three months but it was never on his radar screen, and it probably won’t be until February, when he gets his learner’s permit. I have this hunch he’ll claim to know all about it then, and I won’t be able to tell him a thing.

November 19, 2005

Poison gushed into the tiny metal chamber from a garden hose that hung from the wall underneath the porthole window. They said it was cyanide. When I decided I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, I stuck my head into the burning stream to soak my face and hair, shook like a dog ...

... then woke abruptly as I sucked in a lungful of air.

Man, I hate dreams like that. My heart was beating so fast I had no chance of getting back to sleep. I tottered off to the bathroom to use the toilet, then checked the clock in the kitchen. 3:40. Great. No matter what position I curled up into, nor how carefully I wrapped myself in the quilt, I couldn’t fall asleep again, even with a warm cat snuggled up against my belly, and they’re better than a hot water bottle. I stumped down the stairs to catch up on the last week’s news.

Turned out they were throwing a lot of sticks and stones on the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday after war hawk John Murtha turned on the administration and called for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq within six months. White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the Vietnam veteran and 37-year Marine Corps retired colonel names and accused Murtha of surrendering to terrorism, as did House Speaker Dennis Hastert. When Murtha’s resolution was introduced in the House, Republicans introduced their own version to bait the Democrats and, again, resorted to calling Murtha names, this time “coward.”

Why can’t we throw all this namby-pamby name-calling aside and settle the question with a duel? Get Zell Miller to take the Republican side; he wanted to shoot Chris Matthews last year on television, I think he’d be up for it. I’d even settle for an honest fist fight. Bet that’d get Americans interested in their government again.

Woah, Trigger! Sorry, didn’t mean to go all political on you, won’t happen again.

It was so cold in the downstairs room where we set up the computer that I sat with the hood of my sweater pulled over my head to keep warm and wrote drivel wearing a pair of miracle stretch gloves. Ever typed more than two words while wearing gloves? Talk about fat-finger! I stayed warm but I had to backspace and retype every third word. Try to keep that up for more than an hour without going cross-eyed loony.

November 20, 2005

Tim and I went to see Jarhead last night — or, more accurately, Tim and I got lost going to see Jarhead last night, if, by “lost,” you usually mean “didn’t know where the hell you were going,” because that was certainly me last night. There was a showing at the East Gate mall, so Tim and I hopped in the car and I drove to the East Towne mall. East Gate ... East Towne ... does it make any sense to you that they would build two malls right next to each other and give them names that were so confusingly similar? The correct answer was “no.” Please tell me you used the correct answer.

I have to stay with the definition of “lost” for a moment, though, because, although it’s correct to say I didn’t know where I was going, it’s also correct to say I didn’t know that I didn’t know where I was going. Tim and I were wandering through the East Towne mall for about ten minutes before I confessed to him that I was looking for a directory because I didn’t know where the movie theater was. Right about then we found a directory, and there were no movie theaters on the map. “Was the movie showing at the East Gate mall?” Tim asked. See, he’s in school and stuff, so he gets these subtle distinctions. I’m a senile codger. Tim tells me so all the time.

(Tim tensed up all over and swore through clenched teeth as we stepped into the mall: The public address system was broadcasting a Gene Autry Christmas tune. I guess that was his first of the season. I heard mine yesterday and reacted much the same way; we’re all a little touchy about Christmas tunes, Christmas decorations, and Christmas sales that take place before Thanksgiving. I hope it’ll never trigger An Unfortunate Event of the kind that you read about in the headlines, but if it ever should, when the press comes knocking on the door of anybody who ever knew us, by all means tell them, “Everybody knew they hated Christmas carols before Thanksgiving. It was just a matter of time before they snapped.”)

After we figured out that we were in the wrong place, we jumped in the car again and drove to the more aptly-named East Gate mall where Jarhead was playing. Not a bad movie, but I think the point of the story came across a whole lot more, well, pointedly from reading the book, I guess because the story was more heartbreaking coming straight from Swofford, rather than from a Hollywood version of Swofford (not that Jake Gyllenhaal did a bad job). If you still read books, I’d recommend Jarhead the book ahead of Jarhead the movie.

After last night’s trip to the movies, I have a new rule: I’m not going out to the movies any more unless I absolutely, positively know that I want to see the movie on a big screen. There was nothing about Jarhead worth paying $5.95 plus $8.75 for popcorn and a soda. In fact, that’s how I’m going to rate movies from now on: How many tubs of popcorn and soda was it worth? I’d frankly have to say Jarhead wasn’t worth a small popcorn ($3.75 at the East Gate and about the size of a thimble).

After the movie, Tim and I headed across town to pick up Barb, who was just wrapping up another Saturday of overtime work at the DoT. We stopped briefly in town (Tim looked for Jarhead at the library; he still likes to read) before we went back to the East Towne mall to collect some cash from Circuit City. Tim bought an MP3 player there a couple weeks ago; it went on sale this week, and the store will refund the difference within thirty days — HECK YES!

On the way to Circuit City Barb glanced out her window and said, “Oooo, IHOP!” in a sing-song voice. There’s no way not to stop at IHOP when somebody in the car does that.

 

Windows are supposed to let sunlight in and keep room air in the room, right? I found out today the windows of the house we’re renting in Cottage Grove might as well be open all the time, for all the good they do. Cold air was blowing dust off the frame of the window in Tim’s room as I was trying to cover it with a clear film to seal it up. Tim and I taped shrink-warp over all the windows in the house in a desperate effort to keep the draft out and the heat in. You know what? By suppertime we were already saying there was a noticeable difference, hoping it wasn’t all in our heads. I figure we’ll find out tonight, when we’re all used to putting on sweat clothes before turning in. If I can sleep snug and warm all night long without curling into a tight little ball, maybe it’s actually working.

Possibly the best thing about sealing all the windows behind an impenetrable sheet of plastic was entombing at least two dozen Asian beetles in the frigid pocket of air next to the deathly cold window panes. Die, pestilent vermin!

November 21, 2005

There’s a book out there with my name on it, and I never expect to see it again. After Barb showed me how the Book Crossing web site worked, I registered a couple of my books right away and started scheming to find the most interesting places to stash them around town. I’m a sucker for almost anything on the internet, but a web site where you could leave clues to help people find hidden books? Pure genius!

It helps that we have way too many books. You might think this is impossible, if you recall that almost everything we own is crated in a warehouse near Chicago, but we never stop buying books. We bought books while we were on the road, and within a month of arriving in Madison we bought three or four grocery bags full of books at a library sale. It wasn’t hard to find one or two to share.

I turned my first book loose at my favorite coffee house, Michelangelo’s, at the top of State Street, when I stopped there to get a cup of coffee this morning. It was “Cod” by Mark Kurlansky, a good read about the rise and fall of the fishing industry on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. I felt a little weird putting down a book and walking away from it. Usually the only time I do that in public is by accident. Next, I’m going to turn loose “The Talented Mister Ripley” (Patricia Highsmith) just as soon as I finish it — before the end of the week, I hope, but I still have to decide where to leave it.

 

I was so hungry all day long, and I couldn’t figure out why. Sometimes I don’t eat breakfast, or all I have is a cup of coffee, but today I had a banana, two slices of toast with jam, and a glass of orange juice first thing this morning. By the time I finished my morning coffee at work I was hungry enough to have the shakes, so I snacked on a Snickers bar to get me through until lunch. I had a packet of peanut M&M’s at about two to keep my stomach from growling all through the afternoon, and I snitched some candy from Sue’s desk when I stopped to say hi.

When Barb picked me up after work, almost the very first thing she had to tell me was how hungry she was all day! Tim said he was hungry all day, too. Either it was something in the air or we’re each getting ready to branch off a pseudopod.

 

The house was not as comfy-cozy as I had hoped the sealed-up windows would make it. There is a difference — I don’t feel an actual breeze blowing through any of the rooms now — but I was still so cold last night that I could have cut glass with my nipples. My new strategy tonight calls for curling up into a ball the size of a hydrogen atom and shivering hard enough to shake all the paint in a Sherwin-Williams store. If that doesn’t work, then I’m turning up the thermostat and to hell with the gas bill. I need to sleep.

 

This is the last week I’ll be spending more time in town than at home. After the Thanksgiving weekend, Barb will transfer to another department at the DoT where she won’t be able to grab those overtime bucks by clocking in early in the morning and clocking out late in the evening. She’s even taking Friday off to give herself a chance to acclimate to her new schedule; I’ll be dragging myself into work Friday, but at a (barely) more sane hour of the morning, and I can probably make it home before the big hand’s on the twelve and the little hand’s on the seven. Dinner at a normal hour! It’ll be leftover turkey, but still quite a treat!

November 22, 2005

Has your mind ever been hijacked by a stray thought, really hijacked so that you could do no more than simply sit still, helpless, usually right in the middle of trying to balance last month’s ledgers or some such? You stopped and stared into space so you could entertain the much more important thought of how nice it was to finally trim back that big toenail that was so rotten and starting to hurt. Ever been there?

Yes, there’s nothing that says “senility” like losing all your higher cognitive functions to every happy little thought that dances across the synapses of your brain cells. It’s the mental version of incontinence, only there’s no Depends for it. You have to wipe the drool off your lower lip with your handkerchief and trust your friends and coworkers not to say anything about it.

Once it happened while my boss was trying to show me how to do something fairly important; let’s say it was moving a mountain of money from one account to another. I had the computer configured, I was poking in the command, and the next thing I knew I was making travel plans to Vancouver. They have street cars. Street cars are cool. I like street cars. They’re cars, and they’re in the street.

Then my boss repeated the next step in the process of moving the mountain of money. I wanted to give myself a good slap, not for being such a dope but to make sure I stayed awake this time. I used to be able to multi-task these things; when I was a teenager, I could print photographs to specification for a weekly newspaper while at the same time recalling every minute detail of the latest Farrah Fawcett poster, but I guess after your mind gets old and dries up, mental feats on that magnitude are too much to hope for.

November 23, 2005

“You haven’t said anything about the snow yet,” I remarked to Barb, as she was getting ready to dry her hair this morning.

“SNOW?!” she wailed, rushing to the window to get a look at the half-inch or so on the ground that she had somehow avoided seeing until I brought her back to reality. I didn’t want to do that to her, but if I didn’t do it, somebody else would, and what fun would that be?

 

Our commute to work yesterday introduced us to Tom Reynolds, a Wisconsin state senator who’s calling for a referendum to bring back executions, outlawed in Wisconsin since 1853. Reynolds wanted to put prisoners to death mostly to show any would-be criminals out there the error of their ways. Hanging a few heads on pikes at the gates of the city, Reynolds said (now I’m paraphrasing a bit), would make the bad boys and girls think twice before they did something desperately awful.

The show turned more than a little weird as Reynolds began to plumb the depths of his Christian heart to explain his position further, which he did with all the grace of a palsied tightrope walker. We’re all God’s children, according to Reynolds, although some of us are such bad children that we ought to be snuffed, even those of us going on to face final judgment before his god. I guess some of us need prejudgement.

Putting prisoners to death wasn’t enough for some of the people calling in to support Reynolds. One caller thought the prison system was not only lenient, it was positively cushy. The caller wanted to make incarceration scarier than it is now by transforming our prisons into a chain of labor camps to wear prisoners out so they weren’t strong enough to threaten the rest of us after release from incarceration (not verbatim, but as close as I can make it). He also thought it would be a great idea to use prisoners for medical research. Thanks for your call, Doctor Mengele. Arbeit macht frei, nicht war?

November 24, 2005

A Happy Thanksgiving to you from the O-Folk in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin!

Even though we spent several days getting ready for our turkey day celebration to make sure everything would be just right when our guests arrived, we’ve got a very special custom that we always take care to observe — the Running to the Store. There’s no amount of planning we can do to avoid the last-minute dash to the grocery store to pick up one or two items. This year it was salt and whipped cream. Even though they’re the most basic kitchen items and anybody with half a brain should have been able to remember to pick more up before the one American holiday devoted to eating a bird the size of an SUV (and pie! Who eats pie without whipped cream?), we still had to run out for them. And so the custom continues and will be handed down unto the next generation.

We had family over for Thanksgiving, the first time that’s happened in many years. We toasted a friends and family, ate prodigious helpings of bird and stuffing, played “Catchphrase,” a rollicking word game that kept everybody awake through the after-dinner phase when everybody normally falls asleep on the sofa (we don’t have a sofa, a faux pas but it couldn’t be avoided), then scarfed down some delicious pie and whipped cream. Sue made two kinds of pie, pumpkin and apple. What a great holiday.

 

When it comes to sleeping, Tim got all his mother’s genes. That boy can sleep fourteen hours at a stretch, and does whenever the opportunity comes along. Wednesday was a half-day at his school, so he took a four-hour nap as soon as he got home, then went to bed at ten o’clock and didn’t get up until after ten today. I thought Barb could saw some logs, but that’s a shed full of lumber she’d be hard-pressed to fill.

November 25, 2005

I had to head off to work this morning. Felt weird to go back to work on Friday, one day, before punching out for the weekend. It felt even weirder because a lot of the people at work took a day off today, and unless I miss my guess most of the municipal and state workers were gone, so cap square had the look and feel of a ghost town.

And I mean it was dead downtown. I processed two checks. I answered exactly four phone calls. I spent most of the day tweaking an Excel spread sheet, trying to get the ledgers to balance, with mixed success. And I ate my turkey sandwich. Did you have a cold turkey sandwich for lunch today? Of course you did. Everybody did.

(Do you butter your sandwich bread? I do, every time; a sandwich is too dry without butter on it. The butter keeps the contents from soaking into the bread, and makes a great condiment. Barb thinks this is nuts. As far as I can tell, she butters her bread only when it’s served alone, as a side to spaghetti, for instance, or when it’s toast.)

Barb, brave lass that she was, drove to the mall to see if she could get within a stone’s throw of the Friday morning sales. She couldn’t; the parking lots everywhere were full, except at Target, where she managed to elbow her way in and then back out of the store with a coffee maker. Everybody had one under their arms, she said. Looks like there’ll be a lot of hot java brewing in Madison tonight.

Shortly after the lunch hour the Great White Snow Beast squatted over Wisconsin and unleashed a sub-zero honk that covered all of downtown Madison in several inches of snow by the time darkness fell. Barb said she thought it got warmer as the snow continued to fall, but I think she’s nuts. It never “warmed up;” it was colder than a well-digger’s butt all day.

November 26, 2005

We still don’t have a snow shovel, even though there’s still plenty of snow on the ground. What a bunch of goobs. Barb got around to remembering to buy an ice scraper for the car only last week, and if we don’t get boots soon, or at least some galoshes, we’re going to be tramping through ankle-deep snow in low-quartered shoes soon (which Tim will probably do all winter. Unless I miss my guess, snow boots are so not hip. If nobody else in school will wear them, I doubt that he will, either).

 

We’re trying a new experiment with computer access: Tim doesn’t get any to speak of, not compared to what he used to, anyway. He brought home a report card with outstanding grades in skills and knowledge, but piss-poor grades in effort, “effort” being defined by the school system as “turning in your homework.” He says he does it, he just doesn’t turn it in. You know what? That’s the same as not doing it!

When we got the card in the mail, we called Tim into the dining room with furrowed brow, clucking just like Concerned Parents. What could be the problem? we asked him. He was genuinely shocked at the poor marks and couldn’t provide much illumination, so we decided to swing by the school to attend parent-teacher conferences on Tuesday night. Every teacher we spoke to, every teacher, said that Tim’s a great guy and smart as a whip, but he doesn’t turn in his homework. Well, yes, we understand he’s missed a few assignments, we said ... to which they flipped open their grade books to show us that he’s missed about half. In one or two classes, more than half.

We returned home with a plan. We were no longer Concerned Parents. I transmogrified into Draco the Draconian and pulled the modem off the computer, vowing not to hook it up again until he could show us that he was doing his homework and turning it in, and then he would only get an hour a day (it’s called “positive reinforcement” — I read about it for a class). (Or it may be “negative reinforcement;” we’re having a discussion on that. Barb took a different class and must’ve read a book I didn’t read.)

Not that this keeps Tim from bargaining for more time, and on most occasions he can actually talk us into giving it to him. I feel like such a crusty old dad, though, dragging Tim to the bargaining table for minutes of modem time: “Pray, recite thou thy litany of homework assignments and thy household chores, cur! Now grovel on the floor, swine, and lick my boots. Okay, you can have eight minutes on-line. ARE YOU STILL HERE? BEGONE!”

When I told Sue about our positive-reinforcement experiment, she wanted our secret: How did we do that without making Tim hate us? I don’t know. I guess he doesn’t hate us for it because he’s a decent guy who knows in his heart we’re doing it for love. *snort!* Yeh, RIGHT! Honestly, we don’t have a secret. We just did it. For all I know, he has learned to hate us so deeply because of all the disciplinary measures we’ve imposed over the years that he stays up all night sticking cursed hat pins into voodoo effigies of both of us. It would explain a lot of the aches and pains that have beset us over the years.

But we couldn’t continue to let him not turn in school assignments with no consequence but bad grades. Bad grades concerned him about as much as ... well, I don’t know; is there anything more inconsequential thing to teens? (Parents?) He doesn’t drive yet (and right now we’re thinking it may be a while), so the next most obviously monumental consequence would be no computer time. No more blowing shit up and chatting until who knows what hour of the early morning. It turned out we chose wisely; he’s raking the cat box again in order to bargain for half an hour more.

 

Starbucks is crap. I hate to be that blunt because I know the coffee brand you chose is a deeply personal decision; for all I know you may worship at the House of Starbucks (if so, mea culpa). As for me, I think I gave them a fair chance, but I’m not impressed. I stopped at the store on cap square twice and got a pretty weak cup of coffee both times. It was decaf, but the decaf at the local coffee shops doesn’t taste like dishwater so I should think a national chain like Starbuck’s could get it right. Then I bought a bag of beans so I could serve my Autie Sue her favorite brew after Thanksgiving dinner. I asked the young lady behind the counter to grind it for a coffee press. I trusted her to know what that meant. I got a bag of coffee ground so finely that it might as well have been lint. (Honestly, I’ve never seen coffee beans ground until their individual atoms were torn apart. Doesn’t that usually require a cyclotron and a team of university professors?) I give up. Starbuck’s is not my thing, and I’m done with them, after I put the last of this incredibly expensive bag of coffee dust through the drip filter.

November 27, 2005

I got a tripod for my digital camera for six bucks! I’ve wanted a tripod small and light enough to keep in my backpack so it’ll be handy for a low-light shot when the opportunity presents itself. This one’s not exactly lightweight because it’s all-metal, but excellently made.

Then I got another one for two bucks a minute later ...

... and a minute after that I got a third one, entirely by accident, in a bag with two telescopes, a lens and an electronic gizmo, for two more bucks.

Auctions are like that: I spent all day long waiting for them to get around to the table with the camera gadgets, intending to get just the one tripod, but eyeing the second one as a back-up bid. I bought the first one for much less than I thought I would have to pay, and the second one was so darned cheap I couldn’t pass it up. Then nobody would buy the grab bag of gadgets so I bid two bucks. The guy next to me offered me two bucks for one of the telescopes, which meant everything I bought averaged down to a little over a buck apiece. Score! Then in the dregs of the bag I found what I thought was a featherweight monopod but, when I unscrewed the bottom of it, I found it had a tripod base. Bonus points!

 

We went to see Walk The Line last night at the cinema in Stoughton. Joaquin Phoenix has a lot of talent and I’m sure it’s a great film for fans of Johnny Cash, but all the while I watched it I couldn’t help noting the plot points typical of these movies: dead brother ... philandering ... drugs ... amazing comeback ... it was as if they swapped out Jamie Fox for Joaquin Phoenix and filmed almost exactly the same story they used for Ray.

The movie wasn’t bad, just familiar. The theater was a fun change, though: They had tables with plush chairs and served pizza or subs to eat during the show. It was almost like being at home with a big-screen in the living room. Reasonable prices, too; a pitcher of coke for five bucks and a huge bucket of popcorn for three seventy-five? Unheard of at a Madison theater!

November 28, 2005

Is it supposed to rain in November? I’m pretty sure it’s not. November ... rain ... November ... rain ... even though my memory’s not the best, I can’t remember the two of them ever going together, so why did it rain all day today? It’s nearly December, for crying out loud! In two weeks, we’re going to buy a Christmas tree! We’re supposed to be looking at snow, snow and more snow! Not puddles. It’s enough to make a guy want to toss his mittens in the trash and move to Tucson, where they’re satisfied to play golf year-round and miss out on other more rewarding physical activity, like scraping chunks of ice off the windshield of your car every day, or stamping your feet on the ground to keep your circulation going so you avoid losing a toe to frostbite.

The high temperature today, if you can stand to hear another word about it, was fifty-seven degrees, although by three o’clock temps had dropped to forty-eight. The weather nerds are forecasting snow for tonight and tomorrow.

 

I found out the hard way this morning that making enough coffee to fill the carafe to the “6” does not mean that there are six cups of coffee in it. Those numbers on the side of the carafe must be the “imaginary numbers” I remember reading about in high school math class. They seem to be for decoration, nothing more. I’d like to meet the braniac who thought it would be a good idea to print numbers on the side of the pot so I could ask him why he’d want to suck well-meaning husbands like me into an early-morning coffee fiasco. I figured that six cups for the two of us would be more than enough, but it wasn’t even enough for Barb to get her morning shot and carry some along with her to work. Live and learn.

November 29, 2005

I used my lunch hour yesterday to walk around town, take a few snapshots, pick up a book at the library, and try to find a barber shop. You’d think a town the size of Madison would have a barber shop right on the downtown square, wouldn’t you? Well, it doesn’t. There’s a barber in the basement of the Concourse Hotel on Dayton Street, one block over from the square, and as far as I can tell he’s the only barber within walking distance of the capitol. It seems there aren’t many people in town who need a haircut during lunch hour. That’s just freaking weird.

I made an appointment yesterday so I wouldn’t have to take the chance on a walk-in slot being open today. The barber, George, was waiting for me and I was sure I liked him when he took his time cutting my hair. He turned out to be the kind who likes to make a customer feel comfortable by sharing a little conversation and a couple jokes between snips. I think the last barber I met like him was Jerry, who had a shop at the UW-Eau Claire. There aren’t many full-time barbers with a little shop like George’s these days. Gave me a great haircut, too; not too much off the top, got the hair off my ears and neck but left me with enough to keep my head warm when I’m on the street.

 

“What’s for dinner tonight?” Barb e-mailed me as she was finishing up at work. I knew that whatever we were having would require a stop at the grocery on the way home, so I picked the first thing I thought of: BLTs. We bought fresh baby green lettuce, a big hothouse tomato and a packet of real sliced bacon. BLTs make a great meal, but the best part is making them, especially frying the bacon. I love that smell, and it doesn’t go away for hours.

Tim didn’t have a BLT because he doesn’t like the L or the T, and he thinks making a sandwich with the B wrong. (I think we’re back to “just freaking weird” again.) I don’t know where he got that, but in this case it’s not nature or nurture.

November 30, 2005

We saw bicyclists on the road to and from work today. It was twenty degrees out there, and they were riding bicycles to work. That’s not just dedication any more, that’s OUT OF YOUR MIND!

I wasn’t nearly as prepared as the cyclists were for today’s cold snap back to winter weather. I was still wearing my overcoat, which is a good, warm wool coat, but it’s not enough to keep me warm when the outside air gets down below freezing. I want to be as toasty warm at twenty as I would be at forty or fifty, and modern millinery technology has made that possible: I have a winter coat that would keep me warm at the North Pole. For some dumb reason, though — wait, no; for no dumb reason I forgot to swap it out this morning. It should have been on my back today, but instead I walked to the library in my overcoat as quickly as I could, shoulders hunched, hands buried deep in pockets, chugging breath muffled beneath two turns of my trusty woolen scarf. It wasn’t enough, and I hurried back to work. There’s not a lot that can make me hurry to work, but twenty-degree temps sure did the trick today.

 

I read yesterday that Lynyrd Skynyrd’s been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which was a little disappointing because I sort of assumed they were already in there. What took so long?

That’s the trouble with a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, isn’t it? Everybody’s got their own idea what should be in there, and if it’s not, then the Hall of Fame is, at best, worthless (“Lynyrd Skynyrd’s not in there? Who’d want to pay money to see it, then?”), and at worst a very personal slap in the face (“What the hell? WHERE’S MY LYNYRD?”). Plus, it’s going to have a lot of crap that shouldn’t be in there (“No matter what anybody says, The Doors are the most overrated band since the apostles sang hosanna.”) Everybody’s got their own hall of fame at home, and the one in Cleveland, or wherever it is in Ohio, is only a close second.

A Footnote: Tim can’t stand Skynyrd’s Gimme Three Steps, not because they play it all the time on a local radio station we like to listen to — if that were his reason, he wouldn’t listen to half the music in his illegally downloaded collection — but because “they’re a hick band.” I can’t explain how he got this impression; I can only fall back on the explaination that I’ve somehow failed as a parent.

 

Unfortunate footnote to yesterday’s feast: The B we bought to put in our BLTs turned out to be a little dodgy. Some of us were awake almost all night fighting nausea and The Vapors, and some of us were somewhat worse off than that. Barb came home this evening with a killer headache, but a bowl of noodle soup for each of us helped us all quite a bit. It’s back to dependable, healthy turkey wanna-be bacon from now on, I guess.

 
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