Drivel

December 1, 2005

On this first day of December we woke up to two inches of snow on the ground ... and the radio announced school delays and closings! Pathetic! What the hell happened to Wisconsin while I was gone? The solid people of the good old days have turned into a pack of whining namby-pambys while I was away. Somebody fetch me my cane and bifocals while I powder my hair white so I can carp like a proper old codger:

When I was a kid I knew that the only way I was getting out of school was when snowfall was measured in feet. I woke up early on mornings when I knew massive amounts of snow had fallen during the night, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t hear the ringing sound of snow-chained tires along the highway, the sure sign that the county’s snow plows had opened the roads to school buses. No snow chains, no school. We got mountains of snow in the winter, but more often than not I heard chains. School just didn’t close.

That said, I have to admit the roads were a tad slippery this morning in spots. I didn't see any accidents, but the radio reported more than a couple cars in the ditch, so I suppose the delay could have been justified. Just a little. Okay, curmudgeon time is over.

 

After Barb dropped me off at work, I was feeling a little peckish so I swung around the front of the building to stop in at Scott’s café, where they have a wide assortment of cookies and other bakery yummies that I usually find delicious, but from now on I believe I’ll avoid the apple turnovers. The one I got hold of this morning might have been a freak, but it had all the taste and delicacy of an asphalt shingle smothered in candied apples. Not a good way to start the day.

 

Apparently the car I drive is the stuff of legend. I heard that on the radio this morning, so it must be true. “The legendary Camry” they called it, putting it right up there with the Porsche Carrera and the Lamborghini Countach. Advertising always leans towards superlatives, because “the darned good Camry” isn’t as strong a sell, I suppose. Putting the darned good but rather pedestrian Camry in the lineup of automotive legends somehow doesn’t work, does it? The Chevrolet Corvette, the Ford Mustang, and the Pontiac GTO all have names that deserve to be put in italics. Then there’s the Toyota Camry. Dependable, heck yes. Comfortable, yes, of course. Legendary? Hmmmm ...

 

You’ve been there: After you stopped at a crowded coffee shop to pick up a steaming cuppa joe, and maybe also waiting in line at the news stand for the morning paper, you wish a good morning to about a half-dozen people you know as you make your way to your desk at work, and you might even greet two or three customers in your friendliest manner, but you’re wondering why everybody’s been looking at you as though you’ve grown a third eye. Then on a bathroom break you glance into the mirror while washing your hands and discover, to your horror, that you’ve got a dried booger the size of a horsefly stuck to the end of your nose.

Why’s it considered impolite to tell anybody, even in a quiet aside, to wipe his nose, or at least caution him to have a look in the mirror before he says hello to even one more person? Isn’t that a lot more humane than letting someone you otherwise care about walk around with the equivalent of roadkill hanging off his face? Perfect strangers have leaned out the windows of their moving cars to tell me in no uncertain terms what they thought of my driving, but nobody outside my immediate family has ever called my attention to a booger dangling from my nose or a chunk of food stuck to my chin. It seems a little strange.

 

Story time with Uncle Knuckles:

The day after New Year’s Eve is New Year’s Day, for obvious reasons. The day after Christmas is Boxing day — nobody, though, knows why it’s called that. The day after Thanksgiving day, at least in our house, is called The Day of the Flinging of the Carcass, and now you will find out why, whether you want to or not.

The O-folk have had a huge turkey for Thanksgiving for as long as Sean’s been able to eat his weight in drumsticks, but even on our first Thanksgiving, when the Seanster was still a little bit of a snap, we had such a huge turkey that Barb and I had no idea what to do with the carcass after we carved it up. The meat went into stacks of Tupperware, but what to do with the copious heap of bones, gristle and skin? It was twice as much as the waste can under the sink could hold, and neither of us wanted to trot across a hundred yards of snow-covered parking lot with a big, slimy, steaming carcass under one arm to toss it in a dumpster.

Our first Thanksgiving dinner took place in Barb’s apartment, three rooms with a balcony that overlooked an empty back lot. The building was surrounded by what were probably intended to be decorative shrubs when they were planted. In the ten years or more since then, however, they’d morphed into what I could only describe as a groundskeeper’s nightmare, if the management were to inexplicably break years of precedence and decide to hire groundskeepers. As we didn’t’ see that happing any time in the near future, and because we never saw anybody playing, jogging, walking or otherwise using the back lot, we solved our disposal problem by taking the turkey carcass to the railing of the balcony and dumping it into the bushes. We giggled like maniacs doing it, especially when it made a nasty, wet thump hitting the ground.

And ever after, The Flinging of the Carcass has followed Thanksgiving Day.

*Footnote: Now that I’ve published this story, skewed in my usual crude way for humorous effect, Barb would like it known to all who read these presents that we do not actually fling the carcass into the yard every year. We did that once, and only once, and I didn’t mean to imply, as I apparently have, that we do it annually. After dinner we boil the carcass down for broth before we toss it in the garbage can, which has customarily become known in our house as “flinging the carcass.” But there is no heap of turkey bones, picked over by neighborhood cats, in the yard behind our house. My humblest apologies, especially to she who must be obeyed, for implying otherwise.

 

This has to be one of the punniest articles The Onion has come up with in months: Fritolaysia cuts off chiplomatic relations with Snakistan

Relations between the two countries grew stale in 1994, when Fritolaysian rufflelutionaries crossed zestablished borders and forced Snakistan to dispatch cheesekeeping forces. The late-night SALTY talks held at Snakistan's Kuler Ranch, however, cooled the spicy conflict with the signing of the historic Buttermilk Compromise, which established bilateral chiplomacy and regulated trade flows by setting the international Rold Gold standard of currency.

The dispute over increased prices and decreased serving sizes escalated when Snakistan, swayed by the influence of the nation's healthiest 1 percent, signed a historic fat-free-trade agreement with the Yogurtslavian nation of Colombo. Preparing for a long and grueling war of nutrition, Fritolaysia imposed trade snacktions and set up a blockade of Snakistan's major ports, cutting off their commerce with Yumen, Mmmmadagascar, and the Chex Republic.

December 2, 2005

“Where are you going?” Barb asked, half asleep, when I got up to grab a flannel shirt from the closet to put on over my long-sleeve cotton tee.

“Not going anywhere,” I answered as I buttoned up and crawled back into bed, where I pulled my flannel-covered knees up under my chin, tucked my hands between my shins and prayed to more quickly, and painlessly, freeze solid. The thermostat was set at sixty-nine degrees and the furnace was running more or less continually all night, so in theory I should have been warm, but in reality I was a Popsicle. I think the builders of our rented duplex might possibly have skimped just a bit on the insulation. I’m sure it was an accidental omission, that they weren’t doing it just to line their pockets or make me a lab rat in their hypothermia experiment. I’ll just put on more layers until I can curl up in a snow bank outside, where it’s warmer.

 

I had much better luck at Scott’s this morning, you’ll be relieved to know, where I fell back on the more dependable fare, an oatmeal and chocolate chip cookie the size of a manhole cover that I could nibble on all morning. I pretended that all the sugar and chocolate didn’t overpower the oatmeal and that I was actually eating something that was pretty much good for me. I’m so gullible.

 

There’s a way a guy can pee so he doesn’t get the seat, the floor and the walls wet. Just FYI, it looks as though none of the guys at the place I work know the secret.

 

“Are you going up?” a man asked me this evening at work as I was getting on the elevator ... in the basement. For just a moment, I couldn’t speak, caught between a straight answer and a smart-assed one. I desperately wanted to answer with a simple, “Nope,” and leave him standing there, puzzling as the doors closed, but my brain overrode my gut and I replied simply, “Yes.” Damn.

December 3, 2005

There’ll be no more talk of freezing to death. I remembered we have a closet full of sleeping bags we’ve hardly used, mailed here from Japan because we slept in them for one or two nights after they boxed up all our furniture. I pulled one of them out of the closet last night, tucked it under the quilt and slid inside for a night of toasty-warm sleep. Bliss! I felt a little like a homeless bum, but I’d be damned if I was going to spend one more night curled in a ball, shivering through five layers of clothes.

 

“Shopping is so exhausting!” Barb yawned as we drove home after a day trip into town. We went to Kohl’s for the stuff we had to buy (gloves, earmuffs, boots), into town for lunch at Michelangelo’s coffee shop (juicy chicken and cheese on crunchy toasted buns), swung by the library (Tim wanted to replace his lost card and check out Theodore Rex, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt), and finally stopped to look at the homespun clothes and organic food for sale at the Fair Trade Market. Tim got one look at the granola-eating hippies wandering from room to room and said he’d be waiting for us in the lobby, where he knocked off a chapter of his book.

 

Tim bought a pair of headphones for his digital music player. He had a pair of really big headphones, but they weren’t loud enough for him. I explained why and showed him how to read the specifications of headphones to find louder ones, and he bought a set that wrapped around the back of his head and were so loud they could shatter windows in three counties. I could hear what he was hearing; doesn’t that sort of defeat the purpose of headphones?

It reminded me of one of the guys who comes by the office at work to pick up and deliver the mail. He wears those wrap-around headphones and plays his music loud enough for me to hear it, but he pretends he can hear me, too. For about a week, I believed maybe he could, but only because I usually didn’t say any more to him than, “How you doing?”

“Okay,” he’d answer with a nod. “How are you?”

“I’m doing all right,” I’d reply, and he’d say “okay” and leave. That worked until I settled in and was feeling a little more friendly and familiar with everybody. One morning when he came in, instead of asking, “How you doing?” which he was used to, I asked him, “Waddaya know?”

“Okay,” he answered with a nod. “How are you?”

It confused me, but only for a moment, until the nickel dropped. He could hear me, but couldn’t understand very well, maybe not at all! I could’ve told him, “I’m doing your wife,” and he would’ve answered, “Okay,” smiled, and walked out.

Every morning I tried a new greeting on him — “What’s happening?” or “Having a good morning?” — anything that would’ve required an answer other than the one he always gave me, “Okay.” Too much fun! Then, for about a week, his headphones broke and we began to actually chat a little bit when he came into the office. When he finally came back wearing a new set of headphones, he pulled them out of his ears to say good morning, and the old ritual was over for good.

 

Boo and Bonkers have learned that, when the furnace comes on, the best place to be is in front of the hot air vent under the kitchen sink. They’ll leave whatever they’re doing, even getting lap time, to go sit in the warm blast coming from it. No other vent in the house blows across the floor to leave a warm patch just big enough for a cat to lay in.

 

Summary of an article in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal (I wish I could link to it, but we’d have to pay for a subscription to read it):

As the market for ultraluxury cars grows more competitive, auto makers are taking customization to a new level. They will paint a car to match a customer’s lipstick; Rolls-Royce has 45,000 different shades of paint. Last year, three Rolls-Royce cars were produced with the Spirit of Ecstasy statue made out of 24-karat solid gold. Bentley put a microwave in the back seat of a car for a Chinese customer. An investor in Sweden had his 1933 Maybach shipped to the plant in Germany so they could make an exact replica for $500,000. Maybach, Rolls-Royce and Bentley factories all have airfields that can accommodate private jets and helicopters so customers can fly in to watch their car being built. A few Aston Martin dealerships built a club, complete with a bar and flat-screen TV, which customers can use free of charge for private gatherings.

The article notes that there is almost nothing a manufacturer won’t do to customize a vehicle by request. They won’t compromise safety or alter the performance of a vehicle, but if all you want is ivory door panels, teak finish or platinum trim, they’ll happily load up your car with as much ostentation as you ask.

This article caught my eye in the first place not because there are people out there who will spend an unconscionable amount of money prissing up their already-overexpensive cars, however; it was what they do with their cars that amazed me:

Ralph H. Doering III just bought a new condo in Oakland Park, Fla. Like many upscale developments, the property boasts such amenities as a lounge for entertaining with a catering kitchen and wine storage, a guest office with Internet access, and even an art gallery and photography studio. Mr. Doering has no plans to live in the condo development, however. But his car will. The new development is an “auto-minimum” for luxury cars. Spaces start at about $50,000. A growing number of membership clubs and high-end garages are catering to collector cars. The business models vary, but they generally feature posh amenities, ranging from private driving courses and climate-controlled garages, some with web cams so you can view your car in storage at your desktop computer, to luxury meeting spaces for parties and onsite car portrait studios.

“Onsite car portrait studios”! Come get your photo taken in my Bentley! And I love the web cam idea! Can you imagine having to kiss up to a boss so fatuous that he calls you into his office to show you his web-cam shot of the Aston Martin he just bought?

December 4, 2005

“I want a Roomba,” I told Sean the other night on the phone. He had no idea what I was talking about, but he’s just a college student. They don’t get out much.

Roombas are robot vacuum cleaners. Opinions vary on how well they work; some people love them, others complain that they can’t get into corners and they don’t clean carpets very well. I’ve got one answer to both complaints: Who cares? It’s a robot that sweeps your floor for you!

I guess I love that idea more than other people because I’m a nerd for gadgets, and I remember a time when robots were going to take over all the drudgery of daily life. The day somebody announces their plan to build a robot that cleans toilets, I’m going to invest every nickel in it because that robot’s going to rake in billions.

In the meantime, we have Roomba, not what you expect when you think of a robot, but not any dumber-looking than R2D2. Not much bigger than a dinner plate, you set it down on the floor (duh!), push the ‘start’ button, and walk away. Who wouldn’t want to do that instead of push a vacuum cleaner around? But no, some people just gotta complain about a little dust in the corners. It’s exactly that attitude that’s prevented us from mass-marketing the flying cars we were all supposed to be driving ten years ago! Wahh, they’re so god-awful ugly! Wahh, you have to learn how to fly it like a plane!

Get a Roomba, guys.

December 5, 2005

The Monday morning alarm. Crap.

It was one of those mornings when I didn’t want to crawl out of my toasty-warm bed into what I knew was a cold room. Did you ever have one of those mornings? Did you always have one of those mornings? I burrowed a little deeper beneath the comforter and debated the possibilities:

We could be snowed in. Possible at these latitudes this time of year, and I always think it’s a cozy feeling, at least for the first snowed-in day, to curl up in a blanket and read books until bedtime on the excuse that I can’t leave the house. At the same moment I was thinking of it, though, I heard the sound of a snow plow dropping its spade on the asphalt outside our window and clearing the roadway. If they were plowing Cottage Grove at this hour, every other road in the county was clear.

I could call in sick. Nowhere near as pleasant as the wrapped-in-a-blanket-reading-books scenario, but it would still allow me to lay in bed all day with the comforter, getting lots of sleep. If I wasn’t too sick, reading books was not out of the question. A quick check of all my vital functions, however, found no dysfunction, so that excuse was out.

Our car could be broken down, a popular and somewhat overused excuse, but effective. Alas, it allows for only a temporary reprieve from the start of the week, as the boss usually expects a guy to call a tow truck and get the car repaired while finding another way into work. Besides, we drive a Toyota Camry, a car revered by so many to be so dependable that, the more you drive it, the more solid and reliable it becomes. It’s not only less likely to break down the older it gets, it actually makes you more hale and hearty.

I could think of only one or two more ideas — had to stay home to nurse a sick child, had to fly to an emergency meeting of the Masters of the Universe — nothing seemed solid enough to put off the inevitable, so I rolled out of bed.

Which was ever so toasty warm because we brought home a down comforter from the sale at Kohl’s this weekend. No more sleeping bag! No more sweat pants in bed!

 

The dashboard thermometer of our car, normally at about forty-five or fifty degrees after sitting in the garage all night, will plunge into the teens or twenties as I pull away from the house and start the commute to work in these first weeks of winter. This morning, though, it kept on plunging into the single digits until it finally stopped at zero. We were waiting on tenterhooks to see whether or not it would display a negative number, but we never found out.

 

Do you think you could ride a bicycle on an ice-covered road? How about if the air temperature was zero? How about weaving a bike back and forth between ice-covered lanes wearing a leather jacket and jeans when the temp was zero and cars were passing you on both sides? I passed a doofus doing all that this morning riding his bike along Williamson Street. He was using both inbound lanes by weaving wildly back and forth, possibly to discourage cars from passing, but more probably because he couldn’t feel his hands, which were certainly frozen solid through the thin gloves he was wearing. Barb gaped at him as we drove by. “He’s blue!” she shouted.

 

“Except for Harry Connick, Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole,” Tim said the other day, “everybody should give up making Christmas albums because they always get it wrong.”

WOLX, one of the local radio stations, has been playing Christmas tunes since the first snow fall, about three weeks ago. We’ve been listening, on and off, because this is the time of year when we normally fill our CD player up with nothing but Christmas albums and hit ‘shuffle,’ but we left our extensive collection of Christmas albums in the household goods shipment because we thought we’d be celebrating the holidays in our own house. No house, no shipment, no Christmas music — ergo, we have to take what we can get on the radio.

After careful consideration of everything I’ve heard so far, I have to admit Tim’s probably right. Bing set the standard with Silver Bells, and I’ve never heard anybody sing The Christmas Song as well as Nat, ever. Connick deserves to be on the list for his recording of It Must Have Been Old Santa Claus, and I would add the Vince Guiraldi jazz combo to his list. Vince is the guy who wrote Christmas Time Is Here from the score to A Charlie Brown Christmas.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that all other Christmas music is not worth listening to, except for Barbra Streisand’s version of Jingle Bells. For foisting that piece of crap on us, I’d like to send her to the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay where a special cell wired with surround-sound speakers would play Eminem recordings at high volume for a couple weeks. That goes double for Mariah Carey. And Dolly Parton. Sheesh, I feel a laundry list coming on.

December 6, 2005

As I woke from sweet slumber this morning, I had a topic in mind to begin today’s drivel, but it unfortunately had everything to do with the rather dull dream I’d finished and nothing to do with reality, so it wouldn’t hold your interest much, would it?

(For the sake of experiment: In the dream, Tim used up all of Barb’s yarn by cutting it into two-inch-lengths and tying each strand into a bow on every hardware fixture in the house. Barb accused me of doing it. “Does this look like something a 44-year-old man would waste all day doing?” was the sum of my counterargument. She seemed to think it was something I would waste all day doing, and I utterly failed to sway her, hard as I tried. The dream seemed to go on all night.

(There. Did that hold your interest at all?)

 

Every one of the O-folk had about as much trouble getting out of bed this morning as we would have had getting out of an overturned truck in a roadside ditch, and I don’t know why. We all went to bed at a decent hour last night, and it’s not like we spent all day picking cotton or anything else that would leave us bone-tired.

What’s up with that? There’s no alien spaceship in orbit sucking the life out of us with a death ray as we sleep at night (I really hope there isn’t, anyway), so what could be the magic ingredient that makes it relatively easy to roll out of bed some mornings, and almost impossible to do on others, regardless of when you went to bed or how early you got up, or even how much beer you drank? Well, sometimes the beer makes a bit of a difference.

 

The noisiest eater on earth sat behind me in the break room during lunch hour. How noisy was he? He seemed to be eating with his nose and mouth at the same time, resulting in enough smacking, snorting and coughing to gross out a dumpster-diving bag lady. Even thought he appeared to be expelling as much as he was ingesting, he was determined not to let so much as a hiccup interrupt his masticating rhythm. And he breathed through his mouth while he ate. I’ve overheard zoo animals that dine with more delicacy.

 

Crazy Bicyclist Watch: I didn’t expect this would turn into a contest, but it has. As Barb was driving to work along University Avenue, while the morning temperature was between zero and five degrees, she spotted a guy on a bike wearing shorts! As the days get colder, the cyclists get weirder. (But not just the cyclists: The WOLX DJ said he saw a guy driving along the beltway in a convertible with the top down. Ordinarily I would have thought he was making that up, but after Barb told me about the cyclist in shorts, the guy in the convertible was a pretty tame story.)

 

“What’s our phone number?” Tim e-mailed me from school. I thought it was pretty funny that he couldn’t remember it, so when I told him I added, “ROFL!” I don’t chat, but I know that ROFL means “rolling on the floor laughing,” so I like to throw that in once in a while to connect with him in his own lingo, like when I say, “fo shizzle” or call him “mah homie.” He thinks it’s cute when I try so hard.

Tim does chat, which means he knows how to condense a whole sentence into a three-letter word. His reply to my “ROFL” looked like this: “SNFOO SOL HZZAH NARF!” So I hit the reply button, quickly rapped off the message “Aw, you’re just making shit up now,” and fired that sucker off. The low wattage on my thought-o-meter alone should have been setting off alarm bells.

There was a message in my inbox instantly after I hit “send.” Tim couldn’t have fired back that quickly; he’s fast, but he’s not superhuman. I opened the reply and read: “You have send e-mail from a business system which contained an inappropriate word. Your supervisor has been notified.”

Well, shit.

So it turns out I’m no longer responsible enough to use something as simple as e-mail. If I keep deteriorating at this rate, pretty soon I won’t be able to flush a toilet without constant supervision.

December 7, 2005

Speaking of realtors, we met Wilma last night. I don’t believe I’ve ever met anybody named Wilma before; I’ve got a pretty dodgy memory, but I’d recall that. We wanted to buy a house, and she wanted to find one for us, although she wanted to spend a little more for one than we did. Seems to me the last realtor we used egged us on like that, too; no matter what we told her our upper limit was, she wanted to add at least twenty-five grand to it. When it came time to make an offer, though, it was up to us to find the money, of course. Funny how it works that way.

Wilma’s going to call us when she finds some houses to walk us through Saturday morning. I’ll bet you a nickel she asks to show us at least one listed for two-twenty or more.

After meeting Wilma, Barb and I had a late dinner at the Black Bear Inn. The food there is soooo good, and yet so bad at the same time. Bad in the sense that you can eat an entire meal made in a deep fryer if you’re not careful (Barb had one of those, naughty girl), and because they pile as much food on the plate as it can hold and call that a single serving. I should have taken at least half of my club sandwich home in a doggie bag; it was so big they had to chop it to pieces and lay it on its side to make it possible for me to pick it up.

 

I tied a perfect Windsor knot in my necktie this morning, or as close to perfect as I’m ever likely to come. First and second fold over were perfect, knot was perfect, I cinched it up perfectly, then stepped back and saw in the mirror that the bottom ended about halfway down my fly. The second time I tied it, of course, was a disaster.

 

Turns out the dashboard thermometer in our car goes into negative numbers after all.

 

On the local “Charlie” radio station this morning, the recorded smartass who makes announcements during the station break asked, “Did I step in dog crap on the way to work this morning, or is that your breath?” They like to cop a sassy attitude, but I haven’t heard personally abusive remarks until now. I wonder what kind of demographic they appeal to; and, more to the point, what kind of person they had appealed to with the musical variety of their program, then chased off when they verbally smacked the listeners around like that?

 

Either I must have slept funny last night, or I’ve got what feels like a coat hanger stuck in the waistband of my slacks. Can’t find the damned thing, though. And I say ‘slept funny’ because I walked around bent over like a question mark all day, prompting smirks from others; not because it gave me a chuckle.

 

After all these years of letting the government take the lead in divorcing religious meaning from the holidays, many evangelical Christian churches have introduced their own somewhat novel approach: church services will not be held on Christmas day at Southland Christian Church in Nicolasville, Kentucky; Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas; Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois; and at North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia. Why? Cally Parkinson, spokeswoman for Willow Creek, explained it this way: “Our target is to reach people who don’t go to church. How likely is it that they’ll be going to church on Christmas morning?” Sure, I have trouble trying to wrap my head around that novel idea myself. Instead of services on Sunday, these churches will hold services on the Friday and Saturday before, and leave their parishoners alone on Christmas day to tear open gift-wrapped boxes of gadgets and loot left beneath a pagan tree. (Or maybe they don’t have trees, I don’t know any more.)

In what will certainly be the most astounding case of unintended irony ever, evangelical Christians have got their hackles up at President Bush for sending out “Happy Holiday” cards (instead of “Merry Christmas” cards). Go figure.

December 8, 2005

The simple life of a cat: When they’re curled up in a warm ball on your favorite corner of the bed or your very own chair, life is grand. When they’re hungry, life sucks. When they can get you to pet them, life’s good, but when they can’t quite cough up the hairball that’s been bothering them for days, life sucks. There’s a bug to chase, good; cat box is full of turds, bad. They’re fur-covered life barometers and darned good at putting everything in perspective, making it fairly easy to see why the Egyptians thought cats were sacred.

Not that I mean for a moment that I’m going to drop down on my knees to kiss up to the cats. That’s what Barb does. I’ll bend down to pat their cute little heads, and that’s about as far as I’ll go. But, admit it, if you could convince somebody to take you into their house, feed you, give you toys and clean your toilet, and you didn’t have to do a thing in return except sit in their laps once in a while (and do that only when you felt like it), wouldn’t you jump at the chance? If you say no, it’s only because you’re afraid you’ll look like that roomie you had for a year or two after high school.

 

The weather is such an important topic these days that I go to the NOAA website to check out the forecast every chance I get. Before I left work yesterday I checked on the overnight forecast to get an idea just how long the furnace would be running during the night; they were calling for single-digit temps, so I could look forward to burning enough gas to fill Michael Moore like a Macy’s Thanksgiving day balloon.

Then, just for fun, I checked on the weather in Manawa, where my mother still lives. The overnight temp was forecasted at –1. Yikes. My mother hates winter, for what are arguably good reasons: The days are too short, the roads are too slippery, and the damned temps are too cold. And there was the NOAA, rubbing her nose in it with subzero temps.

Not only that, but I checked forecasted temps at several other Wisconsin zip codes, and nobody else could expect subzero temps, not even towns in the great while north of Wisconsin like Rhinelander, Hayward or Superior. It was almost as if there was this little sinkhole of frigid cold hovering over Manawa. The only logical conclusion I could draw was that the NOAA hates my mother.

December 9, 2005

We somehow survived the storm last night. To hear them tell about it on the radio, it was the most cataclysmic snow storm to hit the area since the polar ice caps formed.

Traffic was supposed to be worst of all. The radio reported accidents all over town: hospitalized motorists, cars in the ditch, rescue workers stretched to their limits. Barb’s normal twenty-minute drive from her office to mine became an hour long in the stop-and-go traffic. By the time we reached the east side of town, we had averaged eight miles an hour; I could have done better on my bicycle. (Funnily enough, there were a few people trying to get through the snow on bicycles.) But it was a lot more tedious and boring than scary.

We left for work about ten minutes early this morning, in case there were still people driving stupid crazy like the guy in the truck who came up behind me so fast I thought he was going to go through our car instead of passing it. There was nobody like that. Everybody was on their best behavior. Getting to work was almost anticlimactic.

 

Many of the various departments and branches of the bank I work for have sent copies of handmade Christmas cards to our office. One of my ‘extra duties’ was probably to make one for our department and send it out, but I didn’t get that memo. Anyway, I’ve been hanging the cards up on the counter front in the office in celebration of the season, although the latest card from corporate security is a strange version of the Christmas spirit. The front of the card looks normal enough, with a smiling Santa and “Merry Christmas” across the top. The back of the card, however, must have been designed by protocol and approved by committee. “Zero Tolerance for Check Fraud!” it warned in huge, dark letters, accompanied by a drawing of a weasel in a Santa hat. Ho Ho Freakin’ Ho.

 

I’m normally pretty enthusiastic about playing Christmas tunes; we usually listen to our collection all through December, and this year we’ve got a local radio station that plays them all day long. However, at three o’clock this afternoon I heard the Gene Autry version of “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” for the third time in less than eight hours of listening to the radio. While I realize there’s a finite number of Christmas songs, I firmly believe that any pop song should be played on the radio a maximum of once a day, and the penalty for crossing that line would be to let somebody like my son clap headphones on the offending station manager and treat him to just one hip-hop or death rock song, played night and day until his tongue hung from his slack jaw and the front of his shirt was soaked in drool. Or would that be too harsh?

December 10, 2005

Pig in!

Except in the office environment it has a more politically correct name, “holiday party.” Kinda boring. Even informally, they call it the ‘floor feed,’ which sounds more than a little unsanitary. I didn’t bother to try to get them to use ‘pig in,’ the term we zoomies used when we brought a feast of junk food like burgers and chips and sugary drinks to the ops floor, partly because there’s no point trying to bring the military world to civilians, and partly because a military pig-in doesn’t compare to an office holiday party.

The food was better, for a start. Ask a pack of airmen to bring food to work for a holiday feast, and they bring whatever they can find at the shopette, mostly packaged psuedo-snaks. Our office party was proper, home-cooked food! The turkey was tremendous! And sweets were home-baked pumpkin bread (I couldn’t keep my hands off that stuff), fudge and frosted cookies! I can’t remember the last time anybody brought goodies like that to a midnight pig-in.

They started off with a light breakfast in the morning, fruit and bagels with coffee. The girl making the coffee stayed in the room to keep the pot full, and poured herself a cup from every new pot. By the time I went in, she was pretty well lit up. “Maybe you ought to slow down a little,” I suggested, but she wouldn’t hear it. “I like coffee!” And coffee likes you, too.

If there’s a down side to a holiday feast, it’s that the food is too good, and it’s available all day long, which encourages me to wander back to the party room every so often to bring back ‘just a few more’ goodies to much on at my desk. I went home stuffed to the neck with good food, so much that I didn’t have to eat dinner last night.

 

Can there be a better way to spend Saturday morning than driving around looking at empty houses? Of course there is, that’s a stupid question, forget I asked it. But Wilma wants her commission and we want to buy a house, so there’s no way around it. We have to go look at them.

The first one was a cozy enough little place that I wouldn’t mind at all signing a note to pay the bank agreeing to give them a month’s pay for the next thirty years in exchange for living there. That’s what it comes down to anyway, right?

The second one was like a time capsule: Although it had been taken care of over the years, nothing in it had been updated since the house was built some time in the late 1950’s. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the kitchen, where everything except the behemoth refrigerator looked exactly as it did back when a contractor installed the last of the goldenrod-colored appliances and chrome fixtures, dusted his hands and called it done.

The third one looked as though it might have been aging for the other houses in the neighborhood, Dorian Gray-style. The siding was within moments of peeling away from the framing, water-stained drywall was obviously painted over, and chunks of cinderblock were falling out of the basement walls. Anybody who buys it will have to spend half again the buying price to remodel it.

 

The Java Cat coffee shop has delicious coffee and food, and it’s on the corner of Monona Drive and Cottage Grove Road — right on the way home! Barb and I stopped for lunch, a ham and swiss sandwich on focaccia with a blueberry scone for dessert. They did such a great job on the food and the atmosphere that I couldn’t think of a single smartassed thing to say about the Java Cat, except that unless they’re relying on a lot of walk-in business, parking may become a tiny bit of a problem. Wasn’t for us, though, as they weren’t especially busy when we dropped in.

 

In Wisconsin, happiness is a warm pair of waterproof boots, so Tim and I are now certifiably happy. Neither one of us enjoys the shopping scene, but that was over in short order. Now he’s got a pair of soft leather insulated boots, and I’ve got a pair that look like mukluks. Bliss!

 

Don’t tell me cats don’t know what they’re doing. Tim and I were standing in the kitchen, having a chat, when Boo walked in and spit one of her claw caps on the floor right at the end of my foot! She hates claw caps, (but I bet she’d hate declawing even more). Right after we glue a new batch of them on, she’ll sit under the table, trying to pull them off with her teeth, which is what she was doing the other night when she spitefully dropped one on the floor between us, then looked up at me with an expression that said, I sneer at your pitiful claw caps, monkey man.

No matter how she sneers at me, though, she still asks me to play with her. We have a bunch of feathers on a stick that she gets pretty excited about. What’s weird is that she understands I’m the one who makes the feathers move. She’ll find the stick, call to me, then toe the feathers, look me square in the eye and squeak out the most pitiful meow she can manage. It’s impossible no to play with her when she does that.

December 11, 2005

Perpetual motion. Flying Cars. Hotels in orbit. These are just a few inventions that hundreds of crackpots have putzed at their whole lives, and all that effort never amounted to anything. It’s not that I don’t think it wouldn’t be cool to drive my car to an orbiting hotel, I just don’t see it happening, ever. And yet they keep on putzing.

With all that inventing going on, how can it be possible that nobody’s devoted a small fraction of that effort trying to come up with a self-cleaning toilet? Can it be that most people like to clean their toilets? That’s the only reason I can think of that would keep anybody from shelling out top dollar for one. Myself, I’d pay thousands if I never had to scrub my toilet again. But it would seem people would rather have smaller, more expensive television sets that double as telephones. Go figure.

 

Sunday is Open House Day. Barb and I go to Monona on Sunday to wander through the one or two open houses in our price range. Quite a few of them, say about half, are run-down dogs that would need at least twenty thou in immediate repairs. The rest are not bad, and about one in ten is A Beautiful House.

We found A Beautiful House today, a cozy little three-bedroom that’ll probably disappear from the market before I can even call a lender Monday morning. The owner beautifully remodeled the interior without losing any of the old-house character that I like so much.

It sort of sucked to be Dave Okonski, Home Buyer up until now because I couldn’t apply for a VA loan until I could produce my DD-214 (Certificate of Release or Discharge From Active Duty), which arrived in the mail last Friday. Now that I have it, a crazed fit of phone calls is on the schedule for early Monday morning.

 

On the theory that ‘you get what you pay for,’ what would you expect of a car that cost $413,000 just for the downpayment?

That’s what you have to plunk down for the Bugatti Veyron, the fastest, most powerful production car on the face of the earth. Its sixteen-cylinder engine can produce 1,000 horsepower and blast you from zero to 60 miles per hour in 2.1 seconds. Keep accelerating and it’ll take you to 200 miles per hour in twenty seconds, and in fifty-three seconds it reaches its top speed: 250 miles per hour. It’s a little hard to keep in mind this is a production car.

The trip from Denver, Colorado, to Lincoln, Nebraska, which takes eight hours in a Ford Escort, would be crushed to just two hours in the Veyron, except for two small but significant engineering limitations: at top speed, the Veyron’s gas tank runs dry in about fifteen minutes, and its tires soften dangerously in about a half-hour. After fifteen minutes at two-hundred fifty miles per hour, though, you would have travelled seventy-five miles. You could pull over to have a leisurely cup of coffee before topping off the tanks for your next run, and still average one-fifty.

The Veyron’s raw horsepower is nothing compared to its braking system, however, which will take you from top speed to zero in ten seconds. It’s hard to imagine what you’d need that kind of braking power for, though. At 250 miles per hour, you'd be moving with such speed that you'd travel almost three-quarters of a mile in ten seconds. You’d be moving so fast that you probably wouldn’t have time to think the word “deer” before you inevitably hit the poor beast as it appeared, almost as if by magic, on the road in front of you.

Oh yes — sticker price for the Veyron is $1.25 million before taxes. Start saving those pennies.

December 12, 2005

Happy Birthday to Me,
Happy Birthday to Me,
Happy Birthday, dear Mee-heeee,
(deep breath)
Haahhhh Peeeee Birrr-herrrr-herrrth Daaaaaaaaayy
Tooooooooooooo
Meeeeee-heeeeeeeeeee!
And many more ...

That’s right, it’s my birthday. The sun rises, I eat my breakfast and go to work, the sun sets, I eat dinner, I go to bed. There’s a cake and cards in there somewhere. It’s nice. Funny how a guy can get a lot of satisfaction out of the simplest things by the time he turns forty-five. Another birthday card is sort of like a kiss before lights out; it’s almost taken for granted, but still a pleasant surprise when it happens.

December 13, 2005

Cheap date that I am, I went to bed last night at nine-thirty, bloated from the food and woozy from the porter we had for dinner at the Great Dane in downtown Madison to celebrate my birthday. It’s a cozy brewpub on King Street that reminds us a bit of the Wynkoop in Denver. The beer’s nearly as good, and the food’s well worth a special trip for. I had the tilapia. Just delicious. Tim wolfed down a super bacon burger — just watching him eat that made me a little woozy. Barb slurped up a chicken quesedilla, and afterwards we all adjourned to the Muddy Moose for a coffee and a game of cribbage before waddling home, happily stuffed.

I was not going to pass the night without making a spectacle of myself. “It’s my birthday tonight,” I informed the waitress as she took our order. “Do I get anything special for that?” She was gobsmacked for a moment. I’m not sure, but she may have thought I was fishing for a birthday kiss, or maybe a lap dance. After she pulled herself together, she suggested to Barb in a stage whisper that she might want to order a special dessert after dinner. Well, since there wasn’t a complimentary slice of chocolate cake to look forward to, coffee at the Moose sounded very good. Besides, it was on the way home.

And it just so happened that there was a special dessert waiting at home anyway (git yer mind outta the gutter!), a carrot cake with two candles. We couldn’t light the candles because, for some inexplicable reason, we don’t have any matches in the house, but I made a wish and blew anyway, so tradition wouldn’t be violated.

 

Remember that I mentioned the crazy bicyclists of Madison? The ones who are still riding to work through snow-covered streets, even when the temperature is in single digits? I call them ‘crazy’ mainly because other cyclists were grateful for an excuse to put away their velocipedes for the season. I get the impression the nutbirds, on the other hand, have been waiting all year to dig their cold weather gear out of storage, gird themselves for battle and get out there to show the world what they’re made of. I passed one guy waiting at a light yesterday who was so into winter cycling, he was dressed up in the highest of high-tech cold-weather gear, the kind polar explorers wear. A getup like that would have cost more than the bike; he was clearly into being a ten-speed abominable snowman.

 

The lost mansion of Gorham St

I set out down State Street from capitol square on my lunch break yesterday, just because I hadn’t looked in the windows for quite a while. It’s a sightseeing trip worth making at least once a month; the shops and the people in them are not merely interesting, they’re downright provocative.

But I never made it past the 300 block of State Street. As I waited for the light to change at the corner of Gorham and State, I happened to glance to the right, up Gorham, and saw the carcass of one of Madison’s venerable mansions, poorly stuffed and mounted. Stripped of its porch, gables and trim, its façade was nearly blank; a faint roofline hinted at a much more expressive past.

I could walk around three sides of the old pile to take a good look at it. It was set back about twenty feet from the street, and surrounded by a parking lot along one side and the back; the fourth side was pressed snugly against the steel-shelf entryways of one of the ugliest apartment buildings in town. A ‘For Rent’ sign was posted in a basement window; the rooms of the mansion had been partitioned into flats, an ignoble end for what had once been such a stately place.

Pink? What were they thinking?

I kept rambling up Gorham Street, hooking around Henry to Gilman to Carroll, looking at one old, lost mansion after another. I love old buildings. The ‘mansion district’ west of capitol square is a rambling collection of ruined old piles that were gorgeous homes long ago, but most have long since been carved up into crash pads for college students. Not that I would bulldoze an old mansion just to prevent it from falling into the hands of landlords, and I’m happy to have had the chance to see them while they’re still standing. I’m just a bit saddened, though, to find what were once grand old houses now covered in slapped-on, cartoonishly-garish paint, their lawns crowded with heaping dumpsters, rusted-out cars and stripped bicycle frames bent in two.

December 14, 2005

Weather announcers shouted doom & gloom all day yesterday, broadcasting a winter snow advisory. (Is there any other kind of snow besides “winter snow”?) The forecast called for anywhere between six inches and twelve feet of snow, which was supposed to begin falling around midnight and drift up to our noses, rendering us all helpless by morning. Even so, there would be no snow day for Barb and I. No waking early to sit by the radio, waiting to hear those thrilling words, “Work called on account of winter.” Schools close, but the reluctance of our bosses to pay for a day off force us real people struggle to get to work even if we have to get out of our cars to shovel a narrow path for ourselves down the middle of the interstate. So it is commanded, and so it ever shall be.

If it ever got as bad as they said it would, I didn’t see it. I heard the traffic guy on the radio say there were wrecks on the beltline all day long, but we never use the beltline during the work week (for just that reason) so all we saw was light traffic — really light. So light it was a little spooky, as though half the city’s population had been abducted by aliens, but I guess it could have been that everybody tried to start out a little early to avoid the crush and slide. Or was that the other way around?

After we came home from work I helped the neighbor shovel the drive, always guaranteed an instant backache. He wasn’t getting a backache because he was smart enough to use a snow blower, but I’m certainly not complaining, since he’s such a considerate neighbor he clears my side of the driveway with it, too. I’m not sure what his name is; it might be Kevin, or maybe Ken. He keeps to himself, so much so that he might have spoken a half-dozen sentences to me since we moved here in August. But one thing I can be sure of is that I’ll see him with his trusty snow blower clearing snow from the driveway every time more than an inch falls. Since I got home in time to help him today, I took my trusty shovel to the end of the drive to clear the heavy, chunky snow, hence the backache.

December 15, 2005

I somehow got through almost the whole day yesterday without confronting the fact that it was Wednesday, until I came home and Tim mentioned it. Made me do a mental flip-take. I didn’t land very well, either. I stood on one wobbly mental foot the rest of the night, but since it was hump day it seemed excessive to start the week over to fix it, so I decided I’d just have to muddle along.

 

We both get pretty angry at Tim when he turns up the thermostat “for just a minute to warm up” even though we’re both comfortable enough stretching the righteousness envelope to do it, too. I noticed Barb started the furnace just before she closed the door to the bathroom to take her shower this morning. I was going to point it out to Tim so he could needle his mother with it, but I forgot. That’s how bad I’m getting: I can’t even remember good ways to start a fight.

 

I love chocolate chip cookies, so when one of the tellers offered me complimentary cookies and coffee as part of the bank’s open house today, I took a couple back to my cube even though I’d already eaten too much chocolate today, if there’s such a thing as “too much chocolate” in this life or the next. Whoever made the cookies didn’t think there was such a thing, either. Not only was it a chocolate-chip cookie, it was filled with fudge. After just two bites of that cookie I was able to pee pure sugar.

 

Because I answer the phone for our department I get a lot of strange requests, but none stranger than the one I got today.

“How do I remove a child from the screen?” a caller asked me. No hi, how are you, no lead-in at all, just that. For all I knew, she was with the Child Extermination Division of Orkin Pest Control.

My gut reaction was to hold the receiver at arm’s length and ask, “WHAT the hell are you talking about?” That kind of response doesn’t demonstrate effective telephonic skills, however, so I took a deep breath, counted to three, then said, “I’m not sure I understand your question.”

“I’m working on the family screen,” she explained rather urgently, “and when I hit ‘enter’ to remove a child, I get an error message saying I’m not allowed to do that.”

Ah, a computer question. What’s really weird is that I felt guilty about not being able to answer her question. “Is this really a question for the Credit Services Department?”

“Credit Services?” she asked. “I’ve got the wrong number!”

No, really?

December 16, 2005

Every day as I’m preparing to go to work, I suffer one sort of brain cramp or another: I forget my tie, I make my lunch but leave it behind, I can’t find my pen, those kinds of things. Usually I catch each mistake some time before I hit the door, although I remembered the tie only after we pulled out of the driveway. (I had to go back in.) Yesterday, however, my gym socks took me by surprise.

I wear white gym socks to bed to keep my tootsies warm at night, which I pull on again after I get out of the shower and add a pair of slippers to pad around the house in. I have to pull off the slippers when I dress for work, and that’s usually when I swap the gym socks out for black dress socks. It’s sort of a no-brainer at that point: I’m half-naked and they’re the only things on my feet, but yesterday morning that must’ve been the point where my brain cramped up. I didn’t really see them until I pulled my boots off at work to put on my shoes. They’re black shoes. I was wearing black slacks. That left me with two bright white socks, glaring like the headlights of an oncoming truck. What a way to start the day.

 

It was a boring day at work. There. I said it. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just that there wasn’t much to do. I paced myself, I took care of everything they asked me to take care of, and then some, but I was still left with time to fill on my own, which I did by reading the shocking news that the president gave the NSA authorization to spy on Americans. Gosh! No!

But I still had a pretty good time today. The boss brought in doughnuts. If you want a pretty darned good way to start any day, you couldn’t ask for much more than a warm place to work and your choice of sugar-covered gut bombs. Jelly or cream filling? So early, and yet so many choices.

I read a cool story in the Wall Street Journal about Khabarovsk. (There’s a sentence you don’t get to write every day.) Seems the Khabarovskians are mightily upset about the gasoline slick drifting their way down the Amur River from the Chinese refinery explosion last week. The Russians and the Chinese don’t get along; they haven’t for years. There’ve been border skirmishes as late as the 1960’s, the town was rescued from post-Cold War ruin by Chinese investors buying up all the desirable housing and factories, and cheap Chinese labor flooded the city to do the scut work the Russians don’t like to do. Now all the affordable clothes and gadgets in the stores are Chinese-made. Any of this sound familiar? At all?

I never eat lunch on my lunch hour. Today I bundled up tightly in my heavy coat and scarf and wandered through the Mansion Hill neighborhood to take some snapshots of the beautiful sandstone houses up there (photos to come soon). On my way back I ducked into Taylor’s antique shop to step over all the wonderful brick-a-brack stacked in the aisles, and not incidentally to warm myself up just a bit before heading back to work.

The afternoon dragged. I ate another gut bomb and bothered the other guys in the office, when they weren’t bothering me. I know one of them well enough by now to shoot him in the back of the head with rubber bands whenever I start looking for things to do. In fact, I know two of them well enough, but the other one would break my legs if I amused myself that way.

Finally Five O’clock! I met Barb in the usual place and we headed into Monona, where we met Wilma, our realtor, to view a house we liked a lot. Wilma liked it, too. Crunch time; I think we’re going to make an offer. As it was late and we were hungry, we stopped at an Italian restaurant up the street and dined on grilled trout before heading home. The restaurant was wonderfully Italian, with all the photos of famous Italians the walls, The Barber of Seville playing softly in the background, and pages of pasta on the menu. It’d be comforting to live a few blocks from that place.

December 17, 2005

Life sucks when you piss off your kids. I got Tim madder at me than ... I don’t know, than a great, big mad thing when I tromped downstairs after he’d been on the internet an hour and I demanded the modem from him. That’s how we regulate his internet access while he’s still on double secret academic probation. I was half asleep from reading in bed, waiting until his hour was up. He had apparently only gotten started blowing things up in the virtual world, and he was under the impression that he was entitled to more than an hour of access tonight. I didn’t want to argue. I only wanted to go to bed. There was a long standoff. He trotted out the “If only you’d trust me” line, a brand of emotional blackmail that torques me up so tight I can hardly see straight. There were long, cold stares, there was enough angst to light the city of Cleveland, and when he finally surrendered, as he certainly knew he must, sooner or later, it was done only with enough disgust to turn me to stone.

And we both went to bed mad. I’ve been told never to go to bed angry with my wife, but I can tell you it’s pretty upsetting when you go to bed and you’re not only angry with your son, you know you’ve pissed him off no end, too.

 

My morning routine has been altered, possibly forever. I always get up earlier than Barb, always have. She loves to stay up late and sleep in; I’m a morning person. I make a pot of coffee, read a bit, write a bit, enjoy the quiet. She emerges from sleep after the sun comes up, says good morning, gives me a peck, pours herself a hot cuppa and, if she’s had enough sack time to wake up properly, we chat a bit.

It’s the peck that’s been changed. Since my return to Wisconsin (“the fatherland,” as my brother refers to it, with a Teutonic accent; it’s a strange story), I’ve developed the capacity to generate more static electricity than anybody outside the comic-book superhuman universe. When I give Barb a peck now, along with all my love she also gets about 1,000 volts direct current right on the lips, especially in the morning when I kiss her good-bye getting out of the car for work.

In order to avoid the unpleasant snap of static discharge, the peck has evolved into a poke-peck. When she leans over to kiss me, I divert my nose to poke the end of her nose. A snap on the end of the nose, it turns out, is much less upsetting. It even gets a laugh. And then the peck is okay.

 

I forgot that I peed: Another sign that I’m certifiably old. In preparation for a trip to Stoughton this afternoon I peed, brushed my teeth, put on warm socks, got my camera ready, grabbed a couple tenners to replenish my wallet, put on my coat and hat, and laced up my boots, all in the space of ten minutes. On the way out the door I said to Barb, “I should pee before we leave,” then stopped myself and, unfortunately, said out loud, “Oh, I peed already.” Tim was standing within earshot, and wowzers, did he beat me over the head with my moment of senility.

 

Three freaking hours of “Law and Order” on television tonight! How can it be that there are enough addled ... excuse me, addicted viewers out there to make it possible to show three freaking hours of “Law and Order”?

Even worse, I had to retreat to the basement to avoid it. It was in my own house! Barb puts the television on while she knits, only for background noise, I hope, and the odds are about even that “Law and Order” will be on at some point in the evening. I can’t ignore it; I have to leave the room. Shrieking. Okay, not shrieking, that would be melodramatic — which would be appropriate, considering the content of the show.

 

Our rental apartment has what could be called a laundry, if you had one hell of an imagination and felt really charitable. It’s the utility closet, where the water heater and the furnace and water softener are clustered. The builders found a way to shoehorn a small utility sink into one corner and leave just enough room along the back wall for a washer and a dryer, if you slapped them together, shoulder-to-shoulder, as it were. The guys who delivered our washer and dryer from Sears were pretty talented at what they did; they not only wiggled and jiggled until both appliances fit the tiny space, they also managed to make all the connections, too. It was pretty amazing to watch them do it. There’s barely enough room to turn around in there, and if you’re holding a laundry basket full of crisp, dry clothes, you have to hold it over your head or you won’t even be able to turn around. I usually back out.

The weirdest thing in the utility closet has got to be the water softener. I’ve never lived in a house before that had one, so it’s a mysterious chunk of machinery to me. I know that adding salt to the water is supposed to extend the useful life of every other appliance in the house that uses water, but I don’t know how. I don’t even understand how it sucks up the salt and puts it in the water. And the salt doesn’t appear to be used at a constant rate; sometimes I’ll put ten pounds of salt in there and it’ll disappear in a week and a half, and sometimes I don’t have to reload the salt for a month. I don’t understand it. It might as well be alchemy. The strangest thing about the water softener, though, is the purge. I don’t understand why it has to purge, or why it takes so damned long. Sometimes it seems as though the hose to the drain has been sputtering for hours. What is the necessity of burping up enough water to fill a bathtub?

 

Blogger Tom Scharbach decided, after a careful reading the Gospels, to follow the lead of Christian fundamentalists and boycott the bible because it doesn’t promote Christmas. His point being, this ‘war on Christmas’ is getting pretty weird. Not to mention stupid. Don’t people have anything better to do?

December 18, 2005

Yesterday and today, Barb got out of bed before nine o’clock. Must’ve been the full moon making her restless.

 

Why would you build a house with no place to eat? We went to another open house today. The place was smallish, a little run-down, would probably need a lot of work, but the weirdest thing about it was it had no place at all to sit down to eat, unless you took your meals in the living room, which seems odd to me. It’s right off the entry way, it’s got a picture window, it doesn’t feel like a place to sit and eat. The front corner bedroom had an awfully dirty floor; I think they used to eat in there. And the kitchen had no place at all for a fridge; it was in the front hall, the first thing you saw when you came in the door. We stayed just long enough to be polite.

 

We finally got our Christmas tree. Barb’s so happy it’s a real tree, and not that fake wire job we had in Japan. Our real tree is a nicely full white pine, although if you ask me it’s a little too green. I was hoping we’d be able to find one that wasn’t sprayed with dye, but it was way too cold outside today to spend a lot of time fussing over trees. Barb went from one tree to the next making a short list of the merits of each while I stamped my feet, trying to keep all my parts moving. “What do you think?” she’d ask, after examining each one, and I’d try to say something helpful like, “Lovely,” or, “I like that one a lot,” but after we were out long enough to look at about a half-dozen trees my blood was slush and my teeth were icing up. When we had it narrowed down to two or three, I tried to steer her toward the white pine every chance I got. I think she eventually went along with me mostly because she was getting cold, too.

After we got the tree home, we took it straight into the house and set it up to get some water into it and melt the snow off the branches, but we didn’t decorate it. Can you believe we don’t have lights yet? (They’re in storage, and all that.) Anyway, we’ll wait for Sean to help us with decorating. He arrives on Tuesday.

Boo doesn’t like anything new in the house. When I brought the tree in, she hid in another room and wouldn’t come out until everything sounded normal again. Then she snuck back out, climbed into a chair under the dinner table, and stared at the tree for the longest time, watching for any false moves, I suppose.

Bonkers loved the tree so much that he ate some of it, then yakked it up shortly after. I hope that’s not going to make a habit out of that.

 

Movie Time: The title of 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould leaves nothing to the imagination. The movie is a collection of thirty-two short films, some of them no more than forty-five seconds long, and they’re all about Glenn Gould, a gifted pianist. Some of the short films are pretty dull, even pointless; one was about thirty seconds of the actor portraying Glenn Gould sitting in a chair while a piano concerto played in the background. I didn’t get that at all. Another was Gould receiving a copy of the latest recording of his performance while staying at a swank hotel in Hamburg; he stopped the maid from leaving to play it for her. She liked it. The end. Several of the films were interviews with people who knew Gould. I suppose it would have been enlightening if I had known who Gould was, was interested in his music, something along those lines. Although the music was beautiful, I can’t say I was intrigued. Although I watched about an hour and a half of it, I finally switched it off before it was over so I could finish a book. The end.

 

My darling bride has been found guilty of conspiring to buy me a laptop. We stopped at Circuit City a couple weeks back so she could buy a digital music player, and while she compared prices, I played with the laptops. She came back while I was still tapping the keys of a Compaq. “Why don’t you get it?” she said.

My eyeballs just about fell out of their sockets. “Ah, because it costs six-hundred fifty bucks?”

“You’ll get your money’s worth from it,” she said. “You use the one you’ve got every day.”

Lest you think I’m collecting laptops, I bought one from a coworker about four years ago that was then, and is now, the oldest, slowest laptop still in use. I didn’t care. All I needed was something to type out my drivelish nonsense. A typewriter would have done the job, and I could have retyped it at the computer at the library. Would’ve been a bit of a drag, though.

We didn’t buy a new laptop that day but, every weekend since then, Barb pulled apart the color supplements to find the latest deal. This weekend, she found not one, but three laptops at bargain basement prices. We called around and found one of them had sold out, but the second place we called wasn’t even opening until ten, so we sailed over there to see how long the line at the front door was — and there wasn’t a line!

Could it be that easy? We went to the front door to find out. We had to wait there a minute, because we were a few minutes early, but heck, a bargain on a laptop is worth five minutes or so standing in sub-freezing weather, isn’t it?

Shoot, I’m still not sure I know the answer to that one.

As it turned out, they not only had the laptop in stock, they also had a wireless router on sale! Now we’ve spent way too much so I can write drivel cordlessly, and I got wireless access to post drivel in near-real-time!

The wireless part turned into one of those computer software installs from hell. Tim and I both dorked away at it all day but couldn’t make it work. In order to get the computer to talk to the router, I had to talk to tech support, a guy named Ravi in Islamabad or New Delhi or some other far-off Asian metropolis. It was either very early in the morning there or he was extremely bored by my questions; he couldn’t stop yawning. After about fifteen minutes of carefully following his directions, I thanked him and went wireless. Too cool.

December 19, 2005

The second thing Barb asked me this morning, after “How ya doin’?” was, “How outrageously cold is it out there?” as she was peeking out the window.

I sucked air through my teeth. “Oooo, do you really want to know that? I can’t believe you do.” She left it at that, and a good thing, too.

It was five below. That was so outrageously cold that it hurt to inhale. It was so cold that the whiskers on my face froze to one another in the vapor from my breath. It was so cold that I was seriously thinking about wearing least two pairs of pants tomorrow, and three pairs of underwear. And three socks.

From the break room, where I sat at the window to wolf down a tuna salad sandwich, I could see people walking to the City-County Building along Carroll Street. Almost every one of them was buttoned up to their chins in heavy coats, most wore hats with ear flaps, and the smart ones wrapped their faces in scarves.

A young lady popped out of a car that pulled up at the corner of Carroll and Wilson. Dressed in a woman’s business suit — a pink dress jacket over a thin, low-cut blouse, dress slacks, and pumps! — she immediately began dancing in place as she watched for a hole in traffic so she could cross Wilson Street. When she finally got it, she trotted to the opposite corner as quickly as her pumps would let her, and carried on at a trot down Carroll toward the City-County Building. I was rooting for her by the time she got about halfway along the block and it looked as though she would make it to the door, but she suddenly reversed direction and came back to the corner!

When people reach the final stage of hypothermia, they often behave paradoxically. Sometimes they’ll take off all their clothes, as if they felt way too hot just before they froze to death, and sometimes they’ll run away from the entrance to a warm building, I guess. She never gave away the reason for running back to the corner of Wilson, dancing in place for a moment or two, then turning and bolting back down the street. She made it to the City-County Building that time.

 

The shredder puked on me this afternoon. I was feeding it a tall stack of old reports until it stopped. When I found it was full, I opened the front and slid out the rack that holds the bag, and that’s when it barfed. There was enough static electricity in there to blast about half the bag into the air. Coincidentally, my slacks generate about the same amount of static, and it must be the electrical opposite of what the shredder generates, because as soon as it was airborne, all that confetti headed straight toward me. It was like being swarmed by bugs. Puke bugs.

 

Design flaw that merits the death penalty: The coffee pot for our coffee maker has a hollow handle, open at the bottom, and the bottom of the pot itself is peaked or, when it’s upside-down, a depression. And this is a problem because (Anybody? Anybody?) when I take it out of the dish washer in the morning, and I don’t have the presence of mind to recall these design flaws, I dump almost a cup of water all over myself, the counter top, the floor, or all three as I turn it over. Major suckage.

December 20, 2005

Barb had the day off today so she could get the house ready for a visit from Number One Son. We talked about sleeping in, but I couldn’t do it. I woke up at five and couldn’t get back to sleep. Crappola! I can type without looking at the keys, I can drive almost any kind of car, I can bake a delicious batch of cookies using every kind of kitchen appliance, but I can’t reset the alarm in my brain on the occasion that I might be able to sleep in a half-hour. Pigeons find their way across continents with precision but I can’t open my eyes at five-thirty instead of five. I wonder if that’s one of the things they were teaching in high school biology when I wasn’t paying attention?

 

While washing my clothes tonight, I very nearly made sure I had the cleanest ball-point pen in Dane County. What made me check the pockets of my shirts? I never do that, but I did tonight, even the one that was already under water, and that’s when I found the pen. What a mess that would have been. It was clipped to my favorite blue shirt, too.

And this time around, I made sure there wasn’t going to be a problem with static electricity: If two drier sheets don’t keep the cat hair off my pants legs, there’s no mortal power on earth that can do it.

 

“Always remember to drink responsibly,” liquor advertisers say. Is it just me, or does the emphasis for this disclaimer fall on the idea of drinking? I mean, the core concept of this disclaimer is “remember to drink,” and the first word is “always.” They don’t touch on “responsibility” until the very end.

Okay, maybe I’m over-analyzing it until I’ve squeezed all the sense out. Advertising disclaimers are pretty senseless to begin with, though. The advertisement is, “Go to the mall and buy stuff!” followed by a warning that disclaims all responsibility? Television commercials for medicine are especially whacky, if you ask me. Each pill they sell seems to have one benefit, and ten or twenty life-threatening side effects, not to mention a whole raft of warnings not to use the product if you’re unhealthy in any way. Why would you be taking pills if you were healthy?

Disclaimers for cars are so fast they might as well be in another language. Stephen Hawking can’t think as fast as those guys talk. The only part I can understand is right at the end when the announcer slows down a bit and says, “Some restrictions apply.”

December 21, 2005

“Let’s see how your project looks,” I asked Tim last night. He’d just finished up a display on diabetes for his science class. It was supposed to be a week-long project, but I’m pretty sure he did all the research, planning, layout and graphics last night. He all but admitted he did. “Everybody’s project gets done at the last minute,” he explained. That’s probably pretty close to the truth, but I have to be Dad, and dads have to counter-argue they don’t like homework that’s done at the last minute. It’s my job.

I especially liked his rationalization that everybody gets good grades for their last-minute work, but he gets the best grades of all, so what’s the point of sweating over it? A high-quality product won’t get an appreciably better grade, was the gist of his argument. This could coincidentally explain why most of the goods you buy in the store these days are made overseas. Nothing they make here would be of appreciably better quality, and you’d have to pay five times as much for it. I learn something useful every time I talk to my kids.

 

Sean came home yesterday, as I mentioned, and the first thing I saw him do was bury his nose in an issue of The Onion and leave it there until he’d read every page, by which time we were home. “You’re awfully quiet back there,” Barb prodded at one point, trying to get him to participate in the conversation a bit, and I think he grunted in reply. Our fault for encouraging him to read so much, I guess. He may have stayed up until the wee hours to read a couple of our newest books, too. There are lots of things in this world that will change constantly and unpredictably, but there are some things we can count on, and one is Sean. The more he changes, the more he remains the same.

 

One of our local stations has been playing Christmas pop tunes since the first snowfall, except, it seems, on the weekends, when they lapse back into playing golden oldies. “Oh, sure,” Barb grouses, “when I want to hear Christmas music all day long, they won’t play it.”

There was something to be said for taking a weekend break from Christmas tunes. Gene Autry’s Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer has always been one of my seasonal favorites, but to tell you the truth I’m getting pretty damned sick of it, and if all the Mannheim Steamroller holiday music disappeared from the ether tonight, I’d never miss it.

One seasonal oddity we all noticed, while we were focused on Christmas music — although they were playing every pop Christmas tune they could get their hands on to fill the hours, they had yet to play Jingle Bells by the barking dogs. It’s not that they didn’t play novelty songs; I’ve heard Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer at least a dozen times. I’ll bet there’s a good story about the station manager and a Christmas past.

And while we were noting this, that’s when Barb had to say it aloud: She hadn’t heard Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, and wasn’t sorry about it. Well, last night when she picked me up from work, she got to hear it, proving again how easy it is to jinx yourself.

 

Thought for the day: “A little pathological behavior never hurt anybody.”

December 22, 2005

I got a Kansas state quarter in change today. The name “Kansas” has always triggered a musical loop to play in my memory, but it changed over the years. I used to hear Carry On, Wayward Son, which sort of dates me, I know. When I was going through my Musicals Phase, for a short time I used to hear Everything’s up to date in Kansas City, a song that gets stuck in my head for so long that it goes from enjoyable to annoying to malignant very quickly.

Today was the first time I heard dozens of munchkin voices singing the refrain, ...and “Kansas,” she said, was the name of the star! when I looked into the change in the palm of my hand and saw “Kansas” over the image of a bison. I have this theory that my mind is determined to play back every memory I have at least once before they’re all lost for good.

It doesn’t mean anything special, I suppose, but with the appearance of the Kansas state quarter we have two coins in circulation with a bison on the reverse side. And with that statement I not only dated myself from the era of the pop-music band “Kansas,” I also marked myself as a coin nerd, all in one morning. (“Numismatist” is the hoity-toity nomenclature, but “coin nerd” is probably a more honest handle.)

 

“You’re all garlicky,” Barb told me, scrunching her nose after we exchanged our morning peck. I didn’t know until then that she’d loaded last night’s chili with garlic. I can’t smell garlic unless there’s at least a half-dozen cloves marinating in the oven, or I walk past an Italian restaurant, and my palate isn’t refined enough to pick out each particular flavor in food. Tongue tells brain, “Food Good!” and that’s the limit of my gastronomic sophistication.

When I eat any amount of garlic, I broadcast the odor like pop music from a 50,000-watt rock and roll radio station, even after eating a single slice of bread garnished with a quick shake of garlic salt, and my powers have been verified by dozens of people who haven’t been any too shy about it, many of whom not only tell me to back off, but state a specific distance. Like all superpowers, it can be a blessing and a curse at the same time.

Here’s what I don’t understand about garlic: I love the smell of it. Lots of people do, none of them less than Barb, but only when it comes from food, I guess. Last night she had to turn to her side of the bed because I was just too powerful, she said. What’s up with that? On a pizza, it’s a mouth-watering aroma, but from my mouth and pores it’s a reeking odor. I’m puzzled.

 

The first real paying job I had was working in a photographic darkroom for a small-town newspaper in central Wisconsin. I got the job by default; my dad owned the business. The job was the real thing, though. I worked in the darkroom after school and nights, and later graduated into the job of photographer, about which dad knew a thing or two.

The first rule of photography, for instance, is: Fill the frame with your subject. If you don’t, you end up with those photos you have to explain: “It’s Peg and Wilmer at the fair. You can just see them from the neck up, way back on the left.” If it’s a photo of the fair, then take a photo of the fair, but if it’s Peg and Wilmer, get them front and center, stick the camera in their faces, and make them laugh. It’s so simple, but so hard to remember.

But my favorite is the final rule of portraits: The photo they like best will inevitably be among the worst of the lot. You can take a dozen or a hundred and put the most stunning photo right on the top of the stack, and it would make no difference. Conversely, if I picked what I thought was the best photo, the subject himself would stop by the office the day after the paper went to press to ask why we printed such an awful picture of him.

That unwritten law of photography came back to me the day before yesterday when Barb and Sean came by my office cubicle to pick me up from work. I have a photo of Barb tacked up on the wall so I can bask in her radiance all day long. It’s a photo of her with a twinkle in her eye, a rosy glow in her cheeks, and a wonderfully bright smile on her face. It’s hard to catch a real smile on film, but she’s positively beaming in that photo. I snapped it while we were at the wine-tasking party a month ago, while she and Susan were sharing a girl moment, before they knew I was pointing a camera their way. And if I posted it here for you to see, I’d catch a cartload of kaka every day for the rest of my life.

And what was the first thing Barb said when she took a look around my cubicle? Was it (a) “So this is where you work.” Or (b) “What’s that funny smell?” Or was it (c) “I can’t believe you put up that awful picture of me for everybody to see!” It’s not hard to figure out if you know the rule; the day I tacked up the photo I knew it would be the first thing Barb commented on if she ever came to the office. But I need that photo there, so it stays.

 

I woke last night at about one-thirty to use the chamber pot and found Sean still awake and chain-reading, plucking books out of the living room bookshelf and throwing them over his shoulder onto a heap behind his chair. Evelyn Woods had nothing on this guy.

December 23, 2005

Drivel was in a black hole for a couple days after I locked myself out of my own web domain. I posted drivel from a coffee house during lunch hour, but couldn’t see it when I tried to call it up from the internet. I’m a paranoid man by nature, so I immediately thought: I’ve been hacked! Somebody must have piggybacked my signal! I have no idea what any of that means now, but in my paranoiac haze it made perfect sense, as did my decision to change the password. Why I thought that would slow down anybody who could piggyback my signal to hack into my account is a moot point, but I claim all the dumb points for it.

Naturally, I chose a password that was so fiendishly clever that I couldn’t recall it fifteen minutes later. I could recall perfectly the password I originally wanted to use, and the one I thought up right after that when the password wizard said it had to be longer and contain two numbers, but the one right after that, the one that took effect and locked me out, that password was not in my accessible memory. I racked my brains for two days, playing mental games with myself (I lost each time) until I finally called technical support to sheepishly admit how stupid I could be. He didn’t seem phased at all. He probably gets a dozen calls just like mine every morning before ten o’clock.

 

After a week of sub-freezing temperatures, often in the single digits, a benevolent weather front moved through the area last night and today we had sunshine and temps in the low forties. Forty-one, to be exact. People were walking around capital square without their coats on, as if it were a balmy seventy-two degrees. I just love it when they do that.

As warm as it was, however, we still didn’t see Helga today. She’s the lady in the blue house coat who swept the fallen leaves from the pavement out front of Hans’ sewing store on the low end of Williamson Street. Seeing her as we passed the shop on the way to work every day was like saying good morning to a friend, although we’ve never met her. We don’t even know her name; “Helga” is what we’ve taken to calling her.

She came out once or twice to sweep away a dusting of snow, but ever since the snow came down heavily enough to make it a back-breaking chore, even with a snow blower, and the temperatures make breathing the air as painful as swallowing bleach, we haven’t see her outside, and we’re a little relieved that she’s not, but we miss her, too. Keep warm, Helga, wherever you are.

 

Early Christmas Present: I got out of work early this afternoon! There is a Santa! There was a short discussion about what I would do with myself, as I didn’t have the car, but then my very wise boss, thinking out loud, said, “Well, what difference does that make? You’ll find something to do, right?” Indeed. I packed myself off to Michelangelo’s coffee shop and relaxed in a favorite corner with my laptop, tapping away at the keys.

December 24, 2005

I set up the laptop, I got a cup of coffee, I sat down and stared at the screen. And stared. Drat. Sometimes, the drivel comes, and sometimes I come and stare, and no drivel. Double-drat.

I drink coffee straight up black. Michelangelo’s has terrific coffee to be drunk black. Rich. Lots of body, if you can say that about coffee. Other cafés make strong coffee, coffee so thick I have to chew it, but it tastes like bitter dirt and I can’t stand it. I don’t know what the guys at Mike’s do that’s different, but I love their rich, dark coffee.

Barb loves her coffee strong, dark & smooth, too, just like her men. “Hi there, strong, dark & smooth,” she coos. “Where have you been all my life?” Then she waters it down with a truckload of milk and sugar. (“Waters”? Can that be right?) She can’t drink it without milk & sugar. It’s not cream, it’s milk. Skim. Not even close to cream. The waitress asks if she’d like cream, but I suspect that stuff is milk, too, although I’ve never called her on it, or stiffed her for the tip because of my suspicions. Does anybody drink coffee with real cream in it any more? I’m new to this coffee game, so I don’t know.

Back to Michelangelo’s and their coffee: She grabbed a hot cuppa joe to go one day when she came in after work to pick me up. They had three blends on tap that day: the organic house blend, a decaf I forget the name of, and a Rwandan dark roast. “I’ll have a tall, dark Rwandan,” she told the cashier. Grins all around, even though they probably hear that a thousand times a day.

 

Sean’s alarm went off at the usual time, six-thirty, even though he hadn’t planned to get up that early today. He never gets up when his alarm goes off. He’s a lot like his brother in that respect. Sean stays up until all hours of the night, doing I don’t even want to know what, then sleeps until he wants to get up and ignores the alarm when it goes off. I asked him once why he doesn’t shut off the alarm and he told me that he didn’t know how. That was back when he had three different alarm times programmed into it and it went off at four-thirty, five-thirty and six thirty, A.M. and P.M., probably the factory setting. He must have learned since then how to program the alarm, but apparently he hasn’t bothered to learn how to shut it off when he doesn’t want to it bleep on the weekends, or when he’s on vacation, he just lets it bleep, rolls over and goes back to sleep, leaving those of us who are light sleepers to blink and wonder if it’s the weekend, as I thought, or to succumb to reflex, roll out of bed and hit the shower.

I did neither. After a quick trip to the chamber pot, I burrowed back under the covers to snuggle up next to the hot water bottle otherwise known as she who must be obeyed. Although she climbed into bed last night, and every winter’s night before that, with a loud “Brrrrr!” and complaints that a bed heaped with a down comforter, a blanket and a quilt can’t possibly be that freaking cold, the heat from a thousand newborn suns isn’t as radiant as she. In slumber, she glows like an ember; chuck her in a boiler and she could steam-heat the city of Cleveland through the worst Midwestern winter on record. But Cleveland will have to do without her because she’s otherwise engaged.

 

Pause. Lull. Words don’t come. I refill my cup, check for a snack. Every one of the fig newtons are gone. I think I had three or four. For a snack that everybody in this house professes not to like, they disappear almost as fast as the faux oreo cookies from the health food store. Oh yes, I got that right. Whole Foods, the health food chain grocery store, sells a house brand chocolate sandwich crème cookie that they claim to be organic, and it’s not that I doubt them, but I think they must be stretching the meaning of the word “organic” to its furthest extreme, don’t you? “It’s a cookie that’s good for me because it’s organic!” You got the first part right, sweetie, but a cookie’s sugar and more sugar. It’s good, but it’s never going to be ‘good for you.’ Oatmeal and exercise are ‘good for you,’ but boring.

Correction: The fig newtons disappeared faster than the faux oreos. I scrounged four sandwich cookies out of the bottom of the recycled cardboard box and nibbled on them as I sipped my coffee and daydreamed of my muse. Is it wrong to daydream of your muse wearing fishnet stockings? I suspect it is. I suspect she’s not especially predisposed to granting me a gift of prose when I’m obviously not devoting my full attention to the craft. I blame it on the coffee. Two cups in an hour. My system’s not wired for that kind of chemical stimulation. If I were a house, my electrical system would be the kind you see in photos of very old farm houses that had clunky crank switches mounted on the walls next to all the doors, and two wires, thick as fingers, running up to the ceiling light fixtures, screwed to ceramic posts. With that kind of electrical system, it’s a wonder any farm houses survived intact to the modern era.

 

Spending Christmas eve with family is always special, as I’m sure it always will be. The O-folk were in Fitchburg all evening for supper with Jim & Sue, Carrie & Darrin, Chance & Bitsy, and Mikey, the Wonder Guy. The invitation was for a five o’clock dinner, but we ended up staying until after eleven o’clock, because after dinner we had story time with coffee and sweets, then played a game of Catchphrase until eight, when Carrie and Darrin left for evening Mass. We had story time again — there was a lot to catch up on, much to say — and after about an hour we started another word game, Taboo this time, which we played long enough that Carrie & Darrin came back from Mass and watched us play quite a few rounds. We were still playing when they decided to hit the hay.

Dinner was good old American meat & potatoes: the pot roast was big enough to stop a truck, and cooked to perfection. Slathered with homemade gravy and served with all the trimmings, it made a dinner fit for a king, but they fed it to us, instead. And of course we all snitched from a platter that seemed to be somehow always piled with cookies, fudge and caramel Christmas sweets for after, but it was almost impossible not to munch on them before dinner, too. Didn’t dent my appetite one bit.

I thought our teenager ate like a pregnant woman, but it seems to be atypical behavior: Mikey eats like a teenager, too. Just what’s that supposed to mean? He had roast beef and potatoes at dinner with us, then he fetched a four-pound bag of Smarties from his room and popped them in his mouth non-stop while the old folks sat around telling stories. He made himself a couple of fried-egg sandwiches to munch on as we played “Taboo,” and of course he grazed from the dish of sweets we were all trying to demolish. And I’ll bet he’ll wake up hungry in the morning.

 

At the end of the night, the long good-bye. Some people claim this is a Wisconsin phenomenon, but in my experience it’s pretty much universal to the species, with some variations: Visitors decide they’ve imposed on their guests long enough; hosts counter with protests that the guests are welcome to stay as late at they like. The usual protests include: the hosts aren’t tired, they’re not going anywhere in the morning, they were just getting comfortable; they all but plead, Please don’t go yet!

It’s been a long time since I’ve played this game, but it always seems to start the same way: Visitors announce their decison to leave, but don’t simply deliver a bald statement of, “Time to go.” A more subtle, qualified intention is usually gently voiced: Something along the lines of, “I wonder if we should be thinking about going?” Following the hosts’ protests, guests all but apologize for even suggesting they were thinking of leaving so early. “I didn’t want to overstay my welcome,” is standard and ends any further doubt that guests will depart within the hour.

Visitors sometimes depart after their second announcement, but it’s really rather unseemly and seldom done. Only by the third announcement do visitors get up and head for the door, where they stop and chat for at least another half-hour or so before actually going outside. In the driveway there’s normally a bit more conversation, plans made to come back, and best wishes given to pass on to other family members before visitors get in their car. The final good-bye isn’t exchanged until the engine is running, the car is in reverse and the hosts are stepping toward the curb as the visitors back into the street. With family, even a good-bye feels welcoming.

December 25, 2005

I hope a wish for a Merry Christmas doesn’t get me targeted for a withering counter-attack from the rebel forces fighting the War On Christmas. What a crock that turned out to me, eh? The decorations still went up on the lampposts along the streets of Madison where, in the moronic opinion of loudmouthed nutjob Bill O’Reilly, you would instead “expect to find [us] communing with Satan.” People still thronged the gift shops and stores to bring home that special gift for loved ones, and most significantly of all, families came together once again to celebrate. Sean is home from college to spend the most wonderful season of all with us, and as much as Tim’s attitude tends toward ultra-hip coolness, he still kissed his mom and hugged his dad for the guitar he got; there can’t be more priceless Christmas gifts a parent could hope for. Among my prezzies, Your Most Perspicacious Drivelmeister is most grateful for the loving kindness of Darling B, the light of my life.

Have yourself A Merry Little Christmas. (What are you doing New Year’s Eve?)

 

I ate way too much fudge and way too many cookies last night. Ugh. They were so delicious at the time, but this morning I slowly woke to the churning sound of my gut loudly complaining at my overindulgence. When that happens, I promise myself I won’t do that again, then I go to a dinner or party and I very nearly keep my promise, and my grumbling insides wake me up again the following morning. And I knew it was going to happen that way, so why do I even make the promise?

I couldn’t skip out on our Christmas custom of breakfast together, especially as Barb went to some trouble to make biscuits and gravy. It was so tasty I found I could make room for it; that and a cup of coffee helped settle everything that was rumbling around inside.

We opened our presents shortly after we finished eating; the boys haven’t deviated one bit from the way they’ve always done it — Tim opened a present and played with it for at least a half-hour, while Sean tore them all open, one after another, then revisited them. We all spent the rest of the day lounging, which is a pretty nice way of saying ‘blobbing out,’ until about four o’clock, when we started putting together the fixings to go with the Christmas turkey. After cleaning up the dinner table, we all went back to blobbing out.

 

An animated feature-length film version of Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea will be released by Studio Ghibli in July, 2006, and directed by Goro Miyazaki, the son of the studio’s founder, Hayao Miyazaki. With any luck we could see the film in U.S. theaters by next December, knock wood.

An article in The Guardian (UK) describes Le Guin’s works, old and new, touching on the Earthsea novels.

December 26, 2005

Hey! There was no newspaper on our doorstep this morning. I want to lounge in sloth-like inactivity all morning. Going out to fetch a paper from the corner store doesn’t fit into that equation. And besides, who said the paper boy could have the day off? I’m the one with the day off today. Sheesh.

 

Barb changed the cartridge in the water filter yesterday and had to use a cup or two of vinegar to clean the scale out of the pot. We have a gallon of vinegar on hand for the one job of keeping up with the battle against scale deposits in the kettle, the coffee maker, the pots and pans. I’ve given up trying to understand where this stuff comes from; my question is this: Are my stomach, guts and the various intakes and vents of my body slowly filling up with layered deposits of this stuff, and should I be chugging down a cup or so of vinegar each week to clean it out?

I wonder if the many denizens of the internet have an opinion on this subject? I’ll bet they do. I’ll have to schedule a search, one more item on my list of meaningless things to do when I have oodles of time to waste.

 

Barb couldn’t find a place to put the bread she brought back from the grocery store. While that may seem trivial at first blush, Barb is not any common packer; she has been, up until now, one of those extraordinary talents who can fit a hundred pounds of kaka in a fifty-pound bag without breaking a sweat. Determined as she was, however, she couldn’t make enough room in the fridge for the two loaves she had to put away.

This was an event akin to the moment in the film The Man Who Would Be King, and copied so often in countless grade-B movies, when Sean Connery’s trip to the throne as the long-lost god of a tribe in the mountains of Afghanistan is abruptly arrested because his bride makes his blood run after delivering a vicious bite. Just about everybody on earth knows gods don’t bleed, everybody except the guy in the movie pretending to be a god. He remains blissfully ignorant until the third reel, when the townspeople run him down with pitchforks and bludgeons.

We didn’t tar & feather Barb, but it was a moment we couldn’t believe we were seeing. She opened the door of the fridge, saw there was no room, and then, instead of unloading at least half of everything on one of the shelves and re-arranging it like a 3-D puzzle to get the bread in there, she swung the door shut, announced, “No room in there,” and stuffed the bread in the closet. I looked out the window for a flock of flying pigs, but there were none in sight, so maybe I’m overstating the significance of the event.

 

We played “Catchphrase” with the Bachs Saturday night. It’s a repackaged version of the word game “Password” — you try to get your partners to say a word or phrase without saying the word itself. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes easy. Carrie got her partners to almost involuntarily blurt out “Dolly Parton” in about half a second with the clue, “The country singer with the big tah-tahs.” If you can think fast in a pinch, winning is easy.

Of course, if you’re going to recycle clues, it helps to be familiar with the terminology. Susan tried to tune into the same wavelength Carrie used and ended up confusing the hell out of everybody when she referred to “kah-kahs” instead of “tah-tahs,” and when she tried it again she said “tee-tahs,” which made Barb suck half a mouthful of soda pop into her lungs and spray the other half through her nose. It might’ve been funny if it hadn’t looked so painful at the same time.

December 27, 2005

Barb put down her knitting last night and whimpered, “I don’ wanna go back to work!” I hear you, sweetie. They just don’t make three-day weekends that last long enough. The good news is, we’ll get another one next weekend!

 

Thank god for Pepto-Bismol! Or, I guess, thank the New York doctor who mixed up the first batch. Last night my guts served notice they would no longer take responsibility for a clear case of overindulgence: In this case, a rich holiday dinner, the night after I’d previously eaten another rich holiday dinner. My stomach, upper and lower GI tract didn’t exactly go on strike last night, but they did rally together to protest what they clearly saw as a case of abuse, sending me to the bathroom medicine cabinet for a double-shot of the pink stuff. I slept fitfully afterward.

 

How was your Christmas weekend? Ours was wonderful; we did absolutely nothing. Okay, not absolutely nothing — we did occasionally eat a meal, or use the potty; we didn’t lie in bed for three days, wrapped up in our warm down comforter, totally inert, although that sounds pretty wonderful, now that I think of it. Mostly we sat around and read the great books we gave as presents to each other, played the latest edition of Trivial Pursuit that Santa brought us, or watched television. Tim played video games and plinked on his new electric guitar. Sean read books almost exclusively; I think he got through at least a book a day.

 

Back at work this morning, a typical meeting in the hallway sounded like this: “How’s it going?”

“Not bad for a Tuesday that’s really a Monday.”

What the hell’s that supposed to mean? It’s not a Monday, it’s a Tuesday, and tomorrow’s Wednesday. Put another way, the hardest day of the week’s already behind us, and we’re nearly halfway to Friday already! Carpe diem, people!

 

Quote of the day: “It appears she didn’t voluntarily swallow [her cell phone].” — Sergeant Allen Kintz, of the Blue Springs, Missouri, police department, brilliantly cracking the case of a woman who was “apparently” assaulted by her boyfriend, who said she swallowed the phone that was the crux of an argument they were having. After some crack investigative work by the Blue Springs police, which should have lasted about as long as it took them to listen to the boyfriend’s bullshit story, he has been charged with assault.

December 28, 2005

The power went out as we were getting ready to leave the house for work this morning, and that’s how we came to realize that we had exactly one candle and one pack of matches in the house, and they were nowhere near one another (but thank dog we knew where they were). We don’t even have a simple flashlight. I’m trying to think of other ways we could have been more unprepared, but I think we covered everything.

Some people are so determined to survive any catastrophe, from famine to war, that they’ve squirreled away stockpiles of food, clothing and ammunition throughout their house and in their basement. Then there are people like us. When the republic dissolves into chaos and it’s every man for himself, we’re going to be the food supply, but at least I’ll know I played an important part.

 

I spoke to the one person in the whole world who least wanted to talk with me today when I called the office of the county treasurer in Dubuque, Iowa. (Why did I call him, then? Long story, very boring, not worth the time.) I don’t think it was a personal inattention. He answered the phone as though with a tone of voice that suggested he would rather be any place else, doing anything else. Perhaps he was off his medication, or maybe he was only a caffeine addict who’d been staring at the empty coffee mug on his desk, counting the minutes until his next trip to the brewer in the break room.

I tried to make it clear from the get-go that this was a business call — you know, business? Your Job? I think I was too subtle, although he gave me the impression I could’ve shouted “WAKE UP!” for all the good it would have done. I got out my hen’s teeth-pulling pliers and extracted the information I needed from him as quickly as possible, then hung up. Can’t wait until I have to call him again.

 

Mortgage applications suck.

First of all, why do I have to go through all this proving that I have an income, and proving that I have good credit, and proving that I have money in the bank for a downpayment? I want the bank’s money; don’t they want my business?

Then the application goes on forever, page after legal-size page loaded with facts and figures that I have to dig up from the deepest recesses of my bank statements and credit card receipts. What a pain in the butt. It’s like a big homework assignment, but worse because I really want the house. Homework I could just blow off.

The shear repetition of a mortgage application has to be the worst aspect of it, though. I have to write my legal name, social security number and birth date on every single page. If anybody wrote a computer program like that, they’d be fired. It doesn’t autofill after I punch it in the first time? What’s up with that?

 

There was a new edition of Trivial Pursuit under the tree this Christmas, to give us a board game to play during the holidays. We’re one of those ubergeek families with a huge collection of board games in our closet, or rather in a crate in storage, which is why this seemed like a good time to get another game. It’s the “book-lover’s edition” of Trivial Pursuit. That seemed perfect for us, because all four of us are book lovers. We eagerly started a game the other night ... and were soon the four most baffled people on earth. This was not a game for mere book-lovers, this was for people who were not just addicted to reading books, but addicted to reading about books. If you think of yourself as a book-lover but you haven’t read every single book published since the invention of moveable type, this game will very quickly demonstrate what a plebe you are. Not that you’ll be embarrassing yourself in front of the other players; they’ll all be sitting around with dumb looks on their faces, too.

 

Researchers at Heriot-Watt University's School of Textiles and Design in Scotland have launched the world's first study aiming to answer the question: Does this make my butt look big? Female volunteers will be photographed wearing hundreds of different types of clothing; participants will then be asked to look at the pictures and asked how big or small the model’s butt appears to be. Science marches on.

December 29, 2005

Two eggs. I was foraging for some breakfast and ran across the two hard-boiled eggs remaining from the batch of eight or so that Barb cooked for an egg salad, or some other concoction. Looked yummy to me, but I hesitated. My quandary was this: She hadn’t yet made the sandwich spread, so could I safely eat these last two eggs for breakfast without getting into a boatload of trouble?

Making the question even more convoluted, she boiled all the eggs left in the carton, explaining she didn’t want them to go bad. Barb’s a stickler for expiration dates. She needed only a few for the salad, though. “Will you eat the rest?” she begged me, begged me, and I agreed. But I’d long since eaten all but the last two.

She doesn’t get out of bed until shortly after six on a work day, but I was hungry enough to eat at five-thirty; who wants to wait when they’re hungry? I don’t. But I didn’t want the trouble, either. Chances were not quite even that I’d find some, though, and not in my favor. In the end, I wimped out. A banana and a glass of juice held me over through the morning.

 

We saw no snatch & grabs on Williamson Street this morning. The traffic cops probably still have the cars we saw them impounding yesterday morning. Williamson is a four-lane road from downtown Madison all the way up the isthmus to Atwood Avenue, and is our preferred route home & back again. Parking is allowed in the outside lanes, except during the rush hour; then the inbound outside lane is off-limits from seven to nine o’clock, and woe be unto you if your car is parked on the street after that. A flatbed truck and a traffic cop in a jeep will bracket it within fifteen minutes, and you’ll step out of your house to find nothing but fast-moving traffic where your car used to be.

Impounding cars is a job I think I could enjoy, but I think I’d enjoy it way too much.

 

My boss and his cohorts have been working my butt off all week. Really. I have no butt. Every morning I start by organizing work into piles, pick the pile that most urgently needs my attention, and snowplow through it, and then the next one, and so on until I look up and oh my god it’s ten o’clock already! I take a fifteen-minute break, then it’s once again into the breach, dear friends. Lunch hour interrupts me before I know it, too.

Once in a great while they give me a task that takes all day but is so mind-numbingly boring that I pray for it to be over soon. This week they have not been giving me those tasks. This week, I lost my butt.

 

The 25 dumbest things people said in 2005 according to Daniel Kurtzman in an article for About.com. I suppose other people might have said dumber things, but they weren’t quoted in the news for saying it.

December 30, 2005

For the Love of God, People! I know it can be challenging to find a parking spot in this town, but what possible reason could you have to park your car overnight in the inbound lane of Williamson Street ever? And supposing you can come up with a sound reason, is it worth losing your car to the Grab & Go Crew of the traffic police? We passed them as they were towing a minivan and a sedan from two ends of the same block this morning, and we tried to think up the excuses the owners would be making later. The only believable one we could come up with was that they were from out of town. Anybody who was even dimly familiar with Willy Street would know the parking rules.

 

Attention, nefarious evildoers: Security researchers at Microsoft have discovered a serious flaw in your computer software:

Security researchers revealed the flaw on Tuesday and posted instructions online that showed how would-be attackers could exploit the flaw. Within hours, computer virus and spyware authors were using the flaw to distribute malicious programs that could allow them to take over and remotely control afflicted computers.

Does anybody but me see logical error in the efforts of these “security researchers” that you might describe as, for want of a better term, STUPID? Maybe it’s because I’m a simple rube, but it seems reasonable to me that the “security researchers” should wait until they’ve developed an armor-plated fix before they show hackers how to exploit a grave security threat. Or am I missing something?

December 31, 2005

To snatch a moment of peace and quiet for myself, I retired to our bedroom after our family dinner and a game of “Trivial Pursuit” last night. Curled up with my most recently checked-out library book, The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station, I read about two pages and, somewhere on the third page (and with any luck, at a spot I can find again), I nodded off. This is how High-Speed Dave lives large on a Friday night: dinner and conversation with the family unit, a board game that puzzles everybody, then a quiet room, a book nobody would read and, almost at the same time, a nap. Yee-haw!

Tell you what, though, it sure cuts down on the expenses. I don’t need a loud discotheque, a barrel of liquor or loose women with expensive tastes to have fun on the weekend; just prop me up in bed with a book and I’m good. It’s also a great source of amusement for the kids. I dimly remember Tim coming into the room to point at and ridicule both of us. “You’re in bed already? It’s only nine o’clock! You’re old!”

Barb roused me from sweet slumber when she crawled into bed round about nine or nine-thirty. As I was putting the book away and getting ready to change into my jammies I remembered out loud the kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes.

“Make those boys do it,” Barb suggested to me. Silly Barb. The boys would be far too busy reading books and chatting on the internet until long after midnight to deal with anything as mundane as washing dishes, so I pulled a sweatshirt over my head, slippers on my feet, and made my way to the kitchen.

Sean was in the living room with his nose in a book, an activity that effectively makes him deaf. Even so, I tried to unload the dishes as quietly as possible. Unluckily for me, however, he almost immediately heard me stacking the plates, his guilt complex kicked in and he rushed to the kitchen and began to beg me to let him finish the job. I explained that I wanted to wash all the dirty dishes in the sink, some of them by hand, and that I wanted to make sure the coffee pot was clean so I could make coffee in the morning.

“I was going to do all that, anyway,” he said. He just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

I think I asked him one more time what I wanted him to do, and he said he was going to wash out the skillet and put the rest of the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. Sounded good to me, so I shuffled off to bed.

Those of you who have experience with teenagers can see my mistake already.

I lounged in bed a half-hour past the usual time I get up on the weekends, rolling out at seven-thirty to put on a pot of coffee and write some e-mail, some drivel, and maybe read a little while I nursed a hot cuppa joe. When I opened the dishwasher, however, I found that (Anybody? Anybody?) it hadn’t been run. Ah, that’s what was nagging me all night. He said he would load the dishwasher, but he didn’t say anything about running it. I should have known better, especially as Sean is infamous for not running the dishwasher “because it wasn’t full enough.” As far as he’s concerned, the cup of water and watt-and-a-half of electricity it takes to wash a load goes to waste if there’s room for so much as one more tea spoon in there, so I should have stressed that I got out of bed last night specifically to wash all the dishes, and if he was going to revert to Commander Conserve A. Watt of the Conservation Corps, he could just go curl up with his book. But I was sleepy; my guard was down. Next time, the memory of this will allow me to resist giving in.

 

“We’re only dipping a toe in the water.” That’s how Wilma, the realtor who’s helping us look for a house, described the offer we made this afternoon to buy a smallish three-bedroom ranch in Monona. She’s been at this for twenty-eight years, so it’s just another day at work for her, but to the rest of us it feels a tiny bit more weighty than ‘dipping a toe in the water.’ For the sake of perspective, though, I have to say I’m glad we have someone with her experience on hand. Without Wilma to reduce BUYING A HOUSE down to toe-dipping, I’d probably hyperventilate every time we made an offer.

We’ve looked at dozens of houses on-line and visited maybe ten or fifteen, but to date we’ve seen only two or three that might have the character to become the O-Home. This is one of the more promising candidates. The floor plan is much like a lot of the other smaller houses in Monona, but the current owner has put a lot of love into fixing it up. He opened up the dining room and living room, making them feel a lot more spacious; added a nifty little back entry and a wooden deck; pulled up the carpeting and refinished the hardwood floors; and did a spiffy remodeling job on the bathroom. There’s just one bathroom, though. That would be a scheduling problem.

There would also be a tiny, but possibly not insurmountable scheduling problem with moving in. The current owner is selling because he’s building another house and will move out in April. Our lease on the duplex ends in May, so it’s almost, but not quite, a perfect match as far as that’s concerned.

All things considered, though, it’s a cozy little house with a lot of charm. I even liked the paint job, inside and out, which doesn’t usually make much of an impression on me. Truth to tell, the present owner had dauntingly good taste in decorating. People like Barb and I, who consider refrigerator magnets a decorative detail, ooooh and ahhhh when we see houses tricked out the way this one was.

 
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