Drivel

Saturday, April 1st, 2006

Take a look at the date. Do you see where it says ‘April?’ Do you know what that means? Do you realize what that means? That means we can now say “this month” when referring to the day we move into our house. Zow!

Okay, I know I’m a little over-excited, but cut me some slack. It’s our first real house since we sold the last one in 1999.

 

I’ve been pounding away at the keyboard for the past two hours, fine-tuning the bells and whistles on the brand-new layout of the picture page, and I dare say it’s turning out well, at least technically. I’ve got all the links working, the layout is finally flashing on the screen without any overlaps or missing text, and I don’t cock an eyebrow at the stuff that seems to appear on its own volition.

Whether or not the subject matter’s worth taking a look at is entirely up to you. I’ve reformatted the page mostly so that I could post a whole raft of family photos that I told everybody I would print out for them, or e-mail, or otherwise get to them in one form or another, and for various reasons I never got to it. So I guess this is my lame attempt to make up for it; “Here are the photos I promised you — now print them yourself.”

Up to this point, I had been posting photos on a web page on blogger. It was so easy to upload photos to it that I couldn’t help myself. Then the ease disappeared in a puff of frustration one night. I couldn’t upload photos at all, and I couldn’t figure out why. Banged my head against the problem two or three nights running, threw up my hands, wrote it off as a loss. Photos will appear on my own darned web site from now on.

 

After a pancake breakfast to benefit the West Side Senior Center, and just before we drove to the book sale at Neighborhood House, Barb and I stopped at the Weston Place condominiums’ open house to ... what’s the reverse of “going slumming?”

It wasn’t exactly the reverse of slumming. As condos go, Weston Place was probably on the low end of opulence. The rooftop penthouse sold for just $1.5 million unfinished; the 1-bedroom condos started at a mere $160,000 unfinished, and finishing them would cost about $75 per square foot, so it’s not like we were out of our price range here. We wouldn’t have been able to imagine how much money it would take to get into the foyer of a condo on capital square, but at Weston we could talk the realtor on duty into showing us around the place. It’s not inconceivable that we could one day live there.

But would we want to? The second-floor condos were finished, so the realtor took us there after showing us an unfinished “white box” condo. The idea was to give us some idea what they might look like, sort of stimulate our imagination to the possibilities.

Well, I have to say I was not that impressed. They all looked like the insides of McMansions. The ceilings were too high by at least two feet; kitchen cupboards should touch the ceiling, not look as though they slid down the walls. The halls were so wide you could’ve parked SUVs in them.

And what’s the big whoop about granite countertops? The realtor wouldn’t shut up about how every condo would be fitted with granite countertops. Not mine, buddy. I’ve seen them played up at a few home expos, and I don’t get it. It’s ugly. I’m a Formica man myself.

Barb loved the granite. That wouldn’t be much of a conflict; I think it’s ugly, but I could live with it. She also loved the wide-open spaces in the finished units. “Except for the bathroom, I wouldn’t have walls at all,” she said, and in that difference of opinion we might find the possibility of conflict. I can’t stand that wide-open look. The kitchen should have walls and a door, or at least cupboards over the countertop to give the illusion that it’s not part of the dining area, which is part of the living area, which is part of the balcony. Yuk. I like the balcony, but I occasionally like to pull the drapes for the same reason that I occasionally want to close the door behind me when I go into the living room. I vant to be alone.

Sunday, April 2nd, 2006

“Daylight savings time sucks. I’m not doing it.” — Tim Okonski.

We got to wondering last night, after dinner: What if we didn’t set our clocks forward this year? We’re not anti-government agitators, we just don’t want to do it. Why should we have to?

“Other than because we’d be late for work for the next seven months?” Barb asked.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I said.

There must be a way to get out of daylight savings time. “I forgot” only works for so long — about a day, I would think.

We could have moved to Indiana, where 77 of the state’s counties didn’t spring ahead or fall back, but that would have required moving again, and we’re trying to break that habit. Besides, the state’s legislature went and screwed everything up by decreeing that, after April 2005, Hoosiers would adjust their clocks like people in every other state in the union except Arizona and Hawaii. I’m not moving to Arizona or any other state where people depend on air conditioning to keep from melting into a puddle of sweat and grease. And we couldn’t afford to even visit Hawaii, so I don’t think we’ll be moving there any time soon. I might’ve moved to Indiana, but Arizona and Hawaii are out.

The only other way out we could think of was that we could claim it was against our religion, but then we’d probably have to come up with a recognized religion and cite chapter and verse, and we only had to toss it around the room for a few minutes before giving up and admitting there wasn’t any religion any of us were familiar enough with to do that. Tim thought we could make one up. An industrious idea, but members of the most recently made-up religions are generally considered to be eccentric at best and, at worst, raving, vacant-eyed weirdoes who give all their worldly possessions to the Supreme All-Being, who turns out to be a guy formerly known as Bob and somehow convinces everybody in the sect to commit suicide en masse. We don’t want to be pariahs, or dead, we’re just trying to hang on to that lost hour of sleep.

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

We went to a consignment auction yesterday expecting to buy some furniture and maybe a few odds & ends; came home with absolutely nothing. First time that’s happened.

“What’d you see?” Barb asked when we met again after splitting up to look over the items for sale spread out over dozen of tables and stacked in the hallways. There’s always at least one thing that each of us feels we couldn’t possibly leave the auction without.

“I didn’t see a thing,” I said.

“Neither did I,” she agreed sadly. So the Rule of Thumb was on its head; there isn’t always one thing, just most of the time.

They were auctioning off some odds & ends to a small crowd at the first ring, so we sat and watched a while, hoping they might hold up something to spark our interest, but it wasn’t happening, so we took to wandering the tables again.

We ran into Jim after about a half-hour, said hi. I showed him the clocks; I love clocks almost as much as Jim, but he knows clocks way better than I do. There was a nifty mantle clock he called a “bing-bong” because it had a two-tone chime. You can tell he’s into clocks on a very technical level, can’t you?

Not even the clocks were enough to hold Jim’s interest, though, and he disappeared after watching the bidding for a short while. As there was nothing much of interest for us, either, we left not long after he did.

 

The Java Cat was jammed with customers and, in accordance with the laws of physics governing coffee shops, only two baristas were behind the counter, running their buns off. “I let somebody go home earlier,” one of the ladies breathlessly said to Barb.

“That’s a good way to make sure you’ll get busy later,” Barb answered.

 

I have never wanted to beat a telephone into little pieces before today.

Before I cut loose on the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, Motor Vehicles Division, I’d like to put in a plug: I think they do a swell job. They seem to be understaffed and underfunded; the resulting backlog undoubtedly makes for crushing work; and still the good people of the DMV doggedly work their fingers to the bone, expecting nothing in return but bony fingers and health coverage. What a bunch of troopers.

And this doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that my wife works there. Okay, honestly, it does a little bit, but in the sense that I might have a better picture of how hard the people of the DMV work at a largely thankless job.

That said, they have got to get rid of their Evil Phone Robot. That witch put me through a three- or four-tiered phone tree, gave me the “your call is important to us” spiel, estimated the amount of time I would have to wait, played an informational message for me, and subjected me to several minutes of poorly-recorded Muzak before a recorded voice issued a curt statement that went something like this: “Due to an unusually large volume of customer inquiries, we are unable to take your call at this time. The best hours to call are between seven and nine o’clock in the morning. Please call us later.” And then she hung up on me.

What the hell!? They made me jump through all those telephonic hoops before telling me they’re too busy to talk to me right now?

I called back twice more, just to make sure it wasn’t a quirk. Although the routine differed slightly depending on the department I called, I kept ending up with the “too busy to talk now” recording and got cut off. That’s just wrong. What happened to a busy signal? I think the DOT has an undeserved reputation as not just uncaring but malevolent; however, when I get treatment like this I have a hard time defending my position, or even wanting to.

Fix this, won’t you, Secretary Busalacchi? I wouldn’t wish this kind of treatment on al Quaeda!

Tuesday, April 4th, 2006

Tim bought a newer, better, bigger MP3 player, so he gave me his old one. What a pal, eh? He even cleaned out the memory, removing all the rap, hip-hop and other brain-melting noise from its memory before handing it over to me. Now, that is a pal; he knew he was a beneficiary on my life insurance policy. If he’d ‘accidentally’ left just one particularly toxic musical event on it, and I had ‘accidentally’ listened to it, he might have been able to afford that car he’s been lusting after.

The MP3 player’s quite a nifty gadget. I plugged it into my laptop and loaded it up with my kind of music right away (my laptop practically transferred the music without me; I’ve got Real Player, a nifty little software program that did everything but drag and drop), then listened to swing and jazz all through the morning while I shuffled papers at my desk. I was on break before I’d whistled my way through four or five of my favorite tunes.

It had its glitches: More than a few times the tune I was listening to would start over, or stop dead, with no prompting from me at all, and once I couldn’t get it to stop repeating Beside The Sea without popping the battery out. And speaking of batteries, it eats them like candy. So it could stand a few improvements, but the trade-off was that I could pass the morning with Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald and Kevin Spacey (as Bobby Darin). Bliss!

 

I cast my first vote since returning to the States — in fact since 1998,when I went to the polls in Aurora, Colorado. Not that I didn’t try since then; I sent away for absentee ballots, but never got them in time, if at all. The military makes a lot of fuss and noise about the absentee voting program, but it’s about as functional as teats on a bull.

Our local election amounted to two referenda, one to build a new school in Cottage Grove, and another to raise the spending cap on education. There were some incumbent county clerks who wanted to hold on to their jobs and a short list of village board members to choose from; it took all of five minutes. Barb was so relieved to finally cast a vote she got all misty and almost had a cry.

Cottage Grove unfortunately didn’t have a resolution on the ballot to express an opinion one way or another on the war in Iraq, as Madison and Monona did. If we’d closed on the house one month earlier, I could have had a shot at that issue, too. And did I want to. We had to vote in Cottage Grove, though; no way around it.

Not that I think affirming the resolution would change anybody’s mind, certainly not the minds of the people conducting the war. Would have made me feel more like I was doing something about it than anything else I’d done before, though, and I like that it’s made people talk about the issue.

 

This afternoon I added to my list of words I don’t want to hear in a phone call from my son while I’m at work; they are, in order: “The toilet overflowed.” I don’t ever want to hear them from anybody, of course; and I wouldn’t particularly care to hear them from my son even while I was at home. There really isn’t any time those words can make me feel good about hearing them, but they’re particularly frustrating to hear when I can’t do a thing to help the situation. I guess what I’m saying is that, if my life required that I heard him say that, and I could chose when, then I’d much rather I were at home, with at least two hours to go before lights out, and preferably while I was wearing rubber gloves.

But it never works that way, does it? You always hear about these things when you least want to.

Tim said he did what he could to sop up the mess in the bathroom and wanted to know what to do next. I tried to imagine how the toilet in the basement overflowed while nobody was there to use it, and that’s when I sensed a chilling disturbance in The Force.

“Tim,” I said tentatively, “go check the utility room.” He was puzzled, but I talked him into taking a look anyway. There was a sewer drain in the middle of the utility room. If the toilet backed up all over the floor, that probably meant that the sewer puked up, too. Then Tim described the gruesome discovery he made in there and I knew it was possibly as bad, maybe even worse, than I imagined.

But fate wanted not only to put the frosting on this particularly foul double-layer cake; she wanted to stick me in the back with the knife, too, and give it a turn: Today was LOOONG TUESDAY, the day that I had to go straight from work to school, and the twist was that I was 99 and 44/100ths percent sure I was going to drop this class. I had decided to give it a go tonight, see if I thought I could sink or swim. I didn’t find it easy to concentrate on the question while my imagination kept taking me back to scenes of Barb and Tim cleaning up sewer puke and trying to move Tim’s possessions up from the basement room he would no longer be able to live in.

As it turned out, the basement wasn’t in as bad a state as I’d feared. The carpet in what had been Tim’s bedroom was a squelching, stinking bog, but only a sleeping bag and a guitar case got sucked under the tide. Tim and I made an expedition into the swampland after I got home to move his bed and a chest of drawers upstairs.

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Okay, I give up. Or, rather, I get up — at five in the morning, even on weekends, to feed the cats. I have to. They’ve got the drop on me, and somehow, even though they have no forebrain at all and what they’ve got that passes for brains wouldn’t fill a shot glass, they know (how do they know!?) when it’s five o’clock, and they know that I can’t sleep when they traipse across my face.

Several weeks ago I thought I’d teach the cats a lesson and lock them out of the bedroom when they woke me up at the usual time to get me to feed them. They accepted their punishment and sat quietly in the hallway for about ninety seconds, then scratched at the door for the next hour or so.

One morning I locked them out there and they somehow opened the door of the hallway closet, where we keep the giant economy-sized bag of cat food; they chewed their way into that in short order. I guess I should have been very afraid that they’d somehow learned to open the door, but it didn’t hit me at the time.

They woke me so early one Saturday morning that I not only locked them out of the bedroom, I sat by the door afterward with a glass of water. When one of them started scratching the door, I’d crack it open and flick water at them. That only taught them to scratch at the door and run away, though.

I’m done teaching them lessons. It’s a lot easier, and a lot less tiring, for me to stumble into the kitchen at whatever ungodly hour they choose, fill their bowls with kibble, and stumble back to bed. That way, they’ll leave me alone for blissful hours of sleep. The only other thing to do would be to get a dog who would sleep at my feet and keep them off my face in the mornings, but I thought the cats would be easy pets; I can’t chance the kind of surprises a dog might bring me.

 

Even though he said he slept well, Tim could not get used to being in a different room. You know the feeling? You wake up in the middle of the night, your barely conscious mind taking in the surroundings like a camera, and the snapshot registers as someplace else. For a full week after we moved here, I woke up in the morning and asked myself, Which damn motel am I in today? But we’d been moving around a lot, for several months.

Tim had that working against him, plus the bed was in the wrong corner of the room. He usually slept facing away from the wall; now he had to learn to roll over to the opposite side. My brain was wired this way, too. I used to drive my mother crazy by moving my bed from one side of my room to the other because it never felt as though it was in the right place. One day I moved it into a corner that I had to move it out of shortly after lights out. I laid there, wide awake in the dark, so disoriented that I had to turn the lights back on and re-arrange my whole room so the bed was in the old spot before I could get to sleep.

 

I expect you’ve heard by now that a bunch of uppity Wisconsin towns and cities voted to pull the troops out of Iraq. As Arlo Guthrie famously said, toward the end of Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacree, “If just one person does it, they’ll think he’s a weirdo, and if two people do it, they’ll think they’re both faggots ... but if three people do it, they may think it’s a movement!” I’m not saying we have a movement, but it’s a start.

(Am I going to get into trouble for quoting Guthrie saying “faggot?” Do radio stations still play Alice’s Restaurant at Thanksgiving, or has it been rooted out because he says that? Hmmm.)

One thing this vote didn’t settle: Reporters, television anchors and radio announcers couldn’t seem to figure out whether to refer to more than one referendum as referenda or referendums. It’s a Latin word, so the Latin plural would be referenda, but we speak English, not Latin. I’ve never heard sports casters discuss what they liked about two different stadia, for instance; the plural is stadiums in English. (“Data” got stuck in plural, funnily enough; I’ve almost never heard datum except in a math class.)

 

Mike the landlord came by after the dinner hour to take a gander at the carpet in the downstairs room that was flooded by the sewer backup yesterday. He had an idea that he could get one of those carpet-cleaning crews in there with a steam-extraction machine and, with hope in one hand and spit in the other, the room might be habitable once again, but after he squished around the room a bit he could see it was hopeless. The demolition crew will arrive tomorrow to tear the carpeting out, in the hopes that the room will dry out before mildew sets in.

In happier housing news, I ran into Kevin, my mortgage loan officer, in the elevator yesterday and he asked if our realtor had picked a time and place for the closing yet. I had to admit I didn’t know, and left a message on Wilma’s machine this morning, asking her to call Kevin. She must’ve rung him up within the hour because I had e-mail from Kevin after lunch with all the details. We close at ten in the morning on April 28th. Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy!

 

If you got e-mail from me today, delete it! I didn’t send a message to anybody, but I watched the PC downstairs try to send dozens of e-mails selling drugs for medical maladies ranging from erectile disfunction to hair loss. A scan of the disc found a worm, and killed it; so far as I know, the virus checker caught all the e-mails, too, but you never know. It should have caught the worm coming in, too.

Thursday, April 6th, 2006

An oversized coffee-table book at the library stuck out from the rack so far that I couldn’t help but notice a photo of an astronaut walking on the alien surface of a planet. I was the kind of geek who ate that stuff up as a kid; I wanted to be an astronaut, myself, until NASA stopped hiring test pilots and started sending engineers into space. I didn’t have the math to be an engineer, but I sure liked the flying part.

But what I think I would’ve liked most was having my photo taken in a space suit, helmet under my arm, big old grin on my face that told you instantly just how excited I was about going into orbit. Astronauts aren’t professional models, and a lot of them aren’t all that photogenic, but point a camera at them and you’ll find that every one has a smile bright enough to turn night into day. By the time they make the cut to be an astronaut, they’re so happy with the notion they can hardly stand it.

Sad to say, it’s an attitude sorrily lacking in the book I found. Voyage to the Planets and Beyond is apparently one of those companion books to a television show featuring lots of computer graphics and five actors so morose I can hardly stand to look at their faces without wanting to open a vein. They smile for their group portrait on page twelve of the introductory chapter in the book, one of them cracks a grin on page 46 in a tiny, icon-like photo, then it’s nothing but deep frowns and scowls until page 136 when the same woman who smiled on page 46 shares a full-color happy face; seems she’s the only one who paid attention during NASA charm school. The rest of them can only glower, mope, fret and worry through every step of their ten-year journey to the outer fringes of the solar system. If we ever blast people as joyless as this trillions of miles into space, it’ll only be because we never want to see them again.

So give the book a miss, but if you see the show and it’s any better, let me know. I’d hate to think it was as big a downer as the book.

 

Finished Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down late last night — or, at least, late for me. I like to snap the lights off no later than ten-thirty on a school night, but last night I had just twenty pages or so left; I wouldn’t have been able to sleep if I didn’t finish it off.

I haven’t made up my mind yet if this is as good a story as Hornby’s others; I think I liked About A Boy best as a story, and How To Be Good the least; A Long Way Down was certainly a few notches above the middle of the pack in terms of plot. It was the characters that made me stay up past my bedtime; Hornby’s a dab hand at putting together a troupe of colorful people. A Long Way Down would be on one of the upper shelves of my library, instead of down at the bottom, in the dust with the paperbacks that were doomed to end up on the “take-one-leave-one” rack.

Friday, April 7th, 2006

It was hard to find a good icon for twenty; this will have to do. Twenty! Less than three short weeks until we’re sleeping on the floor of our own house!

 

I was so tuckered out after two back-to-back episodes of My Name Is Earl last night that I grabbed the good sections of the paper and tottered off to bed to read myself to sleep, and I had to read only two or three pages for that to happen. I figured I’d better grab the extra shuteye tonight while I can, because we’re going to a late show tonight; Lily Tomlin’s early show sold out they day after they announced it, so she added a 10:30 pm show and somehow I got lucky enough to score a couple tickets. It’s way past my bed time but I don’t mind staying up late to see Lily.

Retiring early last night deprived me of writing any drivel while hiding in the bedroom during er; doubly so because Barb didn’t watch the rerun that was broadcast last night. I can’t remember the last time she skipped a rerun of er. Did you feel the earth stop revolving last night? Could have done.

Before I codgered off to bed I had to make sure The Office had truly been pre-empted for some crap sitcom about teachers. I didn’t like The Office the first time I saw it, because I was all snooty about having watched the original British version of the show, which is a lot funnier and makes me cringe more. David Brent, the British boss, is so much more uncaring, mistrustful, and desperate than Michael. Michael’s also a lot slicker, or presents himself that way; David tried to be slick but failed so spectacularly that it was hard to watch.

But the characters in the American version of The Office won me over; Dwight is so much more malevolent than Gareth, who was more of a bumbling macho. Tim, the salesman who sat next to Gareth, and Dawn, the secretary who flirts with Tim, made a daily game out of getting Gareth’s goat. (That was too much fun to write.)

Jennifer, the corporate boss, hated David and ruthlessly slapped him back into his corner every chance she got. The love affair between Michael and his boss took me by surprise and I thought it was a bit cliché at first, but now that Michael’s proven he has absolutely no social skills to take the affair anywhere, I look forward to every agonizing twist and turn of their relationship.

The flirting between Jim and Pam is much the same, although Tim tried a lot harder to win Dawn over at first, but maybe I missed something in the first few episodes of the American version. Knowing how Tim & Dawn eventually ended up is one of the reasons I want to see how Jim and Pam work out.

Saturday, April 8th, 2006

Before I come clean and confess my dirty little secret, I feel I have to explain that I was sooo drunk last night that I couldn’t help myself. It was more the beer than me that was responsible. Surely any jury in the land would understand that.

I took Barb out for a night on the town yesterday evening; we had tickets for the Lily Tomlin show at the Overture Center. Not the originally-scheduled show that started at eight — that show sold out the split-second after the box office opened. We managed to snag tickets for the late show they somehow talked Lily into adding. It started at ten-thirty, way past our bedtime, and the only tickets we could get were in the mezzanine, thirty stories up and waayyyy in the back. To see what was happening on the stage from up there we would need something like the Hubble Telescope, but I’d kick myself around the block if I’d had the opportunity to go to a Lily Tomlin show but passed it up.

Since it was a very late show, we went home for a nap (no, I’m not kidding), then back to town for a late dinner before the curtain went up. Barb let me pick the restaurant. There’s a new place on capital square called The Old Fashioned that’s gotten good reviews and has become very popular because – get this – they serve tavern food: burgers and fries, breaded perch and onion rings, plenty of cold slaw on the side. There’s a big jar of pickled eggs on the bar, all within eyeshot of the capital dome. That’s Wisconsin for you, folks.

We got there by eight-thirty, which should have been more than enough time to eat before the show. The place was jam-packed, though. The kid behind the podium at the door, who wasn’t as old as my shoes, by the way, didn’t have much confidence that he’d be able to seat us within forty-five minutes, but we had him write our names on his list anyway, then sidled off to the bar for a drink.

Barb tried the namesake drink of the place. My Dad used to drink old fashioneds all the time; it might’ve been his favorite, although now that I think of it he drank martinis just as often. Barb has a mixed drink maybe twice a year, and she wasn’t ready for the potent way they made their old fashioneds at The Old Fashioned, so she sipped it very slowly over the next thirty or forty minutes. I don’t drink anything more sophisticated than beer. They had a very good stout on tap, so I had a pint while we waited. One pint. Remember that.

As nine o’clock approached we were thinking of ducking out and grabbing a sandwich at a bar down State Street; we would have to get something to eat before the show, but before we left I weaved through the crowd to the podium and snuck a look at the list. As it happened, we were next, or so close to it that we’d have been stupid to leave. Sure enough, we settled in behind a table shortly after the top of the hour.

We’d had plenty of time to look over the menu at the bar, so we were ready to jump at the gun. The waiter was so bummed that he didn’t get to deliver his spiel, though, that he prodded him to go ahead and tell us the daily special, and it was a good thing, too; he changed both our minds and ended up bringing us two big plates of fried perch; I had it with a side of fries, but Barb substituted onion rings. And when I say big plates, I mean that at least a half-dozen onions gave their lives just to make Barb’s side dish. My pile of fries would have scraped against the sky, if we’d been al fresco. The helping of perch was just right, though.

I ordered another pint of stout with my meal. That’s my second pint. I should have known better. It was late, or anyway later than I’m used to staying up after a working day, and I was eating a big, fried dinner, yet I was stupid enough to drink a second pint of strong, heavy beer. What was I thinking?

Lily started her show with a little warm-up, talked about how great it was to be back in Madison; she’s probably contractually obligated to mention waiting tables at Dotty’s. Then she launched into several of her trademark skits: Ernestine, Edith-Ann, Mrs. Beasley. She was going a million miles an hour all over the stage; the woman was frantic. Or maybe ‘antic’ would be a better description. How she kept that up for two hours, two shows a night, beggars belief. Her throat did catch just once in the middle of an act, but she made a quick apology as she gulped some water, then picked up right where she left off.

Then, it happened: about forty-five minutes into the show I found I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Two pints of beer and that great big fried food tranquilizer made me so warm and comfy I began to nod off! She’d wide up a great routine and I’d fade just before the punch line! I’ve been looking forward to this for months. I’d circled the date on my calendar and scrawled a big, red LILY! almost too big for the square to hold it. But then the big night came along and I blew it! Next time, we’re eating at an espresso bar.

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

My first duty every morning is to make a pot of coffee, not because I know the secret to making the best coffee for miles around, but because I get out of bed before everybody else. I’m the O-folks’ barista by default.

This morning, though, I thought writing some drivel was much more important. Ha! Ha! Drivel more important than coffee! Okay, no, what happened was I went to the kitchen to brew a hot pot o’ joe this morning and found about a half-inch of cold coffee and dregs in the pot and a dried-out paper filter with a clot of grounds congealing in the cone. When I get up at five in the morning I’m still so anesthetized from sleep that I can confront a mess like that, but this morning I had to get myself used to the idea, so I poured myself a glass of OJ and settled down to write some drivel first.

After pounding out my far-too-detailed thoughts on the movie The Weatherman (below, with spoilers; I didn’t think I’d prattle on so long about this movie, but it kept coming and coming, and since this is drivel, why force it to stop?), I shuffled out to the curb (in the metaphoric sense; there is no curb on our country road) to retrieve the morning paper for Barbie. She was making getting-up noises from deep within her cocoon of hand-quilted cotton (that’s a lot of alliteration) and I wanted to have her breakfast table set with the newspaper and a piping-hot beverage, but she emerged as I was still trying to scrub burned-on coffee/charcoal off the heating element. I finished washing, she dried, and we were soon seated at the table with the Sunday paper spread before us, hot java in hand.

Barb gets to unfold and sort the newspaper; she starts by picking through the color supplements, dumping the useless crud (ceramic doe-eyed figurines from the Franklin Mint for three easy installments of $29.95!) and putting aside the sales fliers from Kohl’s and Cub Foods. Then it’s on to the news sections; she always starts with the Forum, a discussion of the topics that made the news this week. I always start with the funnies. I look on this scene and think: We were made for each other.

Oh, I read the Forum section, too; it’s often nearly as hilarious as the funnies. This week: “We asked student leaders from Madison high schools: If they were mayor for a day, what would they change about the city to better prepare for the future?”

I would give out wool socks, mittens and hats to all of the homeless. The winters in Madison can be very cold, and it is hard to get back on your feet when your feet are too cold to walk with. Citywide wireless internet service should also proceed. Access to the Internet would give low-income residents a crucial tool for finding jobs and other resources.

– Art Kohl-Riggs, student council president, West High School

Mittens and internet access, the one-two punch that will end all Madison’s ills. The only problem I see is, how will street people be able to use their laptops while wearing mittens?

Instead of using taxpayer money to fund the military, we should steer that money to schools and education. And then let the Department of Defense raise money through bake sales, car washes and the sale of Bucky Books.

– Natalie Healy, class president, East High School

Natalie is going to major in bumper-sticker philosophy at Ditzy Blonde College.

I would stress cooperation to achieve bigger, more universal goals. A focus on the concept of city unity would be my main objective.

– Ryan Boyd, senior, Edgewood High School

If I had to guess, I’d say Ryan is a fast-burner, destined for upper management.

 

I talked Barb into going for a walk with me after we finished the paper. She has always resisted going for a walk with me before this, but I’ve learned one or two Jedi mind tricks from a correspondence course I saw advertised on the back of a matchbook, and before she knew what she was doing, we were in the car heading east across the countryside to London, where the Glacial Drumlin Trail crosses County Highway 134. Actually, I had planned to go all the way to Lake Mills, but I thought it would make for a more peaceful stroll if we started out in farm country instead of a town.

We walked probably a mile east down the trail from London, a crossroads town with a tavern and not much else. It was a flawlessly beautiful spring day for a walk; clear skies, warm breeze and bright sunshine. The trail is thickly wooded as it passes through London, passing through a wide swamp before it crosses a river. Just beyond the bridge the grade cuts through a short drumlin, then breaks out into open fields. Standing water along the edge of the field made a long, shallow pond that was filled with hundreds of frogs or toads or whatever little slimy animal makes a razzing sound that translates to, “Sex! Sex! I want some sex!”

We didn’t go much more than a half-mile across the field (which was a lot farther than I thought my mystical powers would force Barb to go), then returned across the field, over the bridge, through the swamp and bingo, back to the tavern parking lot where we left the car.

There were two guys out in the swamp with shovels and pails, which inspired us to play a quick game of “What’re They Doing?” Digging for nightcrawlers? No, it was mid-day. Hunting for truffles? I think they grow in the woods. “Probably burying dead bodies,” Barb guessed, always hoping to find the best in people.

A short visit to Cambridge, just south of London, was necessitated by virtue of our love of beautifully preserved Wisconsin villages, as well as the tiny size of our bladders. We stopped at a coffee shop to tank up again and shared a chocolate scone for a light lunch, which was just the thing to recharge our systems after loafing along the trail.

 

The last movie I saw Nicholas Cage in was, I believe, Lord of War. Cage played an amoral arms dealer whose experiences would have taught any other man time and again that this was not a good career choice, and yet he kept at it, even when it killed his brother, for the simple reason that he was good at it. It was filled with dark humor, clever and well-made.

The Weatherman, on the other hand, is not clever at all, not terribly well-made, lifeless, and morose. It had exactly two scenes I thought were worth watching: The first was a burlesque moment featuring Cage in an Abe Lincoln costume having an anonymous romp with a girl wearing an old-fashioned German dress. I liked it because it was the only scene in this supposed comedy that made me laugh.

The other scene was an arty shot of a broken mat of ice lozenges rolling lazily with the waves against the breakwaters on Lake Michigan. I think the whole movie was supposed to be arty; it had a muted blue-green overcast to it that lots of art movies have. The movie started with a shot of the ice on the lake, and came back to the shot every so often, possibly to remind the viewer that this was an art movie. That might not have been necessary if the studio hadn’t marketed the movie as a comedy.

Cage played weather forecaster Dave Spritz. I can only guess that’s supposed to be a weatherman joke: spritz like a fizzy drink, or drizzle, or something. Dave is apparently a very good weatherman, although he doesn’t do any actual forecasting; that’s done by a lackey in a back room who pulls up the satellite loop on a computer terminal and tells Dave what to say. Dave is at the television station for about fifteen minutes a day; he hangs out by the water cooler for a couple minutes, makes his presentation, then leaves.

A weatherman who gets paid piles of money to do nothing is kind of a tired joke, if you ask me. So is a weatherman that people despise enough to pelt with half-eaten fast-food. (Okay, I laughed at the montage of Cage being repeatedly hit by chicken nuggets and tacos. It was a pie-in-the-face moment.) When the occasional fan asks for his autograph, you’d think he’d be happy, but no, he snaps at every one of them. He’s a very depressed man, and I mean clinically, chronically depressed.

So the movie’s got me pretty confused right out of the blocks: Is it a comedy? Is it an exploration of depression? I had to go with depression. Dave takes his father to the hospital over and over for tests. The prognosis doesn’t look good. His father would seem to be preoccupied with the gravity of his medical condition, but it quickly becomes clear that Dave’s father is a very cold, distant man. Although Dave says he’s a wonderful father, he rarely speaks, and when he does his answers are clipped. His friendlier comments are derisive.

Dave’s separated from his wife. He hopes to reconcile with her. She tells him it’s not going to happen. She says she’s seeing somebody who makes her happy. She tells him she hates him and, to put him off the idea once and for all she finally spells out in disturbing detail how much she loathed having sexual relations with him. Despite her most venomous efforts, he keeps turning up at her door. Why she didn’t take out a restraining order against him is beyond belief.

Dave’s children seem almost as depressed as he is. His daughter barely speaks, She asks him for a bow and arrows, for reasons that turn out to be a little scary, but she puts no effort into archery, can’t focus enough to let an arrow fly and quits after one lesson rather than be bothered to learn.

It turns out that Dave’s pretty good at archery. It seems to give him some release. He picks up his bow during moments of stress and shoots at nearby trees and, in an opportune moment, contemplates putting an arrow through the head of the man who’s dating his wife. Far from a suspenseful moment, it’s a completely predictable scene with no outcome: Dave’s defined himself by now as an emotionally unhinged man. He’s pointing a loaded weapon at people. This is the point where he should have been dragged off to the hospital strapped to a gurney with an IV drip of Zoloft plugged into his arm, but the family just points and they shake their heads.

Nobody does anything for Dave, so it’s not surprising that he assaults somebody later. Not only does he assault somebody, he brags about it, and his family seems to think it’s pretty cool. Good on ya, Dave! Way to be a man! True, he assaulted a sexual predator, and he just beat the guy up instead of getting out his trusty bow. It was supposed to be a turning point in the movie. Dave was supposed to be on the up tick by then.

But it was too late. I didn’t like Dave, and the more I learned about him, the less I wanted to know him. I didn’t want to know Yuri, the guy Cage played in Lord of War, either, but the whole point of that movie was to paint Yuri as a bad guy. Unless I’m mistaken, the point of The Weatherman was to paint Dave as a good guy, only it didn’t work that way, from what I could see.

Monday, April 10th, 2006

Barb’s begun to pack already. To one side of our dining room there’s a little cluster of carefully-wrapped and stacked platters and plates in boxes and bags. “I wish we could move today!” she said on our walk yesterday. “If they’d let us move in today, I’d carry everything to Monona on my back!”

That’s the way I feel about it, too ... almost. I dragged the suitcases a couple of miles through O’Hare airport last July and I’m not quite ready to do it again. But I’m with you in spirit, sweetie!

 

Since we bought a house, we’ve had to work on the problem of our furniture. We have none. No, that’s not true, but I’ve gotten used to saying it all these years. We have a sofa set that’s pretty long in the tooth, though, so it needs replacing, and we needed some kind of hutch for the dining room because cupboard space is going to be limited in the kitchen.

Wandering one sales floor after another, admiring furniture I can’t afford, is possibly my least favorite way to spend several hours on a sunny Saturday or Sunday afternoon. If I could take home just one of the pieces I really like each time we go out, I’d feel a lot more like I was doing something, but that’s not going to happen until I can work my way up the ladder of success, which is probably a few years off.

Then there was Saturday. We visited a shop in Middleton where they sold used (excuse me, ‘pre-owned’) furniture on consignment. The shop was about the size of an old-fashioned grocery, or, to put it in modern terms, a 7-11, so we both laid eyes on the hutch the moment we walked in through the front door. It was Ethan Allen in cherry wood, well-kept, no scratches, all the hardware intact, and not incidentally only a third the cost of a new one.

There was the small problem of how to get it home, but they agreed to hold it until we moved on the 29th, so we have until then to figure that out.

 

I called Great Lakes Naval Facility this morning. I don’t know where that is, but they’ve got all our furnishing, clothes, pots & pans. I thanked them for holding onto it all this time, but added that I’d like it all back, now, please. As it turns out, they were only too willing to get it off their hands; they’ll be dropping it off the Monday after we close.

And shortly after I got off the phone with the good people at Great Lakes, our realtor called me to ask when we wanted to do a final walk-through of the house. “Can we do it tomorrow?” I wanted to ask. I’m a little jazzed about moving; does it show?

Tuesday, April 11th, 2006

The temperature got down to fifty-one last night. Not freezing, not a single digit, not a number with a negative. Fifty-one is a summer temperature, even during the day. People use words like “cool,” “pleasant” and “refreshing” to describe fifty-one. Summer is here.

The only thing I’ll miss about waking up to a cold house is turning the thermostat back up to sixty-eight in the morning and standing in front of the warm air duct as I towel myself off after a shower, a special treat. It’s possible we still have one or two of those mornings in store, but for myself, I could wait until next winter for them. It’s time to sleep with the windows open and wear short sleeves out on the street.

 

Yesterday was sunny and so warm that my light jacket was too much as I wandered among the crowd gathered on the lawn in front of the capital during my lunch break. About ten thousand people rallied there, protesting the immigration bill passed by the House (the federal House, not the state’s).

It was the first time I’ve been up close and personal to a demonstration of that size. They marched up West Washington Avenue, starting at about ten-thirty, and turned north up Carroll Street into the square; I watched from the seventh-floor window of our office as the first wave rolled in at about quarter to twelve. Thousands were still swelling up Washington when I joined the crowd at about five past twelve, and they all finally finished their march it to the square at about twenty past. The western corner of the capital’s lawn was filled shoulder to shoulder with white-shirted demonstrators.

I’ve seen other rallies on the steps of the capital before, usually a hundred or two, waving maybe a dozen signs, sometimes chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!” And I remember thinking, Well, that explains a few things, then.

Yesterday’s demonstration, though, was really very impressive. This is what democracy looks like. This is America. Pardon me a moment while I get all choked up about it; I’m only relieved that there’s still a cause important enough to bring people into the streets. Before this, I’d been more than a little worried that most people, the people you meet every day, had become too timid to take such a dramatic stand in public.

 

I thought Crash was a good movie, a very good movie. Reeeeally good. Geeze, I hate writing about movies I like. It’s a lot more fun to tear up movies I don’t care for. All I can say about Crash are things like this:

I never thought I’d see Tony Danza as menacing, but after his performance in Crash, I think he’d make a better Norman Bates than Anthony Hopkins ever did.

Don Cheadle’s line, “I can’t talk now, Mom, I’m having sex with a white woman,” delivered in perfect deadpan, puts him in a hall of fame with Clevon Little’s line from Blazing Saddles: “Where the white women at?” I’m not sure what to call that hall of fame ... or even if there should be one. But it seems to exist nonetheless.

I’ve never seen Thandie Newton before, but she’s a crackerjack actress who deserves more screen time.

I liked the way the characters spoke to one another. They were honest and direct with each other (sheesh, could they be direct), as well as to the audience. Very few of them spoke in dialect, and the few who did turned on a dime to rattle off a vernacular phrase. It was bait and switch, but it they used it sparingly.

It can’t be easy to write about the bigoted ways people behave toward one another, but the writers explored their characters’ constantly subtle biases as well as their blunt attacks with unusual deftness. They kept clichéd setups to a minimum, but worked in a few to challenge the audience’s ideas, or to illustrate how bigotry takes people by surprise. Not every scene worked well for me, but on the whole I thought the film wove a disturbingly convincing picture of how people look at each other through their own preconceived notions.

 

Movie audiences have complained about trailers for the film Flight 93, a drama about the passengers who attempted to overpower the hijackers of the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on September 11th. Some theaters have heard so many complaints that they’ve stopped showing the trailers, creating a ‘national discussion’ in print and broadcast news on the order of, “Is America ready for a movie about 9/11?”

I can’t help but cynically point out this amounts to a ton of free advertising.

I can’t help further pointing out that, no matter what a few sensitive people might say, this movie’s going to make millions. I could be wrong about that, but I think I will be only if it dies on the first weekend because it’s horribly bad on every level (badly written, badly directed, badly acted, etc etc). Hard to believe it will be, though. At worst, I think it’ll be predictable, and by that I don’t mean that we already know how it ends; I mean there’ll be no surprises. The passengers of Flight 93 have become national heroes, so there’s really not much they can do with character development except, well, make them into national heroes. I’d bet the yellow-ribbon crowd will flock to see it, but I’d be drop-dead surprised if Flight 93 gave us anything interesting to think about.

Wednesday, April 12th, 2006

It came down pouring rain shortly after I woke to the alarm this morning, and kept up until shortly after Barb dropped me off for work about three hours later. A good day for ducks. I used to think that was a dumb thing for codgers to say, but we saw five or six ducks on the way to work this morning, so I guess I can add one more codgerish saying to my repertoire.

The change of weather naturally brought me a monster headache, like hardhats in denim coveralls were driving red-hot rivets into the sides of my skull. I wish they wouldn’t do that. I only had to wait for the rain to stop and the sun to come out, though, for the pounding to end, and by then I’d paper-shuffled the morning away. Time for lunch. Today: organic ham sandwich. Beats the inorganic variety by a country ham mile.

 

I had to dump the IT class I was taking Tuesday nights. It moved so fast, I got lost. Simple ignorance of the subject did me in, a very weird feeling. Every chapter in the book seemed clear to me when I read it, and I could understand every idea the instructor demonstrated during lecture. Once we moved into the realm of arrays, though, piecing together a program and getting it to run became a dense, murky mystery. It got worse when we moved on to writing a program for a GUI (point-and-click windows); I didn’t know where to begin. Rather than have a poor grade on my transcript, I withdrew from the class last week.

 

While I had been in class on Tuesday nights, Barb stayed in town, volunteering at the office of Fair Wisconsin, a political group that seems to be made up entirely of people so young and enthusiastic they make Labrador puppies seem withered and shy. When my Tuesday night plans changed and I was free, I volunteered to help out, too. We both stayed in town after work, had a sandwich and a cup of coffee at Michelangelo’s and shuffled over next door to help out.

We spent last night calling people who’d signed up for the volunteer pool, asking them to help with a door-to-door canvass next weekend. I got three or four people to come out; Barb got about the same. When I finished up my first worksheet, and she didn’t have any more numbers to call, she came over to my table and started working up from the bottom of my second sheet, which is how we ended up working side-by-side when she got the giggles.

When we called, we were supposed to introduce ourselves by name and say we were working for Fair Wisconsin. Most of the time I suck at soliciting people on the phone, but we were calling people who had thrown their names into the hat; our calls weren’t unexpected, and they were pretty friendly, so I didn’t get as tongue-tied as I usually do.

With Barb sitting right next to me I had to plug an ear when I made a call, else the sound of her talking would foul up my phonological loop, which is a fancy-pants way of saying I’d start to say what she was saying. Most of the time I was fine, but on the second to the last call I introduced myself as “Dave Wisconski from Fair Okonsin,” and Barb exploded in a guffaw that I’m pretty sure they heard in Milwaukee. It was church-pew laughter, too; once she started, she couldn’t stop. I had to shoo her out of the room.

I didn’t think I’d ever get involved in a political group. When I think of politics, I think of run-at-the-mouth legislators with grins riveted to their faces who all promise less government and lower taxes, but that’s not what we’ve ever ended up with, is it? I’ve tried to stay away from these guys all my life, and now here I am in Madison, as close to them as I could get without living in the capital cafeteria (a favorite crash pad for dozens of Mad City’s street people) and volunteering to help defeat one of the many goofy laws they want to enact this silly season. Life’s taken me in some funny directions.

Fair Wisconsin was organized to talk with voters about how the proposed “defense of marriage” amendment will hurt everybody, not just homosexuals (or, more particularly, LGBTQs, which I stands for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders and queers, putting it in the running for most technically accurate but worst possible abbreviation ever conjured up by anybody on earth). In states where a “defense of marriage” amendment was enacted, victims of abuse have found that their legal rights have been crippled or eliminated entirely. Doesn’t seem like a step forward, if you ask me, but then I’m the guy who got lost in an introductory programming class.

I’m a little lost on the whole “defense of marriage” idea. Most people against these amendments describe them as “too far-reaching,” I suppose because the laws reach many more people than they were intended for. As laws to protect the sanctity of marriage, though, they’re a little lame, when you think about them. If the purpose were to restore the purity of marriage, why haven’t any laws against divorce been enacted? Why are judges still allowed to perform marriage? Could it be the purpose of the amendment is not exactly what legislators say it is? (Was the pope a member of the Hitler youth?)

Barb didn’t exactly have to talk me into staying in town. I’m used to Long Tuesdays now, and if volunteering a few hours will help shoot down anything that schlemiel Sensenbrenner’s involved in, I don’t mind. We stayed until about eight before scooting on home.

Thursday, April 13th, 2006

I woke from a dream this morning in which I woke up in the middle of the night (stay with me, now) because I was too hot to sleep until I peeled about 500 pounds of heavy winter quilts from the bed, one after another, until there was a pile about six feet tall. It was a little like that dream you have if you go to bed drunk and can’t stop thinking about water. You dream about rushing, ice-cold mountain rivers and clear, smooth-surfaced lakes. Sometimes you want to drink from them and can’t; sometimes you’re standing under a waterfall with your mouth open wide as a garbage can, funneling more water down your throat than you’ve ever drunk before, but feeling strangely unsatisfied.

The dream about the quilts wasn’t exactly like that, though. We didn’t got to sleep last night with winter quilts on the bed; we put those away a week or so ago. It was more the spirit of the moment. I’ve been so deliriously happy about the coming of spring that I could break into song, and I guess my inner child wanted to celebrate, too, with a goofy dream about the quilts.

It’s shirtsleeve weather in Wisconsin once again. People have been jogging around town in shorts for weeks now, but they’re as crazy as the bicyclists who’ve been riding on icy roads all winter long, and not a very good barometer of the seasons. When the office workers change into shorts and t-shirts for their lunch-hour constitutionals, that’s a pretty good indication.

There’s one older fellah I see every day walking around the square who should be one of the benchmarks used by the national weather service; if the temps are the slightest bit on the chilly side of warm, he’s wrapped up in one of those puffy down-filled nylon coats that makes him look like a walking hand grenade, his hands and plunged into the thickest pair of mittens I’ve ever seen, and his head is wrapped in a scarf. Gradually over the past two or three weeks, he’s been emerging from his cocoon; the other day he was in a summer jacket when everybody else was carrying theirs over their shoulders. When the older fellah does that, I’ll know summer’s here.

The restaurant where Barb and I stopped for dinner last night had their front door propped open to let in the evening’s fresh air, and after we got home we went out for an after-dinner stroll in short sleeves — first stroll of the season!

 

Bunky’s is a little restaurant on Atwood Avenue that we drove past twice every day, once on the way to work and once on the way home. At least once a week one of us said to the other, as we passed by, “We ought to have dinner there some day,” even though we knew nothing about the place. For reasons that we couldn’t explain, though, we liked the look of it.

Well, last night, as we were equivocating over what we should make for dinner when we got home, Barb said she was in the mood for something completely different, and mentioned we had a few bucks on hand to try a new restaurant. As there was no restaurant called “Monty Python’s,” we considered the places that were on the way home, and the name of Bunky’s came up.

And the name of the pasta place on Willy Street. And the Italian place in Monona, and the Black Bear in Cottage Grove. When Barb starts to consider all the options, she turns into a runaway train. Even after she says, “I’ll leave it up to you,” she keeps on pouring out options.

“Bunky’s sounds good,” I said, after she ‘left it up to me.’

“Or we could get a sandwich at Java Cat,” she suggested.

“How about we stick with Bunky’s?”

“Okay. I just don’t know what I’m in the mood for. The Blue Plate Diner’s right up the street from Bunky’s, and there’s a Chinese place across the way. You like Chinese.”

“I like Chinese,” I agreed with her. “Do you want Chinese?”

“It’s up to you,” she said.

“Then it’s Bunky’s.”

She kept revisiting her considerations, adding another restaurant to list and going over the pros and cons of each, until I pulled into the parking lot of Bunky’s about ten minutes later.

As we didn’t know what to expect, our surprise could’ve gone either way. Thank goodness it was a pleasant surprise. Bunky’s serves excellent Mediterranean food in a relaxed atmosphere. I had a plate of lamb kebabs on a bed of rice with hummus on the side; Barb had a plate of freshly-made ravioli. The décor of the dining rooms looked as though they’d been haunting estate sales for years; the walls were hung with baroque knick-knacks (you can get a hint of what it looks like at their web site, but photos don’t do the place justice).

Friday, April 14th, 2006

I stood in the shower for five or ten minutes, trying to think of a way to describe the sound of fist-sized hail falling on the roof of the house. Bricks? Hammers? Cars careening off the highway into the walls? Nothing but the real thing puts into words the sound of ice chunks as big as baseballs slamming into the house, except maybe baseballs shot from bazookas.

The hail started falling shortly after the lightning began to intensify, but just before the rain began, taking me by surprise. The first chunk hit the house all by its lonesome, so it really did sound like one of the neighborhood vandals threw a brick against the wall before he took off running. I shrugged it off and went back to reading my newspaper, until the next one hit near the back of the house; then, I thought about calling the police.

Quite a few more came crashing down onto the roof before it occurred to me it might be hail. I’ve been through intense hail storms before, but never seen hail any larger than pea-sized. This stuff was killer hail, the kind that Zeus might’ve used to crush an invading barbarian army. It wasn’t solid ice, though, it was more like slush balls; it hit the ground with a solid thump, but splattered instead of bounced, the way melons do if you throw them from the third-story window of a college dorm. Not that I would know.

Tim volunteered to run out into the hail for five bucks, and as funny as it might have been to see the look on his face when he got about ten feet from the protection of the front door and realized how stupid he was to think he could stand being pelted with jagged ice, I would have been an irresponsible parent to take advantage of his ignorance. And his mother would have killed me.

We got two or three minutes of the big stuff; the storm ran down its batteries almost right away, and after the rain started coming down the hail tapered off and was lost in the downpour before it stopped altogether. The excitement was over. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

 

I’m going to declare the crazy hail storm and downpour another of the Signs of Spring and add it to the list, at the risk of making it too long. Another was all the short-sleeved casual shirts people went to work in today. I celebrated the first jacketless casual Friday by dressing in chinos and a beach bum cotton shirt, pressed to make it appear respectable. Nobody’s buying the ‘respectable’ part, but that’s an accusation aimed more at me than the shirt. Roger wore a subdued Hawaiian shirt, not the kind splashed with red and yellow parrots but Kelly green palm fronds. It was up to Jason to wear a bright yellow and orange Hawaiian shirt.

Of course the epitome of casual are the college students, who in warm weather wear as little as possible. For some of them, it appears to be a matter of not wanting to think much about what they’re wearing, especially the young men, who wander the streets in baggy shorts and t-shirts, which, to judge from appearances, spent the night wadded in the bottom of a laundry bag. Badly torn shorts are especially fashionable; the more hairy booty on view to the public, the more chic mode the clothing. A few of the crazier men were dressed this way a week or two ago when temps were still in the low 40s. The young women at least keep their wardrobes clean, but the more slender among them seem to think they’re much smaller than they are, forcing their way into t-shirts and jeans a grinch-hearted two sizes too small, leaving on display many curves and hollows that decency previously didn’t allow. And those are the overdressed women. Some cover only the parts of them that legal language demands, using ridiculously flimsy scraps of fabric held in place by methods invisible to the eye. I can force myself not to stare, but anybody would wonder.

I myself dressed a bit too casually for office decorum, wearing boat shoes to work today. I wasn’t thinking of being rebellious, only comfortable; the boat shoes I have are made of dark nylon mesh, keeping my feet so nice and cool I’d wear shoes like these all the time if they came in a more understated color. Unfortunately for the comfort of my feet, the corporate dress code at work doesn’t allow ‘sneakers,’ so this is the one and only time I’ll be allowed to get away with appearing at work in them.

Saturday, April 15th, 2006

I am so disappointed in the Salvation Army. (Makes tsk-tsking sound with tongue.)

There are very few charities I’ll give money to, mostly because I can’t stand it when they call me back every two or three months to “remind” me to donate again. What the hell’s up with that? I know it’s immodest to talk about the goodness of my heart, but that’s what I’d like to feel when giving to a charity. I don’t want any thanks and I sure as hell don’t want anybody calling me to ask for more.

After we moved to Madison I got a call soliciting a donation for a local policeman’s fraternal order. When people call me on my time at my phone number to beg for money, I usually tell them I’m not interested, I don’t want to hear from them again, and I hang up directly. For the guardians of our fair city, though, I made an exception.

Two weeks later, the firemen called me. I didn’t want to sound like a grinch, so I sort of chuckled and said something like, “I just separated from the military, I’ve got quite a few moving expenses, and I just gave to the hurricane relief fund and the police, so I’m a little strapped for cash right now.” Was he understanding? Did he say something like, “I know what you mean, fellah; I’ll catch you later,” and apologize for calling? No, they never apologize for calling, and his answer was along the lines of, “You’re obviously a very giving person, so I’m sure you can find a way to give just a few dollars for a good cause.”

The deepest realms of my bowels hold red-hot reserves of hate for solicitors who presume my donation is a foregone conclusion. I’ve never resorted to blowing air horns or police whistles into the mouthpiece, but if I did, this is where they’ve reached the point that would make me want to hurt them. Moving on to flattery or guilt might work on other people, but it only cranks me off, which is what I told the firemen just before I hung up.

Two weeks after that, the police called again. Or not again, as it turns out; this was a different fraternal order, or auxiliary, or friends of the police. Whatever. I gave him the same spiel I gave the firemen and asked them not to call, but it was no use. Give a couple dollars to a panhandler on the street and word gets around; pretty soon you can’t walk the dozen steps from work to the doughnut shop without hearing, “Lend me some spare change?” Lend? Okay, how does four bits at twenty percent sound to you? I’ll have to ask for a lien on your shoes and socks as collateral, though.

I am not a Scrooge. Okay, maybe a little; what’s so wrong with work houses? (Kidding.) I want to give a few bucks every paycheck to a benevolent fund; what I don’t want is a phone call “reminding” me to donate again.

The Salvation Army seemed like a good bet. They did that ring-a-ding thing at the grocery store every year, but they didn’t send me anything in the mail, and they never called me on the phone, so I mailed them a tenner with a letter asking them never to solicit me for more. I got a brief thank-you letter with an added note that they would not contact me further, and the deal was sealed. No calls. No more letters. We understood each other, or so I thought until last week when I got a fill-in-the-blank form letter; not as presumptuous as a check-the-box letter with the amounts already filled in, but not per our deal, either.

Criminy, do I have to get mad at the Salvation Army? What’s the country coming to when you can’t count on the Soldiers of God to keep their promises? I don’t know whether to shit or go blind, another codger phrase that never made sense to me until now.

 

An benevolent group that never bothers you for more money, by the way, is Heifer International. You give them money, they give a cow to somebody in a far-off land. If you can’t afford to give a cow, you can give a llama, or a sheep, or a flock of chickens — the chickens and geese are surprisingly affordable. The people who get the cows and sheep and llamas and chickens establish use them to establish their farms. It’s the most practically useful gift you could give them; how cool is that?

Sunday, April 16th, 2006

We didn’t go to Jimmy Buffett night at the Harmony Bar in Schenk-Atwood last night. Jimmy wasn’t there; he’s passed the point in his career when he plays at neighborhood venues like the Harmony Bar, and ticket prices are usually many times more than an eight-dollar donation at the door. Chuck Bayuk and the Drunken Sailors were standing in for him, but that was good enough for Barb, a long-time fan of Buffett’s songs. We trolled the aisles at Goodwill for loud Hawaiian shirts to make a proper night of it.

But we never got there. We tooled over to Fitchburg in the morning to spend the day with family at Jim & Sue’s, and lost track of time.

Talk about an excellent venue for a get-together. They had a deck out back with a grape arbor overhead; the sun shone out of a clear blue sky and a warm breeze played through the branches of the trees around the yard. Mom and Tom came down from The Frozen North for the afternoon, and Carrie drove in from Dodgeville. Mikey woke hours earlier than normal and emerged from his basement lair to help Jim grill salmon on the grill out back while we all settled in to a circle of wicker chairs and played catch-up.

We sat down for dinner at a two long tables pushed together, almost like in the old days. Of course, way back when the card table was set up in the living room for us kids, while all the adults sat around the dinner table. I’ve since been promoted, but I wonder if the adults revisit that decision on occasion. Carrie was called on to say grace but declined, so I volunteered, thinking I could remember enough of it to make it sound good. Boy, was I wrong. “Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy guests...”? It sounded right, like “Harold be thy name,” but I should have learned my lesson all those years ago; I was one of those guys who sang lyrics to pop songs that they never had. In my defense, though, the lyrics they did have usually didn’t make much sense to start with, but I have to throw myself on the mercy of the court for not knowing twenty-two simple words for saying grace before a meal. In future I resolve to keep my mouth shut, or stick with something even simpler, perhaps along the lines of, “Praise the Lord and pass the salt.”

Dinner conversation ran seamlessly into after-dinner conversation until the late hours of the afternoon, when Mom and Tom had to take their leave and start the long drive home to Manawa. We gave them a proper Midwestern send-off: In this neck of the woods you can’t just say goodbye at the front door; you customarily walk across the yard with them and down to the end of the driveway, chatting about the weather or the drive ahead of them or both. At the curb you possibly make an observation about how well the car’s holding up. You share a final few words through rolled-down windows, then step back to the curb and wave as they drive away. It’s also de rigueur to linger in the yard a while after guests have gone, although if you’ve already covered the topic of the weather you’ll have to steer the conversation elsewhere.

From the yard to the garage, then, where Jim and Sue gave away a trove of their unused, or sometimes just their less-used items to Carrie and Darren. They tried to give their bikes to Barb and I, but we already had bikes, so they offered us a bike carrier for the car, and when I balked, they promised to come get it whenever they wanted it back. We got more out of yesterday’s visit to Jim & Sue’s than we did to the last estate sale we visited.

We saw Carrie and Darren off in the usual way, then retired to the living room where we formed a circle of chairs around the sofa and told stories until the hour was far later than any of us suspected. Isn’t that usually the case when you’re in good company, sharing blue-ribbon conversation? One story leads to another until you hobble off to use the conveniences during a lull and you happen to catch a look at the kitchen clock and think, Have we been talking that long? Even Tim enjoyed the stories, although I got the impression from time to time he’d rather be getting them from an Instant Message pop-up window on a computer monitor, which is all right for him, but I’d rather do it the old-fashioned way.

 

Tim cornered Barb and I in the dining room last night to break the news to us that he intends to go to Madison Area Technical College after high school to study mechanics. That wasn’t really breaking news; he’s been dropping not-so-subtle hints for weeks. For instance, just last week he wanted to know if we’d be disappointed in him if he went to a technical school instead of a university. A dad would have to be pretty thick to miss that sign.

His announcement last night was a lead-in to the question children everywhere pose to their parents when they make that all-important decision regarding the vocational training that will see them through the rest of their lives: “Can I live with you guys while I’m going to school?”

We’d not only anticipated that question, we’d brought it up many times already, but I guess Tim had thought of it strictly in hypothetical terms up till now, in the same way, I guess, as he’d thought of going away to college in a far-off state; something he was aware of in an unconscious way, but not yet in sight. He’s gotten close enough to the end of his sophomore year, though, to make the light at the end of the tunnel seem quite a bit brighter. The end is nigh. What’ll he do? And, almost as important, where will he sleep?

Well, we’ve made jokes before about what happens to him the day after he graduates: We’d planned to change the locks on the doors, leave fifty bucks in an envelope in the mail box he could put toward a bus ticket, and we promised to write him at least once a month. That was all in fun, of course. Joking aside, we assured him once again that he’d better have all his clothes packed the night before he graduated if he didn’t want to find them on the lawn when he got home. Ha! Ha! Kidding! We’d never leave them on the lawn! We’d give them away to Goodwill! It’s tax deductible!

Monday, April 17th, 2006

Yesterday became the day to make a start at anything we’d been putting off for too long. It was pouring down rain all day. Not first thing; it was overcast but hinting that it might brighten up later, an unkind tease on any other day but a boon on the last day of the weekend. A brightening Sunday morning is a big favor any way you look at it, the better to ritually disembowel and consume the Sunday newspaper. After you’re done with that and you have to start thinking about getting ready for Monday, it doesn’t matter much if the clouds lower and a drenching downpour begins to fall.

After reading the paper and writing some drivel, I spent my Sunday scrubbing the grunge from the mustier places in the bathroom, and washing clothes. The less said about that, the sooner it’ll recede to dim memory.

The desktop computer had been infected by some kind of malicious programming a week or two ago. Tim thought he got rid of it, but whatever he found must have left behind an especially highly-concentrated lump of evil that was continually connecting to faraway servers with names like “existential-applications.co.uk” or, more cryptically, “thriptymxlplx.ei.kg.nl”. The message traffic from these loudmouth servers through our computer was so heavy that it would clog our router and bring the wireless connections to a screeching halt, raising a great hew and cry from the laptop users elsewhere in the house. Tim would be down there, happily gaming away until one of us came stomping down the stairs to demand that he either disconnect from the network or shut off the computer entirely. He got tired of that right quick.

After emerging from bed yesterday sometime around ten o’clock and wolfing four or five bowls of delicious and nutritious Cap’n Crunch (“An excellent source of Vitamin B! And a full week’s supply of sugar in every bowl!”), Tim attacked the computer problem with the single-minded tenacity of a pit bull. He tottered upstairs to have dinner, or occasionally use the bathroom, but outside of those distractions he was locked in battle and didn’t let go until bed time. I miss having stamina like that.

If only it had paid off. Well, it did; the router wasn’t too busy answering calls from other servers to handle our traffic any longer, but before Tim re-installed the software on the computer he copied all the music he had on the hard drive to CDs. The copies wouldn’t play, and he couldn’t figure out why. He combed the internet for six months to piece that collection together; the look on his face was like a parent who’d lost a child.

Barb built a respectably tall pile of boxed books, tableware and clothing; it’s propping up a wall in the dining room. I think she may be getting a tiny bit more excited each day in anticipation of the move. Either that, or I’m projecting.

 

LATER: Tim found that the computer’s problem was a missing audio driver. He called the Microsoft help line and “a really nice lady” pointed him to a web site where he could download the necessary software that patched up the problem in a trice. This so tickled Tim that he called me at work to tell me all about it. He phoned me to have a conversation about something that pleased him. Remember when people used to do that?

I shouldn’t be such a smart ass; I haven’t rung up anybody for a chat in years, either, and I don’t have the excuse that I’m overseas any more. Phoning from England or Japan wasn’t expensive; in fact, we subscribed to calling plans that made it cheaper to call my mother in Manawa, Wisconsin, from Misawa, Japan, than from Madison, Wisconsin. My theory on that is the phone company probably routes the call through a satellite no matter where you’re calling from, to justify shooting them up there in the first place.

What made calling from overseas was the time delay that crept into the transmission. Those were apparently the calls they routed through the trans-oceanic cable, which has been laying on the sea bottom for such a long time it’s fossilized, slowing electrical transmissions. Mom would say, “Hi,” and I would answer, “Hi, how’re you doing?” and, at the same time, she would be asking, “How are you?” because there was half a second time lag that sounded like a lull in the conversation, so she felt she had to jump in again. We had connections that were so bad we sounded like ham radio operators shouting through heavy static in the ether. “How! Are! You! Over!”

It’s more than a bit ironic that I’m in the habit now of not calling anybody in my family, because one of the things I was looking forward to after returning to the States and settling down was chatting with the kin folk more often, or at least more than two or three times a year. In the last nine months I’ve called my brother on the phone just once, and the conversation I had with him before that was across his kitchen table in Dallas, Texas, almost two years ago.

Auntie Sue, who could be my polar opposite in the telephony department, couldn’t be more connected with her family if they were chained to one another, or exchanged thought balloons through some fantastic mind meld. Every member of her brood has a cell phone on a common calling plan, except Jim, who has his own opinions about staying in touch.

We briefly considered getting cell phones shortly after we arrived. The convenience of always having a phone appealed to us, and giving a cell phone number to prospective employers instead of a motel desk number would’ve made job hunting a lot easier, but we didn’t have to talk about it too long before we began to consider the detrimental effects of never being away from a phone. It’s like a horror story; anybody can reach you at any time no matter where you are. Kinder just to shoot a guy.

The fact that there wasn’t a major cell phone provider that would let us subscribe for less than two years only helped kill the idea almost entirely dead, but not quite: Barb bought one of those pay-as-you-go phones. She says it’s only for emergencies. I believe the examples she gave were: To call for help if our car, the most dependable model Toyota ever made, were to break down along a bad stretch of road. Or, to take an urgent call, for instance if our son’s high school had to tell us where Tim was hospitalized after suffering a myocardial infarction. The wiseass in me feels it necessary to point out that the only thing she’s ever used it for was to call Tim on the way home and shout, “Pick up the phone! It’s really important!” because Tim screens all the calls. (Can you call it screening if he never picks up?)

Tuesday, April 18th, 2006

The count’s come down to a single digit! Do you see that? I can’t stand it! This is so exciting I could just ... Aw, nuts, I did. I peed myself. ‘scuze me.

 

Tim talked his mom into taking him to the store last night to buy a fresh supply of clothes for the summer. She traded her favor for dinner. When he whined about having to cook (and I use the term very broadly, because all he had to do was heat up a pot of rice while simmering a pre-cooked sausage in the skillet), Barb dangled the carrot of new clothes over his head. “If you want to go shopping ...,” she said, leaving the ending up to his imagination. He caved.

They went straight to Kohl’s (“Everything’s Always On Sale!”) and each of them came back with one of those shopping bags the size of a hot air balloon, stuffed full of clothes. “I got six shirts for the price of three,” Tim crowed. The frugal gene hasn’t skipped a generation in my family since we emerged from the Great Depression. A selection of polo shirts in conservatively tasteful striped blue and white surprised the hell out of me. He seems to do that every time he buys clothes. I know he has to wear the baggy pants to fit in, and because that’s all they make now, but he’s just a few months shy of sixteen. I expect him to start dressing in rags any day. Polo shirts on a teenaged boy don’t compute, although to make up for it, he does pile them on top of his chest of drawers instead of putting them away.

Tim’s no clothes horse, he only seems that way after our experience of watching Sean develop his own fashion style, which in a nutshell is to buy “pre-worn” clothing in thrift shops and wear them until they fall from his body in tatters. Maybe you’ve heard a comedian or read a humorist who makes jokes about guys who own underwear with holes big enough to step through. They’re talking about Sean. Not only will the man will throw away nothing, he’ll go ballistic if he catches you throwing something out, although ultimately the only suggested uses he can dream up would require devoting most of your life to learning new trades, such as apprenticing to a cobbler to make shoes from discarded tires and rugs (“You could make shoes from that!” has become another way of saying, “Don’t throw that away” in our family).

Tim, on the other hand, will buy clothes that he will refuse to wear as soon as the next day. That particular episode was an anomaly but an especially frustrating clothes-shopping experience that resulted in much gnashing of clenched teeth, shaking of upraised fists and promises that the next set of clothes we bought for him would be five white button-down shirts and five pairs of straight black slacks. He was careful not to go quite that far again, although there was a time during his latest growth spurt when he wouldn’t wear pants after just four or five months because they were “too small,” a mind-boggling complaint because, as far as we could see, they were still baggy enough to hold two kids his size.

They didn’t buy baggy pants last night; the bargain on the polos was enough, and I think Tim grabbed a package of undershirts, too, because his cat is apparently eating them while he sleeps. He tried to pin the gradual but non-stop disappearance of his undershirts on me, accusing me several times of wearing them myself, but I don’t feel comfortable wearing crew necks, the only undershirts he’ll buy, so that didn’t fly. The clothes dryer eats socks, as all clothes driers do, but the undershirts seem to disappear before they ever get to the drier, so that’s not the culprit. It’s a puzzle that remained unsolved as we went to press.

 

The furnace came on this morning after I showered. I’m hoping that’ll be an increasingly rare treat in the coming weeks until it doesn’t occur at all until winter. (I’m talking about the furnace, not the shower. Yuk.)

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

I’m so easily distracted. I made a visit to the library during my lunch hour to look up information about submitting proposals to Wisconsin magazines, but got stuck in the CD aisle along the way, thumbing through jazz albums. The central branch had a respectable selection of jazz from the earliest recordings of Jelly Roll Morton’s rinkity-tink piano to the silky-smooth saxophone of Stan Getz. How do you walk past that without giving it at least a once over? I couldn’t possibly, so I gave myself fifteen minutes to pick out a few to record to my play list.

Tim bought an MP3 player with more memory and lots of cool bells and whistles, and left his older, inadequate player to me, bless his heart. I could see why he didn’t like it as much; I could cram only a couple hundred songs into its feeble memory. One morning as I was dressing for work, I tucked it into my shirt pocket after loading it with a mix of tunes, and listened to it while I did scut jobs around the office. It’s turned out to be a great way to help pass the time while punching through reams of data entry or filing bales of paperwork; I could load up albums I hadn’t listened all the way through, or ever, or try out new albums I wouldn’t normally give a lot of time to.

After getting distracted in the aisle of CDs yesterday, I brought home Volumes 3 and 4 of the Library of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll Morton. I’d read about them in a newspaper article and meant to go looking for them but, as I already pointed out, I’m easily distracted and never had gotten around to it. Jelly Roll is considered one of the fathers of jazz music, and back in 1938 somebody convinced Morton to sit down in the Library of Congress and record dozens of his musical pieces on record there. The sessions were informal and Morton interjects a bit of commentary here and there while playing, about the music, about the whiskey (he’s apparently got a bottle on the piano to take an occasional snort), or to provide a little back-story as he goes along.

A ‘best of’ recording of Stan Getz came in a two-disk set. You know the creamy sound of Getz’s saxophone if you’ve ever heard The Girl From Ipanema; easy listening stations seem to play his version most often. I love that kind of sexy piano-bar music, and when I learned that Getz did, too, I punched STAN GETZ into Pandora’s music service and liked what I heard so much that I played it happily ever after. The ‘best of’ album covers recordings made in the mid- to late-50s, and I haven’t heard a disappointing note on the album.

 

Tom Cruise is living proof that aliens from outer space walk amongst us in human form, relaying signals from the mother ship to gullible people through the magic of television and movies — which would be more than a little ironic, if what I’ve heard about scientology is true.

I must be one of the few people on the planet who doesn’t see the holy glowing aura of Tom Cruise. Every week there seems to be another television special or personality profile in the Sunday paper to lay before us the wonders of Tom, but to me, the emperor has no clothes. I don’t begrudge him his fame; it’s only that I don’t understand it. He’s fairly good-looking, I guess, but no great shakes. As an action star he always looks like he’s wound so tight he’s about to explode, especially when he runs full-tilt. God, can that man run. But when it comes to acting, he’s as wooden as a decoy duck.

And in person, unscripted, nearly everything he says makes him sound like a barking loony. I would have thought all the babbling he’s done since he hooked up with Katie Holmes would have snuffed his career, but each bizarre utterance that trips from his tongue only makes him more famous, if that’s possible.

People of Earth, your attention, please: This man is not normal. His bright, twinkling eyes are in fact mind rays with the power to cloud your mind. Resist the magnetism of Cruise! Snap out of your rapture before all is lost!

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

Look at that Seven! Just look at it! A week to go!

 

I’ve gone and pissed off the Fraternal Order of Police. You know what this means, don’t you? By next week I’ll be doing hard time in the crowbar hotel for littering, or maybe parking on an expired meter. Just so you know.

They called again tonight soliciting donations. Just last Saturday I was writing about charities calling me at home to beg me for money. The FOP have called me more often than anybody else, and tonight I told the guy I only make donations to organizations that agree never to call me at home to ask for more, so there was no way they were going to get more of my money, and I asked if he could please take my name off the list. I’m thinking there is no way I’ll be allowed to drive into town tomorrow without having to perform a roadside sobriety test.

 

We had gorgeous weather here today, just gorgeous. No other way to describe it. I wonder why I’m so up on the weather? I’m thinking there’s a spore or microbial parasite that’s communicated by a fresh, warm breeze and I’m especially susceptible to it. Whatever it is, I got an extra-large dose of it today by strolling around the square before stopping in the library to drivel a little bit, fetch my e-mail and grab the latest copy of Isthmus before bolting right back out the door into the street.

The walks and lawn around the capital were swarming with school children all morning long, their spring clothes a burst of kaleidoscope colors. Most of them are from out of town, you see, and many of them seem to have dressed up for their field trip to the state capital (well, many of the girls, anyway; boys have just that one uniform look now, brown baggy shorts and a white tee). When was the last time you went somewhere that impressed you so much you dressed up for it? “We’re in the city now,” I heard one of the teachers scold a kid for wandering too far from the pack. Yes, the big city of Madison. Better keep a hand on your wallet, too.

I went for my stroll just as the kids finished up their lunch. They raced in twos and threes across the pavement from the lawn to the trash can, timing their trips so that they crossed immediately in front of me. How do kids do that so flawlessly?

Friday, April 21st, 2006

My e-mail software went on the fritz again. How is it that Microsoft built an empire based on software that spontaneously breaks down every other week? Just asking.

 

I stopped in the library during my noon hour and stayed just long enough to upload drivel, then hied out the door as fast as my stick legs would take me to make the most of yet another gorgeous spring day. The forecast called for thunderstorms by tonight, so I wanted to enjoy as much of the good weather as possible, but I didn’t want to let the noon hour pass without posting the countdown icon (a suitably sunny one, at that).

The thunderstorms never came. I took a lazy stroll around the square as clouds blotted out the sun every so often; in the afternoon a battleship-gray overcast smothered the city, but the sun peeked out again later on.

 

I had lots to do at work this morning, but practically nothing in the afternoon. Even phone calls from customers trying to puzzle out how they missed a payment never kept me busy for longer than it took to transfer them to a credit counselor. It was lower than low-stress; it was coma-inducing. To keep myself awake, I made copies and filed away paperwork that I’d been holding in reserve for a dead day like this. Then I tweaked a couple projects I had worked on earlier in the week. I reviewed the end-of-day balancing procedures for the fourth or fifth time since Bill gave me a copy on Monday. Then I hit a wall. I could keep that up only so long before I couldn’t pretend to work any more, gave up and surfed the news on the internet the rest of the afternoon.

Speaking of news on the internet, this month marks the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. The BBC has set up a deeply-detailed web site recounting the accident, revisiting the power station (which still functions), and talking to people who lived inside and out of the exclusion zone. The stories are accompanied by a flurry of very evocative photos. The main story has a particularly interesting side-story: Flora and fauna flourish inside the exclusion zone, after the initial decimation of intense radiation. With no people about, the animals and plants have taken over. And not only that, a few thousand stubborn Ukranians moved back to the zone and have lived there all these years. It's a story well worth a look.

 

One of the specialties of a local plastic surgeon I heard advertised on the radio left me a bit puzzled. The ad targeted women who wanted to get their “pre-baby bodies back.” As I’ve never personally given birth my darn self, maybe I wasn’t meant to grasp the enormity of the situation (although in the strictest sense, I think I understood too much). I can see why some women might want breast augmentation or a tummy tuck, but an eyebrow lift? How’s that necessary? How’s it even possible that people will hand a doctor thousands of dollars, cheerfully say, “Please slice up my face; I want to wear a look of permanent surprise,” and happily walk among us with the results of their surgery?

And how does having a baby make your eyebrows sag? Do I even want to know? Nah, forget I asked.

Saturday, April 22nd, 2006

I asked Barb to the prom. She turned me down. Story of my life.

WOLX, Madison’s golden oldies radio station, will host a prom at Wisconsin Dells next weekend. I asked Barb to go, just for yuks, and she gave me a “you gotta be kiddin’” look so scathing that it would’ve made a whole bed of spring daffodils give up and die.

Okay, then. We probably wouldn’t have much steam left over for a trip out to the Dells and a night of dancing; we’ll be more than a little busy that weekend anyway, unpacking boxes we’ve moved from as near as Cottage Grove and as far away as Misawa, Japan. Get ready for another update on our move to our new house in Monona.

Well, “new” to us. In fact, it’s more than fifty-five years old, so I suppose the technically proper term is “used” or, to use the vulgate American coinage, “pre-owned.” Doesn’t matter to us. We’re so jazzed to finally have a home after seven years of government-owned housing, motels and rentals that we’re as chatty as six-year-olds wired on Mountain Dew and candy bars. You couldn’t stand to be around any of us these days.

Barb and I met Wilma at this house this afternoon for a “walk-through inspection” to make sure the seller fixed all the things we asked him to. He had, but making sure took all of five minutes. We spent thirty or forty minutes more wandering from room to room, trying to picture where the furniture would go, and generally feeling good about finding a nesting place. I’m already prioritizing a list of DIY projects for the yard and around the house; I think Barb’s got a mental picture of every nook and cranny she’s going to attack with a scrub brush and a bottle of Mister Clean. We’re not just focused, we’re obsessed.

The closing is Friday. If I somehow make it through the week without suffering a nervous mental collapse, it’ll be a miracle.

 

Today was not only the day of the home inspection, it was also the first day of the Dane County Farmer’s Market. To get the most out of this perfect alignment of stars and planets, we headed into town early to treat ourselves to breakfast before we started the prescribed counterclockwise shuffle around the capital. By ‘early,’ I mean we hit the road at eight-thirty, an hour or two before Barb usually wakes up on a Saturday but an hour and a half after the more dedicated (or, as we like to say, crazy) people start shopping at six o’clock in the morning! I like fresh veggies and ostrich burgers as much as the next guy, but there’s still plenty left for us at ten o’clock. I don’t see the point of getting up before daylight.

The restaurant in the lobby of the Orpheum Theater started serving breakfast at nine o’clock. The Orpheum’s one of those cavernous movie houses from way back. It’s survived long after the destruction or ‘remodeling’ of other grand old cinemas (such as the Capitol, which used to be right across the street; it’s been assimilated into the fine arts center) because the owners do things like, well, serve a delicious sit-down breakfast in the lobby. The venue’s very pleasant, even if the architecture of yesteryear doesn’t make you all weepy and fill you with nostalgia for a world you never knew, like some people I could name. I can’t help myself; I love places like this, and I get all warm and fuzzy whenever somebody can find a way to preserve some of them.

After breakfast, the market. It was so busy that people spilled into the streets and stalled traffic, especially where State Street connected with capital square, which is where Barb and I became one with the throng that leapfrogged from booth to booth up Carroll Street. (It’s pointless to try to walk in the other direction; you’d be smooshed like a bug before you went ten yards.) Barb went all googy-eyed over the herbs and veggies she wanted to grow in our soon-to-be yard, and made a mental list of plants and pots and gardening tools to buy over the next two weeks.

I went straight for the cookies. Two or three bakeries sell cookies and cakes at these markets that are irresistible, or at least they are to me. I limited myself to just one chocolate chip cookie today without straining myself; I was still stuffed from breakfast.

 

One of my nephews called last night to give Barb the news that he’s going to enlist in the Marine Corps. I asked him a few polite questions: What job specialty will you chose? How long will your term of enlistment be? Polite stuff like that. I was only trying to be respectful of his decision. After all, he called Barb to win her support; he didn’t ask for this old fart’s cockeyed advice.

I figured it would be better that I bit my tongue. I hold the trophy for being World’s Worst Salesman; my arguments are usually derisive or inflammatory instead of persuasive, not the kind of attitude you ought to adopt when trying to dissuade anybody from a decision like this. And can there be a creature on earth harder to argue with than a teenager? You know there isn’t.

That’s how I talked myself out of saying anything substantial to this guy. I asked a few polite questions, kept my opinions to myself, and my bland response has bothered me ever since. I didn’t even try to engage him in a discussion about it. At the very least, I could have asked him, “What do you want to do that for?” not in an accusatory tone, but as a legitimate question. I wouldn’t care if he didn’t answer it, so long as he made himself a list of pros and cons and thought about them for a little while. I should do at least that much.

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

Freaking cats! Motherless freaking crybaby whining rotten manipulating noisy disrespectful cats! When does a cat think it’s too early to wake up the humans for some cat chow? Never! They used to wait until five-thirty, but that became five, which became four-thirty, and this morning they woke me up at four! Four o-freaking clock! The other O-folk can sleep through the ruckus kicked up by two hungry cats, but I can’t, so I did what I always do every time I wake up: I peed. This turned out to be an excellent smokescreen because the cats followed me into the bathroom. They do that every time I forget to close the door. It’s a little weird, but this morning I was glad they did; it got them out of my bedroom. Then, to make sure my smokescreen was complete, I walked through the kitchen, both cats close at my heels, and kept going through the dining room. That confused them a little bit; they parked in the kitchen, waiting for their kibble, and watched me closely. I appeared again from the living room going into the hallway, ducked back into my bedroom, and shut the door. Crawled into bed. Stretched out under the covers. Had to listen to five or ten minutes’ worth of whining and scratching at the door, but it was strangely satisfying to have outwitted them, even if it was a simple ruse, and they gave up pretty easily when they finally realized I wasn’t coming out again.

 

The sun never decided whether or not it would come out and stay out today. It was so bright and warm when I got up that I decided on a bike ride after I wrote a little drivel and read the morning paper. When I went out to fetch the paper, though, the sun had gone behind a sinister line of dark gray clouds on the eastern horizon. I wasn’t so sure about the bike ride at that point, but it had gotten me thinking about the bike rack that my uncle had bequeathed to me, so I spent thirty or forty minutes in the garage trying to hang it from the back of my car, because Jim hadn’t bequeathed me the instructions. By the time I had it worked out, the sun was out again.

I changed into street clothes even though the sun kept on ducking behind clouds, racked my bike and headed into town to ride on a newly-opened trail we pass each day as we head for work. It branches off Cottage Grove Road right under State Highway 51, although I went a little further, parking near a restaurant and joining the trail by way of a side road.

The trail took advantage of a sliver of land beside the tracks of the Wisconsin Southern Railway, first on one side, then crossing over to the other side of the right of way. The scenery along the first half-mile or so was no great shakes; the Royster-Clark cereal plant, a derelict warehouse or two, a long concrete drainage ditch clogged with trash. After the trail turned away from the railroad it headed into the much more welcoming Atwood neighborhood.

The old one- and two-story crackerbox houses that characterize the neighborhood had all probably looked more or less alike when they were built back in the 50s and 60s. Many of them didn’t appear to have been modified at all since then; one or two of them had owners that couldn’t muster enough attention to slap some cheap paint on them. But a few of them had been re-sided, or added-to, or both. A few were just a season away from acquiring a run-down look, but were surrounded by immaculately maintained yards of smooth, green grass, carefully planned flower beds, tricked out with lawn ornaments, and surrounded by a quaint, painted fence. Quite a lot of them were gussied up in bright blue, yellow and indigo paint that almost made them look as though they’d been pulled up by the roots from the hippy-ish Williamson Street neighborhood and transplanted — a sign, maybe, that the hippies are leap-frogging from Willy Street to Atwood, and bringing their decorating tastes with them?

Although the rails were pulled up years ago, the bike trail’s paved surface through the Schenk-Atwood area is laid on top of the old Chicago and North Western railroad; now that thundering diesel engines don’t drag freight cars screeching through the neighborhood any longer, the ground along the right of way has been turned up for community gardens, and residents were out in twos and threes doing their spring planting. At the outermost edges of the plots, a few gardeners had carefully stacked the stones they dug up, building artfully balanced towers that resembled cairns, as if to mark their boundaries.

I rode as far as Jackson Street, just past Café Zona where dozens of residents were gathering to sit in the garden behind the shop with their morning coffee, their children playing in the sandbox. It had taken me no more than fifteen minutes to cover that distance; if I’d gone on another ten minutes I could have easily made it to the end of the trail, at the intersection of Williamson Street and John Nolan Drive, just a couple blocks from the Capital. I entertained an idle daydream: If we’d bought a house in Schenk-Atwood, I could bicycle to work each day.

Of course, I could commute to work from Monona if I didn’t mind riding up Monona Drive in traffic. I do mind, however. I detest sharing a road with cars. At the best of times, drivers grudgingly swing wide when they pass cyclists, instead of shifting to the next lane as they would when passing another vehicle. Every time one of them shoots by I grit my teeth and wonder if this is the one that’s going to send me to my final reward. At the worst of times (say right around rush hour), drivers are going faster than they usual would and they’re all talking on their cell phones, thinking mostly about getting home as soon as possible and paying little or no attention to what they’re doing. I can’t stand it when I have to thread my way through traffic. Bicycling is a hobby that’s supposed to relieve stress, not create more.

I had the wind at my back after I turned around, and could’ve easily double-timed back to the lot where I parked my car, but it was a lot more pleasant to downshift and take it easy. Even so, I finished my ride in under forty minutes, and was unracking my bike in our driveway within an hour after leaving, a nice morning ride.

Monday, April 24th, 2006

By the time I started writing drivel at eight o’clock this evening I was so tired that I had about twenty minutes left on my batteries. I swore to myself I’d babble as long as I could, but I never promised it would be very long or even make sense. Apologies in advance.

 

Utility companies and service providers all have web pages now. Their services don’t overlap; I can’t get Verizon telephone service in Monona, for instance, but there’s no way to call up a page on any utility’s web site to find out where they do provide service. The closest I came was a page on the Verizon web site where I could plug in our area code and get a list of all the telephone exchanges they served here. Wow, that’s helpful. Like I know all the exchanges in Monona. (Turned out there was just one: 222. Same as Misawa. Weird.)

Here’s an idea: A map of each county, or of the whole state if they couldn’t be bothered to break down each county, with shaded areas representing where they provide service. Too simple? Hard to believe it hasn’t been considered already. It must’ve been shot down for a good reason.

Since Monona didn’t seem to be served by Verizon, I resorted to the same method I’ve used before to find out who provided service to the town I wanted to move into: I opened the Yellow Pages and started calling utilities starting with the first boxed advertisement. It’s my family’s patented method, but feel free to use it if you ever need to.

And what do you know, my method worked like a charm this time around: I hooked up with SBC, the first “telecommunications provider” I called. (Why can’t they just be the “phone company” any more? I know they’re not only about phones these days, but criminy!) The woman I got hold of was so pleasant and chatty that before long we were exchanging notes on raising teenagers, although it was not strictly a friendly conversation; she worked in a few selling points for parental control over internet access.

When we started, she surprised me by asking for my social security number.

“Do you really need that?” I asked.

“No, not if you don’t feel comfortable telling me,” she said hastily. “It’s only so we can pull your credit report.” Phone companies routinely pull your credit report now? Yes, they do, and she had no trouble confirming my excellent credit rating using my driver’s license number. “You qualify for our best telephone rates,” she chirped happily. Presumably that meant a schmoe with an average rating would have to pay more for telephone service, but not as much as compulsive shoppers with maxed-out Visa cards whose credit was in the toilet.

The gas & electric company did the same thing. A credit report has become so important it’s worth more than actual money, or very nearly.

Getting the gas & electricity hooked up was nearly as easy, and I didn’t have to use the Yellow Pages method: I called the city of Monona to ask them to change the sewer and water to my name, and while I had the clerk on the phone I asked her who to call for the gas & electric. “Madison Gas & Electric,” she answered. I could almost hear her eyes rolling.

And that’s the lastest chapter in our nomadic saga as we end our wanderings across the world. Tune in tomorrow when we’ll hear Barb say, “I can’t WAIT to move into our own house!”

 

Furniture stores: Why do they suck? Or, more specifically, why does the furniture in them suck? I had no idea that finding the furniture we liked would be such a challenge. It would probably be easier if we went door to door and stole it from a stranger’s house, because furniture stores don’t seem to have what we want.

Okay, one or two of them do. Stickley’s is a very cozy little store filled with beautiful furniture that’s just the style for us. We would love to have in our house, if only we could figure out how to pay for it before we’re both carted off to cold storage. We found two other shops like that: gorgeous hand-made furniture, prices that made our eyes glaze over. You really do get what you pay for (or, in our case, what you can’t pay for).

That truism that followed us yesterday to Ashley’s Fine Furniture (their name for it, not mine), a store that appeared to specialize in hideously baroque monstrosities glued together of particle board and stamped tin. Everything was covered in leather and hugely overstuffed; it was as if every collection of pieces was morbidly obese. The one example of the mission style, which by design is meant to be very plain, was an easy chair upholstered with two bloated faux-leather beanbags. This place was like American Furniture Warehouse without all the chrome.

Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

I broiled a Salmon steak for the family feast last night, which means of course that I’m still a little dizzy from the mercury. Pardon me if my words fade in and out of sense.

 

We have just a few more days to go. By my count it’s two (Wednesday and Thursday), but some ninnies I won’t name want to count today and Friday, so it could be as much as four. If you count Saturday, the day we’ll move in (Friday’s the closing, but as much as I want to sleep on something other than the floor we won’t move our furniture and personal detritus until Saturday), the count should be five. Screw that. I’m sticking with two. I think it’s easy to see why.

I may be driving our loan officer crazy. I called him again yesterday to make sure he already had a copy of the insurance thingy. He gave us a set of instructions with a laundry list of all the things we’re supposed to bring to the closing. I think he’s told me at least two dozen times that everything’s been taken care of and the only thing we have to bring is a great big, fat check. “What about this insurance thingy?” Barb asked me a couple nights back, going over the laundry list again.

“They got that when the insurance agent called our loan officer to arrange the escrow,” I said.

And that’s when she asked me the fateful words: “Are you sure?” Of course I’m not sure. I have absolute confidence in all my convictions, but only up to the point when you ask me, “Are you sure?” Then, I’m not so sure anymore. Thence my call to Kevin, who assured me for the trillionth time that everything was taken care of and he just wanted to see that big, fat check.

While resting her eyes after dinner, Barb lamented she wasn’t packing something, anything, into boxes to prepare for the move. It’s an exaggeration to say that everything we own would fit into the back of an AMC Gremlin, but I like that imagery, so I’m going to stick with it. Barb has the idea, however, that we have an awful lot of stuff to move. I suppose she’s right. Heck, I know she is. I have learned through experience that I should always listen to her, but it seems to me she’s boxed nearly all the things we’re not using, and the rest we can probably box in one or two nights. We happen to have a few more nights on hand, and what we don’t get boxed up by Saturday we can somehow manage to move during the next week, or even two, after the closing.

Our lease on the Cottage Grove apartment doesn’t run out until the end of May, you see. We didn’t want to have that much of an overlap, but we couldn’t convince the seller to push the closing out any further than the end of April; he wanted to get out of there in March, as a matter of fact, and for that concession we lift our hands in grateful praise to the demigods of home equity.

We were thinking of holding a garage sale or two at the apartment, which would be a great idea only because we could leave heaps of stuff there. In other words, we wouldn’t have to move it. Physical exertion would be minimal. Always a plus. However, even I can see Cottage Grove wouldn’t be the greatest location from which to hold garage sales, especially after the movers bring all our crap from Misawa to Monona we wouldn’t even want to think about carting it all the way out to Cottage Grove, so that’s not happening.

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

House-buying update: Our loan officer called me at work to give me the final closing cost, a mind-bogglingly huge number. I was going to say it’ll be the biggest amount I’ve ever seen printed on a check, but then I remembered I work in a bank, and it’ll be a piddling amount compared to some of the checks I’ve handled. That’s weird.

I asked one of the tellers if there was any kind of special procedure I would have to follow to get a cashier’s check in that amount. “Nothing special,” she said, “tell us how much and we’ll draw the amount, cut the check and hand it to you.”

“What, just like that?” I babbled, flabbergasted. “I don’t have to alert the Department of Homeland Security, or fill out a special request in triplicate to the Federal Reserve, nothing like that?”

She smiled and shook her head, the way you do when you talk to simple people. “No, nothing like that,” she said.

In fact, other than the armload of boxes I’ll bring home from work, there’ll be nothing very different about tomorrow except that I won’t be able to sleep a wink tomorrow night, and the next day I’ll own my own home. Me! Guiseppe Martini! I own-a my own home! No more we leev-a like rats in Potter’s Field! O sole mio!

 

While Barb was still inside brushing her teeth this morning, I went out to the garage to put all our bags in the car. Barb has a purse, of course, and usually takes her lunch in a canvas tote bag, but this morning she had another tote chock full of overdue library books as well. I had my man-purse and an attaché case for my laptop. It was an awful lot to juggle but I somehow managed to claw open the door to the garage without dropping anything, and even swapped a couple bags around by hooking them with my pinky fingers, then —

HONK!

HONK!

HONK!

HONK!

FREAKING MOTHERLESS HELLSPAWN! Why do they even have that panic button on the back of the key fob? I don’t know how many times I’ve set it off by mistake ... wait, yes I do: Every single time it’s gone off. I’ve never used it in the way it was intended, which must be to scare the bejeezus out of anybody within twenty or thirty yards. The Camry’s got a loud horn, and it’s ten times as loud if you happen to set it off in a garage with the door closed. I don’t know how I didn’t wet myself.

 

Scrubs is a terrifically funny comedy but an embarrassingly lame drama. I hate to say that, but somebody had to. The show’s writers and actors can handle just about any subject, so long as they keep to their usual slapstick style. There must be a clause in the contract that obligates them to switch from whacky smart-assed commentary as they near the end of the second act. Either that, or somebody in control of direction wants viewers to know he’s funny and capable of Deep Thought. Either way, when they all come back from the commercial break the actors have all switched character from pie-in-the-face stooges to depressingly introspective doctors who feel a need to beat viewers over their collective head with A Great Big Lesson In Life, and it sucks. The show, not the lesson. Well, okay, both.

M*A*S*H, coincidentally also a doctor show, suffered from the same problem. Early in the life of the show they focused on cracking jokes; later they could keep it going with a little satire, but when the writers or the actors, or maybe both, decided they had to be taken seriously (shortly after BJ grew that Frito Bandito moustache), watching the show became a chore. The last act of Scrubs is like that, except that instead of watching Alan Alda gradually go from smartly comic to tired and bitter over the course of seven years, Dr. Cox and the bunch can go from manic to depressed in a matter of seven minutes. If they don’t balance their meds to even out these mood swings soon, I’ll have to give it up.

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

Stubby node. I hab a stubby node dis born ink. I hay dat.

Where’d that come from? I felt normal when I went to bed last night and slept like a baby until Tim’s alarm clock started to ring at four-thirty. I guess he wasn’t paying attention when he set it last night. Don’t worry, I mentioned it to him. With extreme prejudice. He fixed it. When I crawled back into bed, that’s when I noticed I had to pant like a dog to get any air. I hate that.

When my own alarm finally went off I went straight to the shower, cranked up the hot water and snorfled up as much of the steamy spray as I could manage without drowning myself. Without getting into the gummy details, it cleared me right out, and a cup of coffee helped take a little pressure off the sinuses. Good morning!

 

It was “Take Your Son To Work Day” at the Department of Motor Vehicles — you know what that meant: Tim got the day off from school. Score! They spent the morning with some heavy lifting: that’s right, paperwork, and plenty of it. They processed requests for information from all over the state, even from federal agencies across the country, that made law enforcement and criminal prosecution possible.

Tim listened to Barb answer telephone calls all afternoon, which bored the socks off him because she wouldn’t let him answer any questions from the public. I’m not sure he could have convinced me to let him do that, either. He’s got a well-deserved reputation for saying the wrong thing, even exploring several ways to say the wrong thing. With a five-second delay to cut him off I might have been persuaded; Barb didn’t have that kind of technology at her disposal, and she probably wouldn’t have had as much confidence in it that I would have.

All through the day they ate the two-dozen doughnuts Barb bought at Scott’s on the way to work, so that Tim felt queasy about eating long after quitting time.

Because Tim was with Barb, that meant that we were all in town, together, after work. So many stars have to line up to make that happen that I didn’t want to waste it, so I suggested we eat in town at Brocach, the fake Irish pub right there on the square. Tim didn’t moan and complain too much, and after he tucked in to a plate of hot wings he might have enjoyed himself just a tad, but he never let on, brave lad that he can be, even in situations like this.

I couldn’t take my son to work; the bank doesn’t allow it for security reasons. I thought that sounded a little strange. At the DMV, he was intimately involved in law enforcement procedures and spent all day looking at the personal details of the lives of Wisconsin drivers. Spending the day watching his Dad file paperwork and deposit checks was considered too sensitive, though. I asked him to come up to the office anyway, to help me carry out some empty boxes I’d collected for the move on Saturday, so he got to take a look at the desk I work at, and he thought the view of capital square out the seventh-story corner office was pretty cool.

Friday, April 28th, 2006

This is it! The day of the closing, our one last day living in a rental in Cottage Grove.

And it started so well, he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. The cats went absolutely full-goose bozo batshit at four o’clock in the morning. After having a good scratch on absolutely everything in the room, starting with the carpeting and moving on to the walls, cardboard boxes and luggage, they would take off like coked-up purse-snatchers running from the law. At four o’clock in the morning, two cats can sound just like fifty head of cattle stampeding through an alley clogged with empty trash cans. Worn out from running and scratching, Bonkers stood in the hallway, right outside our door, and serenaded us with the only song he knew, a little number called I Hit My Thumb With The Hammer Again, Bobbie Sue in the key of loud.

I can lay in bed with that going on for only so long. I don’t know why, but I can’t stand to just lie in bed, not sleeping. Barb, on the other hand, loves to curl up in a tight, warm ball after she wakes up and stay in bed, if only for a couple more minutes. If she got any sleep this morning while the cats were going bananas I’d be surprised, but then again she was up all night long, waking me up by laughing and saying things like, “Well, you know what that means.” I didn’t, and I would’ve been able to go back to sleep a lot more quickly if she’d told me, but she only began to snore softly again, and I’d slowly drift off until she started babbling again.

 

I remember being pretty damned nervous about signing a thirty-year mortgage the first time I did it. That was in 1997. B and I had been married eight years and finally decided to make the big jump. She used her VA entitlement to snag a loan guarantee and we bought a beautiful brick ranch in a quiet neighborhood of Aurora, Colorado. Selling that house was the hardest thing we ever did.

We paid a lot more money for a smaller house this time, but I felt more like this: Eh. It hardly seems real enough to feel anxious about. The money, I mean; the house itself appears to be pretty gosh-darned real. The money’s such a huge number that my brain simply can’t encompass it. I fret more over owing twenty dollars.

After the closing, we drove straight to the house to christen it with the customary loaf of bread, cellar of salt and bottle of wine. (If you get that, you can consider yourself a rank sentimentalist, old building and loan buddy old pal.) Then a quick look around to make sure all four walls were standing before we broke for lunch at a favorite local restaurant, the Java Cat. They serve a delicious garlic lentil soup that I lapped up even though I think of my hated arch-nemisis, Barbra Streisand, whenever I hear the word “lentil.” (Don’t waste too many brain cells trying to figure that one out; it was a pretty lame joke.)

To work off our big lunch we bought a cartload of cleaning supplies at a local hardware store and spend the rest of the day cleaning the house to within inches of our lives. B spent all afternoon scouring the kitchen until it was eat-off-the-floor clean. I mopped floors, wiped down walls and dusted Venetian blinds. I think cleaning Venetian blinds was one of the labors of Hercules, wasn’t it? If it wasn’t, it should’ve been.

We finished the day with pizza and beer for dinner, then got busy packing up the last few loose odds & ends knocking around in the rental apartment. Tomorrow is the big move. Jim & Sue will bring their van, Carrie & Darren will bring Darren’s really huge pickup truck and a covered trailer, and we’ll spend the day trying to figure out how to haul all the things we’ll sell at a future garage sale to Monona. Should be fun.

Saturday, April 29th, 2006

So. Awfully. Tired. All I wanted to do by nine-thirty this evening was fall into bed and sleep. Instead, dear reader, I taped my eyelids open and wrote a bit of drivel for you, in the hopes that you might be interested in the details of our move to our new home. With any luck, I figured I might find a coffee shop in the morning to post it — we had no internet at our new home, and wouldn’t until sometime Monday.

That’s right, our new home. Even Tim couldn’t stop saying it. As we sat at the table after dinner, recalling the day’s events, he’d get a big grin and remind us, not for the first time, “This is our house!” And just a day or two ago, he thought we were acting pretty silly when we did that.

We woke, not at all bright and early, in our Cottage Grove apartment for the last time this morning and, after downing our morning cuppa joe, set about the job of putting our last few loose odds & ends in boxes and bags. By now we were not at all orderly or careful about it, just going to a room and heaping items into a box to call it “packed” and make it easier to carry. We started at about seven, hoping to have it done by nine, when Jim & Sue & Carrie & Darren said they would show up to help load all our stuff into a trailer that Darren borrowed for the move.

(Aside: Barb was so tired last night that she kept saying “Dairy & Karen.” Then she reversed the order of their names, hoping, I guess, to kick her brain into gear, and said “Karen & Dairy.” Howls of derisive laughter echoed through the halls.)

Unfortunately for us, there were so many little bitty items still lying around loose that we had no hope of boxing it all up by nine. Fortunately for us, our kinfolk were waylaid by a rummage sale and didn’t arrive until ten.

I’m happy to report the move went well. I was absolutely certain that prying the washer & drier out of the utility closet would take at least an hour and cause much anguish. When they were installed, a couple of big burly he-men muscled them into an opening that was a fraction of an inch wider than their combined width. I don’t pretend to speak for the others, but I’m so far from being a he-man that you can’t see me from there, even with the aid of the Hubble telescope. Even so, it took no more than five minutes to wiggle the washer out of the slot it was wedged in, tip it over and carry it on its back to the trailer. The drier took a minute or two more, but only because it was wider and harder to get a grip on. Easy-peasie.

If that wasn’t the hardest part, I wondered, then what was? And I soon got my answer: Carrying box after box piled full of the tiniest bits of our household. It took the seven of us about an hour and a half to run it all out to the trailer, although it mysteriously took less than an hour to unpack it all after we got to the house.

By then I had already hit the wall: The muscles in my legs had the strength of wet paper towels, my knees popped every time I stooped to pick up a box, my back was stiffer than a rusted hinge, and every time I put something down I sighed as though it was my last breath. I don’t work out often enough. Or ever, for that matter.

Once we were unpacked, I talked Jim into taking me over to Middleton to pick up a china hutch Barb and I bought at a consignment store a week or two ago. I remembered it being about five and a half feet tall and maybe three feet wide, and promised him it would fit in the back of his van. It turned out to be seven feet tall and five feet wide, and came within an inch of emphatically refusing to fit into his van at all. On top of that, it was at least two hundred pounds of finely finished cherry wood. Talk about a workout. But it sure looked nice once it was standing against the wall in our dining room.

I was dead tired after that outing, yet somehow I got up enough steam to go out once again with Barb and Tim to the grocer’s to pick up food for dinner. I pan-fried some brats and served them with Texas fries and called that a meal; chased with a bottle of beer, it wasn’t half-bad.

Washing up the dishes took another half-hour or so, and I did a bit more unpacking just so I could find the coffee maker, because how poor would our first morning waking up in our own home be without the morning java?

And then, to bed.

Sunday, April 30th, 2006

To bed, but not to sleep. Maybe you have the same problem I do: My first night in a strange place, no matter how much I like it, is usually sleepless because none of the night noises I’m familiar with are there, replaced by a whole crop of new ones I’ve got to catalogue in my memory so my brain can learn to ignore them.

To make sure we experienced our new abode at its noisiest, Mother Nature gave us the gift of a spring rain storm that lasted all night long; not a gentle rain that would’ve lulled me into sweet slumber, but wind-driven rain that hit the roof, the siding and the windows with a sound like shovels full of gravel being thrown by big, hairy construction workers. Not restful by a long shot.

Shortly after I turned in for the night, I heard a drumming noise from the corner of the house that obviously had something to do with the rain, but I was too tired to go figure out what exactly was causing it. Once I’d noticed it, though, my brain couldn’t resist trying to figure out how the sound was made. It had a very heavy quality, as if water were falling in gouts on the lid of a barrel, but it would stop for quite a while, then start again, even when the rain was steady. It wasn’t until about three in the morning, when I made a trip to the bathroom, that I realized it was a blocked downspout. Rainwater came gushing out the topmost joint to fall on the elbow at ground level. It stopped when the wind picked up and blew the overflow just enough one way or another to miss the elbow.

Other noises were familiar, but amplified. The new O-Manse has hardwood floors in every room but the kitchen, where it’s linoleum. The hardwood was a huge selling point; remember when wall-to-wall carpeting was this big a deal? The cats sure thought it was the best thing going in the apartment, and they miss it here; they got no traction on the bare floors and went crashing into walls and furniture when they tore around after one another all night long, because apparently they couldn’t get to sleep, either. Talk about noisy.

I got up to put Boo in time out after she jumped on my stomach as she ran across the bed; I can throw her in the basement now and close the door, an idea that got flushed right out of my head when I heard water gushing from somewhere down below. A flood of water. And it was pouring down rain ... Holy Crap! I stumbled down the stairs to see how much of our boxed-up possessions were already soaked through, but it was only the water softener going through a purge cycle, and not rainwater pooling against the foundations and draining in through a basement window. Ye gods. My heart was still thumping as I crawled back into bed.

The whole night was one episode like that after another, and about a million years long. I finally surrendered and got out of bed at about six to make a pot of java and start the day pecking out some drivel until about eight-thirty, when my eyes began slamming shut. The sandman can be such an asshole sometimes.

I went sleepwalking through the day, unpacking boxes, painting cupboard shelves, and hauling all kinds of our accumulated junk to the storage area in the basement so it would be out of the way. If there was a mindless task, I called dibs on it and tried to make it last so I wouldn’t be called on to do anything more complex than stare straight ahead.

Tim painted his room, the whole thing, taped it off and applied two coats. It looks great, even though he lost almost all enthusiasm for the project long before he finished the first coat on the first wall. “Painting sucks!” he said later. “It’s too much work just to change the color of my room.” Maybe so, but after he was done he spent enough time gazing at his handiwork that I’m pretty sure he was jazzed to have done it.

Barb spent a second day in a row in the kitchen, or more precisely in two kitchens; she drove back to the apartment to empty the fridge, then came back home and emptied several dozen boxes of their contents, putting it all away as she went.

By eight in the evening we had managed to clear almost all the floor space in the living room and dining room of boxes and were more than ready to call it a day. Tonight I will sleep if I have to konk myself on the head with a big old mallet to do it.

 
More drivel! Onward to May 06
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