this is drivel

You don’t happen to know how to clean the gunk out of an air brush, do you? I bought a couple air brushes at an estate sale, a single-action Brink model 4, and a double-action Paasche Type V, along with a Paasche air compressor. It was really the compressor I was after; the brushes were gravy. I connected them to the compressor to see if they passed air and they did, so I was pretty darned happy.

My Darling B let me make a side trip to the hobby store while we were in town yesterday (it’s a little out of the way, almost all the way to Middleton) where I picked up some paint so I could try out the air brushes. So far, though, I have to report no joy.

The Paasche flat-out refuses to work at all. It passes air just fine, but when I filled the paint cup with water (I thought it would be prudent to test it using something that didn’t turn me into a never-to-be-seen Funniest Home Video if anything went wrong) nothing but air came out. I took it all apart into about a dozen tiny pieces, cleaned them all well with warm water and a soft square of cotton, then put it all back together. When I pressed the trigger this time, all the water in the paint cup boiled up over the top in a big SPLAT! all over my face, shirt and lap. I’m a newbie at this, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the way it’s supposed to spray the water.

Okay, probably just needed a minor adjustment. Trouble was, I didn’t get any instructions with either of the air brushes and had only the most rudimentary idea how the simplest ones worked. Bigger trouble was, the Paasche wasn’t a simple air brush. The end that the paint was supposed to come out of had no less than three adjustable screws. The double-action trigger worked by pulling back on a needle that rested inside a cone that poked through the spray end. And no matter how many different ways I tried to adjust the many set screws and needles, the water kept going SPLAT! in my face. Or my lap. Doesn’t take too long to get tired of that. I dried it off and set it aside.

The other air brush was about as basic as they get. Just a glance told me that it blew a jet of air over a nozzle to generate suction that would draw paint out of the reservoir and atomize it. The reservoir was a capped bottle. I couldn’t see how it would go splat in my face, so throwing caution to the wind I filled it with paint right from the get-go, cranked up the compressor and tried to spray a spot on a sheet of newspaper, but no matter how I adjusted the nozzle, it would only spit out occasionally blotchy patches, so I took the nozzle apart and rinsed it under a spigot.

No matter how much water I tried to flush it with, paint kept coming out. I tried to blow through it but couldn’t, which was kind of weird, seeing as how paint kept dripping from its end. This nozzle was a little larger than an eyedropper, but there seemed to be enough paint left in it to finish the side of a barn. I dropped it in a jar filled with warm water and a little soap and watched for a couple minutes as paint continued to ooze out, then doinked around with something else for about an hour.

When I came back to it, I shoved the end of a twist tie down its throat and pulled out a gob of paint. And I shoved it in again and pulled out another gob of paint. It was like cleaning muck out of a clogged sink; you keep thinking there can’t be any more crap down there, and then you dredge up more. When I could finally shove the wire all the way through it and give it a twist, I rinsed it one more time, blew through it (no trouble now) and put it all back together. Voila! It worked!

First I sprayed a sheet of paper until I got it to cover evenly, then I tried spraying an old car body I had in a scrap box. It looked a little too runny, so I tried loading the brush with another color but didn’t thin it this time and it looked pretty darned good, until the air brush clogged. I took the nozzle apart and blew through it until it was clear, but it still wouldn’t draw any paint from the bottle.

By this time I’d spent a couple hours dorking around with the damned thing and was a little tired of blowing, splatting, soaking, dredging and rinsing, so I took the nozzle apart and dropped in the water-filled jar, then put it aside until tomorrow, when I’ll give it a reaming it’s never going to forget. Meanwhile, I’m trolling e-bay for a single-action brush that might perhaps be a little less generic and a little more dependable.

“I’ve got a Bee Gees song stuck in my head,” I told My Darling B as we settled into the car and drove to work.

“Good. You just keep it there,” she warned me. “You’re not going to get it stuck in my head.”

I knew what she meant. There’s no easier way to get rid of an ear worm than to hum a few bars around somebody else until it gets stuck in their head. There was a guy I used to work with who did that to me all the time. I did it right back to him, just out of spite.

“What’s the worst Bee Gees song you know?” I asked her. I just wanted to know. She didn’t have to tell me. She didn’t even have to think of one, but she did, almost instantly.

“That would have to be Nights On Broadway,” she said.

I just about wet myself. “Oh! My! God!” I shouted. “That’s the song that’s been stuck in my head all weekend!”

She laughed, but only until she realized it was stuck in her head, too.

We couldn’t figure out how that happened. I thought it was in my head because I’d been listening to a station that claims to be playing every song in their music vault in alphabetical order. They started on Thursday or Friday, but I didn’t think they’d gotten as far as “N” by Monday morning. (They hadn’t. They were still on “J” this afternoon.) And Barb was pretty sure she hadn’t heard it on the radio, anyway. “I think it just popped into your head,” she accused, “and it telepathically got sent over to mine.” Hints of a belief in ESP from a woman with a bachelor’s in psychology. That was money well spent.

I coincidentally learned today that what I thought was one of my favorite Beatles tunes, Lonely Days, is in fact a Bee Gees tune. All these years I’ve been imagining The Fab Four harmonizing the opening, “Good morning, Mister Sunshine, you brighten up my day.” It sure sounds like a Beatles line. Now I’ve got to reprogram all those brain cells to photoshop the brothers Gibb in there. Not only that, I’ve got to face the fact that I like something the Bee Gees recorded. Makes me a little queasy just thinking about it.

I figured out the problem I was having with one of the air brushes, by the way. I bring it up not because I thought you were waiting with bated breath, but because I thought you might be amused to know there wasn’t enough paint in the bottle. The paint’s fed to the nozzle through a metal tube that doesn’t quite reach halfway to the bottom of the bottle, and the bottle was less than half full of paint, but I couldn’t see that because the inside of the bottle was, of course, covered in paint. Duh.

The solution to the problem with the other air brush hasn’t made itself quite as obvious, though, and I still can’t get it to work. There. Now you know.

My Darling B wondered aloud how it can be that I still have hair on my chinny chin chin. I can only say I never gave it any thought, because I don’t realize I’m pulling at my beard in the first place. Almost as soon as I started growing the thing, I developed that nervous habit of tugging, twirling and constantly pulling at my beard.

“Seriously, what did you do before you grew a beard?” she asked me one night, swatting my hand away from my face, after putting up with my nervous twitch for as long as she could possibly stand it. Try as I might to stop myself, though, it doesn’t seem to be something I can control. I think if I had somebody tie my hands behind my back I would evolve a completely new pair of arms inside a half-hour for the sole purpose of pulling at my beard, and chances are she would have to yell at me to knock it off before I even noticed I now had four arms.

Even then, I wouldn’t be as crazy-looking as this guy.

And you’re entirely welcome for the el stinko Bee Gees tune that’s now stuck in your head, by the way. I knew it would turn out that way, but I couldn’t not tell the story, you know?

It may be a little early to say this, but I think Infidel might be the best memoir I’ve read this year.

Possibly you’ve heard of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but probably not. I hadn’t until about two months ago, although I do remember the news reports of Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh’s brutal murder. Hirsi Ali wrote the screen play of van Gogh’s Submission, a film that pissed off Mohammed Bouyeri so much he shot van Gogh, then messily butchered him, then pinned a death threat for Hirsi Ali to van Gogh’s chest with a knife. To say he was upset about the movie would be the understatement of all time.

I’ve seen the movie (YouTube!) and it’s not what I’d consider controversial, much less incendiary, but here in our open-minded and more enlightened land a hotel owner will shut down an art show featuring a naked chocolate Jesus after the death threats start coming in, so I guess I can see how a woman in a semi-transparent veil questioning Allah’s holy word might raise somebody’s ire. I don’t think anybody got shot for the chocolate Jesus, though.

Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, years before the civil war there blasted the city to hell. The first half of this roughly 300-page book recounts the wanderings of her family across Africa to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya while her father was trying to organize the overthrow of dictator Siad Barre in Somalia. Whenever I read stories like hers, I wonder that people can survive such experiences with their faculties intact.

The second half of the book focuses on how she went from working in factories and cleaning toilets while she studied Dutch, to earning her master’s degree at one of the best universities in the Netherlands, to becoming a minister of Parliament, in just ten years. Clearly, this woman had a mission in life.

And it was this: She said she studied political science, and joined a right-wing think tank, and became a politician, and made a movie, all to spark an age of enlightenment for Muslims, to get them to discuss why they do what they do, instead of simply learning their religion by rote and doing it without question. As it happened, quite a few Muslims didn’t want anything to do with her message, and she’s been in hiding, heavily guarded, under threat on her life, ever since the movie was released.

I found Hirsi Ali’s books when I went looking for works by Muslim women (Reading Lolita in Tehran was pretty darned good). The Caged Virgin, a collection of her essays, was very readable, but I found her memoir to be much more engaging for the fact she was in it. Her presence, and the depth of her story, filled her arguments with a life that I hadn’t felt in her essays. Not only is it well worth reading, I would even suggest this is a story that you should read. Like Ann Frank’s, it throws light on a human condition I hadn’t seen before.

Weirdest news story of the day: No, it wasn’t that Keith Richards said he mixed up his dad’s ashes with some cocaine and snorted it. That would’ve been pretty weird, but it turned out to be a pathetic cry for attention. “It was a joke,” said Richards’s publicist today, and Keith himself scoffed and said something like, “I can’t believe anybody took that seriously.”

Huh. I wonder why anybody would believe an old cokehead like Keith Richards if he said he snorted his dad’s ashes?

Even if Richards had snorted his dad’s ashes, it still wouldn’t have been the weirdest story of the day, which was that archaeologists reported they found no evidence to prove the biblical story of the parting of the Red Sea.

First thing I thought was, well, you wouldn’t find any evidence, would you? Because it’s, y’know, water. Did they expect to find a scar?

Second thing I wondered was: Why were they even looking? Was this the story of another crazy old billionaire whose mind snaps after he realize the pointlessness of bulldozing unimaginable amounts of money into sky-scraping heaps, and instead devotes his fortune to a cause that will end all the suffering in the world ... like searching for Noah’s ark?

It turned out that they were looking for historical evidence, like maybe a couple column-inches buried in the back pages of some forgotten issue of the Exodus Picayune, or maybe some graffiti; they were always writing on walls back then, I’ve heard. But they couldn’t find any. I guess The Greatest Story Ever Told didn’t count. If it had, they would’ve mentioned that. Charlton Heston was awesome.

The weirdest headline of the day was: “New Mexico Voters Divided Over Spaceport Tax.” Zow. Never in my nerdiest dreams did I think I’d be reading anything remotely like that in a national newspaper in my lifetime (that one’s from the Washington Post).

Okay, to be perfectly honest, when I was twelve or thirteen years old I believed with all my heart that scientists were just a couple years away from making a breakthrough in warp drive technology. Spaceports would’ve been a given, of course, although there wouldn’t have been anything as anti-utopian as a “tax” to raise the “money” to build them. Workers would have reported to the job site to put in a six-hour day, four days a week, because exploring outer space was the right thing to do. Everybody knew that.

Then I grew up. Scientists weren’t working on a warp drive, they were working on a space truck, and they never did get around to giving astronauts a place to poop. Our valiant explorers of the cosmos still have to wear diapers to fly no farther than low earth orbit? You can’t expect them to sit in their own stink for as long as it takes to get to the stars! At the rate the government-paid dorks in the lab coats are figuring this stuff out, we’ll have interplanetary space travel licked just in time to hand the keys to the Enterprise over to the cockroaches.

It took billionaire Richard Branson to finance construction of a spaceship that’ll take tourists on regular trips to low orbit. Those billionaires; always throwing their money into mind-blowing schemes to better humanity. No, only kidding; he looks at space tourism and sees a way to make heaps of money, mostly from other billionaires. Why should the Russians be the only ones with a hot ride and billionaires lining up at their door for the thrill of their lifetime?

The trick for Branson is to get the state of New Mexico to pony up about fifty million dollars, hence the headline, but he’s scratched up that much in pocket change from passers-by in the street. He’ll soon turn those New Mexicans around. He’s already learned to say, “A percentage of the tax will start a fund to buy every kid a puppy.” They’ll be coughing up to put billionaires in space in no time.

“It was a non-statement nonsensical statement that didn’t make any sense at all.”

That was our vice president today, trying to tell the world how badly Nancy Pelosi bungled her message to Syrian president Bashar al Assad, whom the vice characterized as “a bad actor.” To underscore his point with double-thick black lines, he called Pelosi’s visit “bad behavior.” Zow. I guess he showed her.

Then, to demonstrate his laser-sharp understanding of the situation, he added:

“I do believe that a significant portion of the Democrats, including, I think, Nancy Pelosi, are adamantly opposed to the war.”

Thank you, Captain Obvious! *

ADDED:

I hope my brother, Pete, won’t mind if I quote in part from his response to this post:

Seriously? You’re going to ding Cheney for talking like a moron and ignore that the almighty Speaker Pelosi went to visit the leader of a country that has openly supported terrorism? Really?

Um ... yes?

I wasn’t trying to make a political statement, honest. I only wanted to say the vice president made me laugh. The quote caught my eye and the first thing I thought was, “Wait, he’s saying she bungled her message?” And then he topped himself by intimating he suspects a large number of the Democrats might very well be against the war. Gee, Mr. Vice, you think?

Switching to serious mode: I don’t like the vice, but I’m not all that thrilled with whatever Pelosi’s up to, either. She calls it shuttle diplomacy, but I thought it was up to the president to dispatch diplomats for that kind of thing. She looks as if she’s making a play to upgrade her legitimacy, or wants to be able to say she’s looked into Assad’s soul, or is executing some equally blatant political maneuver that isn’t nearly as funny as Mr. Vice pointing out the blindingly obvious or rambling about nonsensical nonsense that doesn’t make any sense.

Reading my original post again, I have to admit it could be read as a rank political statement. I won’t deny that I can’t stand the guy, and it comes through in everything I say about him. (You should’ve seen it before I edited out most of the snarky stuff.) I’m sure if I were called on to do something as pedestrian as compliment his haircut, it’d be obvious to everyone in the room that I don’t like him, which is why I try to keep away from saying anything about him or his boss at all.

I give fair warning, though, that if he babbles like that again, I won't be able to stop myself from pointing it out.

*Tip O’ The Hat to Pete for the tag line.

“I don’t know how to bring this up,” Tim said to me the other night, about as hesitantly as he’s ever been, and that’s not very hesitant at all, “so I’ll just come right out and say it: The message on your answering machine at work sucks.”

That was a pretty tame finish for a beginning filled with such ominous portents. Usually when somebody starts off with “I don’t know how to tell you this,” you’re going to learn your coffee breath really stinks, or your significant other is cheating on you, or you’re a jerk and the person talking to you never wants to speak to you again. A sucking answering machine message isn’t even close to any of those things.

“What is there about the message that makes you think it sucks?” I asked, hoping to get a few pointers regarding Voice Mail That Doesn’t Suck.

“Dunno,” he mused sagely, “I guess it’s kind of flat and boring. It makes you sound like a cubicle drone.”

I blinked at him. “I am a cubicle drone,” I pointed out.

“Well, yeah, but you don’t have to sound like one.”

Five minutes after I got to work the next morning, I played my phone message to see what the flat, boring voice of a cubicle drone sounded like. It sounded just like me. I couldn’t think of how to make it sound less like a cubicle drone without howling like a circus barker, or affecting an out RAY jus Frrronch accent. I didn’t think my employer would go for that, so I left it alone.

Sean came to visit us during his school’s Easter break. Georgetown is a Jesuit school, so they can call it “Easter break” and not “four-day teacher in-service weekend.” He brought a ton of books, papers and tapes with him, along with his laptop, to work on a thesis that’s already a tiny bit overdue, and since his arrival Thursday he has sat down several times to make some headway on it, but this is after all his weekend away from school, and we’re a family with a house full of books, which are to Sean what shiny objects are to crows.

To make it easier for Sean to write his paper, I offered him the use of my lair at any time. It’s far away from everywhere else in the O-Mansion, and it’s about the quietest room in the house. Only trouble with it is: It’s chock full o’ books.

“Yeh, but they’re all boring choo-choo books, right?” Sean asked, when I warned him. Word of my perversion precedes me wherever I go.

“A few are,” I admitted. Okay, two book cases are stuffed with magazines and books about trains. Four others have been jammed with so many novels, references, picture books and children’s books that they’re falling off the shelves.

He went down there to check it out. I ran into Tim upstairs, who asked if Sean was downstairs working on his thesis. I said he was downstairs, but he had a book in his hand the last time I saw him, so he probably wasn’t writing.

“If you gave Sean an unlimited supply of books he liked,” Tim mused, “I wonder how long he could keep reading before he dropped?” And then, because he’s Tim he added, “I’ll bet he’d poop himself rather than stop reading.”

I don’t know about that, but after he said good-night to us all and headed for the basement once again to work on his thesis, I noticed when I came out of the bathroom after my nightly ablutions that he had come back to the living room and was curled up on the sofa with a book cracked to the opening chapter. And then, at six o’clock in the morning when I got up to feed the cats, Sean was still curled up on the sofa with the same book, opened to the last chapter.

“Did you stay up all night reading?” I had to ask. There was just the slightest chance that he might have speed-read his way through most of it, slept a couple hours, then gotten up just before six to finish it off. But no, he never went to bed, so it’s very possible that Tim’s right, but I’m long past the day I would check to see if his diapers needed changing.

Best News Story of the Day: Lost Frenchmen ate jungle spiders (BBC) “Two French hikers who got lost in thick jungle in French Guiana survived for seven weeks by consuming turtle meat, big hairy spiders and river water.”

I asked Tim how hungry he’d have to get before he ate “big hairy spiders” and he said he’d kill himself first.

Most Predictable News Story of the Day: The New York Times reported the ongoing prosecution of astronaut Lisa Nowak. They waited until the second-to-last paragraph to mention the diaper, but they got it in there, by god!

“Does your cat see dead people?” I asked Ami the other day, while we were talking about our cats. Such a look she gave me.

Cat people talk about their cats the way parents talk about their kids. Both kinds of people have built up a catalogue of experiences so much alike that sharing them is a recurring experience.

I started off tentatively describing how our cat was jumping all over my shoelaces; the other cat person says, Hey! My cat does that, too! Then she told me how her cat rolled on its back and grabbed its tail; I said, Yeah, Bonkers loves to eat his tail. And so on.

It turns out, though, that what I call “seeing dead people” is what Ami calls “staring at nothing,” and she wasn’t quite ready to think of it as “seeing dead people.” I’m pretty sure she went home hoping that her cat wouldn’t stare at nothing that evening.

“Who’s the one leaving the bathroom blinds open so anyone on the streets can see my privates?” Sean popped out of the bathroom to ask us this morning.

In answer, all I could think of were all the different questions he had raised, the first and most immediate was, “You’ve got privates on your face?” because the bottom half of the bathroom window is frosted.

“Well, you know,” Sean tried to clarify, “if someone were to stand just outside the window ...”

“Somebody’s standing outside the window? That never happens to me, darn it.”

He gave up any chance of getting an answer and went back to the bathroom to take his shower.

I’m glad nobody’s asked me to write a thesis in a long time. I don’t think I’m in good enough physical shape to do it. Sean must’ve been up and down the basement stairs at least two-dozen times before one o’clock looking for just the right place to settle down to write, moving from my lair to the kitchen table, back to my lair, making a quick suitability check of the sewing room and finding it wanting, holing up back in the lair ... whew! With a couple breaks in there to eat lunch and hit the shower, he put on a couple miles, forty feet at a time. It must work, though. He kept rapping out the pages.

In the very unlikely event that I might be captured by the Iranian government, I thought I’d put it in writing ahead of time that I’ll say and do anything they tell me to do, so long as it keeps me alive and gets me the hell out of Iran.

For instance, if they point a video camera at me and tell me to denounce my mother, I’m going to say that she beat me all day every day with a nail-studded rolling pin, gave me a nickel for ever kitten I brought home for sacrifice on the Satanic altar hidden in our basement, and performed abortions in her kitchen for twelve-year-old girls. If the stuff I make up doesn’t make my mother look evil enough to them, I’ll repeat, word for word, whatever the hell they write on cue cards.

I have a pretty good idea what they’ll do to me if I don’t cooperate, you see. It’s not that I wouldn’t take a bullet for Mom, and Mom knows it, but my Mom wouldn’t ask me to, and she wouldn’t question my devotion to her because I lied my ass off to get the hell out of Iran. Mom would be pretty damned glad to get me back in one piece.

Anybody who wouldn’t be as happy as Mom to have me back, no matter what I said or did in order to live and fight another day, well, I wouldn’t fight for them, anyway.

Sean came to Madison a vegan, and he left four days later with bits of a ham roast still stuck between his teeth. This seems to fly in the face of the people who hold that Madison is a den of liberalism so toxic it’ll turn almost anybody into a granola-eating hippie weirdo freak if they stay. Hell, he was only visiting for what was barely a long weekend and we had him feasting on animal flesh before the end of day three. And it’s not that we teased him by shoving a warm, juicy ham under his nose. His mother made sure there was plenty on the table that would be safe for a vegan to eat; she even warned him off when he reached for the stuff that wasn’t vegan. But the rest of us aren’t vegan, and she’d bought a wonderful ham at the farmer’s market. There was no way she was going to let a weekend go by without fixing that up. We had it Sunday night with garlic buttered potatoes and plenty of crusty bread. Gosh, it was good. (Ask Sean.)

Speaking of dinner, on Friday night we went to Texas Tubb’s Taco Palace on Atwood Avenue, a place we drive by every morning when we go to work, and nearly every day we say we ought to try eating there. Last Friday we finally did it. I can’t say I’m all that impressed. None of us were. I had a chicken flauta; Barb ordered a chimichanga; and Sean, who was still a vegan on Friday, ordered a bean burrito. It was all very average. My flauta was on the greasy side and not very flavorful at all. The restaurant itself has a very cozy, eclectic atmosphere, and the bar has a lot of delicious local beers, but it’s not much of a night out if you’re looking for particularly good eats.

Sean was still sitting at the desk in his mom’s sewing room when I got up to take my shower this morning. Barb cleared away a spot where he could work sequestered away from the rest of us who were clunking around the house, and he shut himself up in there after supper the night before, emerging only occasionally to pee or get a drink. Judging from the sleepy look in his eyes this morning, I guessed he’d been up all night long, and imagined he’d had enough time to bang out at least a dozen more pages of his thesis. “How’s it going?” I asked him, and he answered, “I’m just wrapping up.”

“Good!” I enthused. He’d been fretting all weekend over finishing that paper; it did my heart good to know he was closer to finishing it. Only it turned out he wasn’t. He’d found a copy of Wicked in the book case and spent all night skimming through it, his mother revealed to me later. I guess he liked it, more than writing a paper, anyway.

And now he’s gone back to school and we won’t be seeing him until May 19, when we take the train out to D.C. to witness his graduation, assuming he finishes his thesis before then. If he passes by a library or a book store, there might be a slight delay.

Nobody at work has ever had anything good to say about the coffee machine in the break room, not even the people who will drink the swill notionally deemed to be coffee that it dispenses. I am one of those people. The brownish stuff that dribbles from the machine’s spout into my mug is hot and it’s a nice pick-me-up at about two o’clock in the afternoon when my internal timer signals for a nap, but I would never call it coffee.

I used to fill my mug from the Silex in the consumer lending department, but their source changed and now the stuff they brew down there is worse that the ersatz coffee-like substitute from the machine. When I drink their new fomulation, the stale smell of wet cardboard pops immediately to mind, and it’s a hard smell to get rid of once it’s in there, I can tell you, so it’s back to the machine. That stuff’s bitter, almost rancid sometimes, but it doesn’t remind me of pulp and glue.

Winter storm warning? Winter storm warning? Are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me? It’s April, and we’re under a winter storm warning?

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Everybody else was. Being the only one not complaining about it all day long made me feel like the odd man out. But seriously — are you freaking kidding me? They’re calling for seven to ten inches of accumulated snow by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. If it’s there when we get up, Barb has pledged to call in sick. I wish I were a state worker. Being nothing more than a lowly banker, all my sick days are in my vacation time.

Not only has the coffee in my department gone bad, the coffee machine in the break room went on the fritz today, too. I stuck my cup in there, waited for the clunk that follows the hum to signal it’s finished dispensing, and pulled out a cup of hot water, tinted somewhat yellowish. Ewwww. If it had been clear water, that I could’ve handled, but steamy, slightly bile-colored water made me want to scrub it out with soap, so I did.

I drank water from the tap the rest of the afternoon, which was coming out of the bubbler slightly yellowish, too. Must’ve been a rusty pipe in the plumbing somewhere. At least, I hope it was a rusty pipe. I don’t mind drinking a little iron. Anything else, I don’t want to know about.

There was a slight delay getting home. My Darling B hit an administrative snag getting out of work on time, a highfalutin way of saying she was helping somebody straighten out his cash drawer, which indirectly reminded me to take care of an administrative detail of my own. The windows of the break room look out over Carroll Street, where B usually stops to pick me up, so in cold weather I stand there and watch for her, and when I do, I’m not only looking at Carroll Street, I’m also looking into the windows of the Jackman Building, a flatiron building on the corner of Carroll and Hamilton streets, and the home of Peppino’s Restaurant.

Several months ago ... heck, I think it was nearly a year ago when Barb and I decided to stay in town instead of heading home one Friday night. All we had to decide on was, where to eat? And while we were sitting there waiting, the mouth-watering scent of garlic filled the car, not for the first time. We were parked directly under what must’ve been the exhaust from the vent of Peppino’s kitchen. It was a place we had told ourselves several times that we wanted to visit. I set the brake, we pumped the meter full of quarters, and they happened to have a vacant table for two.

Only trouble with Peppino’s, and this is a very small, almost insignificant gripe: It’s on the expensive end of our dining-out spectrum. It’s exquisite food, and we don’t mind paying extra for it, but we can do that only so often. Well, actually, “often” isn’t the right word for it. “Almost never” would be more factual.

The first night we went there, it was Friday the 13th. We figured, since you get maybe two or three of those each year, we’d made it a new tradition: Friday the Thirteenth is our night at Peppino’s. And so it has been.

But there’s one more little detail: They seem to want diners to make a reservation. We had no idea. The first time we went in, it was on a whim and they happened to have a table for us, so they didn’t squawk. The second time we popped in, the head water frowned at us and asked if he had a reservation. It hadn’t occurred to either of us. We frowned back at him and said no. And added sorry. I think Barb may have made puppy dog eyes at him, too. Anyway, he found a table for us, but the message had been sent: Make a reservation.

So today, as I was waiting for B to work the administrative hitch out of her git-along, I crossed the street to Peppino’s and asked them for a table for two this Friday night. And he took my full name. The hostess at Great Dane never asks for my family name; she just scribbles “Dave” on her list with about four other “Daves” and I get the same old “No, not you” when I jump up after she calls. But never mind.

It was just warm enough to stand on the street in my coat and read while I waited for Barb to come pick me up, which I did. If we’re rewinding to February tomorrow morning, I’m going to get the fresh air while I’m able to take it.

It snowed today, a lot, and damn me but not one person I ran into all day made a joke about global warming. I would sooner have expected the sun to fall from the sky at noon, or President Bush to pull out of Iraq.

Oh, sure, everything has to be political with you, doesn’t it, Dave?

Maybe. I’m not going to say “no,” but I’m not going to say one more word about the war or the president, so rest easy.

It snowed enough that quite a few schools in the area closed. Not the ones that could take the full force of the storm without flinching, just the prissy ones. Tim’s school, for instance, but he won’t care that I called Monona Grove a prissy school. He got to leave early. In gastronomic terms, that’s like a triple-decker chocolate brownie cake with chocolate fudge frosting and candy sprinkles. Ice cream on the side would be a little too much, unless they’d dismissed school earlier, say at ten o’clock. That’d probably be whipped cream, too.

My employers didn’t release me early, natch, and even if they had I would still have had to cool my heels until My Darling B threaded through town on the way home from her job at Hill Farms on the west side. She pulled up at a few minutes past five and we got home at the usual time to find that Tim had shoveled the driveway. What a guy.

I said I wasn’t going to mention the political stuff but I am going back to global warming again, only because I’m stuck for something else to write about, and, a bit more to the point, I think the dumbest thing about it is the name: Global Warming. *yawn*

Not the question of whether it’s junk science or even the nah-nee nah-nee tone of the debate, but the lame-o, nerdish name: Global Warming. snzzzzzzz

Couldn’t they have broken a chunk off the research budget to hire a couple slick advertising consultants, professionals who would give it a snappier, more fearsome name, and maybe even a cool doomsday graphic, that would strike dread into the hearts of all people across the world? The few reports I’ve read suggest “COUNTDOWN TO EXTINCTION!” would come closer to the spirit of the event, as well as much flashier (and I’m just an amateur)(it shows, doesn’t it?). Naming it “global warming” was the metaphorical equivalent of stepping in dog poo on the way to the podium to explain what it was about. Everybody in the audience is holding their noses and making poop jokes instead of listening to the dire consequences. It doesn’t sound scary, it sounds warm and cozy, like something you might look forward to. I’m not surprised nobody but Al Gore and the hundred or so people who saw his movie takes it seriously.

Holy Geeze. It snowed again today.

I think I know what happened here. It’ll sound weird at first, but if you’ll just hear me out, I think you’ll agree it makes a certain amount of sense: I must’ve conked my head last week and, lapsing into a semi-comatose state, my haywired brain began to imagine itself back home, but in some kind of a parallel-universe Bizarro-land version of home, like a bad dream in which all my friends turn into talking farm animals and I climb up a tower to escape them, making it all the way up before it topples over and I go splat on the pavement like a water balloon.

Yikes, I hate those dreams.

There wasn’t a lot to do today, now that the end-of-month reports are done, so I dug out a pet project: tweaking an excel spread sheet that tracks the applications. And, after a few hours of banging my head against a sorting problem, I finally cracked the syntax of nesting a formula. In point of fact I’d been trying all week to get my head around the right way to nest the argument, but it evaded me until this morning. Cracking it was like being released from jail. I jumped up from my chair and danced a jig that carried me out into the common area of the office, where I demonstrated my happiness to anybody who could stand to watch, and that wasn’t very many people. I’m pretty sure they wanted to call security to haul me away. But I kept dancing.

That was the high point of my cubicle-rat existence today. No, wait, going home was.

I had the veal smothered in Marsala sauce with mushrooms. B ordered scalloped veal with prosciutto in white wine. And thus went the main course of our traditional Friday the Thirteenth Dinner at Peppino’s.

I wasn’t sure if we were going to eat at all. I told her that I’d wait in the restaurant if she was late, so we wouldn’t lose our reservation (I don’t think they just dump you if you’re a little late, but I don’t know for sure), but when I said “late” I meant, like, five minutes. Maybe ten. But these things have a way of getting away from me. It was Friday the thirteenth, after all.

After the hostess seated me, I took the waiter up on his offer of “something to drink” by ordering a Newcastle Brown Ale, and slowly sipped it to pass the time. Stared out the window. Played with my beard quite a bit. The New York Times was folded up in my bag, but I thought it’d be gauche to whip it out, especially as it’s the size of a billboard. There aren’t many newspapers in the States as big as the Times these days.

At twenty past the hour, the waiter, twigging to the idea that my date might not arrive as early as planned, came back with a dish of hot sesame bread “to tide you over.” Did I look that hungry? I wanted to ask.

Just after five thirty I glanced out the window and saw Barb glide by in the O-Mobile, looking in vain for a parking spot. On a Friday night they’re all claimed shortly after five o’clock, but at five thirty a whole new opportunity opened up, and while she was waiting at the red light on Hamilton Street, right out the front door, I rushed out to tell her: “Park on Wilson!” She seemed puzzled until I mentioned the time, then circled around the block and got a spot right in front of the court house where, just minutes earlier, she might have gotten a ticket for blocking a traffic lane. The outside lane of the capital square loop turns into street-side parking at five thirty.

She rushed in, out of breath and apologizing like crazy. “No worries. Relax, now,” I urged, and she took a deep breath, then reached for the menu. No, not that one. Not the wine menu, either. “Where’s the cocktail menu?” Whups! Our waiter missed that one. I stepped around to the hostess’s station to ask, and she flipped one to me from a pocket under the bar. Crisis averted.

We started with the crab cakes, same as last time, but damn, they’re good. And now that I know I can eat gorgonzola, I had the salad instead of the soup, smothered in gorgonzola dressing. C’est magnifique! And really good, too.

The rest you already know. I should have stopped about halfway through my veal, but I tucked it all away even though I had to adjust my belt to make room for it. B saved half her entrée and ordered dessert. I can’t believe it, but I helped her with that, too, as we sipped our coffee.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is just this: “What are we going to eat for dinner?” And, not any less important: Why?

Author Michael Pollan tries to answer the question in just under four-hundred pages. I have mixed feelings about that. He’s a good writer and I liked everything he wrote about, but it took me more than a week to plow through this book, and that was a chapter at every sitting, three or four times a day. I couldn’t help thinking that a ruthless editor could have trimmed a hundred pages off this monster.

My Darling B disagrees with me, and says that it’s just long enough to say what he wanted to say. I don’t disagree that he got his point across, or that he wasn’t a pleasure to read, but I can’t help thinking that he might’ve condensed it to even three-hundred fifty pages, and he’s certainly a polished enough writer to do that without losing a thing.

Now that I’ve got my one gripe with The Omnivore’s Dilemma out of the way, I’d happily recommend it to anybody at all, even people who roll their eyes at the slightest notion of questioning the practice of industrial farming, which Pollan spends the better part of the book doing. Maybe especially to people who roll their eyes.

The entire first half of the book is an intense look at the farming industry, or as intense a look as the industry will allow a journalist to make, and discussing how we got into the practice of farming almost nothing but corn and soybeans. And if you think cows and pigs and chickens count as not corn or soybeans, you’re so far up the Nile without a paddle that you’ll never know how you got to be first in line for your Soylent Green ration.

Just a tangential observation: Farmers will plant ninety million acres of corn this year, twenty million more acres than last year, in response to the demand for ethanol, which we will burn in our mixed-fuel vehicles. To grow that corn, farmers will fertilize it with thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate made from — Anyone? Anyone? — oil. We’re using oil to grow corn that we’ll substitute for oil! Talk about dystopia.

Pollan devotes the second half of the book to examining the organic-food movement and its related half-cousin, the beyond-organic farm. As he compares and contrasts these with industrialized farming, it’s really a continuing argument from the first half of the book, as is the final chapter, a relatively brief look at hunting and gathering.

The industrial method of farming doesn’t exactly take a drubbing at Pollan’s hands, but the idea of producing more corn and soy than we know what to do with, or turning oil into fertilizer to grow all that corn, doesn’t appear to be the most sensible thing we ever did, when you get to thinking about it, and certainly Pollan means that you do. It’s not a screed about eating right or saving the world, but rather a well-thought-out argument that you ought to give more than a passing thought to not only where your food comes from, but how it gets to the supermarket shelves. And after all, maybe that’s why it should be four-hundred pages.

The Rubik’s cube has made a comeback. I could hardly believe it when Tim told us that lots of kids in school were carrying them around, playing with them in class. “Do they have mood rings, too?” Barb asked him. “How about pet rocks?”

No. Just Rubik’s cubes, although investing in pet rocks might not be a bad idea if people are playing with Rubik’s cubes again. When I told Tim I still had the one I bought back in the 1970’s, he asked if I knew where it was. Against all odds, I found it in the basement almost immediately, sitting on a corner of my workbench.

He played with it after dinner for about an hour, which was all the time he needed to determine that it was impossible to solve. Not impossible, it turned out; he met a kid in school the next day who could finish it in about two minutes, but something went wrong while Tim was working on it and he popped one of the center cubes loose. Hot glue wouldn’t fix it, and the cube’s retired to a corner of my desk now.

Maybe I can’t eat all the gorgonzola I want, after all.

I was up quite late last night — too much coffee before bed time. Sometimes that doesn’t bother me at all, and then there are times like last night, when the caffeine wires me directly to the electricity grid of the universe. I can keep fluorescent bulbs burning all across the county when it’s like that, and it was like that last night. Maybe you wondered what that glow in the sky was.

And because I was up so late last night I got to experience the full effect of the remarkably odiferous decomposition going on in my lower colon. This was a case of the vapors so bad that even Tim recoiled in horror when he blundered into the outer boundaries of the deadly invisible cloud that enveloped me. “Agh! What is that?” he gurgled as he pulled the collar of his t-shirt up over his nose, as if such a feeble effort could deflect my awesome malevolent power. It wasn’t long before he just gave up and backed away.

I ran upstairs to refill my coffee mug (I didn’t know yet that I would be a power grid night) and when I came back even I was offended by the stench that filled my lair. That was the first time I remember that gorgonzola made me so repulsive.

At least, I think it was the gorgonzola. I can’t imagine that anything else I ate would ferment so quickly in such a profoundly evil way. Maybe it wasn’t gorgonzola at all. Or maybe the dressing was gorgonzola and some other cheese, cream or other unmentioned milk solids. Eighty percent of everything on Peppino’s menu is dressed in some kind of creamy sauce. It sure was good, though.

We woke up to beautifully sunny, warm weather today, and you know what that means: Yard work! Yay!

I’m not down on yard work. It’s just that we have quite a lot to do, and when I say a lot, I mean, Oh My God! Where did all that come from? I’ve cut so many branches away from the bushes and trees in the back yard and piled them up along the lot line in a pile so thick and high that I wouldn’t be surprised to find a yellow-brick road in there, complete with lions and tigers and bears.

I’ve been at it since last fall — not continuously, mind you. To be brutally honest, I haven’t put more than four, maybe five weekends into pruning back the keepers and cutting down two evergreens that had gone wild. I’m not what you’d call a terribly conscientious gardener. I’m more like the kind of guy who looks out the back window every so often and murmurs to himself, “I got to get out there one of these days,” and then goes back to his coffee.

But even five weekends spent cutting back the mess we had has amounted to quite a pile of brush, and this is the last week before the city comes by to pick it up. We’ll spend next weekend hauling it out to the curb, rain or shine. Considering the luck we’ve had with weather so far, the smart money’s on rain.

With so little time left, I spent most of the day cleaning up the patch of ground in the northeast corner of the lot that My Darling B wanted for her garden. A big part of it was covered with that fibrous black matting that looks like old dryer sheets. I guess there was a flower garden there several years back. I found lots of those little plastic cards that come stuck in the flower pots, and the mat would have been good at keeping the weeds out of the flowers, but a Virginia creeper muscled in and that was the end of the garden. The creeper was so widely spread and deeply rooted that pulling it up felt more like an evisceration than gardening.

While I was in back B was out front, turning over the ground for an herb garden, but even so I had plenty of company as I tore through the yard like Godzilla through Tokyo.

The robins are everywhere, bless ‘em. If I’d been a robin these last two weeks, I would’ve left in disgust by now, departed for warmer climes. Just one look at last week’s record April snow fall and it would’ve been, “Screw this white crap! I’m out of here!” But dozens of them stopped in the yard through the morning and afternoon to pick worms out of the lawn, swallowing them whole before zipping away, probably to find a private place to barf up uncooked, wriggling whole worms, because, y’know, yuck!

A cardinal moved from tree to tree along the lot line down the middle of the block, stopping ten minutes or so in each tree to mark his territory by singing a song. A female stopped by just once to pick something out of the brush pile before quickly flitting away. She didn’t say anything to the noisy guy upstairs.

Chickadees are just plain fearless. I didn’t have to wait frozen in place for ten minutes in the hopes of seeing one out of the corner of my eye. Hacking away at a thick lilac trunk, I heard the sudden blit! of tiny wings going past my ear and automatically dropped the pruning saw to swat away a wasp. There was no wasp, but there was a pair of chickadees staring me in the eye from their perch on the bottom branches right in front of me. They got bored with me pretty quickly and started a game of tag, flitting up to the higher branches, then back down to the lower branches, and they hardly noticed when I went back to noisily sawing, although they did stop to watch for a minute or so as I stacked up the branches.

If a genie were to appear to me today and offer me one wish, I wouldn’t ask for diamonds or immortality or all the power in the universe. That’s piddling stuff. I’d ask the genie to cast a spell on Ken Merson that would prevent him from ever saying his name aloud.

I don’t know Ken, but I know his work. I am, in fact, a big admirer or Ken’s work. He’s the day time DJ on WOLX (94.9 on your FM dial in the Madison metro area) and has a classic DJ’s voice and style. He’s an overflowing font of pop-music knowledge, and he can even tell a pretty darned good joke.

Trouble is, Ken goes by the handle, “Ken Merson, the Merson Person,” which probably sounded nifty when he introduced himself on the first day, but he kept on introducing himself every day, day after day, after every single song, and by this time it’s at least as aggravating as dragging knuckles across a cheese grater.

Ken used to be on later in the afternoon, so my annoyance levels didn’t rise to prickly levels until around three o’clock, but Ken got his hours switched to take over from the morning crew and finish out the day shift. If I want to keep on listening to my favorite oldies station, and I do, then I have to listen to him saying “Ken Merson, the Merson Person” about a thousand times every day. And I don’t want to do that. It’s a pickle.

Please. Ken. Knock it off.

I picked Turing’s Delirium off the book shelf at the library because it had a really cool-looking cover. A ghostly head, a web of printed circuits, a ring of typewriter keys: the alphabet in a circular arrangement is your classic decoder-ring icon, and, not to give away the plot at all, but coded secrets are what this story happens to be about.

I’d never heard of the book or the author, Edmundo Paz Soldan, but that cover grabbed my attention and held it long enough to get me to read the first couple chapters. I’ve checked out books before just because I liked their covers, usually depicting landscapes of far-off worlds populated by leggy, naked women. The difference between most of those and this one was that, this time, the book didn’t suck. I liked what was between the covers of Turing’s Delirium more than the dust jacket. I’m sure the author would be so happy to hear such glowing praise.

What I liked most about it, he said, hoping to get back to some kind of criticism that wasn’t pure drivel, was a style of writing that was almost drearily noir-ish enough to cue up a wailing saxophone in the background every time I began a new chapter. I haven’t enjoyed an author who could call up that style since I plowed through the complete works of Raymond Chandler.

I’m not saying Paz Soldan is Chandler, but he’s got a good voice, even thought it’s translated from Spanish. That can’t be easy to do. I couldn’t help but wonder, more than once, if the translator was responsible for the noir-ish tone, if maybe she wasn’t a huge Chandler fan and whipped a little Farewell, My Lovely in wherever she could. But there’s little doubt Paz Soldan’s story of revolution in modern Bolivia is straight out of the cyberpunk mold, a kind of noir all its own.

Set in Bolivia during an uprising against an oppressive government, the novel tells the stories of a cryptologist nicknamed Turing; his wife, an academic specializing in the history of cryptography; their daughter, who maintains a sort of social web page detailing the lives and activities of computer hackers; an uber-hacker who leads the uprising against the government using computer viruses; and The Black Chamber, Bolivia's spy agency.

(Cue the saxophones.) Their stories all appear to center on what they’ve lost. The cryptologist has devoted his life to the spy agency, a devotion that will turn out to be all for nothing. His wife not only loses her husband to the agency, but her daughter to the uprising and her work to government thugs. The hacker not only gets all his compatriots killed but suffers a scorching case of carpel tunnel syndrome. Only The Black Chamber lives on through the ghostly presence of Albert, an etherial character who emerges to weave all the characters together with the history of cryptography.

It’s pretty surreal stuff, but I liked it a lot. Recommended.

Movie Time: Project Grizzly

Troy Hurtubise is a Canadian scrap metal dealer who has obsessively built a series of armored suits, each stronger than the last, in a quest to perfect the one suit of armor that will allow him to face a grizzly bear.

This movie is not a documentary about the suit, though. This is seventy-two minutes of video demonstrating that Troy is crazy as a loon. To do this, film maker David Lynch only had to point the camera at Troy and let him talk (or jump around in his long silk underwear swinging a billy club — I thought it would only be decent to warn you about that). And boy oh boy, can Troy talk. About the only time he doesn’t talk is when he’s locked up tight in the grizzly-proof suit.

That’s because under the huge bullet-shaped armor carapace, he’s wearing a motorcycle helmet. There’s a hole about the size of a baseball in the armor, but he’s effectively blind. The rest of the suit is so rigid that he can barely move when he’s in it, and so heavy that he can’t get up when he falls over, which he does nearly every time he’s in it. In other words, he’s built a suit that makes it impossible for him to get anywhere near a grizzly. Pretty clever.

Dana, the morning DJ on WOLX, noted that Florida’s governor is considering pardoning Jim Morrison’s thirty-seven-year-old charge of indecent exposure. I think maybe the governor’s having a slow week. “I bet he wouldn’t pardon Morrison if Jim was still writing songs like this next one, though,” Dana added, and played, Touch me, Baby, which she thought was “pretty risqué.”

Risque? Really?

C’mon, touch me, baby!
Can’t you see that I am not afraid.
What was that promise that you made?
Why won’t you tell me what you said?
What was that promise that you made?

If that’s sexual innuendo, it’s all but impenetrably obscure to me. Maybe I’ve become jaded to all but the most blatantly obvious come-on. Merely spinning past a hip-hop station exposes me to more cussing and double entendre than that. I’m going to hazard the opinion that if Morrison were still alive and writing quaintly vague lyrics like “touch me, baby,” he’d be a has-been. More accurately, he would’ve been a has-been ten or fifteen years ago on the merits of that kind of material. I wonder if the stunt that got him charged for indecent exposure would even get him arrested these days.

The local Pick And Save food store chain has a radio advertisement for their “value days” set to the tune of the chicken dance. An accordian player backs one guy singing mostly off-key. “Would you like to save on pork? Would you like to save on beef? It’s value days!” Repeat for thirty seconds, with a short break to announce prices.

I’ve written them the following letter: “Dear Pick And Save: I’ll never ever shop at your store until that jingle stops playing in my head, which, as you well know, will be the day hell freezes over. Thanks! Yours truly.”

There. That’ll show them.

It’s hard to think of anything to say about Pulp Fiction without resorting to a lot of cussing. Tim probably said it best after it was over and the credits started to roll: “That’s the weirdest movie I’ve ever seen.”

Amen to that. This is a critically acclaimed film that’s an homage to bad movies, something of a trademark for director Quentin Tarantino, who’s widely regarded as a cinematic genius. Is it possible to make a really good movie by imitating really bad movies? Warhol made soup labels into what many consider to be art, but I do not, so I don’t know how to answer that.

It’s possible to make a pretty funny movie. I can’t deny it made me laugh, but I’m not sure this is a movie you’d find in the “comedy” section of your video rental store. In fact, in our neighborhood video store it’s in a corner reserved for movies that are quirky, foreign or, preferrably, both. Apparently not even video store workers know what to do with Pulp Fiction.

But it’s one of those cinematic touchstones. Tim had kept running across references to it seemingly every week, and I hadn’t seen it since it was released, so I grabbed it when we were trolling the shelves of Bongo Video last weekend and now Tim understands what all the cussing is about. I wonder what it’s like to be Samuel L. Jackson, knowing that everyone in the English-speaking world thinks of one disgusting word when they see his face?

It’s Thursday! You know what that means, right?

Me, neither. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that Thursday is a sort of a false-alarm for the weekend. “It’s almost Friday,” I hear a lot of people say, trying to keep on the sunny side, build a little momentum toward Saturday, but it feels forced. “One more day until Friday!”

I try to go along with it, but all I hear is, “It’s not Friday yet!” *sigh*

It was a really slow Thursday today. I fetched the morning’s work from the office mail box, took it back to my cubicle and ran it all off in under an hour. It was pretty light. To fill the time, I dug up a project I’ve been working on all week but had to leave in the middle and finished that up. Looked pretty slick when I was finished, if I do say so myself. (Pat-pat on own back.) Then I went to the file cabinet to dredge up yet another project and did it r e a l l y s l o w l y. That left me famished, so I ate my lunch. It was eleven o’clock when I finished. (Pasta and roast red pepper sauce! Yum!) Now what?

Luckily, somebody brought me more applications just then, to tide me over until the noon hour. When I came back from that, I banged away at a very special project I’ve been putting off because setting up all the ground work for it has been pretty tedious and awful and I dread doing it, even though I know it’ll be awesome cool when it’s done. That kept me pecking away at my keyboard for a couple hours, or at least it felt as though it was hours. Time is relative, unless you’re an actual ticking clock, in which case you get to crush the soul of many a cubicle rat who can’t help but look up every five minutes in the hope that at least a half hour has passed by since the last time he looked. Gawd, it must feel wicked to have that kind of power!

... and so on, as I limped my way through Thursday. It’s almost Friday! And Friday’s going to be ... what?

Well, it can’t be more of the same, because I’m scheduled to present the staggering wealth of all my credit card knowledge at a real live meeting right in the middle of Friday morning, which will put a lot of my other projects and duties off to one side, where I can come back for them at a later time, preferably after lunch.

Was that Norm MacDonald playing Chubby on My Name is Earl tonight? Whoever it was, he did a drop-dead awesome impression of Burt Reynolds, who played Chubby in one episode last year. I’m pretty sure it was Norm this time around. He had all Burt’s mannerisms down solid: the gum-chewing, the chuckle, the halting way he talked. Even the rug. I don’t watch television enough to know what Norm’s been up to lately. He was one of my favorite Saturday Night Live cast members from the modern days, which I guess dates me as a pretty ugly-ass old codger.

Okay, now it’s Friday!

To celebrate, we walked down the street to the Edo Garden, a Japanese restaurant just blocks from Our Humble O-Bode. We’ve been meaning to try it since we moved here almost two years ago and finally got around to it tonight.

It is with great reluctance that I have to report I’m really very disappointed in the Edo Garden. I was stoked about having a fantastic Japanese restaurant just a stone’s throw from our back yard, but it’s not a fantastic Japanese restaurant at all. It would be about an average Chinese take-out place, if they served the food in wire-handled paper boxes.

Specifically: The gyoza we ordered as an appetizer was greasy, and I’m pretty sure it was frozen factory-made food. My salmon was overcooked, leaving it dry, chewy and tasteless. The crab cakes were rubbery and mostly tasteless, too. Barb’s chicken teriyaki, beef teriyaki and shrimp teriyaki (it was a combo platter; she doesn’t habitually order three entrees) were all about the same, and we both thought the shrimp was frozen.

I don’t think either of us are fussy eaters, but what they did to the chicken and beef was careless, and neither of us expects to pay good money for frozen sea food.

On a positive note, my Alaska rolls were delicious. I have no idea how fresh the crab meat was, but the veggies were very tasty.

Now we are very tired. And Barb has a very, very pink face.

Working in the yard is supposed to be good for you. It’s supposed to be satisfying and keep you fit, the key to that last thought being that you’re assumed to be fit to start with. My Darling B and I, however, have gone decidedly soft. Grubbing in the dirt or pruning back the bushes and dragging the cut brush out to the curb is rather satisfying, but a few hours of that will bust my hump.

There was a certain amount of yard work we had to do today, though, because city-wide brush pick-up is scheduled to take place this week, so we have to move our stunningly huge and impressively diverse collection of pruned branches and cut trees to the curb today or tomorrow. And being the procrastinators we are, it’s never a good idea to leave anything until tomorrow.

But before we did that, we made a quick trip to the farmer’s market, the first one on capital square since it went indoors last fall. We started on the east corner so we could pick up a hot cuppa joe at Michelangelo’s and a giant-sized chocolate chip scone from the Stella’s Bakery truck. Stella’s is the reason I tag along on a trip to the farmer’s market with B. I usually get a frosted pumpkin square, but the scone was too tempting to pass up.

I also have to tag along to hold B’s basket, to give her a little more freedom to move as she weaves through the crowds making her way to the front of the line. Her basket would ordinarily weigh enough to cramp my shoulder by the time we made it halfway around the square, but today she surprised me with her restraint. She wanted to buy just about every herb and flower she saw, but her garden isn’t ready and it’s too early in the season to plant most of what she wants to grow.

We changed into our grubby clothes after we got home, trudged into the yard and got to work. I mowed the front lawn first, then Tim and B joined me piling up chopped brush along the curb. With all three of us dragging it up from the back, the work went mercifully quick.

But then came the horror. The brush I’d cleared away along the back lot line had been hiding a mess of rotting wood, broken masonry, metal fence posts and various other junk. One of the previous owners had dumped all their hard-to-dispose-of rubbish out there, then let the brush grow wild to cover it. We raked it into a pile, but then what? When I was a boy we would’ve loaded junk like that into our truck and hauled it to the town dump, but there’s no such thing in this environmentally-friendly world. We had to call around to find a hauler (who would load it up into his truck and haul it away to a “landfill,” no doubt).

We dragged and hauled and raked from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon, and it wrung us out and left B and I as limp as a couple of well-worn dish rags. Tim was fine. I can almost remember being sixteen and indestructible, but it’s a pretty dim memory. For B, the memory seems to be a little stronger, though. She won’t wear long sleeves or a hat when she works outside, even though I nag her, and after we were done working and retired to the rear deck to siesta for a little while, she parked her chair in the sun, rolled up the sleeves of her t-shirt and turned her face up. Hence the boiled lobster look. Tomorrow it may be easier to convince her to use sun screen.

There was never any time while I was watching Children of Men that I thought: This will turn out all right now. I’m guessing that I was meant to think that, particularly at the end, but I didn’t. It’s a bleak movie. And it’s not about a glimmer of hope, either. “It’s an action movie,” My Darling B curtly summarized it, and she was spot-on in her appraisal. Nobody in the movie spent any time at all talking about the premise, that women all over the world started miscarrying their babies and then, for eighteen years, none of them got pregnant again until a woman named Kee (subtle name, isn’t it?) turned up in Britain, which is too bad for her because they were rounding up immigrants in cages and deporting them, for reasons that were never very clear. That’s the long and short of the movie’s plot. All the rest of it went like this: kaBLAM! Bang, bang, bang, chase scene, kill off a movie star, bang, bang, bang, chase scene, kill off a movie star, and so on. Sorry to ruin it for you.

Man, am I bushed! I had no idea I was this out of shape. If I don’t start getting some regular exercise, like, say, a twenty-minute walk every day, I’m going to be a total creampuff by ... oops! Too late!

I’ve been reduced to this quivering bowl full of jelly by another few hours’ work in the yard. All I did was prune back a few bushes and haul some more brush out to the curb. Oh, and I dug up the bushes along the back side of the house. They sucked. I mean they sucked like I didn’t like them, not that they were hard to chop down. They were easy to chop down. Heck, they were fun to chop down.

It still wore me out, though. Every time I bend over I groan like an old door in a haunted house. Looking on the bright side, I’m going to sleep like the dead. I’m not saying that makes it all worthwhile. It’s definitely a minor perk, but I’m going to enjoy it.

My Darling B bought a ton of bricks today. It is without question one of the weirdest, or at least the most out of the ordinary purchase she’s ever made.

She’s been digging up dirt for an herb garden alongside the driveway. The ground there drops away in a shallow hill that we’ll have to shore up with a curb of bricks to hold back the earth after we level it off. If we’ve done our math right, we’ll need about three-hundred fifty landscaping bricks for the job. To be nit-pickingly accurate, that comes to 4,200 pounds, but “a ton of bricks” scans a lot better.

Now comes the fun part: Neither one of us knows the first thing about building a retaining wall out of bricks, and we’re both practically crippled from a little light yard work, so moving more than two tons of bricks ought to be good for a few stories, at least. Watch this space.

I had about fifteen or twenty minutes to kill before I went home from work Friday night, so I wandered down Carroll Street to browse the aisles of Shakespeare’s book store, and the first thing I noticed as I walked in through the front door was that there were a few aisles missing.

“Whoa! What’s going on here?” I blurted out.

“We’re moving,” the lady at the check-out answered, with a surprised laugh.

A few more questions brought out all the awful details: The city’s one book store on capital square, my refuge from stress and grief, and a cozy island when this city’s been frozen over, will move to the far end of State Street, a thirty-minute round-trip from where I work.

This is a sad event. Capital square has gone over almost entirely to banks and a Starbuck’s. Okay, there are one or two pretty good restaurants, too, but precious few places to hang out for a lunch hour. What could have precipitated this? Are people really that tired of book stores like Shakespeare’s? Tire of Shakespeare’s? Might as well tire of life!

But it’s going, going, gone. Gone are the creaky floors, the endless aisles between wooden-plank book shelves, the musty ten-volume collections of prose and poetry. What’ll I do without their dark corners to crouch in, a book propped open on one knee? This is a grave loss for the square. I can’t believe it’s happening.

There were two tons of bricks waiting for us on our lawn when we came home this evening. "I thought it would be a lot bigger than that," I said. It was one pallet stacked about five feet high. "Me, too," Barb said, and we each breathed our own private sighs of relief. Myself, I pictured three or four chin-high pallets along the driveway. I mean, two tons is a lot of bricks.

All the brush we laid out by the curb was gone, too. I truly expected that to be there quite a few more days, but the city must have hired a much more punctual contractor than they did last fall, when our pile of branches sat out there for weeks.

Should we go for the hat trick? I hired a guy to come clean up the collapsed, rotten wood pile that I found under the overgrown brush in the back yard. He was supposed to come this morning, but it was raining pretty hard all night long last night and was still coming down pretty heavily when I woke up this morning. I wouldn't have blamed him at all if he postponed it until another day, and a quick glance out the back door on my way in the house confirmed that he did. When I called him, he said he didn't want to tear up the yard running back and forth across it with wheelbarrows and would check back tomorrow to see if the ground had dried out enough. If not, maybe Wednesday. Hoe-kay.

After blundering onto the discovery that Shakespeare's book store was moving to the other end of State Street, I decided to commemorate the event by splurging some lunch money on a book. The problem with being surrounded by a quarter million books, though, is that it's nearly impossible to remember any of the titles I most wanted to buy. I wandered the aisles from poetry to history to biography to anthologies and finally ended up in the fiction section, where I began to read the spine of every single book on every single shelf, starting from the top and working my way down. At the bottom shelf of the last stack of the aisle I saw it: A beat-up hard cover copy of Herman Wouk's The Winds Of War. I've been looking for a cheap, beat-up copy of that book for years. It was a sign.

I've read just one other book by Herman Wouk: The Caine Mutiny, and, to be honest, I really didn't like it the first time I read it. I certainly never thought I'd ever read it more than once, but I did. I read it the second time because I skipped over all the slushy, sentimental stuff, skipping ahead to find the next scene that had more to do with the war than with what's his name. After finishing off the book, though, I realized I sort of wanted to know what was going on with what's his name, so I started over, this time reading the stuff I'd skipped the first time. It wasn't too bad. Some time later, I started over again and read it from start to finish without skipping anything, and really got into it.

There's no telling how many times I've read The Caine Mutiny by this time, because I'll crack it open whenever I'm reminded of a scene or a passage that I particularly liked, read it through, then back up or fast forward to a relevant passage and, soon enough, I've read an entire chapter and it's way past my bed time.

And that's why I've been looking for a copy of The Winds Of War. I found a copy of War And Rememberance, which is apparently a sequel to Winds, and tried twice to read it but never got past the first five chapters. Winds, though, is a much easier read, not nearly as turgid, but, and this is a killer, it's 880 pages long! I can't read that much in a month! To get through it all, I imagine I'll have to read a couple hundred pages, then set it aside and read something lighter, or at least distracting, before coming back to Winds to bite off another hundred pages or so, and you won't be hearing a summary or recommendation or exasperation from me on it until sometime later this winter.

So long as I'm babbling about books, I might as well mention that I finished Reading The River this afternoon, and was sorry it was over so soon. My mother picked up a copy for me a couple weeks back when the author, John Hildebrand, went to a special event at the city library. I'd read two other books of his, Mapping the Farm and A Northern Front and liked them enough that I wanted to go to the library meeting, but they scheduled it for a Tuesday night, and Mom lives in a town that's a three-hour drive from Our Humble O-Bode. Much as I wanted to go, I didn't want to take two days off from work to give me enough time to make the drive.

I'm a sucker for travel writing. Give me a thick volume of Bill Bryson or William Langewiesche and I'm happy to curl up with it for days, even if I've read it before. Hildebrand's not exactly a travel writer, but Reading The River was very definitely a journey for him. Starting at the cabin he built in the Alaskan bush, where he and his newlywed wife began and ended a short marriage, he moves on to the Yukon, where he buys a canoe with an outboard motor and heads downstream. He stops at most of the villages and fishing camps along the way, apparently striking up a conversation with nearly everybody he meets, and while he's there he whips a little of the history of the place on you as well. Actually, he's especially good at that. Mapping The Farm was a memoir of his (second) wife's family, a history of their farm, and an essay on how people and the land shape one another. He does much the same magic with Reading The River.

The second most important thing to remember when scrubbing the cat pan clean is to try not to think about what you're doing. It's already bad enough that you have decided to keep a pan filled with crap in your house. It's already bad enough that you have allowed the cat to train you to rake the crap out of the sand, morning, noon and night. Somehow it's even worse that you've got to keep the pan spic and span, too, so that poor widdow diddums won't pee on your carpet. Yuck. Just yuck.

And exactly what do you wear while scrubbing excrement from a cat pan with a greenie-meanie? I dig up the heaviest pair of rubber gloves I can find and an old shirt, both of which I burn using thermonuclear weapons afterwards. Then I go shower under an upended bottle of chlorine bleach. But I try not to think about it.

The very best way to clean the cat pan would be to throw it in the dish washer and repeat the longest cleaning cycle until it came out spotless, but sooner or later Barb would probably catch me at it.

The first most important thing to remember is, of course: Don't lick your lips. Don't even open your mouth, no matter what happens. Spit, sputter or spray, but resist the impulse to brush away any fleck with the tip of your tongue. Don't even innocently wet your lips, thinking them to be free of, ah, contamination. Remember that's a cat pan you're cleaning, for god's sake, not pizza tin or pie plate. The gunk that spashes out of that pan could turn Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, so keep your mouth clamped shut. I realize this is contradictory advice, in that you're forced to keep in mind at all times what you're doing, but after a while I learned to separate one from the other, and if I can do it, you can, too.

The rains have returned. This is no news to the people of Dubuque, Iowa, who at the very moment I write these words are being pounded by enough rain to float a battleship. Disclaimer: These are the prognostications of an armchair weatherman. I don't even know what "prognostication" means, and my meteorological skills are about as developed as my vocab. Even so, I can look at the radar map and see a storm shaped like The Angel of Death tromping across the plains states. The top of its hooded skull-for-a-head is just south of Madison, so the next time he raises his scythe, probably at about midnight, most of the state will be swept by thunderstorms and My Darling B will herd us all into the basement and make us stay there until dawn. We could be in for a long night.

Or not at all. I'm hoping for a gentle rain playing tippity-tap across the shingles, maybe waking to some dramatic lightening and thunder at around two o'clock, then drifing off to sleep as the storm moves into the distance. The dawn will break bright and clear, and we'll watch reports on the news that twisters shattered dozens of towns in Illinois, because it always happens somewhere else, except if you live in Denver. It always happens there.

And now, the fascinating world of home improvement, also known as: Tinkering with it 'til it's broke.

Our water softener's not working. Disclaimer: I don't know jack about water softeners, either. But I can look in the bottom of the electric kettle, see all that scale built up from hard water and know that a water softener's supposed to keep that from happening, so I feel somewhat more confident in my abilites to diagnose a faulty water softener than I do forecasting the weather.

As I said, I don't know jack about water softeners, but the one thing I'm pretty sure about is that the tank I pour the salt into should be filling with water when I trip the switch to make the softener start its regeneration cycle, and I never saw more than a scum of water on the bottom. The water softener sucked that up in about thirty seconds, then gurgled as air filled the uptake line, so I did what any curious boy would do: I got a hose and filled the brine tank with more water. The softener sucked that right up, too. Maybe it needs more water, I thought, and set about trying to figure out how the water got in there in the first place.

Turns out it gets shot back in there during the "fast rinse," and on our water softener the timer for the fast rinse was set to be about two minutes long, not nearly enough time to fill the tank with water. I cranked the setting up to ten minutes, and was rewarded with a couple inches of water in the brine tank after the fast rinse. Will it work, or will it break? Will the silverwear come out of the dish washer with a shine, or will I have to call the professionals to fix what I so studiously mucked up? Watch this space when I reveal the exciting conclusion.

I bought a typewriter ribbon today. Can you believe that? When was the last time you even saw a typewriter? But I walked into an office supply store on Carroll Street and asked them for a typewriter ribbon, and they not only knew what I was talking about, they got one for me. Had to special order it, and it took twenty-four hours, but still, it was an event as remarkable as finding dinosaurs roaming your local city park, if you ask me.

I have quite a few manual typewriters. When most people were throwing them out, I was buying them up. I've always been a big fan of typewriters. It's probably that guy & gadget thing. I'm not sure, but I think the first used typewriter I bought just for the fun of it was an Underwood desk model with an open cast-iron frame. It stands about a foot high and you can see all the parts moving around inside when you type on it. It turned out to be the venerable Underwood Number 5, a typewriter that not only set the industry standard but was also heavy enough to punch right through the floor of your house to the basement if you dropped it, which was very likely if you made the mistake of trying to pick it up. Definitely a two-man carry.

After the Underwood, I bought any typewriter I saw that was in halfway decent shape and looked old — really old, not old like the ones you learned to type on in high school. One of the portables I have is so old it's got twenty-four alphabetical keys, from back before they invented the letters "c" and "u."

About the coolest typewriter I have is a portable that folds in half that I found in an antique shop for a price so cheap, I practically stole the thing. This was back before anything labeled "antique" cost more than four figures. Looking at it folded up I could tell it was a typewriter, but I couldn't figure out how it worked until I tripped the switch that unfolded it. When I saw that, I didn't care what it cost, and when I found out how little it cost, I just about threw the money at the store keeper.

I bought the ribbon for a Smith Corona Silent portable that I've been rapping away at for the past week or so. It's older than my mother but still in great working order, covered in an unmarred glossy coat of black enamel paint and, I think, still has all the original gold trim. Ribbon needed refreshing, however. Now it's good as new, except that the letter "e" is slightly askew under the clear plastic key cover, but that gives it a special kind of charm.

One of the oddest things about typing on typewriters, as opposed to "keyboarding," the bastard verb that sprang out of high school computer class rooms, is that each typewriter has its own subtle variation of key arrangment. The layout of the alphabet didn't change; the QWERTY arrangement became a sacred cow that almost nobody messed with. The other keys, however, were freely moved from one side of the keyboard to the other.

The back space key had to be the most nomadic key of them all. It was usually in the upper right corner, but sometimes on the middle right, and every once in a while in the upper left corner. I supposed they figured this would never be a problem because, after all, who owned more than one typewriter? But if you spent the night pounding out an essay on your personal portable, then moved to an electric desk top in the library to make a nice, clean final copy to turn in, the sudden movement of a key as basic to typing as a back space could be positively enraging. Word processors aren't as romantic as old typewriters, but I don't miss the wandering backspace.

When using a typewriter, another thing that takes a little getting used to is not having an exclamation point. Also, I like being able to italicize. Those improvements, and being able to correct my misspellings, are undeniably good things about word processors. But what I miss most is beating on the keys when an especially good idea comes to me. On a typewriter, I can bang away like a piano virtuoso, get a good rhythm going, and finish off with an arm-waving flourish. Feels great. Sometimes I try to do that on my laptop, too, but the klitter-klitter of the key tiles isn't as satisfying as the BANG! BANG! BANG! of a typewriter's clacking keys. That's why I'll probably always keep at least one old manual close at hand.

The votes are in and counted, and the result is clear: Courier New was not the font you wanted when reading drivel. Please welcome back Times New Roman.

It was either that or ARIAL, and I don't like Arial, so here you go. I've absolutely got to have serifs. It would be law, in fact, in Dave's Dream World that everything printed would have serifs, even handwritten notes, even though it would add depths of tedium to penmanship classes undreamed of in a school kid's worst nightmares. No serifs = no grade. "Sorry, can't read this." RIPPPP! "Do over."

If you're thinking that Dave's Dream World must be pretty lonely with crap like this going on, you'd be wrong, because there's free beer for everybody on Friday after work. Truth be told, it was a little lonely until the bar opened that first Friday, but citizenship picked right up after that. That's just to get your weekend started, though. You're on your own Saturday and Sunday and Monday.

Did I mention that Monday's a day off, too? Three-day weekends in Dave's Dream World. Nobody wants to work on Monday anyway.

Waiting for the light to change so I could cross Johnson Street, I noticed that the car parked at the corner was not in a designated spot, but along the yellow curb, a way of parking that might go over in New York city, but not in Madison, Wisconsin. Odder still, there seemed to be a big, white bean bag chair stuff into passenger seat. Not so odd, I hear you say. Some people still like bean bag chairs as a novelty, if nothing else, and in a city filled with hippie wierdo freaks, as Madison is, a bean bag chair counts as quaint. Why would a bean bag chair arouse my interest? Well, because there appeared to be another one in the driver's seat. One bean bag chair would not be very odd, and neither would two, but if one of them were in the driver's seat — wellllll, that would be a leetle odd, wouldn't you admit?

It wasn't until I stepped around the lamp post to get a closer look that I noticed the owner was sitting on the hood, and the hood was knuckled up and back, exposing the radiator, the dead-giveaway sign of all cars that have rear-ended other cars.

Oh. It wasn't parked at all. And those weren't bean bag chairs. (I can be kind of slow sometimes.) They were air bags in their post-deployment position. The owner of the car was chatting with somebody on his cell phone, but it wasn't happy chatting. It was a very sad, serious conversation, something along the lines of, "You know that drive were planning to take to Door County this weekend? Well, guess what?"

I was headed down State Street after trying on shoes for half an hour at Jack's Shoes, a couple blocks back. The pair of plain black low quarters I bought five years ago finally blew out earlier this week. It wouldn't have made any difference to a dopey guy like me, but my toes got soaked walking the rain-drenched streets this past week, and I got tired of that real quick. Hence my trip to Jack's. Jack's is an old-fashioned shoe store where clerks still run into the back room to bring out several different sizes of the shoe you asked for, and a few other styles like the one you showed him, trying hard to make the sale.

The guy who waited on me didn't quite have my number, though. He couldn't find a shoe I liked in the style I wanted, and he grossly misjudged the style he thought I would appreciate, whipping out a pair of Doc Martens at one point. I'd been steering toward a pair of simple leather Oxfords in brown or black, and he brought me these waffle stompers with soles made of translucent amber plastic and stitched with electric yellow thread. "Don't let the scuffs on the leather put you off," he cautioned, "these are really trendy, popular shoes."

I gave them a once-over, just to be kind, then handed them back and said, off-handedly, "It's just not my style, sorry." By that time we were both tired of trying on shoes. He had some sympathy for me, on account of his feet being at least as big as mine, so he knew how hard it was to find likeable shoes in a size large and wide enough to be used as lifeboats. But he knew he'd reached rock-bottom when he trotted out the Doc Martens. He wasn't going to bother trying to sell me something I didn't want, and even if he did, he knew I wasn't going to look, either.

After failing to find the shoes I wanted, I wandered along State Street toward the university to see if I could fail to buy a lunch that I was hungry for. There can scarcely be another street in Wisconsin where you're more likely to find exactly the meal you want, because State Street has not only the most popular chain restaurants, it also has some of the weirdest ethnic food ever. Countries and cultures that I didn't even know had cuisine are represented with acclaimed restaurants on State Street, places so good that people fight to get a seat.

All I wanted was a cheap lunch, though, and nothing I had to sit down for. Quick and "lite," but what? For a moment a Chinese take-away caught my eye, but after looking at a menu stacked with columns of the same old stuff I walked away to look some more. I'd wandered all the way down to the five hundred block, nearly resigned to buying a sandwich at Pot Belly's (not a bad thing; it's just that I was looking for something different), when I happened to glance into the front window of Pelmeni's, the restaurant that served only the Russian dumplings that the shop was named for. I stepped inside.

"What's in them?" I asked the woman behind the counter, and, without being condescending to somebody who was obviously a dim wit, she described a dumpling. There's not much to it. I ordered a batch. "Plain or spicy?" she asked. What's the difference? Spicy comes with a dash of curry powder and cumin. I could add hot sauce if I liked. And you know, they weren't bad. They weren't exactly the light lunch I had been looking for — I mean, they were dumplings, after all, the original stick to your ribs food — but they were very tasty and something different. I'd go back for lunch again in a heartbeat.

Oh. My. God. I'm going to sleep so well tonight. Check this out:

After drinking my Saturday morning glass of orange-banana-strawberry juice, then following My Darling B around the Dane County Farmer's Market with a large cup of extra-dark-roast decaf in one hand and a cookie in the other, I spent my first day off doing what? Anybody? Did you guess digging holes in the dirt where I could plant bricks that would eventually grow up to become a real, live retaining wall around an herb garden? You might say you did, but I don't believe you. Nobody would. But that's what I did, I kid you not.

I have zero experience building a wall with bricks. None whatsoever. Barb kept asking me if we shouldn't do it this way, or if it wouldn't be better to do it that way, and every single time I had to shrug, or frown, or wildly throw my arms up in the air and remind her that I had no idea what I was doing, maybe even less than she did. But somehow, with zero times zero experience between us, we built a retaining wall that not only retains soil for a future herb garden (hence the name), but looks as though we knew what we were going when we put it together. I'm certainly not going to tell anybody otherwise. Let them figure it out for themselves. Or learn how to read drivel.

I'd like to go on a while about it, but I'm just too tired. Maybe more tomorrow, if I ever get out of bed ...

It's the two-and-a-half-tons-of-brick story, continued:

If I were to trace it back far enough, it's actually the story of cutting down the row of tangled bushes that were overgrowing the strip of land between our driveway and the neighbor's. I don't know what kind of vegetation they sprang from, but my first guess would be some kind of giant Martian fungus that rode to Earth on an asteroid. I've read about those kinds of happenings, and although the stories usually ended well for America and apple pie, I didn't want to go through all the struggle and strife that takes place between "Once upon a time" and "The End," so I sawed them all to pieces, leaving only very short stumps. Earth, or at least this small corner of it, had successfully repelled yet another alien invasion. Yay, me!

The problem since then was that the Martian fungus bushes had so completely dominated the strip of land between the driveways that, for quite a while, almost nothing would grow on the soil now exposed to sunlight, wind and weather. It was a classic scene of desolation, even after a few leafy, noxious weeds ventured into the no-man's land. And isn't that just typical? Why's it always the thistles and garlic mustard that get there first? We mercilessly hacked away at the mess week after week with a lawn mower, but any fool knows weeds like these aren't intimidated by power tools (lucky for them I'm not just any fool).

Late last year, just before the snows came, My Darling B got the idea that she'd like to plant an herb garden on the spot, if only she could figure out a way to stabilize the hillside. The soon-to-be-garden-strip is on one of those transitional steps of land between two house lots. The houses on either side of ours sit on lots that are maybe two or three feet higher or lower, as the street runs down hill. A garden would look nice there, but an open plot of bare dirt would get washed away unless we could figure out how to level it.

It was probably B herself who came up with the idea of digging a terraced garden out of the hill side. She originally wanted to shore it up using treated lumber. I think I'm the gooberhead who suggested using landscaping bricks of the sort that one of our neighbors used to border his house. I thought they looked snappy and were a lot more durable. They're also a lot heavier, albiet in aggregate rather than all at once, but even if you move a ton of bricks one brick at a time, your back will still remind you afterward that you've moved a ton of bricks. I realize this would have been the first thing on a thinking husband's mind before he so much as opened his mouth, but I am running on full-goose babbling bozo all the time, any time. It just jumped out. I couldn't help it.

And that's how I came to spend most of yesterday building a retaining wall around a not very small soon-to-be garden in our front yard with My Darling B, our strapping son assisting. And thank dog Tim was there to help us, that's all I've got to say. He broke ground for the trench that went all the way around the plot, hacking through some truly back-breaking gravel when he had to cut extra-deep into the far corner, and carrying most of the ton or so of bricks we moved yesterday, breaking several of his fingernails off at the quick doing it. Truly impressed, we offered to treat him to a pizza at La Roca's on Willy Street. He firmly but politely declined (polite for him, anyway), wanting nothing more than to sit on his butt after we were done for the day, playing a video game to unwind. We brought a pizza home for him.

I was somehow able to stay awake until a little after ten last night, but when the end came I had one of those moments where one minute I was reading and the next minute my book, Herman Wouk's 880-page chunk of lumber Winds of War, thumped against my chest hard enough to make me jump. Sometimes when I drift off like that, I'll try two or three times to start over, just to finish the chapter, but you never want to get hit by a book that size more than once. It leaves a mark.

We very nearly got the herb garden finished over the weekend. At least the retaining wall's finished. The only hard (engineering) part left is leveling out the dirt inside the walls. Not that growing the herbs isn't hard, but that's Barb's department. I just dig trenches and stack bricks.

The wall was finished shortly after lunch time, and My Darling B and I had every intention of turning over all the dirt in the afternoon. I should've been out there helping her, but the sun was way too hot by then, and I was just too damned tired. I packed it in at two o'clock, begging Barb to do the same. She kept promising she would, but didn't give up until Number One Son made his weekly call from college. Once we were both sitting down in the cool comfort of our living room, there was no going back. It was nap time.

And I still wasn't going back out even after I woke up from my nap. It was still hot outside and cool inside, so instead of grabbing a shovel and moving dirt I went downstairs, where it was comfortably cool, to move the boxes around on the shelves. I thought I might look for my beer-making equipment while I was down there, too, not daring to believe I might actually find it. I've learned how to make myself face the mess down there, and the most important thing is not to get my hopes up. I can't take the heartbreak, y'know?

But something really weird happened: I found a lot of the beer stuff in under an hour. Didn't have to tear half the basement apart (but I did anyway), didn't get distracted by any shiny objects, and found nearly everything I was looking for. Even if I knew how to figure the odds against that, I wouldn't bother, because I just know they're freakishly huge and, really, once they're stacked a million to one against you, what difference would it make if it were two million?

As it turned out, I've still got just about all the equipment I bought way back when I first made beer in Denver. I'll have to replace the hoses, but I've still got the brushes, funnels, a hydrometer, three carboys and one of the best bottle cappers I could invest in. I even found my old copy of Charlie Papazian's Joy Of Homebrewing in under five minutes, out of the thousands of books we have on half a dozen book shelves.

It was a sign! A sign that I should brew again! Well, maybe. I don't believe in signs. It's sort of moot anyway because I talked Barb into making a pit stop after work at the local brewing supply store on Monroe Street. I figured I could pop thirty or forty dollars on a simple brewing kit and a few bits of hardware that I needed, and ended up spending eighty bucks because the price of the hardware's gone up a few dollars. At least I won't have to buy the hardware again, I kept telling myself on the way out to the car. It'll be worth eating leftovers for lunch for the next two weeks. Which is coincidentally about the time the beer will be ready to drink.

 
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