this is drivel

When December made its big entrance, it pulled no punches! This morning was icy cold with a steely overcast when My Darling B and I met Auntie Sue and Uncle Jim at Lazy Jane’s cafe for breakfast at eight. B ordered one of the specials, a stack of three cherry pancakes large enough to feed all four of us, if only we hadn’t ordered our own breakfasts. Since we had, she cut her stack down the middle and saved half for lunch. Jim and I had the two-egg breakfast, and Sue breakfasted on a fritatta. Frittata? Free tah tah. Whatever.

We returned to cars dusted in snow an hour and a half later. The winter storm forecasted as The Blizzard Of ‘07 by the National Weather Service yesterday had arrived several hours early. There was already enough snow on the roads to make them slippery, although people weren’t driving as if they knew that yet. After a quick sping around the block (a right turn out of Lazy Jane’s into the thick traffic on Willy Street made the only sense to me) we met Jim & Sue again at Olbrich Gardens to see the poinsettias, trains and, most important to Sue, woodland fairy houses on display in the sun room.

There was an inch of snow, maybe even two, on the ground when we returned to the parking lot barely an hour later and we couldn’t find a brush or a scraper anywhere in the car. Some irresistable force of nature makes them all migrate to the garage for the summer. We had to resort to using an old towel to clear the snow off the doors, hood and trunk. All we could do about the ice that had frozen to the windows and wipers was sit and wait for the defrosters to loosen it up, and you know how quick and easy that is. After waiting and wiping and freezing hour hands, we tentatively nosed our way onto Atwood Avenue about fifteen, maybe twenty minutes later.

It was too early in the storm for the plows to begin making their rounds, but so late that the road was one wide, white lane. It would probably be best, I said (but not aloud; that frightens people), to stay out of the middle, where people were zipping along as if they were somehow exempt from the laws of thermodynamics. I hugged the curb, when I could see it, all the way home.

The clock on the wall over the recliner has a day / date display, and it said “31” and “Saturday.” I knew immediately that it was not the thirty-first, because there were only thirty days in November, but that would mean that this was the first day of December. The voices in my head went back and forth on that idea for quite a while as I stood there, wondering if I should flip away the wheel that would hide the “3.”

“It can’t be December already!”

“But the clock says so!”

“The clock can be wrong.”

“What was the date yesterday?”

“The thirtieth of November.”

“Then this has to be the first of December, right?”

“It can’t be December already!”

And so on. I don’t know why it was so hard for me to believe the first of December had arrived already. I’ve bought Christmas gifts for everybody, there have been Salvation Army bell-ringers on every corner for a week (and the panhandler in Elizabeth Link park was shouting, “It’s the SEASON of GIVING!” at passers-by), and the governor lighted the “Holiday Tree” in the capital rotunda on Friday. Something in me wanted to hang on to November as long as I possibly could, though, and I was stuck in it, without knowing I was, until I saw that clock.

At the end of A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius Dave Eggers was going on and on about how wonderful his little brother Toph’s life was and how great he looked and how much fun they were having, so I guess Toph didn’t grow up to be a serial killer who preys on homeless drunks in the back alleys of New York after all.

Toph moved from California to New York with Eggers, who, at the end of the book, was still locked in a war with inner demons that prodded the festering emotional wounds left from the deaths of his mother and father and maybe the several attempted suicides of his friend John, and the near-death of one of this co-workers, if those last two weren’t more fictional than non-fictional elements of this very quirky memoir.

Eggers’ recollection of and reconcilliation with his bruised emotional states is at times playful, at other times anguished, very often depressingly self-flagellant, and occasionally annoying. The first time, for instance, he delves into fantasies of his own death from AIDS it’s engaging, but like listening to a self-absorbed aunt who comes over for coffee way too often and talks of nothing but her hypocondriac afflictions, I was tired of it way before he collapsed to the floor of his office, crippled by the pain of kidney stones, croaking, “I’m dying, I’m dying.”

Likewise I was really very sympathetic when he began describing the reasons for the anguish he felt over his mother’s death, but he would repeatedly launch into a stream of consciousness that went on for pages and pages, repeating the same lament far too many times. By the end of the book I just wanted to tell him to shut up, much as he told his friend John that his repeated suicide attempts were getting old. It’s not that I don’t appreciate self-examination, it’s that I got the feeling he didn’t exercise much control over it a lot of the time.

You know why eskimos have only fifty-seven words for “snow?” Because they didn’t grow up in Wisconsin.

This morning the porch, the front walk and the driveway were all covered in eight or ten inches of heavy, wet snow scummed over by a thick crust of ice durable enough to stand on until a miserably cold rain began to fall. I knew the rain would melt some, but not all, of it. I knew I would have to shovel most of it. I knew all this, and thought deeply upon it over a cup of coffee as I read the morning paper ... then emptied the dish washer ... then folded a basket of clean clothes ... anything to put off shoveling a driveway’s worth of heavy, crusted snow.

But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and in a little while, way too soon, really, I was crouched over the top of the driveway with a shovel in my hands, chopping the crusty snow to pieces, scooping a couple shovelsful away, chopping the crusty snow to pieces, scooping a couple shovelsful away. Took me five or ten minutes to clear a narrow path down the side of the driveway to the front walk, chopping away three inches at a time. Man, that sucks.

I was halfway up the front porch steps when I heard the sound of somebody else shoveling snow behind me and turned to see the youngest O-Man setting to work on the driveway, working over from the narrow path I’d cleared. I joined him after I finished off the front porch, starting from the bottom where the city snow plow rammed a ridge of slush up against the end of the driveway that had frozen overnight and had to be hacked apart with our trusty ice scraper. That thing is the bomb. A hardened steel blade mounted on the end of a steel pole, it will chip away any kind of ice, even that impossibly hard stuff you get after you back over the snow with the car. It’ll even chip away the cement of the driveway if I’m not careful. Every time I use it I have nightmare flashes of chopping off my own toes but I keep using it anyway.

Working together, Tim and I cleared the driveway in less than an hour. Not bad for two guys, but if you’d showed me an eight-hundred-dollar snowblower when we were done and told me I’d only get to use it once more this winter but it would be on a driveway covered in the same frozen, wet snow, I’d have whipped out my Visa card in a blink and worried about what to tell My Darling B later. After a steaming hot shower and a cup of coffee, though, I was back to my curmudgeonly, cheapskate self. I’ve got a shovel and a stout young man to help me. Who needs a snowblower?

There’s nothing that compares with enjoying a long, hot shower on the weekend, particularly after I’ve been up to my ankles in the snow, shoveling a considerable amount of it off the driveway and walk. I take five-minute showers on weekday mornings because I’m not completely awake anyway so all that hot water would be wasted on my insensate body, but on the weekend I don’t shower until hours after I get up, make a pot of java and flip through the morning news with a hot cuppa in my hand. Today I managed to read a couple chapters of Northern Lights (thumbs up!) and take an initial stab at the weekend crossword puzzle (fiendishly difficult) before toddling off to the bathroom to crank the hot water spigot wide open and ease myself into the steamy blast from the overhead nozzle.

To get under what’s essentially a jet of painfully scalding water, I have to go through what I’ve always thought of as the Bugs Bunny Moment. When Looney Toons were on after-school television, I remember seeing Bugs Bunny draw himself a hot bath and climb into it, but not all at once. First he tested it with a toe, hmmmming musically as he swirled it around. Then he gingerly stepped in and lowered himself slowly toward the steamy surface of the water, tail up, until his butt touched. There was a soft fizzing sound as Bugs yelped and jumped up, but he lowered himself in again anyway. Another fizz, another yelp, but not so loud this time. The third time his butt hit the water he went, “Ahhhhh,” and lowered himself in the rest of the way.

I can stand in a blistering hot shower, but only after I’ve had the Bugs Bunny moment, testing the water with my foot first, then turning my back on the blast and sticking my butt into it two, maybe three times, shoulders hunched as I yelp and jump away. Once that’s done I experimentally duck a shoulder in, wincing as the heat peels away the outer layers of my skin, leaving only a bright pink underlayer. Then and only then can I duck completely under the shower, shoulders relaxing, head back, and let out a long, loud, “Ahhhh.”

I can usually withstand about twenty minutes of that before my insides melt into porridge and begin to percolate out my ears.

I picked up Northern Lights Saturday night, the first novel in Philip Pullman’s three-book series known as His Dark Materials (a phrase pinched from Milton’s Paradise Lost). The book was published on this side of the Atlantic as The Golden Compass. It’s been one of Tim’s favorites since he read it in grade school and I got him to lend me his copy after I read several news stories about boycots organized against the movie version because the Catholic church and several others are miffed at the jabs they say Pullman took at organized religion in the book (the movie was apparently sanitized of all the most blatant but one). I just had to find out what that was all about.

A bunch of witches show up in the final chapters of the book, and in the penultimate chapter one of the main characters, a lord named Asriel, finally gives what I’d hoped would be the definitive explanation of the single most important plot point in the book, a cosmic emination referred to as Dust, but by the end of the chapter I was as confused by his explanation as I was by the technobabble so loved by Star Trek science officers to explain the space-time continuum or the subspace baud rate that was supposed to make me slap my head and go, “Of course! The gravimetric waves! That’s why they couldn’t transport back to the ship during the photon storm!”

But that’s not to say I didn’t like Northern Lights. This is the kind of fantasy I scoop up with a soup spoon. The opening of the book introduces a world much like ours, apparently a decade or so after the industrial revolution, but with several very immediately different traits. Each of the people in the story, for instance, is being constantly followed by a shape-changing animal called a daemon that can talk, but usually only to the person they hang around with. That’d probably bug the crap out of me sooner or later. I never could stand precocious animal sidekicks.

Thankfully, Pullman keeps the deamons in the background most of the time and lets the people tell the story, although deamons quickly become another major plot device: their association with people isn’t casual. Each person is mystically bound to his deamon. Where one goes, the other has to follow; they can never be very far apart, and if they’re forced apart they feel a terrible emotional and physical pain from it. When a person dies, the deamon dies with him.

In the first few chapters of the book there really isn’t anything all that unusual about this slightly different world, besides that weirdness about the deamons. A rambunctious girl called Lyra sticks her nose into all the wrong rooms and is very plainly going to be caught up in a densely-woven intrigue, but it’s hardly as fantastical as Harry Potter’s world. There isn’t even any magic going on until the middle third of the book, when Pullman brings witches into the story.

The final third of the book, though, is way out there. It’s got witches, it’s got giant talking polar bears in suits of armor, it’s got bored medical technicians in lab coats conducting ectoplasmic eugenics experiments on children ... really, you never would have imagined half this stuff in your weirdest nightmares. What it hasn’t got, I have to say, is much in the way of a resolution. It’s clearly meant to be no more than the opening of a grand story arc, and not a book that begins and ends on its own. To kids who gobble up one Harry Potter book after another that may seem pretty cool, but it annoyed me no end. That’s it? No battle to the death between good and bad? Just the equivalent of TO BE CONTINUED ... ? Damn! Now I’ve got to read the next book!

In fact, I already have read the next book, The Subtle Knife, but that was seven or eight years ago, so I hardly remember any of it other than it had something to do with a magical knife and spooks who ate children. I’ll have to read it all over again if I want to know what’s going on. If I can find it. It’s here somewhere, but nobody knows where. Doesn’t that just figure?

And now, my moment on the soapbox: I can’t see what it is about fantasy books like this that gets some people twisted inside-out. Kids understand that talking armored polar bears aren’t any more real than witches who ride straw brooms, cackle and throw hexes. I find it impossible to believe reading a fantastic book about either one of them is going to warp any child’s thinking. Besides, the talking polar bears are way cool. (He steps down and bows deeply.) Thank you for your indulgence.

What’s the address of a business whose front door is in the nose of a flatiron building, open to two streets, facing neither? That’s the question I was asking myself as I was looking at a fire insurance map of an apartment building called The Eleanor and thinking of the Milio’s sandwich shop in the narrow end of the first floor. The apartments were listed at 405 Frances Street, where the west entrance was. The two shops on the southeast side had Gilman Street addresses, but Milio’s was on the point of the triangle where the two streets met. Which street did they pick?

Fully aware that I was already spending more time on this trivial question than a high schooler out of his mind on weed, I dug the office copy of the yellow pages out of my desk drawer, thumbed to the green-bordered restaurant pages, then traced my finger down the many, many entries for Milio’s. Geeze, are there really enough people in Madison drooling for a stale, tasteless sub sandwich to support this many Milio’s shops? None were listed on Frances or Gilman, but there was one on the five-hundred block of University Avenue, and The Eleanor points its prow at University.

A tiny notation on the fire insurance map confirmed it: Somebody neatly printed “540 University” in tiny italic script just ahead of the squared-off nose of The Eleanor to mark the address of the door there.

Thinking I had the answer to my original question, I cross-checked by flipping back through the phone book to the name of Genna’s Lounge, right across the street from the building where I work and also in the tip of a flatiron building that pointed at Main Street. Bingo! Another match. But Peppino’s, in the nose of the Jackman Building just across from Genna’s, was also pointed at Main Street. Their address, though, was on Hamilton, the street that cut through the block to make the two triangular lots where Genna’s and the Peppino’s sat. Damn. There goes that theory.

So the answer to the question seemed to be: If there’s a door in the point of a flatiron building, the address is on the street it points at, unless it’s not. Clear as mud.

I was looking at a fire insurance map, called a Sanborn map, in hopes of finding out more about The Eleanor, a block of flats let out mostly to students. What I’d actually wanted to do was look at several maps in hopes of finding maybe a hint about who built it, but there weren’t any Sanborn maps made just before and just after 1914, the year The Eleanor was built. Since 1892, in fact, there weren’t any made for Madison until 1942. A pretty big hole in the space-time continuum, as we say in the looney bin, but it didn’t matter anyway because Sanborn maps don’t have the kind of information I was looking for. They told me everything about where all the windows and chimneys were, and what materials the building was made of, but not who made it. Oh, well, at least I had the street addresses of those doors. That would’ve kept me awake all night.

And you know where I got hold of a fire insurance map made in 1942? The Archive Research Room of the state historical society. They keep piles of this kind of ephemera in a Beaux-Arts style building that at one time probably dominated the lower campus of the University, but which now looks shy and retiring, almost cozy, in the crowd of buildings around library mall. I read about the archives on the interwebs and, since I usually take a hike during my lunch hour anyway, I hoofed it down to the campus to check it out.

I got there at exactly the wrong time. The lone volunteer in the archive said all the others had gone off on errands so she couldn’t leave her desk to go fetch the maps I wanted. I said fine, I’ll come back later, and I made to go. A minute later she trotted out to the hallway where I was looking at a collection of children’s books (The Teenie-Weenies! Grandma used to read them to me!) in a display case. “They’re back!” she said, “I can help you now.” Quite fine timing, really.

Another volunteer helped me find the map I wanted, a thick sheet about three feet on each side in a clear plastic sleeve, cartoonishly colored and marked up with all manner of arcane symbols. As I struggled to understand it, the volunteer slipped away and brought back some instructional leaflets with color keys and explanations to the symbology. Then I kicked my shoes off and he rubbed my aching insteps while I poured over the map. No, not really. I mean, I did pour over the map, but he wasn’t quite that accomodating, it just seemed that way.

I dug one more map out of the pile to take a few photographs of the environs of another building I’ve been gathering information together on, then put it all back in the box, gathered up my shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, and headed back to the office. Yay.

You might have heard that we’ve suffered a return of the winter storm that zapped us last weekend, and it dumped several inches of snow on the city just in time for the evening commute. My Darling B came to a dead stop several times crossing town on Campus Drive, a three-lane thoroughfare where most people normally drive ten to twenty miles over the speed limit of forty per. Not today, they weren’t. Nobody was.

She gave the wheel over to me when she stopped at Carroll Street to pick me up and, though we didn’t hit traffic that locked us in a standstill, the slush made the roads so slick I never went faster than twenty-five the rest of the way home. That wasn’t a problem on Willy Street, where a woman in a New Beetle kept a generous fifty feet or more between her car and mine, but she turned off somewhere on Atwood and a guy with the patience of a two-year-old got behind me, right behind me, and wasn’t at all happy that I wouldn’t speed it the hell up, dammit! He blew past me when Monona Drive opened up to two lanes in both directions.

Actually, Monona Drive was in a lot better shape than any of the roads we’d seen in Madison, a good thing and a bad thing, because the other drivers figured they could go forty to fifty miles per, scaring the hell out of me as they fishtailed past, barely under control. I hate that. I’m not particularly scared of dying, but I’m not looking forward to being horribly mangled in a road accident, so I felt no small amount of relief as we turned into the drive of Our Humble O-Bode.

I’m reading Close Range backwards, not word for word but from the last story working forward. It’s a collection of short stories by Annie Proulx that includes Brokeback Mountain, the last story in the book, which I wanted to read first, hence the retrograde reading schedule.

The only other work I’ve ready by Proulx was The Shipping News. It sat on our bookshelf for many moons after my Dad made a present of it to me. He thought it was the greatest book he’d read in a coon’s age, but my eyes passed over it time after time whenever I went browsing for my next book. And then, for no reason I know, I finally picked it off the shelf, settled down with it and, when I was finished, thought it was every bit as good as he said it was.

And Brokeback Mountain is one of those rare screen gems, a short story that didn’t become unrecognizably mangled when they made it into a movie, and once again every bit as good as I’d heard it would be. Time and again I came across passages describing a scene so vivid she might as well have been writing poetry. “Dawn came glassy orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the smoke from Ennis’s breakfast fire. The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-thin shadows and the rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite.”

I have no idea what 55 Miles To The Gas Pump is about. It’s short enough that she could have dashed it off on the blank back of a beer coaster in the idle moments spent waiting for a friend to arrive at the beginning of happy hour. It’s just two paragraphs, each one long, rambling sentence, and then one more, very short, a brief coda to join them. But it’s so short I can hardly grasp the idea.

I finished The Governers of Wyoming after supper but I’m not ready to talk about it yet.

Anne and I were reminiscing over our favorite candies — York Peppermint Patties, those crunchy sugar buttons stuck to a strip of waxy paper, Bon Bons, and a brand of mints sold only at Grand Central Station in New York city that tastes like soap (I didn’t ask why that was worth remembering) — when Ami asked me a question, so I stepped into her cubicle to answer her. Then, as I walked back to Anne’s office, I noticed a telltale breeziness around my southern latitutes, and a quick XYZ confirmed that my barn door was indeed wide open.

There’s really no point in acting coy at that point, I figure. I may be wrong. I so often am about these sorts of things. Lacking an idea of how to handle it more gracefully, though, I let out a “Whoops!” then half-turned away and zipped up. Which is not to say I wasn’t embarrassed about it. To me, it’s the equivalent of saying “hi” to a dozen or so people as I make my way to my desk, but stop by the bathroom on the way, look in the mirror and discover there’s a huge green boogie dangling from the corner of one nostril. There’s just no dignified way of recovering from that, so I go “whoop” and dance around a bit.

Other than that, the high point of my day was a free lunch. Contrary to popular opinion there is, in fact, a free lunch, and I know because I had one today. I suppose some people might argue I got my lunch at the cost of being an office prairie dog in cubicle town, to which I say: Razzz! Your argument’s screwed because I’d be working there regardless of whether or not I got a free lunch out of it.

It was bangers and mash, a supposedly Irish dish served at the supposedly Irish pub on cap square. Not a bad place at all for a weekday lunch; I certainly don’t mean to put them down. The celtic music incessantly skirring in the background is a bit much, but the food’s not bad. If only we could’ve indulged in a pint o’ stout with our business lunch, but that’s strictly out of bounds during business hours because we’ve got to remain professional. Times change.

“Oh, you got a haircut,” I said to Tim, when I noticed that his hair was quite a bit shorter than it was this morning.

“No, I cut it myself,” he said. Well, of course he did. All guys do, sooner or later. Whatever it is in the genetic makeup of human beings that makes them think they can cut their own hair, all guys have it and it’s switched on in every one of us, no exceptions. If you know a guy who claims he never once in his life cut his own hair, he’s not only a liar, he’s a bad one.

And I’m no judge of what makes a good haircut, obviously, or I would have been able to tell that Tim did his own. A good haircut, as far as I can tell, is shorter and I don’t think you should be able to see any scalp. If you went by only my criteria, then Tim did a pretty decent job of giving himself a haircut. By his mother's, not so much.

“I cut it in the shower,” he said by way of explaining how he did a fair to middling job of it, no scalp anywhere to be seen.

“You cut your hair in the shower?” I echoed, for no particular reason other than I was stunned.

“It’s easier to cut when it’s wet,” he explained, but admitted it was sort of a pain in the neck because he had to stop way too often to clean out the screen we installed that keeps hair from clogging the drain. I would have thought that not having a mirror to check progress in would be a bit of a handicap, too, but he didn’t seem to think so. He worked on it a little more after he got out of the shower and would have cut it even shorter if only the battery in the hair clipper hadn’t run out of charge before he could finish.

The hair clipper doesn’t run on batteries. “That’s a beard trimmer!” I said, when I realized what he was talking about. I bought that back in the dark ages, when I thought modern technology was the way to keep a neatly-trimmed beard. Turns out we already had a pair of barber’s scissors that worked a lot better. We do have an electric hair clipper, but it plugs in to the house current. Now that he knows where that is, I’d guess his hair will be even shorter the next time I see him.

His older brother went through this in high school too, buzzed all his hair off so he looked like a fuzzy peach, then the next day smeared shaving cream all over his scalp and removed every square inch of fuzz with a disposable razor until his dome shone like a waxed watermelon. That lasted a week or two before he gave up the daily exercise of having to shave it and went back to looking fuzzy, then curly, then alternating between fuzzy and curly as he resisited going to the barber for as long as he could stand it, arguing it was a waste of money.

As for me, I’m a shaggy dog and happy to be one, the result, I suppose, of having short hair imposed on me for twenty-one years. The electric clippers were mine and I used them weekly back when I would buzz myself in front of the bathroom mirror, then sweep up the leavings from the floor and shower the prickly bits from my neck and shoulders. Now I go visit a barber every three or four weeks, partly for his expertise and partly because I like talking to him. He keeps things trimmed up top and has offered two or three times to work on the beard a bit, too, but I haven’t given in, hoping against hope that it will eventually fill in and get longer, although I may have to give in and admit that it’s as long and thick as it’s ever going to get.

On the one hand, working downtown has made shopping for Christmas presents mind-bogglingly easy. I customarily take a walk around town on my lunch hours anyway past all the shops that have the gifts I wanted to get for the rest of the O-Folk. Not a lot of people have that kind of convenience, not even the other O-Folk.

On the other hand, I’ve got the age-old problem of how to get the Christmas presents home without the rest of the O-Family seeing them, particularly My Darling B, who picks me up at work and is nosier than a six-year-old drunk on Christmas spirit when it comes to presents that are supposed to remain secret until The Big Day. I’ve tried to think of inventive ways to disguise the bags filled with gifts I bring out to the curb, but tonight I didn’t bother, and instead simply slung them into the back seat of the car. I figure she’ll pretend not to notice them if she wants a surprise, and if she’s feeling nosey nothing will stop her anyway.

It doesn’t help that some of the gifts themselves won’t shut up. One of the stocking stuffers I bought today suffered from a tendency to go tweet-tweetitty-tweet like a spastic bird when the car hit so much as a crack in the road. B was willing to pretend she didn’t know what was in the extra sack on the floor of the back seat until something inside it launched into a lengthy musical recitation, very clearly chirping every note of “Jingle Bells” — then she had to giggle like a maniac. There’s one stocking-stuffer that won’t be a complete surprise on Christmas morning.

Tim went back to school today with his do-it-hisself haircut. His belief that haircuts from barbers are only for lemmings and stooges was vindicated when one of his teachers and one of his fellow students complimented him on how good it looked and asked where he got it cut. He told them both the truth, that he did himself. “Did any of them ask you if you would cut theirs?” I asked. They didn’t, so they may have been complimenting him and they may have been humoring him. If he gets any more compliments, though, I suggested he might have found his calling, but he’s not interested in making money off his serendipitously-found talent.

Mara planned to take a day of leave from work tomorrow. I walked in the door just as she was beginning to record the sing-song rhythm of her “out of office” message for the telephone voice mail. When I recognized what she was doing I stopped dead in my tracks, stuck my thumbs in my ears and waggled my fingers at her. I had to. It was an irresistable impulse. Her message came to a spluttering halt, which was my cue to quickly duck away if I wanted to avoid being hit by pens, paper clips and other desktop debris.

Our office has an entirely new phone system. The new hold music sounds like trippy 80’s techno music, Gary Newman, The Cars and Orchestral Manoeuvers In The Dark all rolled into one. I want to do the robo dance whenever I hear it, which is pretty often because I have to call the branch offices nearly every day. Luckily for me I work in a cubicle with walls that are high enough to keep most of the other people in our office from observing how I bust a move.

Wyoming, the way Annie Proulx writes about it, is about the most depressing place on earth, everybody worn out by the time they’re thirty-five, nobody happy in their relationships for more than a year, sometimes less than a week, all the men hard and jagged as a gravel road and all the women loose as a bowel filled up on greasy food, and about as attractive. I sure hope it’s not that bad. Why would anybody live there if it was?

Yet even while dealing with all the messed-up ways people treat each other, she still finds a way to paint a lyrical scene: “There’s a feeling you get driving down to Casper at night from the north, and not only there, other places where you come through hours of darkness unrelieved by any lights except the crawling wink of some faraway ranch truck. You come down a grade and all at once the shining town lies below you, slung out like all western towns, and with the curved bulk of a mountain behind it. The lights trail away to the east in a brief and stubby cluster of yellow that butts hard up against the dark. And if you’ve ever been to the lonely coast you’ve seen how the shore rock drops off into the black water and how the light on the point is final. Beyond are the old rollers coming on for millions of years.”

On this day in 1917, an explosion destroyed about a fourth of the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. In 1917, at the height of World War One, Halifax was an important port city. One of the ships in port was a French supply ship, the Mont Blanc. It carried 200 tons of TNT, 2,300 tons of other explosives, 10 tons of cotton and 35 tons of flammable chemicals, all stored in vats on the upper deck. The Mont Blanc collided with a Norwegian freighter, which started a fire. The crew piled into lifeboats and paddled frantically away.

A crowd of onlookers on the shore watched the fire on the ship, not knowing about the cargo. The docks were full of spectators. One of the only people who knew about the cargo was a dispatcher at the yardmaster’s office, who started telegraphing warnings around the city and kept sending even though he knew that an explosion would come at any minute. And it did. The ship exploded with the single most powerful man-made explosion at that point in human history. The dispatcher was killed along with more than 2,000 other people. [heard this morning on The Writer’s Almanac]

This blog very nearly came to a screeching halt last night. Did you feel the world stop turning? Me, neither. But I did get an awful sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach when my laptop, which has always worked dependably even though I’ve been treating it a little less like a Fabrege egg and a little more like a cheap high school notebook as each day goes by, finally said enough is enough last night and gave me the computing equivalent of the *tick* your car engine makes on a cold morning when you turn the key on a dead battery.

I unpacked the laptop after supper, set it up on my desk downstairs and poked the on/off button. As always, I got a black screen with a white “Compaq” in the center. It’s normally no more than a blink, but last night all I got was the “Compaq” screen continuing to stare coldly at me. I waited maybe a minute to make sure it wasn’t just running slow, but it soon became apparent it wasn’t running at all. No tickity-tick from the hard drive, nothing. Hmm. I held down the on/off button to force it off, then started it again. “Compaq” still. Oh, crap.

Computers are very much a mystery to me. I know a few basics about them, like I know a few basics about cars: I know a car moves when you push the gas pedal to inject more fuel into the cylinders, but I can’t fix a fuel injection problem and I don’t know what to do when the computer won’t start, so I fell back on a trick I learned from a guy named Francis who could always be counted on to fix my computer at work when it froze up. “You really know this thing backwards and forwards,” I said to him after he’d prodded The Beast back to life from a particularly sticky freeze-up, and he answered, with a laugh, “All I know is, hold down the control key and start hitting buttons.”

That’s what I did to my laptop last night, and you know what? It worked. I started with “CTRL-Z” and punched quickly down the row, got as far as “CTRL-M” before the screen flashed and it tried once again to boot up. I’d hit so many buttons so quickly, though, that I wasn’t sure which one triggered the boot, and anyway it got stuck at the “Compaq” screen again, so I started with “CTRL-Z” again and this time marched more slowly across the keyboard. When I got to “CTRL-B” the machine beeped every time I poked a key, but otherwise, nothing, so I forced a shutdown with the on/off key and, when it stuck at “Compaq” again I started with “CTRL-Q” and snaked down to “CTRL-Z,” then back up. I think it booted when I got to “CTRL-C” that time, blurred through the welcome screen and came all the way back up. Thank you, Francis!

Once the laptop was up and running again I guiltily backed up a few files I hadn’t bothered to protect before, took a deep breath and shut it all the way down. I’ll bet it’s been months since I’ve done a cold stop and, although I know there are computer demigods out there who would probably claim it doesn’t make a difference, I think it gives the laptop a chance to clean up things it wouldn’t otherwise bother with. I have no measurable evidence whatsoever to back up this claim. I know I might as well claim that washing it in mild dish soap under warm water helps clean up the boot processes, and maybe someday I’ll even have to resort to doing just that, but after the cold stop I did last night it not only boots up with no problem, it even seems to boot faster.

And I’m going to use the lack of time available after all that monkeying around as an excuse for the especially low-quality drivel I pounded out before bedtime.

A couple weeks back I got a tip that Jonathan Coulton was coming to town. I have never before heard of JoCo, as his fans know him, but my source assured me that his performance was guaranteed to be a good time so I bought a couple tickets last week and we stayed in town after work on Friday, got a bite to eat and a couple pints of just-brewed beer at the Great Dane and headed over to the Majestic for the advertised six-thirty opening to try to get some good seats.

JoCo and his opening act, Paul & Storm, had played Minneapolis the night before and hit bad traffic or slippery pavement or otherwise dangerous conditions while driving down today with the unfortunate result being that B and I and the rest of the hopeful audience had to stand in the middle of a line that ran up to the end of the block for about a half-hour in twenty-degree temperatures, about the suckingest thing that happened all evening ... no, wait, the very end of the performance may have been even worse than freezing my nipples off, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

“Ask me how I’d label this audience,” My Darling B whispered to me as we stood in line. I glanced around. Most of the people in eyeshot appeared to be in their mid thirties to late forties, wore their hair down to their shoulders (boys and girls), lots and lots of them tied their hair back in ponytails (particularly the boys). They tended toward paunchy tummies. Nearly every one of them wore narrow, rimless eyeglasses.

Hippies? Not really. Their clothes were mostly synthetics in bright colors, or black, not the earth-tone homespun of the Willy Street crowd.

“DMV employees,” I guessed, once we were inside and I’d had a chance to settle into my seat. It was a cheap shot, but I really had no idea.

She giggled, shook her head. I had to guess again. If I’d been paying close attention, the reality that I was the squarest-looking guy in the room might have revealed itself to me, but I wasn’t on that wavelength yet. “I really don’t have a clue,” I admitted.

“I.T. geeks,” she said. I perused the crowd again but now my eyes were poisoned: Everywhere I looked I saw keyboard jockeys. Was that fair? Was the stereotype really that ubiquitous? Should I be ashamed of myself for even thinking it?

But even Paul & Storm cracked wise at the crowd’s expense. During an audience participation number in which they asked us if we could handle counting to ten, Paul guffawed and said, “This is a Jon Coulton audience. They can probably do it in base three.”

And then about three songs into his set, Jonathan Coulton introduced the song Code Monkey by explaining that, before he began performing for a living, he wrote computer code. That got a huge response from the audience. “Anybody here write code?” he asked. Hands went up all over the theater. Then he launched into what I thought was his most enjoyable number:

Code Monkey get up get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting
With boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very dilligent
But his output stink
His code not “functional” or “elegant”
What do Code Monkey think?
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy, just proud

If that wasn’t enough to put the seal of approval on the stereotype, a few lines from Mandelbrot Set, which everybody in the theater could sing every word to, certainly did:

Take a point called Z in the complex plane
Let Z1 be Z squared plus C
And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C
And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on
If the series of Z’s should always stay
Close to Z and never trend away
That point is in the Mandelbrot Set

To be perfectly factual, every member of the audience could not only sing every single word to every song, they knew what song Jon Coulton was going to play when he gave them hints so obtuse that he made my idea of subtlety look like a punch in the face with brass knuckles. “Here’s a song I wrote one day,” he’d say, or something just as vague, and everybody would cheer and punch the air and sing along with him from the very first word. These were fans in the most elemental sense of the word.

The encore number, by Jon Coulton together with Paul & Storm, was something about the joyous celebration of springtime in the great outdoors that I liked every bit as much as all the other songs they’d performed, and I was thinking, This was one of our best nights out in weeks. Then they had to go and tinkle in my lemonade by launching into Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, a song I loathe with a hate more toxic than all the scum and sludge in the New York city sewer system. The audience lapped it up like kittens around a bowl of cream, singing along, dancing and punching the air for the parts that go “BOM! BOM! BOM!” and “SO GOOD! SO GOOD! SO GOOD!” I might’ve been the only person in the room who wasn’t singing along if My Darling B hadn’t been there, giggling at the way the night had ended.

After the concert we walked the four blocks back to the parking ramp where I work and the below-freezing temps made me wish out loud we’d parked in the city ramp right across the street. That was mostly for B’s benefit, who suggested it in the first place, but I’m such a tightwad that I badgered her to park in the free spot four blocks away.

The gates were down when we got there and nobody was in the booth because of the late hour. Three other people from the concert were staring stoop-shouldered at the gates repeating, “Shit! God dammit! Shit!” as their brains short-circuited from trying to figure out how they were going to get home. I pulled my ID badge from my pocket and waved it at the card reader by the gate, which obediently jumped up. Instant Hero! I get such a rush out of being able to use my powers for good.

We drove out one of those cut-it-yourself tree farms, somewhere between Waunakee and Sun Prairie, to bring the seasonal pagan pine bough back to Our Humble O-Bode. Tim did the honors again this year. He wanted to hack it down with a hatchet this time and we let him. Heck, if all we’ve got to do is pick the tree, then wait for him to fell it, I don’t care if he uses his teeth, although if he did I’d want to bring along a flask of brandy and maybe a set of those hand warmers to keep my circulation going.

We set it up in the customary corner of the living room, watered it and let it sit overnight to open up. Tomorrow we’ll hang the lights and other decorations.

“Do you want to trim the tree this afternoon, or wait until after dinner?” I asked Tim.

He crossed his eyes at me and asked, “What?” seeming genuinely puzzled. I thought that maybe, because I had interrupted him while he was intensely involved in his computer game, he was still a bit disconnected from reality and needed a moment to collect himself, the way a sleeper takes a moment to blink and focus when roused from slumber, so I waited a moment, then repeated my question, much more slowly this time. “Do ... you ... want ... to ... trim ... the ... tree ... now ... or ... after ... dinner?”

He rolled his eyeballs at me, so he obviously understood that I was mocking him, but when I finished the question he still appeared to be struggling with the meaning, as if I’d just spoken to him in a language he had studied for two semesters in school. He had an idea what I was saying, but something was stopping him from making sense of it.

“Trim the tree now or later? Do you have a preference?” I said, attempting to prod his translation along.

“No, no preference,” he said, “but why are we going to trim it?”

“Because it looks kind of boring the way it is now.”

“Okay, but how’s trimming going to help it?”

Ah. So that’s the problem. “’Trimming’ is another way of saying ‘decorating.’ When do you want to decorate the tree?” Odd that he’d never heard it put that way before.

He picked after dinner. He had a paper to write for class and wanted to do it sooner rather than later so his mom would stop nagging him (which she was doing only because he asked her to).

We were seated on the sofa all morning, My Darling B and I, reading the Sunday paper and burying the cat under layers of the unfolded sports section, about the only thing it’s good for in our house besides building a fire in the barbeque, but since that’s standing in a snowdrift just out our back door, the lid holding up a foot-thick pillow of wind-blown precip, it’s likely we won’t be starting any fires for a while, so the cat got to play.

B picked up her laptop from time to time to find a reference she saw in the paper. On one occasion the intro to a Jon Coulton song abruptly jangled from the computer’s tiny speakers. B smiled at me as I looked over the top of the newspaper section I was reading. “Time for Code Monkey,” was all she had to say. The song has grown on us. I’m not sure which aspect of the words she likes more, the love song or the depressingly spot-on description of life in cubicle hell.

My mother sends me books in the mail, usually for my birthday or a holiday, but sometimes for no reason other than she liked the book a lot and wants to share it. I have only occasionally reciprocated because she holds a daunting record: I can’t remember a single book she recommended to me that I didn’t like, a string unbroken since, I believe, Catcher In The Rye (or was it The Left Hand of Darkness?) and continuing to the book I received Friday, wrapped in a thick envelope and left in our mailbox, a copy of Bel Canto.

I don’t recall ever having heard of it or the author, Ann Patchett, but resisted reading even the first page until Saturday night because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop once I did. “When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her,” it began, the kind of opening hook I wish for in my most self-indulgent dreams of writing a great novel. “Maybe he had been turning toward her just before it was completely dark, maybe he was lifting his hands. There must have been some movement, a gesture, because every person in the living room would later remember a kiss. They did not see a kiss, that would have been impossible. The darkness that came on them was startling and complete.”

Damn, but that’s some good scene-setting: a musician (because she has an accompanist) performing at a private party (because she’s in someone’s living room), and an unfolding mystery. Who is she? Why had the lights gone out? And what’s up with that kiss? Over the course of the next several pages the scene unfolded expertly, bit by bit, posing two or three more questions for each one answered, every new paragraph drawing me further into the story as I read. I’m only a fraction of the way into book so far, but if the rest is as good as the first sixty pages I won’t be disappointed with a single one.

It’s already the tenth! One-zero! We’re in the double digits of December! If I sneezed it’d be Christmas by the time I opened my eyes again. We’re in seasonal hyper-panic fast-forward shopping mode now. Stay away from the shopping mall or hang on tight!

We’re also deep in frozen snow, at least in this neck of the woods. I asked Tim to help me clear off the driveway yesterday and he ended up doing most of the clearing. After I made a quick and easy pass with the shovel to get the snow off the porch and front walk I spent the rest of the time at the end of the driveway with the atomic-powered Chipper of Doom, putting the zap on the heaps of frozen snow and ice on either side of the driveway. It resisted doggedly but in the end was no match for the Thor-like hammer blows of irresistable force I hurled with each crushing blow of the chipper’s blade. And, luckily for me once again, I managed to chop all the ice away from the pavement without losing any of my toes. I’m still unsure if there’s a higher power that holds sway over every action in the universe, but whenever I can walk away from any job that might have resulted in a permanent limp I feel oddly like I owe somebody a favor.

Ordinarily I don’t care much how much snow builds up along either side of the driveway. I even think a trench flanked by towering, snowy ridges that run from the garage door to the road looks pretty cool, but the recent snow storms, heavily laced with sleet, have been assaulting the city during the night, leaving us barely enough time during the day to hack a narrow entrance to the street that was only a little wider than our car. I had to line up perfectly and go straight as an arrow between the chest-high snow banks if I wanted to get in and out through the narrow opening. It’s not that I couldn’t keep doing it, it’s that I know I tend to get sloppy after a while and that sooner or later I would hear the dreaded yielding crunch of jagged ice scraping against the side panels of our nearly-new car.

So with some spare time before dinner yesterday afternoon I trekked outside and, while Tim cleared the rest of the drive, I tried to widen the mouth a bit. I spent maybe an hour at it and probably didn’t open it up any more than a foot. The snow was fluffy and soft on top but it was solid as a snow cone from about as high as my knees on down to the ground. The toothless plastic snow shovels we own weren’t up to cutting into that so I had to blast it apart three or four inches at a time with the Chipper of Doom, clear away the debris with the shovel, then blast away some more. After banging away at the ice on the concrete like that, my hands wouldn’t stop shaking all evening and they were still sore today and so weak that I kept dropping pens, letter openers, my fork at dinner. But I slid out of the driveway with satisfying ease this morning.

One of the ladies at work hung Christmas stockings on the wall in our office, one for each of us, and various people have been chucking candy into them. It’s a lucky break chocolate’s so good for you. It still is, isn’t it? Don’t tell me if it’s not. Last I heard, four out of five doctors said so, or people who ate chocolate were five times as likely to live to be one hundred, something like that. Naturally I stopped paying attention to any news squib about chocolate after I read that one, so I’m sort of frozen in time regarding the medical evidence on the healty effects of chocolate.

Today I got a handful of something called Now And Later in my stocking, which is not chocolate but a brightly-colored, thick toggle of what looked like bubble gum, so unwrapped one and popped it in my mouth. It turned out to be ten pounds of sugar boiled down to bite-sized tablet form and I had to spit it out before I barfed on my shoes. I stuck the rest of them on the ends of paper clips and hung them from my overhead filing cabinets as decorations.

Today I heard from somebody in Chicago who was googling the interwebs for a definition of “surensified” and found a post I made to blogger back in November of 2006. Rosie Real says she decorated her kitchen to look like a 50’s diner and wanted to make up a sign asking, “Has your sufficiency been surensified?” a phrase from her grandfather.

Earlier this summer I put in a call to the public radio show A Way With Words and left a message on their answering machine, but they never got back to me. (That put them on my list.) When I google “surensified” I don’t get much and there’s nothing in my Thick, Heavy Unabridge Dictionary that comes even close, but then I wondered: What if it were spelled “serensified?”

And the answer is: There’s still nothing in the THUD like that, but there is “serene” as in “satisifed,” the essential meaning my Dad conveyed when he patted him stomach and said, “My sufficiency is serensified.”

And then I googled “serensified” — ZOW! A whole plethora of examples:
– In a short story by Jackie, the question: “Has your insufficiency been sufficiently serensified?”
– In a mystery novel written by author Madison Hill for National Novel Writing Month, the phrase: “Nesbitt's flock, satiated with holiness and serensified with love, would wend their ways back home.”
– Dawn Smith-Pfeifer writes a monthly column for the North Dakota Farm Bureau web site and used the phrase, “My sufficiency has been serensified” to demonstrate something called Immense Utterance Syndrome.
– Karen Edmisten thought the phrase “I have eaten diabolically and I am highly serensified” was worth noting in her blog.
– 3H, a “progressive rock” garage band made up of a father and his two sons, has just released their second album, Exploration Room, featuring the track “Sufficiently Serensified”
– and there are twenty or thirty iterations of the question “What does it mean: Sufficiently Serensified?” posted on the Words & Wordplay message board of answers.yahoo.com

And so on for eighty-some hits, not a huge amount but more than I’ve ever found before, so it’s not nearly as rare as I might have thought. It’s always in past tense, though. If I try to google “serensify” I get nothing (well, actually was I get is the response, “Did you mean: serenity”).

I dinked around with this for a couple hours but never found an authoritative answer, just the general consensus that it means “satisfied” or “sated,” and I already knew that.

School was cancelled today! Tim got to stay home, and go back to bed, and sleep all morning while we had to stumble around getting dressed and gobbling down breakfast to prepare for the slog into work through heavy snow and a brand-new coating of ice!

“Are you sleeping in there?” Barb yelled through Tim’s darkened bedroom door as she paused on her way up the hall to the bathroom. “Are you comfortable and warm?”

That backfired on her. “Yep, I’m really comfy,” he shot back. “Sure is nice and warm in here.” He packed all the smugness he possibly could into every syllable. About the only answer to that is a bucket of icewater, but she’s not like that so she left him alone. I, on the other hand ...

She was so dejected by Tim’s lucky break that she broke down and put in a call to the state hotline to find out if government workers were allowed to show up late, or — it’s a longshot — if work was called on account of the weather, even though she knew better. There’s about as much chance of the governor shutting down the whole state as there is of Madison being wiped out by an asteroid.

"Report to work as normal," she pouted as she hung up the phone.

With no asteroids in sight we slouched into our overcoats, climbed aboard the O-Mobile and headed off up snow-filled streets, sliding around corners and slipping into gutters to find our way to our respective workplaces.

I got to sit and watch the snow falling all day long from my fourth-floor vantage point, and I’ve got a tiny speck of advice for pedestrians who tromp through the street to avoid walking on the unshoveled sidewalks: The bus drivers actually want to hit you, guys. Remember the one who gave that fellah a mile-and-a-half joy ride hanging from his rear-view mirror? Those drivers are nuts! And you’re making a big mistake thinking they’ll try to avoid you because it’s against the law, or union rules, or just too much trouble. I’m not telling you to get out of the road, I’m just saying think about what you’re exposing yourself to.

Not that I have an opinion about bus drivers. Or much experience getting run over by them. Almost getting run over, yes, tons of that. They’re either very good at appearing to want to drive right over the front of my car or very bad and, so far, unsuccessful at trying very hard to turn the O-Mobile into a road pizza-pan. There’s one driver in particular who pulls up at the bus stop on the corner of King and Wilson. Twice he’s waited for me to go around before pulling out then signaling. I’m not going around him again because he’s become more determined to get somebody and he’ll find success on these slippery streets.

It didn’t stop snowing until a little after three o’clock, long enough to bury most of the city in a heavy blanket of snow that the city crews plowed aside and shoveled into heaps carefully place to block all the secondary roads from the use of all but the most determined drivers in the biggest SUVs. The main roads were left looking deceptively easy to drive around on. (Hint: It’s a trap!) I couldn’t tell how easy it was because I was doing only twenty miles per. So I’m a sissy. Sue me.

I woke up to the sound of wimpering from My Darling B’s side of the bed, the telltale sign that a nightmare was in progress, so I cuddled up behind her to give her what comfort I could and she calmed down. Then I dozed off and it was my turn to have the nightmare!

Kenneth Branagh, the actor, took me captive and whisked me away by dogsled to his remote arctic laboratory, a huge, half-burned (and still burning) wooden farmhouse on the crest of a high hill. I didn’t think there were farmhouses in the arctic, or hills either, for that matter, but there you are. He took me to an attic room where he demonstrated his latest diabolical experiment: transmogrifying a shackled captive into a zombie by force-feeding him a transfusion of blood. It was pretty gross. Where he got zombie blood, I don’t know. Then he announced his nefarious intention to assemble an army of zombies loyal to him (of course) before he wrapped himself in an embroidered dressing gown, curled up on the sofa and went to sleep. I wanted to shoot the newly-made zombie in the head with Branagh’s pistol, which I saw him carrying in a manila envelope, but Branagh woke up as I was looking for it, stuffed the envelope between the cushions of the sofa, laid down and went back to sleep.

I went exploring the farm house while he slept. I could roam at will; he hadn’t shackled me or locked me in or so much as warned me not to leave the premesis. The house was huge and included ball rooms, a hay loft and a yawning lobby dominated by towering doric columns. I walked through the lobby, out the front door and across the lawn of Madison’s capital square to the front lobby of the bank where I work, approached a teller that I recognized and asked her how I would go about withdrawing money from my account without my ID (Kenneth Branagh still had my wallet). She didn’t have any problem with giving me all the money I wanted. I took my wad of cash to the hotel across the street and checked into a room so I could take a shower, and while I stood at the front desk I watched a family dressed in Santa suits rehearse for a wedding. The dad, in an oxygen mask, had to run to keep up with the bride walking down the make-believe aisle at a trot. I leaned over to the guy at the desk to make a comment about dad’s pallid complexion when my alarm clock jangled me awake.

I rarely remember my dreams anymore but that one sticks. I haven’t been so happy to hear the alarm clock in a long time.

This morning Bonkers caught another mouse! I thought the cats were up to something when I found them staring at the crack under the clothes dryer, but after fifteen or twenty minutes passed I figured they were only zoning out or staring at the dead people again. They didn’t seem especially agitated; Bonkers looked about half asleep. They just sat there and stared. They even did it in shifts; when Bonk sauntered away downstairs to visit the litter box, Boo stayed until he came back, then she went to get a drink and a bite to eat for breakfast while he stood there, and so on. It was odd, but they do so many odd things that I soon lost interest.

When I was cleaning off my place at the table after breakfast I noticed that Bonk was pawing around my backpack where it was slouched against an end table, sticking his nose inside, dancing around it. I didn’t think anything of it because he does that kind of thing a lot, too. I walked right past him into the living room with my coffee to sit with my laptop on the sofa for ten minutes or so.

While I was waiting for the computer to boot up I watched Bonk take off into the dining room, dance around under the table and head back toward the living room, batting something like a linty ball across the floor as he went. Once again, a linty ball on the floor of our house wouldn’t be at all unusual. I think I’ve mentioned our dust bunny problem before. The cats don’t play with them, however, so I finally paid closer attention to what he was up to. If I squinted, I could just make out that the linty ball had what looked like a tail. I got up, took a few steps toward the dining room. Bonkers jumped back from his toy, giving me a good look at it, grey on one side, cream-colored on the other, and there was no question it had a tail.

“He’s got another friggen mouse!” I blurted to Tim, who was in the kitchen making his breakfast. When he scampered over, Bonkers stopped batting it around long enough for him to have a good look. I went to the closet to get my leather snow-shoveling gloves but was two steps ahead of me, peeling a paper towel off the roll on the countertop and grabbing the mouse. Bonkers went off across the room, sniffing the baseboards and peering under all the furniture looking for another one.

Well, now we know the first one definitely wasn’t a fluke. It’s a good thing we’ve got at least one dedicated mouser in the house. Boo stood aside and watched this time, not at all interested in joining Bonkers or learning anything at all about catching mice.

The people I work with will bring in munchies and call it a party at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t take much. This morning it was bagels, doughnut holes and a couple of kringels with some juice on the side, and they called it a birthday party for me. It’s not that I wasn’t flattered, I was, very. “Happy Birthday,” Ami said, stopping at the door of my cubicle as she came in the office, “I hope you didn’t eat breakfast already.” I had, but it was two slices of buttered toast and a cup of black coffee. I could stand a little kringel. Or kringle, however you spell it.

Forty-seven doesn’t feel any different than forty-six, in case you were thinking of asking.

This date marked the first morning since the Jon Coulton concert on Friday night that My Darling B didn’t play Code Monkey while she was surfing her web sites for news during breakfast. She loaded it into her MP3 player last night, though, so I have the unshakable suspicion she listened to it at least once before she clocked on at work, probably while she was waiting in line to get through the security pat-down, maybe while she was getting her Power Point slides ready for the presentation she had to give a little later, if she had time to spare. What I most liked to picture, though, was her closing the door to a stall in the women’s room, standing on the lid of the stool and doing the Code Monkey dance. (It’s not as weird as it sounds, it’s just fun.)

Thursday night is guy dinner night. Barb makes dinner every other night, unless we go out, but on Thursday night the guys have to think of something to cook. The only rule is it can’t be mac and cheese or cup o’ noodles or any other pseudo-cooking that could be considered cheating.

Tonight we thought we’d try to make Barb’s recipe for homemade hamburger helper and we were doing just fine until we added the rice, some kind of weirdo mutant rice from a waterless planet that wouldn’t cook no matter how long it simmered. After pushing it around in the pan for more than an hour we put it on the table anyway and ate it, al dente rice and all. It was pretty good but next time we’ll have to start a lot earlier, like maybe the night before.

Tim plays a computer game on the interwebs with hundreds of other gaming junkies: Space Pirates! I don’t remember what it’s really called, but that’s what it is. He started off with a spaceship that was the equivalent of an AMC Pacer and, quickly learning the ins and outs of how to be a privateer, stole enough booty to work his way up to owning several ships.

Every time he gets a new ship, he has to outfit each one with engines, armor plating and weapons, the whole shebang, and it occurred to him yesterday that all this stuff cost a lot more in some parts of Pirate Space than it did in other parts. Some part of his hindbrain whispered Buy low, sell high! He bought a whole boatload of the stuff in the cheap zone and shipped it across the universe to one of the places where it cost a lot more, put it on the market and left to eat dinner. When he checked back later he found he’d made more on market speculation in a couple hours than he had all summer when he’d been pillaging and looting. And a capitalist was born!

I finally caved in and tried the wireless headset that information services gave to me. I’ve been very happy with the old headset but if I didn’t clip the curly phone cord to my shirt pocket, a tiny detail that’s astoundingly easy for me to forget, it tended to catch on the keyboard tray and jerk the headset off when I reached for the filing cabinet or turned from one end of my L-shaped desk to the other. If you were a gambler and wanted to put odds on it, you could double your money betting it would happen when I was right in the middle of answering a crucially important question. That can be a little frustrating.

Also, wireless headphones have become tres chic mode around the office. More and more, I’ve seen my coworkers walking through the hallways with the little silver bug-like things clinging to the sides of their faces. None of them watch enough SciFi Channel to know they’re not supposed to smile and greet people as they pass by, a violation of the Borg Code which dictates they ought to stare straight ahead as they march wooden-legged toward their assigned stations.

I broke open the box this morning, plugged in the gumdrop-shaped tower and cradled the earbug to charge the batteries. When it was ready I victimized the next couple of incoming callers by answering them using it and although it worked fine for talking with them, I have to say the designers haven’t come up with a comfortable way to wear it, or maybe it takes time to get used to that big plastic hook around the back of my ear, if I keep using it.

A walk around the city during my lunch hour: After all the snow that’s fallen in the past week, sidewalks in the capital hill area have been reduced to little more than trenches through the snow, the walls higher and solid as concrete at the street intersections where some dogged soul hacked his way through the chest-high stuff pushed up along the curbs by the plows. Even the sidewalks along State Street are tightly hemmed in, the panhandlers taking advantage of the situation by planting themselves where walkers can’t get by, bottlenecking foot traffic. The sidewalks around cap square, though, have been completely cleared. They’ve even cleaned off the benches so we can sit and eat our lunch in the sub-freezing temps.

Major league baseball players use steroids? Shut up! I thought that was strictly a Barry “One Bad Apple” Bonds-sort of thing! And this has been going on for at least nine whole years? How am I ever supposed to feel good about watching Field of Dreams now?

Thank goodness pro football still hasn’t lost its integrity, that’s all I’ve got to say about it.

We went shopping on State Street after our weekly Saturday visit to the farmer’s market, a repeat of two weeks ago. We were looking for stocking-stuffers this time and found quite a few, but naturally I can’t get into that here. I can report (and am ecstatically happy to do so) that we found tickets to see They Might Be Giants perform at the Barrymore in February. It did look a little dicey for a moment or two after we asked, because the cashier said that “the ticket lady” hadn’t stopped in this morning (today was advertised as the first day TMBG tickets went on sale) but she’d check for us because sometimes they dropped off new tickets a day or two early ... and they had! Yowza! I’ve bought their recordings ever since my MTV days when I heard a recording of Don’t Let’s Start and enjoyed their frantic style and clever lyrics. I’m not the kind of TMBG fan that checks the interwebs daily for news of their comings and goings, or even one who travels to faraway lands to see them perform. In fact, I’ve never seen them perform, but I’ve talked to people who have and said the experience was not to be missed. I’ve never been anywhere near one of their performance venues until now, though, so I’m pretty damned happy to have gotten my sticky little mitts on tickets to the show.

After shopping around town we headed home to nap. Really, it took a lot out of us. We’re not used to so much of that kind of excitement all in one morning. We got up early to get to the farmer’s market by nine so we’d have plenty of time to walk up and down State Street at our leisure, went from the two-hundred block all the way down to Paul’s Bookstore on the six-hundred block and worked our way back up to the one-hundred block. I’m no good at math but even I can see that’s something like thirteen hundred blocks! Maybe you can see how that would take its toll, even if he were spring chickens or whatever kind of fowl you consider to be particularly athletic. Small wonder we had to hit the hay as soon as we got home.

I cheated a bit on the nap, though. My Darling B retired to the boudoir to catch a few winks while I pushed back in the living room recliner for my afternoon moment of contemplation and recomposure, but I had so many thoughts running through my head that I flipped open my laptop and spent the next couple hours diddling around with that instead of catching some Z’s as I should have been. Somehow I’m even a slacker at slacking.

In the evening we went out for a few drinks at the Tower Bar on Broadway with some of B’s coworkers. We almost never go out for drinks and almost never with our coworkers. It’s not that we have ethical objections against either; I’d venture to say that both B and I feel very positively about both drinking and socializing, and particularly good about doing both together. We simply don’t get around to doing either very much. It’d be hard to explain why but if I had to sum it up in just a few words I’d guess it was due mostly to sheer inertia. We get home from work, we have dinner, and by that time all we’ve got the energy to do is park our butts on the sofa and read the paper. We both like to go out, but most of the time it seems like too much trouble.

This being the weekend, though, we couldn’t plead that we’d been working all day, that we had only a few hours to ourselves, that it was late or that a favorite television show would be on soon. (Television sucks so bad in recent memory that I don’t remember any time in the past five or ten years that the last one has been a consideration, but it popped up anyway so I thought I’d throw it out there.) Having planned most of the week for it we were in fact ready, willing and rested to venture out in public to have a few drinks and tell a few well-worn jokes.

The Tower Bar is a tavern where everybody knows your name, although since B and I had been there only once several months ago nobody there knew who in hell we were and looked at us with exactly that expression when we stepped through the front door. B knew the bartender, though, and with a smile and a wave she established that we were welcomed there, so we narrowly avoided reenacting a scene from Dawn Of The Dead, the one where the zombies mob the unsuspecting out-of-towners and devour their brains. We found B’s coworkers in a back room, ordered beers and settled down to relax.

I feel obligated in this public forum to point out that we had a designated driver for our night of pubbing. Tim dropped us off and promised to come back to pick us up when we called in an hour or so. His deed was all the more heroic when you take into consideration that he drove us there and back on snow-covered, slippery roads and did an outstanding job of it. I salute you, Tim!

Grilled ham & cheese for dinner after a couple beers at the Tower. Yum!

We’ve been unable to open the back door to the yard for more than a week now, blocked as it was by six or eight inches of snow (I didn’t measure it, I’m going on memory). The door didn’t open even a little bit when I pushed on it last week, a dead giveaway that there was some frozen stuff under the pillow-soft snow on top, exactly what I found when I went out back with a shovel this afternoon to see if I could clear any of it away.

Shoveling my way across the deck was surprisingly easy to do once I had cleared enough space to stand in at the opening in the rail at the far end of the deck. I worked my way from there to the door a little bit at a time, tossing one shovelful of fluffy snow after another through the railings to watch them burst open like fireworks. The crust underneath was thick enough to walk on until I was standing about halfway between the rail and the door, where first one foot, then another broke through to the deck. After it was cracked open it was easy to break up by stamping on it or, for the thicker, more stubborn crust, grabbing a tomato stake from the stack propped against the back of the garage and jabbing it into the icy snow until it was weakened and broke up into gravelly pieces, easily scooped up with the shovel and tossed aside.

Over by the door it was somehow easier to get the shovel under the crust and lever up huge pieces of it that I had the mistaken impression were easier to remove until one of them turned out to be much heavier than it looked and a muscle in the small of my back sent me an explicit warning message that said, should I try something stupid like that again, I would regret it. I paused for a moment to stretch, catch my breath and reflect on how stupid that was. Then I moved a little more slowly and broke the snow up into very small chunks.

Our roof needs a roof rake, a sort of shovel with a handle that telescopes to give me a thirty or forty-foot reach so I can remove the snow from the roof. The roof vents are blocked, trapping warm air in the attic and melting the snow on the roof. We’ve got icicles hanging from the front and back of the house and I can see ice built up along the gutters. It’s not that they can’t handle the water runoff, it’s that the water freezes in the gutters when it gets there. The snow shouldn’t even be melting, it should be evaporating or blowing away. That’s what the vents are for. But I can’t clear them because every hardware store in Monona is sold out of roof rakes.

Well, of course they are. Sixteen to twenty inches of snow have fallen in the past two weeks. Men who are normally considered sane and rational have become reckless enough to climb onto their ice-covered rooftops to shovel snow away. I should have bought a roof rake last fall when they were everywhere, but we had almost no snow last season and, like everybody else, I expected much the same again this year. So did the hardware store managers, which is why they’re out of stock now.

So I did what everybody does when they can’t get what they want by driving to the store: I googled “roof rake” and ordered one straight through the interwebs from a guy in Michigan. How did we ever manage to get along before we could ask for and get anything we needed on-line? He said he’ll send it out tomorrow and it ought to get here by Wednesday at the latest. I ordered from their web page but had to call him afterwards because I pushed the wrong button and ended up paying thirty-eight bucks for shipping. “I wanted regular shipping, please,” I asked him, and he answered, “No problem, we’ll get that taken care of and shipped out tomorrow.” Then he added, “How’s the snow in Wisconsin?”

Nothing’s a secret on the interwebs, especially not where you’re calling from. “Getting deeper all the time,” I told him. He could sympathize; they’d just gotten a fresh fall of new snow today.

So a roof rake is on its way through the USPS and I have every reason to believe there will still be plenty of snow on the roof to put it to good use when it gets here on Tuesday or Wednesday. Hell, there’ll probably be more snow on the roof by then. It doesn’t seem ready to stop coming down, does it? And the cold is butt-numbing. In the short thirty minutes or so it took me to shovel my way across the deck I lost sensation in the ends of all ten fingers even though they were snugly nestled deep in the top-grain cowhide and wool lining of my heavy-duty gloves and I was moving snow at a pretty respectable pace, if I may say so myself. My toes weren’t so warm, either. When the high temperature for the day ends in “-teen” there isn’t much you can do to stay warm other than wrap up in all the quilts you can lay your hands on and curl up on the sofa with a book and a hot cup of coffee in easy reach.

All the chocolate in the world is the office building where I work. Honestly, I’m not trying to exaggerate this, every bit of it is in there. It has to be. Even if it’s not, I’m a little disturbed that the world could somehow support enough cocoa trees to bury us under this many kisses and candy bars and toll house frikken cookies and oh my god are those double-fudge chocolate brownies? They ARE! How am I ever going to make it until the end of the week without lapsing into a diabetic coma? There’s just no way

Okay, there is. I haven’t been having much trouble resisting the temptation to grab a little something from every dish I walk past because unlike my younger days I can’t gorge myself on candy past the point where I’ll have to barf it all back up. I can’t even come close anymore. Not that I think it’s a bad trait to have lost.

This morning Chris opened his mail and in one package found a tin as big as a basketball chock full o’ dark chocolate Hershey’s kisses. When he first popped the top open the smell made me want to strap it on my muzzle like a feed bag and start munching, but I didn’t want to look like a complete slob so I scooped up a modest handful and walked back to my cube with it. And then later, another modest handful. And again later, another. Yet by mid-afternoon the tin was still somehow heaped with chocolate kisses. It hardly looked as though we’d made a dent in it, even though six or seven of us, and at least a dozen visitors, had been grazing from it all day. It was The Evil Chocolate Tin, hexed with a combination of magical spells that keep it filled and tempting.

But after lunch it was very easy to resist. I felt like that enormously fat guy in the Monty Python film who explodes after stuffing one more chocolate wafer in his mouth. My stomach grumbled at the mere thought of more chocolate. ugh.

So if you’re looking for some sweeties, or were wondering where the heck all the chocolate went, there’s a mountain of it over here. Come and get it. If you stand on the sidewalk and call me on your cell phone I’ll dump a bunch of it out the window and you can catch it in your hat. You’re welcome.

Tammy in the next offfice was wearing bright ruby-red heels today. I waved my crabbed hands in her face and cackled, “The Ruby Slippers! Give them to me! They’re of no use to you!”

Her mouth dropped open and there was an uncomfortably long silence, then she finally asked, “Huh?”

I couldn’t resist. I couldn’t! I walked right past a woman on the street Saturday who was wearing ruby-red boots and held myself in check then, not wanting to be tackled by police and hauled away to a psych ward by the guys in the white coats, but I didn’t feel right about it afterwards. Why doesn’t anybody play the movie quote game but me and Tim?

The elevator in the oldest part of the building always smells a bit like a overheating car engine, an odor that makes me sniff the air every time I get in there and wonder, Is this the day I’m going to make the evening news? Plunging to the bottom of a smoking elevator shaft has got to rate twenty seconds on at least one of the local stations, not that it’s the kind of notoriety I’m looking for. I’m all but certain I’d survive, by the way. That elevator goes up only as far as the third floor, which is why I’m never nervous enough about detecting a burning smell when I step in to step right back out, as I do when the other elevators suddenly jump before the doors close.

“Did you ever notice how many announcers on public radio have annoying voices?” Tim asked from the back seat as we started out one morning last week with the radio tuned to WERN, a local station.

“How many sound annyoing to you?” I asked.

“Pretty much all of them,” was the answer, so NPR’s got a lot of work to do to get a loyal listener out of this guy.

I don’t know if I’d be uncharitable enough to characterize any of the voices on public radio as annoying ... okay, yes I would. I can’t listen to Zorba Paster. His program is on two or three, or maybe it’s four times on both Saturday and Sunday; it seems that I can’t turn the radio on during the weekend without hearing his giggly voice. It’s exponentially more grating than fingernails on a blackboard. In fact, now that blackboards have pretty much disappeared from the U.S., Zorba’s voice could be the new benchmark for sounds that reduce people to quivering heaps of jelly. It’s only my opinion, and I mention it just to illustrate I can understand where Tim’s coming from.

There’s just one other guy, Tom Ashbrook, whose voice doesn’t bother me, it’s the way he uses it. He hosts the afternoon show On Point, a current events talk show, and the topics of discussion get Tom so worked up he often sounds as if he’s going to burst into flames. If I listen to him for too long I can feel my own heart rate speeding out of control and have to change to an easy listening channel for at least half an hour to calm down again.

But I think Tim’s being a little unfair when he says all the other announcers have annoying voices. I can think of several right off the top of my head who have really cool voices. Jim Flemming speaks in such a smooth, relaxing tone I don’t dare listen to his program, All Things Considered, while I’m driving or operating heavy machinery. And long-time announcers Jim Packard and Carl Kasell have what can best be described as classic radio voices, clear and solid, not just easy to listen to but a pleasure. Kasell can literally make an answering machine sound better; his voice is the prize of one of the quizzes on the weekend news show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! (Packard announces regularly for Michael Feldman on the weekly show Whad’ya Know?)

It turned out I was wrong yesterday when I said that all the chocolate in the world was in the building where I worked, because somebody somewhere found even more chocolate, packed it in a gift basket and sold it to one of our clients, who sent it to me and my boss. We received it this afternoon. And then the building exploded. Chocolate drops rained down all over capital square and the insulin shock wave broke windows as far away as Monona.

Sean’s coming! But where to put him? I mean, it’s not like I’m thinking of racking him like wine or coiling him up and storing him in the basement like a garden hose, which by the way I entirely failed to do last fall. Technically it’s still fall, of course, a conceit that led me to mistakenly believe that, even if it snowed, which it did, I would have many weeks to catch up on my tardy yard work, just like last year, but Mother Nature had a classic reply to that: BWA!HA!HA!HA!HAAAaaa! She was not accompanied by menacing organ music, but the effect was the same, and our garden hose has remained frozen solid somewhere under six inches of snow for weeks. Even if it does melt enough to allow me to locate it and pull it free of winter’s icy grip, the result will be a complete set of purpled, numbed fingers, the ultimate revenge for my arrogance and sloth. At this point, though, I’m going on the assumption the snow won’t be melting off before March. That may seem pessimistic, but as far as yard work is concerned it’s worst-case scenario time. That hose is a goner.

I seem to have wandered a bit from the opening thought. Sean’s coming to visit. We had to figure out where he could crash for the night. Previously he’s crashed on the futon on a converatble frame that’s usually in the basement, but we’re not going to make him sleep in the basement in the winter where it’s cold enough that not even Chilly Willy would want to come back for a visit until summer warms things up a bit. It’s cold upstairs at night, too, after our programmable thermostat resets to sixty-four degrees, which would be bliss at the height of a summer heat wave but is tolerable now only if we stay in bed rolled tightly in quilts, blankets and cats. We can’t spare a cat for Sean but we can make room for him upstairs where nighttime temps are a lot more hospitable than the deep-freeze downstairs.

To that end, My Darling B gave up her sewing room for the week, converting it to a guest room by clearing out the chair, ironing board, quilt rack, toy chest and other odds and ends, and leaving a gaping blank expanse of floor, which I filled by getting Tim to help me carry the futon frame up from the basement; he left me to drag the futon up the stairs by my darned self. B was worried there wouldn’t be enough room for all this but there was plenty and to spare, so Sean has a lovely space not only to sleep in but to curl up with the dozen or so books he’ll read during his week-long Christmas visit to Our Humble O-bode. It just wouldn’t be a visit from Sean if he didn’t try to read at least a dozen books, and stay up all night to do it.

The last time we saw him was in September and we’re all jazzed about having him back for the holidays so we can pester him with a lot of catch-up questions about his job, where he lives, who his friends are now, etc. etc. etc. Maybe that’s why he spends so much time with his nose in a book when he visits.

I finished reading Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto last Sunday and I’ve been mulling it over ever since. It ends pretty much the only way it possibly could end, and yet I don’t quite understand the ending. I almost understand it. The story, finally, was about love and the epilogue, a wedding, was significantly witnessed by the most authentic lovers in the story, the French attache and his wife, Simon and Edith, but there was something about them I didn’t quite catch on to, something that links them to the love of opera and the love of the hostages and their captors, Stockholm-style, but I still haven’t tuned into it. I don’t know if I ever will. Does that mean it’s bad? Hmmmm. No, I don’t think so. It was very readable, the characters were well-developed and easy to identify with. Although Patchett obviously loves opera, a medium I don’t understand, she did make me understand how other people love opera. But even though I don’t quite get everything that was going on, I would unhesitatingly recommend Bel Canto.

In order to make her sewing room into a guest room for Sean’s visit this weekend, My Darling B shifted some of the easier-to-move furniture to our bedroom. She tucked a chair into the corner behind her nightstand and she tried to stuff a quilt rack into the space remaining beside a couple of laundry hampers, but it didn’t quite fit. At least a third of it, particularly its very substantial foot, was sticking out like a battering ram that I would have to try to avoid in the dark if I had to get out of bed in the night, and I most assuredly would because when my alarm clock starts to bleep it’s still night as far as I’m concerned.

I tried to rearrange the way the laundry hampers and the quilt rack were wedged into the corner. It was like one of those games where you have three chunks of oddly-shaped wood that fit perfectly inside a frame if only you can figure out how they all nest together. I never was very good at those, and the quilt rack was apparently a piece to a different puzzle; I couldn’t get it to go all the way back into the corner with enough space left over for the hampers no matter how many different ways I tried to do it.

So guess how many toes I stubbed when I got out of bed this morning and headed for the shower? Hint: Not quite all of them.

Among the many, many things I did at work today (Very busy! Lots to do before the holiday!), the most fun I had was gluing and piecing together a map of northeastern Wisconsin. I could tell you why but then we’d both go to jail. Penny bought a couple road maps and some tag board and cut the map so all the lines matched up. I helped a little with matching the lines, but where I really excelled, and Penn promised to endorse this on my resume, was when I helped her spread glue across the back and flatten it out against the tag board so it was practially wrinkle-free. It turned out awesome.

The toughest part was fighting the nearly-overwhelming urge to eat the glue stick. That was probably a grade-school memory kicking in.

Huge pig-in at work today ... uh .... Excuse me, I had a minor brain cramp and relapsed into military terminology for a moment. “Pig-out” was what we called a pot luck and was in no way meant to disparage the wide and wonderful offerings of food brought to the board room this morning. I personally liked the meatballs a whole lot and they seemed to be popular with everyone else, as well. It’s really hard to beat meatballs that have been simmering in barbeque sauce until they’re tender as soft-boiled eggs. I tried very hard to put a little bit of everything on my plate, partly to make sure I didn’t miss anything really good but mostly to camoflague the size of the pyramid of meatballs I stacked in the middle, not that anybody was paying much attention to me.

And of course there were thirty kinds of chocolate treats. I think I’ve covered the chocolate situation and won’t go into that again.

And finally, we stayed in town this evening to attend a meeting of Veterans for Peace. Neither one of us has been before and we weren’t sure what to expect. Mostly, we just wanted to find out what they were up to, see if it was worth investing more time in. I think we’ll go back again, and probably even volunteer our time when it comes to it, just because it doesn’t seem right not to.

Crossing Doty Street on Carroll on the way to work in the morning is always a bit of a challenge. I luck out a lot when the traffic light at Hamilton stops traffic headed east along Doty, a one-way street, but when there are a lot of right-turners waiting on Hamilton to turn onto Doty it’s a free-for-all and I either have to close my eyes, stomp on the gas and lunge through the gaps between the moving cars, a maneuver that doesn’t sit well with My Darling B, a devoted bride but a nervous passenger, or I can sit and wait forever (or what seems like forever) for a break in traffic. Given my passenger’s nervous predilections, I wait.

And today I had a little while to wait after a dark blue Crown Vic turned off Doty into Carroll and stopped at the corner, blocking the road. Doty was wide open but I couldn’t cross! It was like the bartender putting a foamy pint of rich, dark beer down on the bar, covering it with a pitcher and saying, “You can have it free if you can figure out how to drink it without touching the pitcher.” I could’ve jumped the curb and gone up the sidewalk, I suppose, but the police station is right there at the corner. That probably wouldn’t have been prudent.

After sitting at the corner for about a minute he pulled up about two car lengths and stopped again. He seemed to be looking for parking but I’ve never seen anybody take such a long time to decide whether or not to park, and it wasn’t as if it was a hard decision because the meters were all bagged — no parking along Carroll today. (I never learned why.) But he pulled up just far enough for me to get into Carroll Street, and Doty was free of traffic, so I bolted across, then jammed on the brakes as I entered Carroll and came up just short of the Crown Vic’s rear bumper.

He pulled up another two car lengths and took another long look at the parking meters. What in hell was he looking at? It wasn’t hard to see they were bagged, every last one of them, each and every bag brightly printed with NO PARKING in red block letters big enough to be visible from orbit. He stared at them long enough that I could have gotten out of my car, walked to his, knocked on the window and told him, “It says ‘No Parking.’ Could we move it along, please?” But, you know me, I’m far too patient to resort to a rash act like that. Also too polite.

He stopped once or twice more before we were far enough along to pull into our customary spot, where we exchanged seats and a brief snog. The Crown Vic pulled into the last spot, paused there a minute and, as I was crossing the street to work, he pulled out and drove away, apparently to look for more clearly-marked parking slots.

My barber tried his darndest to slip me some wine on my visit to his chair today. The guy ahead of me enjoyed a glass and George wanted me to try “just a bit” before I left. I was sorely tempted, but I was going back to work and my employers are funny about drinking during work hours. And not “funny” as in “they like us to have fun drinking,” either, more’s the pity. “Funny” as in “looking in the section behind the funny papers for another job.”

George has always had a little fridge in the back by his cash register where he keeps sodas, mostly for himself, I assume, but he’s offered them to me before. This time of year he likes to keep special treats in there. He offered me beer last year; I can’t remember if he offered me wine or not. Told me if I couldn’t partake during the work day I should come back after work when they’ll finish off the wine. Seems rude to refuse his hospitality. Besides, he ought to be good and lit by then.

The joys to being a homeowner are many. Standing on a ladder in the dark raking heavy, wet snow off the roof is not one of them. You may quote me.

I should have been doing this last night. I had the rake then, I just wasn’t motivated enough to put it together, but the ice dam that’s still piled up along the gutter, front and back, isn’t going to disappear by itself, especially when it’s got a thick layer of fluffy white snow insulating it from Mister Sun’s warming rays, and I’m never going to get home from work early enough to clear the snow off when it’s daylight.

I put this off long enough, so with ten minutes or so of free time before dinner was served I took the box of aluminum parts to the basement workbench and engaged the part of my brain that can put things together without reading the directions. This roof rake was one-hundred percent made in the good ol’ U.S.A., and completely in little pieces. Well, as little as they could get them without going to ridiculous lengths: four pieces of pipe about five feet long, a flat blade, braces, two (and only two — don’t break those suckers!) plastic wheelies to keep the edge of the blade from scraping all the gravelly bits off the shingles, and the plastic bag of nuts and bolts that’s in every kit and is always missing at least one nut or bolt ... but not this time. When I found I could put it all together without digging through my junk box for an extra bolt I was so overjoyed I just about peed myself.

After supper I took it out back to give it a try. It worked like a charm, and you know what? There’s one hell of a lot more snow on a rooftop than you’d think, and when it’s wet, it’s nearly as hard to drag it off the roof as it is to shovel off the driveway. I had to be careful to shave off little chunks, starting at the eaves and moving gradually up to the peak. Each chunk hit the ground with a sound like a watermelon dropped from an airplane.

I had to give up after about a half-hour of dragging the handle of the roofrake through wet snow soaked my gloves and I lost sensation in the ends of my fingers, but I managed to get most of the snow off the back of the roof and came around the front to rake the snow off the ice dam built up there. If the temps are in the high thirties again tomorrow like the good people at the National Weather Service promise they will be, that ice ought to be crumbling away by the time we get home tomorrow, fingers crossed, knock on wood.

The Imperial Way was really a coffee-table book, but I’m going to put it on my list anyways because I liked reading Paul Theroux before (Riding The Iron Rooster and, I think, To The Ends Of The Earth and maybe even The Great Railway Bazaar). He writes about two-dozen pages of travelogue describing a railway trip from Peshewar in Pakistan to Chittagong on the other side of India, a trip that is told again in the photographs of Steve McCurry, the photographer who took the haunting photo of the Afghani girl everyone remembers from the cover of National Geographic.

You know what today is, right? Besides being the day that I have to change the “th” to “st” after the date to make it say “twenty-first” instead of “twenty-oneth,” even though I’ve always been in favor of changing it to “twenty-oneth” because it sounds so freakin weird, but also because I forget to change it sometimes. Of course, if you say “twenty-oneth” you also get to say “twenty-tooth” and “twenty-threeth” and that’s just too friggen weird to be real, and I love it. So say it with me: Today shall henceforth be the twenty-oneth of December. You don’t have to say “henceforth” if you’re not cool with that, but I think it adds to the weirdness, and that can’t be a bad thing.

The twenty-oneth of December is, to get back on track, the longest night of the year. Yes! The days get longer from now on by something like six minutes each day. I used to know exactly how long, back in the day when I paid certified academicians at the glorious ivory tower of UW Eau Claire to tell me trivial crap like that. I used to know how to calculate a Holmann transfer orbit, too. Talk about information I’d never be able to use. Now I can’t remember the difference between an expedition and an exhibition so I’m not too worried about forgetting how many minutes of daylight are added to each day after the solstice. At least I still remember what a “solstice” is, so that’s something.

An exhibition, of course, is a fancy-pants word for show & tell, although the tell is not always necessary. If you peel open your overcoat and you’re not wearing any clothes underneath, you’re automatically an exhibitionist without saying a thing. And if you refuse to explain what you’re exhibiting you can call yourself an artist and sometimes even get people to throw cash at you by the fistful for doing what in the real world amounts to dirtying canvas or breaking things.

For example, and I love this example, there’s a “piece” that was recently “installed” at the modern art museum here in Madison that looks, to my eyes, which are admittedly untrained in the subtleties of artistic expression, exactly like a used housepainter’s dropcloth dangling from the ceiling by ropes looped around the roughly-knotted corners of the fabric. Not wanting to seem like an unlettered Philistine I studied the “piece” for ten or fifteen minutes from different angles, even different heights (it hangs in a stairway), pausing to rub my chin thoughtfully as I meditated on it, and you know what? It is a dropcloth. The paint’s not splashed across it in any way that reveals a message or stirs an emotion, the cloth isn’t knotted or folded or hung in a way that’s especially eye-catching. My kid could literally make one just like it. He wouldn’t be able to get the museum to hand him a roll of money for it yet, though, so it’s sort of obscene as flashing in public but without the risk of getting punched in the face or arrested.

An expedition is what Jacques Cousteau made wherever he went while traipsing all over the globe, climbing into shark cages, photographing cora reefs and living in tin cans on the sea floor for weeks at a time. I thought of Jacques and the rest of the Calypso crew quacking at each other like ducks in the high-pressure oxy-helium atmosphere in their sea lab because Tim told me that he learned in school that if you breathe pure helium you die. Imagine that, kids still learn science stuff in school.

His teacher was demonstrating how sound waves move through helium and threw in the warning that breathing it causes death as a bonus, probably because he knew the guys would think it was very cool. Cool, yet trivial. So Tim learned he’d die breathing pure helium, not something he’d be very likely to do. I learned, from watching the films of good ol’ Jacques and his aquanauts, that breathing pure oxygen under high pressure, such as in an undersea lab, will kill you. Cool, but not something I would be very likely to do. My head is filled with this kind of stuff and now, so is Tim’s.

That’s what I was telling Tim about when I was trying to remember the word “expedition” and couldn’t. Exhibition? Exploration? Exhalation? What in hell is that word? It starts with “ex” and ends with “shun,” I know that for sure. Exhaltation? I ran through a long laundry list of euphonically-similar words until Tim mercifully cut me short with raised eyebrows and suggested, “Expedition?” Yes! Expedition! Thank you!

It’s how I remember things now: I keep blurting out words that sound somewhat like the one I’m groping for until somebody feels enough pity for me to supply me with the right one. It’s sad, really. Not your puppy-run-over tragic, but puppy-lost-his-bone sad. I can fart out all kinds of big words while I’m banging away at the keys on my laptop, but when it comes to the power of speech I’ve lost it. I can hardly order a burrito from the take-out down the street without having to beg the guy at the window to play the word game. Bandito? Bluto? Barista? Help me out. He can’t. He’s not getting paid enough for that kind of harrassment.

It makes me wonder if all those odds and ends about helium and oxygen aren’t bottlenecking the speech centers of my brain, as if I’ve run out of memory space where that crap would normally be stored so my brain is stashing it wherever it can make room. He’s never going on an expedition! Throw that junk out! Next time I go to say the word all I get is “link not found” and I have to play the word game until somebody can refresh my memory.

Sean was supposed to fly into town last night in time for dinner; we even made reservations at Bunky’s, one of our favorite restaurants in the Atwood-Schenck neighborhood (there are so many great restaurants in the Madison area that we have to break them down by location). As an extra-special treat they even would have had a floor show, a professional belly dancer who weaves her way between the tables, shaking her goodies at the customers as she waves her veils over their heads. We were sort of hoping to get Sean’s reaction to that, preferrably in photographs that we could post to the interwebs and share with everyone else we know. Talk about priceless!

Alas, it was not to be. Dane County Regional Airport was socked in by fog until well past dinnertime and all the early connecting flights from O’Hare were cancelled, but when I checked at about mid-afternoon, Sean’s flight was only delayed. After a quick consultation with My Darling B I called the restaurant to cancel our reservation until we could regroup and decide what to do. Big, fat bummer.

But then, rapture! I made a few more quick phone calls and a check of the internet and it looked as though he was going to leave Chicago at six-ten, so I called to reschedule the reservation for seven-thirty ... and then I got to call back almost immediately to cancel again when his flight was scratched entirely from the schedule. There was no possibility of making a third reservation because he wouldn’t possibly get to Madison before ten o’clock, well after closing hour and probably long past the belly dancer’s bed time. As we still hadn’t eaten, we motored down the street to Fat Jack’s for cheeseburgers. B, always the loving mommy, ordered a double-helping of ranch fries and carried it back to the house for him in a doggy bag.

We were eventually reunited with Sean about three hours later when he came in on the seven o’clock bus out of O’Hare and we picked him up at the Dutch Mills transfer point, just a five-minute drive from the front door of Our Humble O-Bode. To give him the customary welcome we stayed up past midnight gathered in the living room, B and I pelting him with questions, his loving brother pelting him with abuse and, occasionally, his fists, but Sean can give as good as he gets so we had no worries there. Not that we understand that kind of brotherly love but even our awesome powers of parental control have proved ineffectual every time we’ve tried to put a stop to it. We have been able to set a few ground rules that they grudgingly agree to follow: they try to refrain from breaking any furniture or other hard-to-replace items, and understand that if either or both of them becomes gravely injured as a result of their affectionate pummeling they must find their own way to the emergency room. We have to shout to reenforce the first rule; the second rule is by now unspoken but still in force; other than that we no longer discourage them, as we used to, from bashing each other insensible with whatever comes to hand. I think that’s more than fair.

As much as I wanted to stay up and gab into the wee hours, I didn’t have the fortitude for it and turned in shortly after midnight. I think several others wandered off to bed, too, but Sean, bless the cockles of his heart, confessed this morning he stayed up until two o’clock reading a book. Talk about a well-established custom. I would sooner have expected the sun to fail to rise in the morning.

Today didn’t turn out at all the way we planned. Mice and men, that sort of thing. We were supposed to be gathering with the clan at grandma’s house far to the north, through woods and over dale, but last night we fell asleep to the sound of freezing rain pelting the windows and dripping from the eaves, and this morning we woke to the sight of drifting snow driven by sub-freezing winds. The idea of spending three hours trying to maintain traction on county roads covered by that kind of meteorological mayhem was the kind of madness that gets men thrown in to padded rooms. A quick phone conference between dear Mom and the other members of our clan gathering put the kibosh on the whole deal. We agreed to put off our get-together until Christmas day.

Snowbound at Chez O, each of us came up with our own ways to pass the time. My Darling B spent the last half of the morning and most of the afternoon in the kitchen, her kitchen as she contentedly calls it, or not so contentedly when she runs out of counter space. Today even her little galley couldn’t cramp her spirit as she hummed along with the holiday tunes on the stereo and filled the house with the smell of yummy Christmas treats. This could turn out to be a plus for the rest of our clan if we somehow manage to restrain the boys from wolfing down every last crumb before sundown tomorrow so we could take at least a few treats to grandma’s house. (Hope in one hand, spit in the other.)

The boys, meanwhile, holed up in Tim’s room most of the day. Tim read the last couple books of Miyazaki’s Nausicaa series, then started one of LeGuin’s Earthsea books while his older sib, Sean, played Civiliation on Tim’s computer until he was crosseyed. Occasionally they would switch places. Every once in a great while one of them would briefly emerge, usually to snatch a freshly-baked cookie from the kitchen, then hastily beat a retreat to the bedroom in the hopes that their mother was too busy baking to chase them. From my subterranian lair I heard a little shouting from time to time above the floorboards but never the telltale fast-march cadance of B’s footfalls in pursuit of either of the camp robbers.

I retreated to the basement for a couple hours to play with my choo-choos. I haven’t done that in a coon’s age. I wasn’t even sure what to start with, but where trains are concerned I’ve found it’s always best to start with the tracks, so I laid out two sweeping s-curves for arriving and departing trains to the as-yet notional station. Later, after the glue dried, I jerry-rigged a power pack to the rails and ran an engine along the longest track, about nine feet of back-and-forth action, just to see one go again. Didn’t work out too well. The track was awful dirty and the engine was in desperate need of some lubrication, a maintenance job for another weekend. But even a bad day playing with trains is better than a good day slaving away in a lithium mine, if there is such a thing as a good day for a slave grubbing away at the muck in a mineshaft.

Speaking of things not working out so well, or according to plan, or in any way, shape or form, I found out this morning, as I was getting ready to head for the shower, that I was out of undershorts and emergency back-up undershorts! Holy freaking monkey-men! I changed tracks, went straight to the laundry hamper and dug out every single pair of undershorts I could find, then spirted them off to the wash machine rather than put it off one more day. And just so you’re not freaking out that I may have been underpantsless the whole time I was pounding out this drivel: When I’m out of emergency back-up undershorts (the ones with the hearts on them that are a little too tight) I revert to gym shorts. That can be a little uncomfortable if I have to wear them under street clothes ... bunching, don’tcha know ... but it was doubly easy to get away with today because we stayed in and that meant I could lounge around the house in sweat pants. Nobody cared.

Man, it’s such a great feeling waking up at seven o’clock on Monday morning and not having that OH CRAP! OH HELL! OVERSLEPT! panic moment. I hate those, but I love it when I can look at the clock, see the little hand on the seven, and think, Guess I’ll roll over and catch another forty winks or so. That was pretty damned great.

Eventually I had to face ugly reality and shovel the driveway so the postman wouldn’t slip and fall and break his pelvis on the frozen sleet and snow and sue us forty ways from Monday. Technically I didn’t shovel the driveway so much as shaved it with a four-inch-wide ice scraper, the only tool in our arsenal of anti-snow weaponry that was powerful enough to deal with wind-blown drifts soaked through with rain and icily bonded to the concrete. It wasn’t hard to remove but scraping just four inches clear at a time really sucks big frozen stinky mastadon toes, you know? But Sean came out to help, and before either of us went out we each took our sweet time getting ready, Sean hunched over a bottomless bowl of cereal while I almost finished the crossword and tanked up on java.

I took today and Wednesday off from work so I could lounge around at the O-Home with the rest of the family unit, singing Christmas carols and drinking egg nogg, only we’re not having egg nog this year and the only singing we’ve done together so far is when B sung Skullcrusher Mountain for Sean, not the most Christmasy song by anybody’s reckoning. We tried to get everyone to join in on Code Monkey but Tim doesn’t like it enough to sing along, not even on the chorus, and he staunchly refuses to do the dance. So technically we haven’t all been singing together yet, either.

But we have been watching Christmas movies. Last night we watched The Wizard of Oz. Again, maybe not an especially Christmasy movie but I have this memory of it being broadcast on television every Christmas (or was it Thanksgiving?) so it brings back Christmasy memories (or turkey memories. Whatever). I picked up a copy of it about a month ago and you have no idea what I had to go through to get my hands on it. I figured a golden oldie movie that everyone knew like The Wizard of Oz would be in such demand that I’d be able to walk into any store in town, even the hardware stores and coffee shops, and buy a super-deluxe two-disk DVD with all the extras. Well, you won’t believe this but that’s not how it is. By the time I visited nearly every shop I could think of, and finally found one at a Borders on the far side of town, I could’ve driven to China and bought a bootleg copy with less trouble. And even at Borders I had to hunt through the racks before I ran across a copy, more or less by accident, as I was trying to get inside the Borders mindset to figure out what category they’d put it under. Children’s? Drama? Musical? Where in the seven flaming rings of hell is it? And then my boot snagged on an endcap and I saw three copies of Wizard on the bottom shelf. The bottom shelf! Is this not a popular movie any more? Don’t answer that, it was a rhetorical question. I’ve got my copy, so just let me go on living in my bubble of happy self-delusion.

The night before last we watched Elf. Sean had never seen it before and said he didn’t like Will Ferrell much, but we dared him not to like this movie (with the caveat that the ending’s a little sappy) and he took us up on it. “Okay, that was pretty good,” he admitted when the goofiness was all over. My Darling B felt the same way last year when Santa left the DVD under the tree.

In the O-Home each of us opens one present on Christmas eve and the rest on Christmas morning, but because we won’t be here tomorrow (over the river and through the woods, et cetera) we opened prezzies after dinner. Hold it, back up, I went too fast. Dinner, first. My Darling B slaved over a hot kitchen stove all day to serve a tasty leg of lamb for dinner and I would be a complete cad if I didn’t at least mention what a delicious meal it was. She served it with those tiny little potatoes, halved, and biscuits, with cranberry sauce and pineapple slices on the side. This was at variance with the Christmas meal the boys have customarily come to expect, a roast turkey, and the youngest was particularly put out when we decided on a leg of lamb for our Christmas table, but after a single bite he was convinced that even a major change to the holiday menu can be satisfying experience

And she made a pumpkin pie for dessert, but all of us stuffed ourselves so full with the dinner that we didn’t have room for pie. Honestly, it happens, and I think I can speak for at least the boys as well as myself when I say we wouldn’t skip the pie unless we had a dang good reason. She even had real cream she was going to whip up for the topping. That puzzled the hell out of Tim; he couldn’t wrap his head around the concept that “whip cream” was just cream whipped into a froth with a wisk. I guess he figured it only came from an aerosol can that way.

After after-dinner clean-up it was time to open the presents. Or was it time for the Grinch instead? I think we may have slipped a viewing of How The Grince Stole Christmas in there and then opened the presents; my memory’s not too clear on the order. Everybody got everything they wanted, and then some. B slipped a can of Silly String into all the stockings and we cocooned Sean in a psychadelic cobweb. Tim traded his York peppermint patties for some dark chocolate from my stocking. I got a copy of the newest world atlas put out by the gag newspaper The Onion and Sean buried his nose in it almost immediately. Five will get you ten he stays up late into the night until he reads every last word.

And so this is Christmas ...

In my memory, Christmas has customarily been a time of gathering and giving.

We gathered at my mother’s house, the house I grew up in, to break bread. My Uncle Jim and Auntie Sue came with Cousin Mike from Fitchburg. Cousin Carrie, her husband Darren and their new baby Gray came from Dodgeville. My Darling B, Tim and I came from Monona with Sean, come all the way from Denver, Colorado, and we gathered round the dinner table before the hearth, a rather cool hearth since Mom installed electric heat and doesn’t light a fire much anymore in the cast iron Franklin stove that’s stood sentinel against winter in the far corner of the room for years, but still a hearth nonetheless.

Dear Mom made us a scrummy dinner, roast tenderloin and potatoes with broccoli and a pumpkin pie for dessert. I showed Tim how Mom cut the potatoes in half and how he could empty the jacket of the tuber’s starchy goodness, the only part of the potato he’ll eat, by slipping a knife blade just under the skin and giving the jacket a twist. “Whoa!” he gaped, and almost carried it off when he tried it himself but split the jacket down the side halfway through the twist. It takes a practiced hand and a careful turn to get it just right. Do not be discouraged, Grashopper! ‘Tis but your first try.

Sean astounded Uncle Jim by making the slice of pie Mom set before him instantly disappear, but just before that Mike amazed me by making two helpings of broccoli disappear in what was almost literally the blink of an eye. The first disappearing helping amazed me because I’ve rarely seen young progeny voluntarily help themselves to so much of any green vegetable. Usually a parent has to serve it up and spends the rest of the meal reminding said offspring to get around to eating it sometime before reaching the age of majority; rarely does that happen. Mikey not only finished but heaped quite an impressive second helping of broccoli on his cleaned plate. I turned away for two seconds to cut my remaining tenderloin into bite-sized pieces, speared one and popped it in my mouth, and when I turned once again in Mike’s direction his Mount McKinley of broccoli was gone! I blinked! I sputtered! In all my years of dining with Sean and Tim I’ve never seen a son swallow up so much so fast! Truly, he made our own boys look like fussy nibblers. Mike could only explain it this way: “I like broccoli a lot.” I guess you do!

We exchanged gifts during pie and coffee, then had a few laughs by breaking out the board game Sue brought along, a gag called Mad Gabs wherein contestants are presented with an apparently nonsensical phrase, e.g. “Weak Lows Won Oak Lock,” that they must decipher, in this case “We close one o’clock.” It was easiest for me if I didn’t look at the card but instead listened to Carrie say it aloud. She had a gift for pronouncing the phrases with a drawling, nasal accent spoken by no one on this earth that made the phrase we were looking for plain as day. Most of the time she would figure it out on the first or second try, but sometimes she wouldn’t realize she’d said it and somebody else would jump on it. I wasn’t fast enough on the draw to beat anybody else, though. Still, listening to her without looking at the cards felt like cheating so I switched to reading the phrase once to confuse my phonological loop before I looked away to listen to Carrie.

Our visit ended much too soon but we had quite a ways to drive and the roads were still just a bit tricky, so come about five o’clock off we all went before every bit of daylight was gone. Jim and Sue and Mike, Carrie and Darren and Gray departed in the first wave of hugs and handshakes. As soon as the doorway was clear B & I corralled the boys, we put on our shoes and, one by one, exchanged hugs with the hosts before we climbed into the O-Mobile to begin our return trip, about which more later.

As much as I’m grateful for the convenience of being able to drive a four-lane highway from Monona all the way to Stevens Point and thence to Waupaca, which was not possible when I was but a wee lad (the interstate didn’t reach beyond Milwaukee!), it seems to me there’s an immediate need for some kind of Mad Max traffic enforcement unit to patrol what most people seem to think is a Wisconsin autobahn with no speed limit and just one rule: The biggest, fastest guy has the right-of-way. It shouldn’t be hard to find recruits for the job; a few billboards along the side of I-90 advertising the perks of the job (five on the floor connecting a turbocharged V-8 to a pair of fat tires on a wide wheel base and the authority to pull over anybody who galls you and waste as much of their time as you like) and a phone number ought to do it.

Not that I’m opposed to the idea of an autobahn, mind you. What kind of idiot was it, do you suppose, who thought it would be a workable idea to build a four-laner that was flat, wide and as straight as they could make it, then post a speed limit of sixty-five and expect people to stick to it? Guy ought to have his brains scooped out with a soup ladle and replaced with something that might be more useful to him. I’m not at all surprised that most people get on an interstate, want to wind up the big, high-performance engines of their car-toys and blast off. I drive what looks like a very pedestrian Toyota Camry and even I wanted to see if I could make its four-cylinder, sixteen-valve, fuel-injected heart beat like a scared bunny thumping a log. But I didn’t, because seventy miles an hour in the killer traffic on the interstate is fast enough to make me clutch my own fluttering chest and wish for a quiet park bench under a shady tree where I can slouch over a bag of bread crumbs and feed the pigeons all day, far from the rush of coupe-crushing tractor-trailers.

And seventy miles an hour on that breakneck byway is slow! At that speed, my fellow drivers not only made me feel like a high-collared codger out sightseeing in his Nash Rambler, they went the next step and made me feel unwanted! As each of them signaled from scarcely half a car length off my starboard stern quarter, pulled into the passing lane I would never have the nerve to risk using, and screamed past, they seemed to imply I had no business cluttering this modern traffic arterial if I wasn’t going to take full advantage of the silky-smooth surface and arrow-straight alignment. They didn’t flip me off or even so much as glare at me, mind you. I’m more than willing to admit their derision was probably all in my head, but they were clearly showing me how the road was meant to be used and that I was a piker for foresaking it.

As bad as their tailgating and drive-by signaling was in the daylight, it was twice as terrifying after the sun set. I drove in white-knuckled terror down the right lane all the way south, the slowest driver on the road (at seventy?), trying very hard to stare straight ahead and not to think at all about the cars and trucks hauling ass past me for what seemed like hours and hours and hours.

And what’s with the signage on the interstate? It was so cryptic as to be almost indecipherable! It’s not that I couldn’t read the signs, I could read them just fine, but their placement made it all but impossible for me to understand their meaning. Some signs marking the exits, for instance, would appear miles ahead of the turnouts. The road would widen into a third lane, the sign would indicate EXIT ONLY, I would signal and merge across the rapidly-spaced white dashes into the special exit lane and then drive further ... and drive, and drive and drive and oh my god drive until — What’s that! What do I spy on the distant horizon! Another sign! My exit is coming! Huzzah! But no, as I slowly closed the gap between myself and the next sign (at the snail’s pace of only seventy miles per hour, remember) and my codgery eyes could begin to make out what was written there, I could see it was nothing more than another EXIT ONLY sign, apparently erected to make sure I remembered that an actual exit lay miles beyond it, probably over the horizon. I drove on.

On one other notable occasion I merged into the exit only lane and drove past five or six EXIT ONLY signs until ZOW! The exit! Damn, that snuck up on me! But I wasn’t about to let it get away ... I firmly twisted the wheel around, tapping on the brakes to slow our incredible velocity (seventy miles per, if you’ll recall) ... turned a bit harder ... stepped a bit more firmly on the brakes ... and the thought, Damn! This seems like a dangerously tight turn for a high-speed exit! drifted up from my consciousness at nearly the same time another voice shreiked from my hindbrain, tinged with animal terror, Exit, Hell! This is a bobsled run! It was an exit, but not the high-speed exit to I-90 that I’d been looking for. They’d funneled me into an long exit-only lane, then hung a turnout to a country road halfway along it — a classic bait and switch! A fine trick to play on a guy who’s been driving for nearly two hours and only wants to be in a comfortable chair in his home and castle.

Among my super-powers is the ability to see the worst-case scenario. You may think nothing of setting a piping-hot cuppa joe on the edge of a table, but when I do that I not only see that it could burn somebody, I see, in a flurry of images that makes me wince, every possible way it could burn each person who might come into the room. The flaw to this super power is, I can’t tell which worst case, if any, is going to unfold. The more worst cases I foresee, though, the more likely I am to simply move the cup of coffee until I don’t wince quite so painfully.

Here’s another example: Sometimes I set my laptop on the arm of the recliner. Man, are there ever a flurry of worst cases when I do that. The varnished wood is slick as snot and, although the armrest is about four inches wide, the laptop is about eight when I turn it sideways, twelve if it’s turned to face me. It was such a natural perch for a laptop, though, and I got such a (false) sense of security when I sat with my hands on the keyboard, that I took the chance. Usually I cocked it at an angle until two of the little rubber feet at the corners of the laptop grabbed the armrest so I got a further sense of security (yes, false again).

I ask you, should a guy gifted with super-powers such as the one I just described be taking reckless chances like this? Of course not. But wait, it gets worse.

This morning as I sat in the recliner web surfing through the morning comic strips (there are still a few good ones out there, believe it or not) I decided I wanted to refill my coffee mug with cold water to cleanse my palate so as not to get that stale, coppery taste coffee often leaves in my mouth, and I figured that, since I’d be gone hardly a minute, I could twist my laptop around the long way and leave it on the armrest until I got back. Sure, the idea made me wince, but what could possibly go wrong in the time it took me to walk to the kitchen sink and back? Ye gods, I can be thick sometimes.

When I returned to the front room not twenty-one seconds later the cats were having a fight on the recliner, Bonkers swatting at Boo from the top of the back, Boo dancing a jitterbug on the seat, her butt bouncing just fractions of an inch from the corner of my laptop, her tail waving furiously back and forth, brushing the keyboard. I had foreseen this exact scenario the very first time I set the laptop on the arm of that chair, but did I heed its warning? Nooooooooo!

I froze in the doorway between the dining room and the living room and muttered a quick prayer to Schrodinger and Heisenberg: Kill the cats! I’ve seen them, there’s no uncertainty about their condition, but kill them anyway! There may have been alternate quantum universes where decaying isotopes struck them dead at that moment, but none of those universes were the one I was currently observing. I would have to somehow stop them myself.

When I took my first step toward the recliner, hand outstretched to grab whichever turned out to be the nearest cat, Bonkers swung around to fix his full-blown eyes on me, then bolted down the back of the chair and hid behind the Christmas tree. That confused the hell out of Boo, who had apparently been winning their fight. She spun around two or three times in the seat of the chair, maybe watching out for Bonkers to sneak up on her from another angle, maybe just trying to make me wet myself each time she spun past my laptop. Just before I got to the chair, half a second before I could scruff her, she leapt up to the empty armrest and did a perfect double-gainer from the end of it to the floor, then scampered away to the top of the basement stairs where she crouched in the dark, watching through the crack in the door for Bonkers and leaving me clutching my chest with a minor heart attack.

When I could move again, I gingerly picked up the laptop, dropped into the recliner and set the computer on my lap. If I ever do something as stupid as that, well, it’ll probably happen tomorrow.

It’s Friday! Friday! Huzzah! And it is such a big deal because just yesterday it was Thursday, which felt a little bit like my Monday because it was my first day back at work after I took my actual Monday and Wednesday off. And now it’s Friday already! It’s like having a fifteen-minutes work week. I’ve got to figure out how I can do this all the time and still make a living.

And I’m looking forward to a short week next week, too! Not as short at this week, but shorter than a full week by a day and a bit. We get off work early Monday afternoon, I guess to give employees a couple extra hours to warm up their highball-hoisting technique, and we’re off all day Tuesday too because that’s the first of January and everybody will be hung over like death. A few people will probably still be wan and pale on Wednesday but that’s more fun for the rest of us Wednesday morning in the lounge where the rest of us can tease the hungover zombies by hiding all the coffee pots.

Wowzers, did we get dumped on by Silny Sneg the snow monster today! There was nothing but a steel-gray sky over the square when I went into work this morning. Then I looked out the window after I sat down at my desk and ZOW! And I’m talking a really big dump right from the get-go. This was a curtain of snow heavy enough to blot out the buildings on the other side of the square, and it was like that through the morning, into the afternoon and on until after sundown. Even then we got flurries on and off until bedtime, but long before then I got tired of fingering open the venetian blinds and saying, “Man! Lookit the snow!” Nobody was listening to me anyway.

It was the kind of snow that was like the icing on a birthday cake, and about as slippery. My feet didn’t make a sound floating on it until I got to patches where it was thin enough for the soles of my boots to hit the pavement or ground some dirt or road salt against the ice. As hard as it was to maintain any kind of traction I still walked all the way down Main to Broom, over to the end of State Street, then worked my way back up to Avol’s Books to check the new arrivals and made it back to my cubicle in an hour. Or I might have possibly gone five minutes over, but still, that’s pretty good time, if I may say so.

Bizarre Trivia: My Darling B left her camera at Mom’s house on Tuesday. Mom called us the next morning to ask if it belonged to one of us, and said she would pop it in the mail if we needed it soon. Oh, would you? I asked, so she did, that very afternoon. And the postman dropped it in our mailbox the next day! I didn’t think the USPS could work magic of that kind any more!

Tim shoveled the driveway yesterday and was almost immediatedly afterward inaugurated into The Victims of Dastardly Snowplow Drivers.

“I started at the end of the driveway,” he said, “and worked my way up to the garage and, just as I finished, the [really gross and deeply offensive expletive deleted] snow plow came by and filled up the end of the driveway with snow! It was like the [relatively mild but still utterly disgusting expletive deleted] was waiting at the end of the road for me to finish!”

Not only that, but the plow driver managed to get close enough to the curb to knock down a fair-sized chunk of the chest-high pile of snow and ice that has built up and throw that onto Tim’s freshly-shoveled drive. It made him gripe like a well-seasoned snow-shoveling codger!

I’ve had a couple gift cards bulking out my wallet for too long, and today I finally had the time to set out in the O-Mobile to see what I could get.

First stop: JoAnn’s, not a store for me or my gift cards. My Darling B went along for the ride so she could pick up some fabric and other sewing-related odds-and-ends at JoAnn’s, right down the street from a Borders book store, the second stop. I trolled the shelves at Borders for the better part of an hour looking for just the right book before my eyes settled on a copy of The Great Bridge, a history of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough. Why this book? Funny you should ask. First of all, McCullough is an entertaining writer. He happens to be a historian, but even if you’re not interested in history I think his books would still be a lot of fun to read. Second, I’m a nerd about bridges and railroads and skyscrapers and gee-whiz engineering like that. A story about the Brooklyn Bridge would not only be epic, I could easily geek out over it for at least a week. (Maybe two. It’s a thick book.) Finally, when I was a little booger eater and asked my Dad, “What’re you doing?” he’d answer, “Standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, picking my nose!” So when I saw a book by McCullough about the Brooklyn Bridge, it was like all the planets were lined up. I had to buy it.

The Great Bridge was just eighteen dollars and my gift card was for twenty-five, so I grabbed a magazine, Classic Trains for six ninety-five, on the way to the check-out. It’s not often I get all the way out to East Towne, and no way was I going to walk out leaving seven dollars on a gift card today.

Back in the O-Mobile I phoned My Darling B to see if she was ready to leave. I had one more stop to make, this time at Half-Priced Books, but there was no sense running all the way out there and coming back if she already found everything she wanted and was cooling her heels at JoAnn’s. And she was. So I swung back to get her.

Just an observation: The weekend between Christmas and New Year’s is a baaaad weekend to go shopping, or even if you’re not going shopping it’s a very bad time to drive anywhere in the vicinity of East Towne Mall. I don’t know if you’ve ever played Sim City, or seen anybody play Sim City, a computerized game the object of which is to build roads and utilities and zone property in the most harmonious proportions that inspire larger and larger numbers of Sims to live in your city. If you don’t keep watching every corner of your city, if you take your eye off the ball for even five minutes, whole neighborhoods will fall into disrepair and hundreds of Sims will move elsewhere, but they warn you, sort of, before bad times befall your city. When traffic is bad, for instance, the streets glow red on your situation map. Today around the East Towne Mall, the streets were glowing bright red. If I’d been able to look at a situation map before going out I would’ve thought twice about it.

I picked out a lot more books at Half Price Books but we weren’t there nearly as long. The beauty of Half Price Books is that you don’t have to agonize over which book to spend twenty-five bucks on because I wasn’t looking at books that cost that much. I picked up a two-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook that I’ve wanted to read for weeks ... wait, I mean, for weeks since I saw it on sale in another store I’ve wanted to read it ... although, now that I’ve gone and split hairs, I guess I have to admit that I’ll probably spend weeks reading it, too. Each volume lists for eighteen bucks but I spend six bucks a book, leaving me more than enough to buy a copy of Patrick O’Brien’s Master and Commander, another book that’s been on my list since I saw the movie and heard that the series of books it’s based on is loved far and wide. I’ve been a big fan of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower books ever since I bought one at a garage sale on a whim, expecting nothing and ending up shocked at how much fun it was. O’Brien’s books about Jack Aubrey are sometimes compaired to Forester’s Hornblower, so I’m hoping to be pleasantly surprised again.

Half Price Books sells videos and music, too, and while I was browsing the stacks My Darling B thumbed through the music on offer and brought me the cover of Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing, a recording I’ve been looking for in CD format ever since we went to her concert several months back. That should’ve taken me just over twenty-five bucks so I headed for the checkout, but when it was all totaled up I still had four-fifty on the gift card — there must have been a sale going on. I was already in motion toward the car, though, not in the mood to go back and scour the stacks for a four-dollar book, so I pocketed the card and we headed home.

My basement lair has been getting crowded. That’s the way I like it, truth be told, but for months the back wall of the lair has been overwhelmed by a sofa that we bought while we were stationed in England. It’s really more of a love seat, but either way it was too friggen big for the lair so today I pushed my desk aside and horsed the sofa out the door, replacing it with an overstuffed wing chair that I’ll probably use the same way I used the sofa: As an ad-hoc filing cabinet.

Getting busy moving the furniture around must’ve released some kind of guy hormones because I went from that to moving a bookcase out of the nook at the bottom of the stairs, where it made more sense for the microwave to be. And I hear you ask: But Dave, wouldn’t it make the most sense to put the microwave in the kitchen? To which I would answer: Yes, if there were any room in the kitchen for a microwave, but there isn’t, especially not the microwave we own, which is big enough to park a car in. It very definitely needs the wide-open spaces of the basement, or at least as much as we can give it in the nook at the bottom of the stairs. Luckily we don’t use it much, maybe once a month, twice in a very busy month, to defrost a roast or thaw a jar of frozen broth.

And then I got the youngest O-Man to help me carry the futon frame back down to the basement so his mother could have her sewing room back. That made her so happy she pieced together a covered cat bed for Her Royal Booness.

When My Darling B’s alarm clock began to bleep this morning I became really hugely disoriented, almost as bad as yesterday morning when I woke up at six and thought I’d forgotten to set my alarm. “Well, hell, that’s going to screw up the shower order and everybody’s going to be pissed at me,” I thought, and then I heard the nickel drop and The Great Gig In The Sky reminded me it was Saturday, dummy, and I wouldn’t be going to work unless I was feeling especially dedicated. I was not.

I woke this morning on my own while it was still dark, realized this time it was still the weekend and burrowed deep into the blankets, thinking I didn’t have to get up at any particular time. I drifted in a half-awake, half-sleeping mode and was enjoying it a lot until I heard B’s alarm. When she shut it off she held it high enough that I could see the time: seven o’clock. She sighed hopelessly, the way she does on a weekday morning, and set it back down on her nightstand.

“Have you got an appointment?” I asked her drowsily.

She turned her head back to look at me over her shoulder. “We’re helping move today.”

Zow! I clean forgot about that! One of B’s coworkers was moving house and B offered our help. I knew that, right up until sometime last night when my brain apparently took a complete memory dump. Probably right around dinner time. That was pretty distracting. B wanted pizza and offered to take us all out. It was such an irresistable offer that even Tim put on some pants and we all went to La Rocca’s on Willy Street.

It’s not that Tim sits around the house in his skivvies, by the way. I’d have to ask him to knock that off if he did, or prance around in a pair of tighty whities myself if he did and wouldn’t stop. (Image stuck in your head now?) He usually wears what B refers to as “lounging pants” and the rest of the nation knows as pajama bottoms. I don’t think he’s ever gone out in public wearing pajamas, although it’s not an unusual sight at all in this town, especially in walking distance of the university. What was very unusual was that he consented to go out for dinner with us at all. Now that I think of it, this is the second time this month he’s gone out to dinner with us, which has to be a record!

La Rocca’s is a long way to go for pizza but theirs is tasty enough to be worth the drive and they serve ten-inch pizzas for seven ninety-five, cheap enough that we could each have our own personal pizza, avoiding that “half with onions, one-quarter with mushrooms” special ordering fiasco that confuses waiters and nearly always gets screwed up by the cooks. I ordered The Works, or whatever it’s called when they pile everything but the kitchen sink on the pizza. No pineapple or any of that funny stuff, just what the natural laws of gastronomy call for when putting the perfect balance of toppings on a pizza: pepperoni, onions, green peppers, mushrooms and olives. B categorically refuses to eat mushrooms and turns her nose up at olives, too, resulting in the aforementioned fractional pizzas mentioned earlier. I ate about half my pizza, which nobody else would touch (I don’t eat mushrooms on my food only because nobody else will, but I won’t say I don’t enjoy the perk), and washed it down with a bottle of Hopalicious beer from Madison’s own Ale Asylum brewery.

The other half I saved for lunch today. B ended up with a little more than half, Tim with a little less. (Guess who was sampling whose?) We didn’t eat lunch until we got back from the move-out, about two o’clock, so it was more of a dinner-lunch (Linner? Dunch?) and after humping furniture up and down the ramp of that moving van I was sooo looking forward to chowing down on it that I would have happily eaten it straight out of the fridge, but it’s so much better hot out of the oven. My Darling B bought a couple bags of kettle-cooked potato chips and a six-pack of Capital Brewery’s Amber Ale, so I was happy to sit and munch on the noshies while the pizza pie heated up under the broiler.

Tim couldn’t wait. He snatched his out and ate it lukewarm.

I polished off all the rest of my pizza even after noshing on too many potato chips. That’s entirely too much cheese for me to eat in one sitting and I paid for it later in the form of greenhouse gas emissions and a grumbly gut, but it was worth the trouble and it didn’t keep me from napping on the recliner for about an hour. B retired to the boudoir and napped even longer.

I can’t figure out how this happened: I woke up this morning with The Pina Colada Song stuck in my head this morning. Do you remember The Pina Colada Song, a cheesy personal ad set to waka-waka-boom-chukka seventies music? Did that song suck like an Eletrolux or what? It had one musical phrase repeated over and over against a beat you couldn’t dance to even if you were dorky enough to try, and its catchiest lyrics went something like this: “If you like pina coladas / and getting caught in the rain / if you’re not into yoga / if you have half a brain / if you like making love at midnight / on the dunes of the cape / I’m the lady you’ve looked for / write to me and escape.” Yes, I still remember the words. Please kill me.

Truthfully, I have to disclose that I liked the song in the first week or two of its popularity. It’s possible I may have even owned a copy of the single, but in my defense a forty-five cost four bits back then and, at those prices, I bought everything that was popular. I’m pretty sure there were a few recordings of K.C. and the Sunshine Band in my collection. My enthusiasm for The Pina Colada Song, however, flickered and died a lightning-fast death as every AM radio station within skip distance (on a good night I could pick up stations in Texas) increased the number of times they played it exponentially from week to week. Did you ever see that science film in grade school that showed one germ splitting into two, two into four, four into eight and so on until they filled the screen about ten seconds later and died in their own stink? It was like that.

I haven’t heard The Pina Colada Song in months, years, decades! How I could wake up to the jangle of an alarm clock that usually rattles my brain so badly I can’t generate a coherent thought for half an hour, and yet that song was bopping around in there from the first moment I opened my eyes? I don’t remember dreaming about it. I rarely remember my dreams unless I have the one where I’m at the top of a radio tower that falls over. The splat at the end always wakes me up. And I remember other dreams if the cat walks across my face in the middle of it. Waking up during the dream seems to be the key. It’s also unpleasant, like turning to find somebody looking over your shoulder.

But I wasn’t dreaming about crappy pop music tunes when I woke up. I wasn’t dreaming about anything. I’d been sleeping pretty poorly, just cat napping on and off all night, really, and there was nothing in my head, nothing at all, when the alarm clock started bleeping. I suppose My Darling B might have been cooing it into my ear just before that as a sort of cruel joke, but I don’t think so. She was sawing logs pretty musically most of the night, but it didn’t sound like The Pina Colada Song.

By the way, did you know it wasn’t called The Pina Colada Song at first? According to Wikipedia (and where would modern thought be without a repository of knowledge as authoritative as Wikipedia?) the song was called Escape, but the title was lost in the top forty chart because it was too obscure. Everybody remembered “Do you like pina coladas?” from the beginning of the refrain and not “write to me and escape,” from the very end of it, probably because he changed it to “where we’ll plan our escape” the second time around, then “come with me and escape” the last time. So the mucky-mucks at the record label changed the title to Escape (The Pina Colada Song). Apparently singer-songwriter (and, might as well say it, one-hit wonder) Rupert Holmes was against the change (again, according to Wikipedia) because it was supposed to be about more than a frou-frou cocktail that he reportedly didn’t even like but, once again, capitalism triumphed over, and utterly crushed, artistic integrity.

But back to my very tragic story: There I was, standing in the shower with this crappy pop tune echoing in my phonological loop, so caught up in trying to figure out how it got there that I didn’t even try to put a stop to it. And you know what? When I was done with my shower and had listened to the whole miserable song two or three times, as clearly as if my dental fillings were receiving a signal from a five-thousand-watt hayseed radio station where the disc jockey set the needle in the groove of a well-worn forty-five, then started necking with his girlfriend and forgot all about what he was hired to do, the whole horrible experience was over. By the time I finished my breakfast I’d completely forgotten about it. My brain was firing on all cylinders by then and I’d taken up an entirely different train of thought altogether.

Unfortunately I’d made a note to myself (it said, simply, “pina colada song”) so I could write this drivel later on in the day. The song played in my head until bedtime.

 
More drivel! Onward to January 08   |    All of 2007!   |    I missed something! Back to November 07

Every gosh-darned word © 2007 Dave Okonski