this is drivel

It probably comes as no surprise to you that we toasted New Year’s in the living room of Our Humble O-Bode. I sat in the middle of the sofa with a big bowl of popcorn in my lap, My Darling B on my left and Tim on my right, tuning in to Dick Clark on Times Square about ten minutes before the ball dropped. Up until then we were watching the best of Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live and, when we ran out of that, pulling stand-up off You Tube of comedians like Brian Regan and Don White. Do we know how to party or what?

We had a marvelous New Year’s Eve dinner thanks to the extraordinary culinary efforts of My Darling B and Her Amazing (Galley) Kitchen. The roast ham came from Jordandal Farm (might as well put in a plug for the Johnson family) and was so deliciously juicy that B decided to make a sauce out of the drippings. Fantastic! I haven’t been a gravy man until B made me see the light. She served up the ham roast with homemade biscuits topped with garlic butter and fresh-frozen corn off the cob. The best five-dollar bottle of Gran Spumante from the corner liquor store gave us a little something to toast with and complimented the meal well, as if I knew what kind of wine would compliment pork or even what that meant.

Then we settled down to watch videos and while away the time until midnight. B sewed a kitty tent for Boo. I finished a crossword. I told you we knew how to party! Those guys tearing the tin off the ceilings in the trendy bars downtown don’t have a thing on us! Which reminds me: Sean called us at about half-past eleven from a crowded and very loud bar somewhere in downtown Denver, and again a little more than a half-hour later from an even louder bar. I imagine he’s nursing a big head this morning.

(The key to recovery, Sean, is to drink lots of water. Sometimes a cool compress helps. Asprin doesn’t do squat. I’ve never had any success with Tylenol or Advil, either. Just drink water. You’ll get really dizzy at first, but you can beat that by finding something to keep you busy, anything at all. Sweep the floor. Change the sheets. Pick lint out of your sock drawer. And keep drinking water until you go to bed tonight.)

One of my dirty little secrets, revealed to you at no extra charge this morning, is that I’m one of the people who thinks the coffee at Starbuck’s is crap. I’ve been keeping this a secret for so long because I liked the people at work who drank Starbuck’s coffee and I wanted to fit in, but I had a cup of the worst coffee ever yesterday morning, even taking into consideration the bilge water that comes from the coffee machine in the break room, and I’ve decided I can’t pretend any longer. There’s no way I’m ever drinking another cup of Starbuck’s coffee no matter how much I need a wake-up.

And I needed it pretty badly yesterday morning. After spending all day Sunday lifing furniture and boxes and hauling it in and out of a moving van, every single muscle in my body was tight as a great big tight thing and, even though I slept the sleep of the dead just the night before, I was still a little groggy because I didn’t make the usual pot of coffee after I got out of bed in the morning. I had to go to work and My Darling B didn’t, so I was up at five-thirty, as usual, but because she wouldn’t be out of bed for hours I certainly couldn’t see brewing a whole pot of coffee for one cup, so I figured I’d grab some java when I got into town.

Why go for coffee at Starbucks if nobody else from work was going? It’s simple, really: A coworker gave me a gift card. I feel just a little bad talking smack about anything I got as a present, but it’s not like he made the coffee and Starbucks coffee would still stink on ice whether or not it came as a gift, so I figure it’s okay to bash it so long as I acknowledge it was a very thoughtful present even while I’m pointing out what an awfully bad product it is.

And this was a frightfully bad cup of coffee. I’ve had a cup or two at Starbucks before that was passable as coffee, but this last one was simply wretched. It had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, not even as a beverage to quench my thirst; I ran to the bubbler in the hall to rinse the taste of it out of my mouth. The flavor was burned to the point that it tasted like ashes strained through a sticky sock. I added the sticky sock just to make sure you realized how truly repulsive it was. I’ve never sucked on a sock that’s been on anybody’s foot all day, but after drinking that coffee I’ve got a reasonable facsimile of a guess what it might taste like.

It just so happened that I also got a gift card for another coffee store called Barrique’s. I don’t know if this is a national chain or not. It doesn’t appear to be; googling the name turns up only a few stores here in the Madison area. There’s one on the corner of Washington and Fairchild, just a block from where I work, so I swung by on the way back to my cubicle after my lunch-hour walkabout. It might seem a little masochistic of me to order out for coffee twice in one day given the experience I had just that morning at the Starbuck’s across the square, but I figured that, if it sucked, I could roll up the day and call it a loss, but if it was okay or even good it’d be a counterbalance to the nasty cuppa I had before.

It turned out that Barrique’s coffee tasted like an average cuppa joe I’d get at almost any fair-to-middlin restaurant anywhere in the city, but they put crack in it. Wait, not crack. Everything I’ve been given to understand would indicate that crack makes you feel really good. What I felt after downing a cup of Barrique’s coffee was a high-speed case of turbocharged jitters, and not good ones. It was almost like having a panic attack, but without the abject dispair, and there must have been a couple thousand milligrams of caffeine in the cup I drank because it went on for hours. I don’t know that all the coffee they serve is like that, but I wouldn’t chance it again unless I needed to walk to Minneapolis in an hour.

I was kidding about walking to Minneapolis, I don’t think it would take as long as an hour if I drank another cup of Barrique’s rocket fuel. When I got home that afternoon I was still on the tail-end of my jitter jag, so I changed into work clothes, hauled the roof rake out of the garage and dragged about a ton of snow off the roof of my house, an hour spent with my arms raised over my head. Just what the doctor ordered for stiff, achy muscles.

Damn! I lost track of time tonight puttering around in the Wisconsin Historical Society’s web pages. I retired to my basement lair at about seven-thirty and didn’t come out of my self-induced fog until half past nine! Totally zoned out for two hours! Piffft! All I figured on doing was printing a couple articles and filing them away! My search for the articles turned up a couple names I hadn’t found before, so I ran a search on them, which led me to a hint that I might be able to find more information in the National Register of Historic Places ... just a hint, don’t go looking in the National Register for anything. It’s one of the worst web sites I’ve been to in weeks. I bashed my brains against their 1980’s-era GUI for at least a half-hour and got exactly nowhere. It was like asking questions of a tired government employee who had less than a month until retirement and no interested at all in doing anything for anybody, least of all some schmuck asking about an obscure house in Madison, Wisconsin.

So I came out of my fog, blinked at the clock and the first thought after Holy Crap! How’d it get to be so late? was that I had only a very short time before hitting the hay and I had yet to write a word of drivel. And I know you came here for drivel, because that’s the name of the web page and that’s what I do here. Surely you would expect nothing less? (This is where the “Don’t call me Shirley” punchline goes.)

There’s just one thing to do when waking up from a fog with a deadline to beat: Run up to the kitchen and make tea. Ordinarily I’d brew a pot of coffee, but it was too late for coffee, and besides, I’ve exceeded my daily java limit. My heart lets me know when I get there by playing a Gene Krupa drum solo and I’d heard it shortly after a visit to Michelangelo’s coffee shop this afternoon for a take-away cup of dark-roasted Guatamalan. It’s pretty exciting to have Gene Krupa beating on your chest, I can tell you, but I knew if I hoped to get any more than fifteen minutes of sleep before daybreak I would have to put the Krupa recordings away for the day. Maybe in the morning. Tonight, a cup of hot cinnamon tea would have to do.

The trick to making tea or coffee, though, would be that first I would have to find a mug. When I’m trying to put the mugs away it seems as though we have enough to serve tea to every man, woman and child in Beijing, China, but when I want a cup of tea, there are no mugs to be found. How’s that work? I’d guess the same insideous forces that break up pairs of socks is at work here, but I know nothing of quantum physics, and something like this is squarely in the realm of undead cats in boxes and bodies existing simultaneously in two places. Maybe.

If there are no mugs put away where they’re supposed to be, the next best place to look for them is in the top rack of the dish washer. Check the plates for dried-on leftovers, first; if the plates are clean, then so are the mugs. Otherwise, all bets are off. With a fresh mug in hand and a pot of water on the boil I made a quick detour to the living room to say good-night to My Darling B, who was not in her accustomed place, the end of the sofa where she could easily plug her laptop into the extension cord. I found her propped in bed with the newspaper, poor tired thing! There just aren’t enough hours in the day and the DMV eats up most of hers. I kissed her on the forehead after wishing her sweet dreams, because she would surely be fast asleep by the time I finished driveling, then trotted back to the kitchen to fix up my cuppa tea.

I had several ideas jotted down for today’s drivel. What would it be? The butter? The hair? Frozen rubber lips? I took a tentative sip of my piping hot beverage, put the mug to one side, set my fingertips on the key caps and pondered ...

... ahh, just one more Gene Krupa recording couldn’t hurt.

Well, then, now that I’ve warmed up and the topics are close at hand:

I don’t know how I ever convinced My Darling B to leave the butter out on the countertop. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was simply an idea whose time had come. She was dead set against it for going on nineteen years and then, overnight, WHAM! She gets this little piece of crockery called a butter keeper from a kitchen gadget store, fills it with butter and a quarter-inch of magic water and leaves it on the countertop for me. Up until then she absolutely, positively wouldn’t allow butter out of the fridge for longer than it took to eat supper.

The one and only reason I have for keeping a stick of butter on the countertop, of course, is so it’s soft enough to spread on my sandwiches and morning toast, and although she made the complaint about dairy going off when it went without refrigeration I can’t help wondering how she factored in my weird need to butter my sandwich bread. Apparently they don’t do that in Ohio, or at least not in the Dayton area. Buttering my toast seemed to be okay with her, but slapping a pad of butter on a sandwich slice got me some twisted sideways glances.

I grew up in a house where a tray with salt, pepper, a stick of butter and a shot glass filled with tooth picks always sat at the end of the kitchen table. Keeping the butter out guaranteed not only that it was soft enough to spread on sliced bread, it also meant in the summer it would dissolve into a greasy pool we could have dabbed on anything we wished with a brush. I don’t remember trying to do that, but the point is I could’ve.

On a visit to the ancestral manse earlier this summer I was chatting with Mom in the kitchen with My Darling B at my side and, during a lull in the conversation, I nudged B in the ribs and pointed at the covered butter dish on the table, waggling my eyebrows when I knew she realized what I was going on about. Mom wanted to know what the waggling was about so I told her. Shortly after that, the butter keeper appeared.

At first I thought maybe she was trying to kill me. She believed, after all, that rancid butter would poison us all. Was she hoping for an illustrative episode of stomach cramps? If so, she’s been disappointed. No painful cramping has yet followed the butter’s move to the countertop. The only trouble with keeping butter this way is inherent in the design of the butter keeper itself. The butter’s packed into a small ceramic bell that’s kept inverted in a protective jar. The trouble is that only Tim seems to have the knack for loading it with butter. Whenever B or I try to do it, the ball of butter falls out when we lift the bell. If we don’t learn how to do refill it fairly soon, Tim will have to come visit us at least once every week to reload the butter keeper.

There’s hair on the bathroom ceiling, and not just one or two strands that might have ridden up there on a freak updraft. Dozens. Nay, hundreds. Last time I looked there was enough hair up there to hook a rug. The ceiling looks like a floor.

Last weekend I wiped as many of them off as I could reach with my wash cloth, but I don’t get around to that more than once every Saturday or Sunday because during the week I’m too tired to notice anything outside the immediate quarter-inch bubble wrapped skin-tight around my body. Shower on? Check. Is the water hot? Check. Do I have bar soap in hand? Check. Looking overhead for errant hairs is not on the checklist, so by Saturday morning I get quite a fright when I idly glance around while soaking under an extended-length hot shower and OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WHAT ARE THOSE? CENTIPEDES? CATERPILLARS? A BRIGADE OF DADDY LONG LEGS ON PARADE? Oh. It’s just hair.

How in hell does hair get on the ceiling? It’s not that I think it’s impossible, but it does seem just a tad improbable that such a large amount should defy gravity to find a resting place far away from their much lazier cousins on the floor. It ocurred to me just now that it might possibly be riding up there on a freak current of air after all. Two other O-Folks dry their hair with a sort of hand-held jet engine kept in the closet and unleashed almost every morning. I myself can’t stand blow-driers because they make my hair go all Dagwood no matter how much conditioner and/or gel I use, so I avoid them at all costs. That’s just my way of saying It ain’t my hair on the ceiling, kiddo!

And finally, rubber frozen lips. (Oh, if only she’d let me.) (RIMSHOT!)

But seriously, folks: When temps get into the low twenties my lips lose their ability to make intelligent sounds. After scarcely five minutes in the open, speech becomes less like communication and more like a dozen or so kids letting the air out of party balloons. Ps become Ffffs, Bs become a kind of half-hearted Bronx cheer, Ms become vowels. I don’t dare speak more than two or three words to the cashier (“yes” and “thanks” seem to come out unmangled) if I duck into a store to buy something for fear of being arrested for lewdness.

I must have toast for breakfast in the morning. The rest of the day won’t go right if I don’t. A coffee drinker would understand. So would a crackhead, for that matter. I would definitely break into your house and steal your television set to pay for a loaf of bread. Or just steal your bread, if you buy whole wheat or rye. Keep your doors locked at night.

When I went to the kitchen to make my breakfast this morning, I found out we were out of sliced bread. There was nothing but half a stale loaf of sourdough we bought about a week ago, probably for a salad night but I couldn’t remember so I didn’t know how old it was. I tromped down the stairs to look for another loaf in the freezer but wasn’t too hopeful after I’d seen Tim munching on the butt of the sourdough loaf last night as his before-bedtime snack. (He’s a teenaged boy. Nuff said.) If we’d had a back-up loaf in the freezer he would have fetched it up rather than gnaw on a stale loaf. And sure enough, I found no frozen bread on stand-by in the basement deep freeze.

Out of options, I grabbed the loaf of sourdough, slapped it on a cutting board and pulled a whacking huge bread knife from the block and began to saw away at it, eventually removing three fairly straight, more-or-less evenly cut slices of bread that I could manage to fit in the toaster slots. Three, because I could saw only smallish slices from the oddly-shaped loaf. I need my carbs. As there were only two slots in the toaster, though, they had to take turns. The third one was getting a nice tan while I was buttering the first two. Then, with a plate in one hand heaped with toasted slices dripping in butter and a hot mug of java in the other hand, I could descend into my basement lair to read the funnies feeling that all was right with the world.

At a downtown corner on the commute to work we came to three police officers stepping off the curb into Wilson street. All the traffic promptly stopped for them. It was awesome. This never happens in Madison. All the downtown motorists I’ve seen, either as a driver behind the wheel or a pedestrian waiting on the curb, would speed past silver-haired old ladies standing by their walkers in all kinds of weather. ‘Screw her! I’ve got to get to work!’ But this morning they come to a screeching halt for three guys in uniform with guns strapped to their hips. I never thought I’d see it.

I’ve read a little more than half of Master and Commander and I have to say I’m not all that hot to read the rest of it. What a huge disappointment. All the talk I’ve heard about Patrick O’Brian’s books was glowing; everyone said these stories were every bit as good as Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series. Pfeh. I don’t see it. O’Brian’s style is nowhere near as polished as Forester’s, and even if I didn’t have Forester to compare O’Brian to, O’Brian’s plotting drags, the characters are flat and the dialogue is so disjointed I hardly know who’s speaking half the time.

Well, I guess that settled it. Time to move on to another book.

Saturday! And you know what that means: Not sleeping in late, sadly, no. This was the first Saturday that the farmer’s market moved to their winter quarters at the senior center on Mifflin Street. It’s a much smaller venue than the Monona Terrace, where they’d been temporarily holed up for some reason, but the senior center has a kitchen, which meant they’d be serving breakfast again! We got up plenty early to make sure we didn’t miss out. By “plenty early,” I mean eight o’clock. No sense going overboard.

No sense getting there too early, either. I think the market opened at eight, and I know that they didn’t begin to serve breakfast until eight-thirty, so it’s not like we had to spring out of bed at an hour that would make us both ubergrumpy. Eight worked out just fine. We got there shortly after eight-thirty by skipping the shower, just threw on some clothes, brushed our teeth and BAM! Out the door. It sounds gross but I don’t think anybody noticed.

This morning they were serving eggs, biscuits & gravy, and a spinach salad with raspberry dressing, all very yummy, although I wasn’t quite ready for the idea of spinach for breakfast. It tasted just fine but it seemed more than a little odd with eggs. I know, I know, it’s just one of those weird hang-ups I’ve got to get over. I gobbled up everything else, though. My Darling B put me to shame by cleaning her plate before I was done with my eggs, and started shopping while I finished up, then relaxed with my morning cup of java.

Did I mention we’ve got ice dams? Do you even know what ice dams are? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. I never bothered myself with them much before this winter, but in the past week or so a couple of eye-poppingly big ice dams grew up along the middle of our roof, front and back, and I’ve been trying to find out more about them because a lot of people I’ve spoken to say water’s leaking through their roofs and into their houses through the ceiling on account of the ice dams building up along their gutters and eaves. Oh, great, another home-owning perk.

One of the things everybody seems to agree on is that, to keep ice dams from building up, you’re supposed to shovel the snow off your roof. That’s right, they say you’re supposed to climb up a ladder to the edge of your roof, where there’s a mound of ice growing, remember? If you can find a way to clamber over that dripping-wet lip of ice with a shovel, then you’ve got find a way to walk up and down a steeply-pitched roof covered in eight to ten inches of crusty, frozen snow. I’m pretty sure I can think of much easier, certainly much warmer, ways to break every bone in my body.

I bought a roof rake from some guy in Michigan. He didn’t laugh at me the way every hardware store owner in town did. He didn’t say, “Check back next week Tuesday, maybe I’ll have one or two then,” then turn his back with an evil cackle. No, the guy in Michigan was packing it in the box while he chatted me up and charged my card. It was on my porch waiting for me when I came home two nights later. He overcharged me for the shipping but fixed it up right away. Love the guy, love his roof rake. I’d marry him, but I can’t because it’s been constitutionally prohibited in this state. We’d have to go all the way to New Hampshire, partly because it’s legal there and partly because My Darling B would probably want to stick a steak knife in my heart if I ran off with the roof rake guy. She might try to chase me all the way to New Hampshire, but I think I can outrun her.

Even though the rake was great for getting all the snow off my roof without risking a painful pratfall, the ice dams were already there. You’re supposed to rake the snow off before the melt-off starts to build up along the eaves, y’see. And although I spent several hours raking snow off my roof with my new home maintenance toy, I couldn’t come up with the chutzpah to set up a ladder and chop away the ice with a hatchet in the below-freezing temps we’d been experiencing the past two weeks. My chutzpah works best in warmer weather.

Speaking of which, today, finally, the temps soared into the relatively balmy mid-thirties. I dragged a ladder and my newly-warmed chutzpah out to the front of the house, set the ladder against the eaves, climbed it and started hacking away. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Also a lot wetter. Every whack sent a shower of ice chips and melted water flying. About twenty minutes of hatcheting away at the ice removed most of the really thick stuff on the front of the house and drenched me from hat to waist, but, since I was already wet and it wasn’t too cold, I moved around to the back.

The eaves at back of the house are three, maybe five feet higher off the ground than the eaves at the front. This calls for an extension ladder, the kind that looks like two ladders, one riding piggy back on the other. I had to run it up to about half again its unextended height before I could safely prop it against the gutter and climb up to have a look around. The ice was much thicker in back and not nearly as rotten. Chopping at that stuff with a hatchet would take all day and, more significantly, I’d end up one tremendously sore daddy, but I had a Plan B: I fetched the ice melt from the garage and peppered the ice dam with it. I’ll bet you a shiny new penny that it’ll be a lot easier to chip away at it by tomorrow noon.

Feeling immensely pleased with my ingenuity I stepped down off the extension ladder, set the ice melt to one side, pushed the extension up until I saw that the toggles holding the ladder up had closed so it would slide shut, and I let it go. As soon as the top of the ladder was no longer high enough to reach to the eaves the whole thing toppled into the house, slamming into the kitchen window. I winced as hard as I could. That’s the only thing that can keep a window from shattering ... in my dreams!

Actually, it didn’t shatter in the real world, either, just tore a gaping hole in the screen. I don’t know how I got so lucky. Even luckier, nobody was in the kitchen when it happened. I waited for a face to appear at the window as I untangled the end of the ladder from the shredded screen, but apparently nobody was anywhere near the kitchen. They didn’t even hear the ladder crash into the window. I tiptoed quickly away, put up the ladder and went inside to fade into my easy chair with the newspaper.

Minutes later, My Darling B came around the corner and went into the kitchen to check on the cake she was baking, and what do you suppose was the very first thing she saw? That’s right, the hole in the screen. She even shouted, “Hey! How’d that big hole get in the screen?” as loudly as she could, twice, so I couldn’t pretend not to hear. And not only didn’t I get away with it, I had to submit to admitting my humiliating ineptness again when Tim went into the kitchen for a glass of water and the very first thing he noticed was the hole in the screen. I should’ve taken that furshlugginer screen off before I came in.

No worries any more about the ice dams on the roofs. The temps never dipped below thirty-eight all night long, and by noon today they were up above forty-five, but it didn’t take that long for them to melt away. They were gone when I traipsed down to the end of the driveway to fetch the paper at eight this morning.

Speaking of which, tell me how this makes sense: Every day since we first subscribed to The New York Times, they’ve delivered it to our door double-bagged (well, technically the delivery guy flips it into our driveway from the window of his speeding car), a waste of plastic most of the time but worth the waste a thousand times over when it rains. I’ve never had to mess with a wet copy of the Times ... until this morning.

This morning it was foggy and raining and the snow was melting so fast it ran down the driveway in coursing waves high enough to surf on, and yet today was the day the paper delivery guy decided to go green and deliver it in a single bag. What on earth would make him decide to do that? He didn’t even tie the opening off. Most of the first section was soaked all the way through. The next three or four sections were in various states of spotted sogginess. And it couldn’t have been the sports section that got soaked, no, it had to be three of the sections I wanted most to read. Karma’ll get that guy.

It wasn’t just the weather that was foggy today. I walked around all morning and even part of the afternoon in a fog after I woke up last night and couldn’t get back to sleep. Sometimes I can just roll over and start snoozing right away, but sometimes it takes hours. I don’t know why. I must be wired wrong.

I took My Darling B to see Juno, the first time we’ve been out to the movies since, I believe, we saw Waitress early this summer. I paid for the tickets and she paid for the popcorn and soda, so I got off easy, although if she hadn’t gone for the super combo (large bucket of popcorn, one large drink) she might have got off paying less than me, if only by the narrowest margin. I’m not one-hundred percent sure on that, though. The large bucket of popcorn, by the way, is more popcorn than two people should eat in a whole day, much less during a two-hour movie. The large soda was outrageously, comically large. I could’ve put out the Chicago fire with that much juice.

But back to the movie: My short review would be, go see it. It’s a lot of fun. It’s got full, funny characters, an interesting story for them to run around in, and babies. You can’t go wrong with babies. They make B go all weepy and I have to admit I got a little choked up myself. So go, if you can possibly afford the tickets (if you don’t get the popcorn, it’s like half-price!).

I have no idea who Ellen Page, the young woman playing Juno, is. I’ve never seen her before. I thought at first she was a little too sassy and smart for a sixteen-year-old, but quickly changed my mind and ended up liking her a lot. Ditto for her costars. They all portrayed believable high-schoolers, even though they were just a little too quippy from time to time. And I like Allison Janney in everything I’ve seen her in; she played Juno’s mom here. J.K. Simmons played Juno’s dad. I know I’ve seen him before in something other than the latest Spider-Man movies, but I can’t remember what. The opening cameo from Rainn Wilson (Dwight from The Office) was nifty. And Jennifer Garner was a lot better than I thought she would be. I can only remember her from Daredevil, so I guess she could conceivably be better than that performance, as she turned out to be here.

The only other movie I’ve seen this weekend was Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, a beautifully done version of a so-so book. It’s an older movie, released in 2003, and I picked it up on a whim on the way home from work Friday night to get the stale taste of the book out of my head before moving on to another, but even if you’ve seen it already, as I have, it’s well worth another look. Both the movie and the book are about the friendship that grows up between Jack Aubry, a naval officer commanding HMS Surprise during the 1800’s, and Stephen Maturin, a surgeon who goes to sea with Aubrey. They’re played with wonderful chemistry by Russel Crowe and Paul Bettany, gifted actors both.

I drove My Darling B to her place of employment this morning, not at all a pleasant experience except, of course, for the presence of My Darling B in the car. She works on the west side of town; we live on the extreme east side and we have to head north around Lake Monona to drop Tim off at school, so I keep going and drive into town from the northern end of the isthmus, all the way down Willy street and across town on University Drive.

On a typical day we usually leave early enough that the drive down Willy street isn’t much of a problem. Traffic is never very heavy until after seven-thirty. We might have the displeasure to cross paths with a weaver or two and maybe even have to deal with the occasional Truly Crazy Driver but, really, I can’t complain about that part of the commute. Then at about seven-thirty I park the car on Carroll street, get out and kiss My Darling B good-bye, and she goes on to Hill Farms.

This morning, though, I needed the car to get to a dental appointment, so I drove her all the way to Hill Farms and went back on my own, and that means I had to join the crush of traffic on University Avenue just as the rush hour became infuriatingly impossible to navigate. If it seems like a contradiction in terms to say that I somehow successfully navigated an artery of traffic that is impossible to navigate, I can only answer that I am just as mystified as you are. If you saw the crushingly huge number of vehicles rushing bumper-to-bumper down University at fifty miles per hour in morning darkness, weaving back and forth, dashing forward into gaps hardly big enough to admit them, slamming on their brakes to narrowly avoid collision, you’d agree that it’s impossible they could get away with razzing at Death they way they do. That stretch of road ought, by all rights, to be a bloodied, charnal wasteland that nobody could ever survive. And yet I did it this morning.

It’s not because nobody tried to kill me, either. No less than one of Madison Metro’s bus drivers did his worst, and he had the weather on his side. As I drove away from the Hill Farms building and started down Segoe Road the heavens parted and what the weathermen would technically characterize as a deluge of biblical proportions came pouring down all across Madison, turning roadways into rivers and rendering the atmosphere practically opaque, although many drivers continued to sail right on through it. I’m a big chicken, so I pulled over to wait a minute for it to let up.

It took more like three or four minutes for the storm to clear up even a little bit. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time but I remember last year’s flash floods, triggered by a passing heavy weather cell that dumped just enough rain to choke downtown Madison’s sewer system and back water up into basements throughout the Regent street neighborhood, so I sat and waited a minute or two longer to see if the manhole covers would all pop off. When they didn’t, I guessed it might be safe enough to go on. I did.

The roads weren’t so bad, and the heavy rain at least cleared away the dense fog that’s been eating up motorists like cheap candy these past few days. There was just one tricky spot on Johnson street where it dips down to cross Park street. A pool of water fifty yards or so across was sloshing back and forth against the right-hand curb as cars hydroplaned across it. I merged into the center lane to avoid the deepest part of it and slowed down to about twenty miles per, feeling pretty smug about avoiding it until a bus in the right lane passed at twice my speed, sending a tsunami of mud surging up from the deep water over my fenders, hood and windshield, overwhelming my wipers. I couldn’t see a damned thing! And I couldn’t stop because I knew there was a car right behind me. All I could do was try to keep it going in a straight line and hope the engine didn’t stall. And lucky me, it didn’t.

The rest of the drive to work was a piece of cake after that. Corkscrewing my way up the tight turns of the company parking ramp has never felt so effortless.

As I was shaking the rain off my coat before hanging it on the door of my cubicle, planning the things I had to do before my dental appointment, it occurred to me that I’d never gotten the “two-minute warning” phone call the night before from the phone robot at the dentist’s office. Maybe it was just a glitch in their software, maybe the roof was leaking into their computer, but I figured I’d better give them a call just to confirm my appointment, not that I doubted for a minute that I had the right date and time.

What I didn’t have, however, was my wallet. I run into this problem every Monday. When we go to the farmer’s market on Saturday morning I take my wallet and my car keys out of my overcoat and stick them into whatever jacket I’m going to wear for the weekend. Nine times out of ten I forget to move my wallet back to my overcoat on Monday morning. Even though there’s rarely much money in my wallet and I don’t go anywhere I’d need to show my ID it’s still somehow managed to be damned inconvenient every single time. This morning, for instance, because my dentist’s phone number was on a card in my wallet. “Well, look him up in the phone book, dummy,” I hear you say, and that’d be a great idea if I could remember the name of the dental clinic right off the top of my head, which I can’t. All I knew was that it was on Cottage Grove Road. And just how many different dental clinics could there be on Cottage Grove Road? About a dozen, it turned out. I called three of them blind before I remembered how I found it in the first place: I picked them at random from a list My Darling B e-mailed me when we went on her health insurance. I still had it, thank dog. After just one phone call everything would fall into place and the hellish drive through the gauntlet of traffic during The Great Flood of ‘08 would pay off.

“Hi, I didn’t get a confirmation call about my appointment for a cleaning and I just wanted to make sure we’re still on for this morning,” I said.

“Your appointment’s not until Friday,” the receptionist told me. It was awfully nice of her to leave off the “dummy” at the end, even though I could still almost hear her say it anyway.

I am so stupid. Man, am I stupid. Here’s how stupid I am: I forgot my wallet and my lunch at home yesterday, so around about noon I walked down to the teller line and got twenty bucks out of our checking account to get a sandwich at a shop down the street. “It cost twenty bucks?” My Darling B asked me, when I told her later. Yeah, but they’re really good sandwiches. No. I mean, yes, they are, but I got twenty bucks because I would’ve felt stupid filling out a withdrawal slip for five bucks. But I felt stupid anyway, and it’s not like they would know or care why I was withdrawing the money. All I can say is it seemed to make sense at the time, even if it doesn’t in hindsight.

But back to the stupid: I took out twenty bucks and went to the shop, bought my five-dollar sandwich and put the change in the hip pocket of the pants that are, today, hanging over the back of the rocking chair in my bedroom, which is four or five miles as the crow flies, and that would be across Lake Monona. Not very easy for me to get at even if I could swim. What’s more, my wallet’s still in the pocket of the fatigue jacket hanging in the front closet, too. So I have no money on me today. Again.

I somehow remembered to bring my lunch, though, which is sort of what reminded me about the money and the wallet. I brought a bowl of soup B made last weekend and I got to thinking I could really go for some saltines to eat with it. I figured I should be able to get a packet at the market for maybe a buck or two, a thought that was immediately followed by, D’oh! That’ll be pretty hard to do with the seventy-five cents I might be able to scrounge from the bottom of the tray of my desk drawer!

How did I forget to put my money in my wallet and my wallet in my overcoat? The first thing I do after coming through the door at night is hang my overcoat right next to my fatigue jacket. I should’ve thought of it right then, but I was thinking of beer, or that I needed to pee, or something distracting enough to focus my mind elsewhere, not that it made me any less stupid to be distracted. It made me more stupid, really.

And then I was driveling about it after dinner and I still didn’t remember to move it when I remember it. As soon as typed the first few words and the memory came back to me I should’ve stopped, marched straight up the stairs and taken care of it then. The internet probably distracted me that time. Or maybe something shiny and jiggly. Maybe even something shiny and jiggly on the internet. I’ve heard there’s a lot of that out there.

I have about a dozen books checked out of the library, half of which I’ve barely glanced at, and what do I pick up and start reading? Nick Hornby’s Slam, a book My Darling B checked out and left on the coffee table without reading herself. She’s into another book, although how she could check out a Nick Hornby book and leave it on the coffee table, unread, it is beyond me. “Any good?” I asked her as I idly thumbed through the pages, pretending casual interest when what I really wanted to do was scurry off to a quiet corner and devour the thing whole.

“I don’t know,” she answered. She hadn’t read a single page. That’s fair game, if you ask me. There are a few rules around here about reading other people’s books, but if other people are not actually reading their books, you can make it your own. I flipped it open to the first page and began to read, with a look on my face not of intent but of passing interest, as if I might put the book down at any moment and walk away to do something much more important. According to the reading other people’s books rule it was prudent to project an appearance of merely browsing through the first chapter.

The trouble with browsing through the first chapter of a Nick Hornby book is that after just a few paragraphs you go from browsing to reading intently, even if you’re not a serious fan of his writing. It’s like he’s sitting across the table from you at a tavern, and you’ve just bought him a pint of something very rich and dark from New Glarus Brewery or maybe Ale Asylum, something that you’ve got to drink slowly so, because he’s got the time, he starts telling you about the latest ideas that have been knocking around in his head, and before you know it an hour has gone by and he’s spun a story that you don’t want to interrupt but, unfortunately, it’s time to get another round. And you pray you can get to the bar and back fast enough to keep him so lubricated he’ll go on.

Slam was categorized in our local library as a book for young adults, but I wouldn’t pass it up if I were you and you were a Nick Hornby fan, which I am. I haven’t been able to stop reading the thing today, honestly. I’ve written this drivel in two- to five-minute spurts between reading chapters of the book, and there’s no way I’ll be able to go to sleep tonight until I finish it. Lucky for me I’ve got less than a third to go.

I have finally clipped my beard back to the point where I look just slightly less like a drunken reprobate. When I first began to grow out my beard I had been trimming it back to keep it close to my chin, and I shaved it partway up my neck very tidily, but I really, really wanted to let it grow out a bit after I saw a guy with a pretty cool-looking Santa beard walking along the square a couple weeks ago. It was big and bushy and white, truly an eye-catching beard. I’ve wanted one like that for a long time. I figured, It’s winter, as good a time as any to give it a try, so I stopped trimming mine altogether to see how it would look if I gave it a chance to grow out. I knew it wasn’t going to be white, but maybe, just maybe it would get that kitchen-broom look I was hoping for.

Well, I got an eye-catching beard, all right. It looked like something you’d see on a guy in a mug shot. Trouble with my beard is, the stuff on my chops and chin grows more or less straight until it’s a little more than an inch and a half long, then gets curly without getting exactly bushy. Or it does get bushy, but it doesn’t have a lot of backfill. You see what I’m getting at? It sticks out crazily all over, but there never seems to be a lot to it. And the hair under my chin grows in some kind of whacked-out corkscrew that tucks the point of my beard in close to my chin if I keep it trimmed, but if I let it go it eventually twists away from the right side of my neck and chops (your left, if you’re looking at me) and no amount of conditioner will tame it.

I let it go for as long as I thought I could possibly get away with before the police picked me up for questioning. Then, last Monday morning after my shower, I caught a look at myself in the mirror as I was toweling off and thought, If I get myself a coffee on the way back from my noon walk, and I stop at the corner on the square to wait for the light to cross, somebody’s going to drop some spare change in my cup. And as soon as I was done drying off I spread the towel across the sink, got the barber’s scissors from the medicine chest and lopped off enough hair to stuff a mattress.

When I let it go too long, though, one clip is only the start. I can’t shape it right the first time when it gets all crazy from being long for a while, so I had to do it again last night, this morning, and again tonight. I think I might have finally begun to come close to restoring its former neat and tidy appearance. The police cruisers didn’t slow down when they passed me on the street today, anyway.

I brought my wallet and my lunch to work today, so no gripes about leaving either. Both the O-Folk asked me as I headed out the door. There’s no way I could have forgotten, but I hadn’t. I tucked the wallet into my overcoat last night and grabbed my lunch this morning as I was cleaning up the kitchen. What I forgot today, damn me, was the Nick Hornby book I’ve been reading. I got to within fifty pages of the end last night before lights out and intended to finish it today. I even read a dozen or so pages as I waited for My Darling B to finish in the bathroom so I could brush my teeth, just minutes before we packed up and headed out the door. I couldn’t believe it when I reached into my man-purse this morning as I got ready to head for the break room and my groping hand found nothing but the usual litter and cookie crumbs at the bottom. The book is resting on the arm of the recliner in our living room. I can picture it there so clearly it’s almost like telepsychic viewing.

The last time My Darling B went to the library she brought back a grocery sack stuffed with books, video tape cartridges and music CDs. She’ll glance through most of the books, read one from cover to cover while the rest hold down the newspapers on the coffee table, take them all back three weeks late and pay a twelve-dollar fine on them. The tapes and CDs she’ll probably take back on time, because the fine’s a lot heftier.

This is not a personal criticism of her. I’m exactly the same way. Tim would be, too, if he still had a library card. We once let him check out books on our cards but he returned a few books late and refused to get his own card, so we don’t let him do that any longer.

One of the music CDs B brought home was a collection of Gershwin tunes recorded by contemporary pop stars. Well, contemporary to me and B, people like Jon Bon Jovi, Elton John and Elvis Costello. I loaded the tunes up on my laptop so I could have a listen to them today at work. I usually set up my laptop on a nearby desk and put the jukebox software on “shuffle” because I can’t get a decent radio station in my cubicle and anyway I know all the songs they play on the oldies station by heart now.

The first one I listened to was Elvis Costello’s version of But Not For Me. It was like nails on a chalk board, and it really hurts me like a case of dry socket to say that. I like Elvis Costello quite a bit when he’s yowling What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding? mooing Almost blue, or screaming Pads, paws and claws, but But Not For Me is a crooner’s song, and Elvis doesn’t seem to have the pipes to croon. He can howl, scream, cry and rasp like nobody else can, but he ought do himself a favor and steer clear of ballads from now on.

Jon Bon Jovi belts out a surprisingly good rendition of How Long Has This Been Going On? Honestly. It surprised the hell out of me. I hadn’t even meant to give it a listen because I’ve never cared to listen to Bon Jovi and probably never will again, but he wailed it just right.

Robert Palmer’s I’ve Got Rhythm set to a calypso beat is almost, but not quite, an interpretation worth keeping on my hard drive. It just didn’t light my fire. Too bad. I wanted to like it a lot, or even enough to keep it around, but I don’t.

They brought Cher in to record It Ain’t Necessarily So. She sounded drunk. Not pleasantly buzzed, not happily inebriated, but sloppy drunk, the kind of drunk that makes people slobber and spit when they’re talking to you, or singing. Drunk, as in throwing-up drunk. DELETE

Carly Simon was the perfect choice for I’ve Got A Crush On You. She’s got a smooth-as silk voice that’s always been easy to listen to and somehow gets better and better the more she uses it. And then there are all those album covers from the 70’s and 80’s. There wasn’t a guy I knew in high school who didn’t have a crush on Carly.

Maybe Meatloaf has a good enough voice for Somebody Loves Me, but whenever I hear it all I can think of is Paradise By The Dashboard Lights. I know it’s my fault, and it’s not fair, but there you are. I had to delete it.

Elton John sings Someone To Watch Over Me and Our Love Is Here To Stay back-to-back with a hey-golly-gee intonation that harks back to Bill Murry when he did that lounge singer act on Saturday Night. Frightening. DELETE

Former Police front man Sting does a rinky-tink version of Nice Work If You Can Get it complete with banjo and harmonica. Interesting. I’ll keep it for now.

Courtney Pine and Peter Gabriel both do versions of Summertime. I have no idea who Courtney Pine is, but I get a mental picture of a Peter Tesh wanna-be who thinks reducing a great song like this to elevator music is a breakthrough in imagination. Peter Gabriel, well, he’s been a favorite since I could legally drink beer, but I gotta be honest and admit he should have left Summertime alone. It just didn’t work for me, much as I wanted it to.

I know I’ve heard of Lisa Stansfield, I just can’t remember where. She does a kick-ass job on They Can’t Take That Away From Me, though. A keeper. Same goes for Oleta Adams’ version of Embraceable You. I’ve never heard of her, but I may have to look for recordings of both these women.

I listened to about two lines of Kate Bush warbling The Man I Love and skipped to the next song. I bought her Hounds of Love album back when it first came out and liked it a bunch. Haven’t heard from her since. Maybe I should have left it at that.

Somebody named Issy Van Randwyck recorded a slow, slow, slooowwww version of Stairway to Paradise, a song I’ve never heard sung at anything slower than march tempo, and now I know why. DELETE

I have yet to hear a recording of Rhapsody in Blue I don’t like. This version’s on harmonica backed by an orchestra. Never heard that before. Never heard of Larry Adler and George Martin before, either. I had to google them to find out which one played the harmonica (it’s Adler). Very odd, but I like odd.

A truly great idea for a topic came to me early today ... but first, I really gotta pee!

It was such a good idea I wasn’t at all worried, as I got up from my desk to head for the head, that I’d forget it. No way in hell. I was developing the topic as I left my cubicle, I was parsing it into paragraphs as I stepped into the hallway, I thought of a funny tagline as I opened the door to the men’s room ... Gotta jot this down as soon as I get back to my desk. And then I revelled in a blessed relief so all-encompassing and animal that it utterly extinguished every rational thought in my brain. Not a single nerve synapse was firing anywhere in my frontal lobe for a full five seconds. Oh, sure, like you never get that way after holding two cups of coffee in check for at least as many hours. Right.

When I came to my senses again, or rather came out of them and returned to conscious thought, I had no clue what my great idea was any more. I didn’t even realize I’d had a great idea until I was washing my hands and felt the vague notion that I’d forgotten something ... Did I leave my coffee mug on the pissoir again? No...

That’s not the first time I’ve lost a good idea, or any idea at all. Candidly, it happens daily. Ideas pop into my head and disappear again, like a spark in the ether, sometimes revealing themselves only long enough to say nanny-nanny-boo-boo before they vanish and leave me wondering what it might have been. I don’t seem to be wired to retain them for more than a minute or two unless I happen to be at the keyboard of my laptop (or, in the good old days, my trusty Olivetti).

I’ve never been sure what to do about this. I carried a notebook around for a while, but quickly found out that “writing” is a figure of speech as far as I’m concerned. I’m way too lazy to try to write down every freaking thought that passes through my phonological loop if I have to do it in longhand. To avoid triggering my lazy reflex I tried editing my thoughts by putting to paper only the ideas I deemed worth the time and effort, but then I found myself questioning the importance of all of them and writing practically nothing down. Well, nothing, really.

I thought laptops might be my salvation, once they were affordable. I type way faster than I ever learned to write, so my lazy gene doesn’t kick in before the idea has a chance to sneak out. I can literally make a note of every tiny idea that flits through my thoughts. (Hence, this page.) The laptop I’ve got now is only a little bigger than a notebook but — and though I hate to sound ungrateful, it feels like a significant “but” — the battery lasts only about an hour, sometimes surprisingly more, sometimes frustratingly less. I never know how long I have to develop a thought. About fifty percent of the time I can bash the whole thing out, but the other half of the ideas get cut off in mid-stream, a real bummer.

I’m also forgetful enough to leave the laptop in its case leaning against the leg of a restaurant table and walk away from it. You don’t have to go through a heart attack like that (walking down the street, hot cuppa joe in one hand, tucking other hand casually in pocket, memory of carrying something in that hand comes back — Holy SHIT!) to discourage yourself completely from taking it out anywhere in public.

Once, I even had a tiny MP3 player with a record function that I could’ve used to whisper ideas into, but I’m so self-conscious about looking like an egomaniacal putz that I could never bring myself to do that, not even once.

So ... another idea gone, so completely gone that, if it ever occurs to me again, it’ll be an entirely new idea because I won’t recognize it. I hope I remember to jot a few notes about it next time.

I’m reading Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris again. I read it more than a year and a half ago, just after I saw the latest film version. It was a good movie, but I couldn’t read the book without thinking of George Clooney. Sometimes a movie made from a book is a good thing, and doesn’t spoil reading the book at all. Sometimes a movie makes the book better. This time, though, the movie didn’t help me with the book at all, other than stirring me to finally pick it up and read it. I needed to see the stuff in my head for my darned self, but no matter how doggedly I tried to focus on the book, I kept seeing the movie. I finished it, but it was a frustrating experience.

Nineteen months later I was surfing through the newest postings on Paperbackswap.com and, almost before I knew what I was doing, I finger-whipped the cursor over to the little photo of the front cover of Solaris and clicked on it (ironically, it’s a photo of Clooney kissing costar Natascha McElhone). I guess it had been stuck in my subconscious ever since the last time I read it, and now my subconscious wanted to take another crack at it.

A friend of mine who was heavily into Stanislaw Lem introduced me to the idea behind Solaris years before I ever started reading science fiction: A living organism so large that it’s initially mistaken for an ocean covering the surface of the planet Solaris. The story’s narrator, Kris Kelvin, goes there for reasons that are sort of vague, but apparently he’s been training to become a “Solarist,” one of the researchers on the station, and he wants to establish contact with the planet-sized organism, but soon after he gets there that’s about the last thing he’s thinking of. He finds that all but two of the station’s researchers are dead, and the living ones are acting pretty weird.

But Solaris, or whatever the ocean itself is called, apparently wants to contact him and the remaining researchers on the station. Each one of them has recently received a “visitor,” somebody they know and somebody who couldn’t possibly be there. Not hallucinations, because Kelvin sees one of the other researcher’s visitors almost right away after he arrives. It creeps him out big time, but that’s nothing compaired to the ga-ga freakout he gets into when his visitor makes her appearance. It’s Rheya, the live-in lover he walked out on years ago, who killed herself in despair after he left. The guilt of her death has been following him around ever since and it’s too much for him to bear now, so he kills her. These are boomerang visitors, though, and Rheya comes right back like the rest of them.

That’s about all I remember of it. And last night I finished off Nick Hornby’s Slam (Excellent! Five stars! Read it!), wasn’t sleepy enough to turn out the light, looked over at the rows of books I haven’t read on the shelf beside my bed (I keep them there to remind myself there is never enough time to be bored) and Solaris caught my eye ... nay, it jumped out at me. It literally leapt into my hands, open at the first page, and forced me to read the first three chapters. Next time that happens I’ll have a more sensible reaction, like maybe running into the street, screaming in terror. This time, I kept on happily reading.

Treat day! Every Friday morning our boss makes espresso and a different person each week brings in doughnuts or bagels or, if we’re really lucky, homemade cookies or cake. This week it was doughnuts and a big mixed box of muffins. I couldn’t resist the walnut muffins, not that I tried very much, or honestly wanted to. At least I know for sure I reached my daily recommended allowance of fat and sugar, no question, right out of the gate. And if somehow I didn’t, there’s still tons of chocolate in candy dishes all over the office. Oh, I’m so going to have a heart attack soon.

I grossly underestimated the shipping weight of a transformer I sold on e-bay and ended up making a net profit of about a dollar on it after paying at least three times what I thought the postage would be. Now you know why I’m not in business for myself.

It was a transformer I bought in Germany for a toy train set. It was wired to be plugged into a two-hundred twenty volt electrical socket with a European two-prong plug, but some guy in San Diego bought it. I wondered why, but I didn’t ask. When I posted it I made sure to mention that it was Wired for European household current and is equipped with a European plug in big, bold letters. Maybe the homes in San Diego are wired for two-twenty and have European outlets. Maybe he knows how to take the transformer apart and wire it up for one-ten, or maybe he wanted to use it as a paperweight. He’s assembling California’s largest collection of German-made toy train transformers? Whatever, it’s been banging around in my tool box for years and now it’s not, so what do I care?

We bought a computer printer and a zip drive when we lived in England and sold them after we came back to the States. Those had European plugs on them, too, and were wired to run on two-twenty. The printer went to a guy in Texas and the zip drive went to Oklahoma. I never heard a word of complaint so they must have found some use for a printer and a zip drive that I couldn’t plug into our electrical outlets, but what they did with them, I haven’t a clue. Still, it’s a little weird.

Monona Grove High School students made the front page of today’s Wisconsin State Journal for starting a food fight in the cafeteria as a senior prank last December (on my birthday, even). The administration called the cops, the kids were identified using recordings from security cameras in the school, and the perps were cited in court for disorderly conduct. The story was not only on the cover of the print version, it appeared above the fold and right next to a photo of Brett Favre! You’ve got to check it out if only to read the whiny comments from the parents who spoil their kids so rotten they pay their court fees and complain that they school administrators should have stopped this before it started. How in hell do you do that? You’d need supernatural powers, wouldn’t you?

Here is the sum total of everything I know about wine:

They’re made from fermented grapes, sometimes most or all of the grape, sometimes just the juice, pulped and strained by machine. Nobody mashes them barefooted anymore.

There are “red” wines and “white” wines. I used quote marks because red wines are a lot darker than fire engines and apple skins, and white wine isn’t white at all, it’s really more a washed-out greenish color. The color of the grape doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the color of the wine.

Wine can be “dry,” which means “not sweet.” I prefer sweet, but I won’t say no to dry.

And, finally, there are bottle wines and there are box wines, meaning exactly that: some wine comes in a bottle with a traditional cork stopping the neck, the signature of an old-fashioned, carefully-crafted top-shelf wine. If the bottle’s got a screw top, chances are it’s favored by people who sleep on park benches and don’t change their clothes, and it’s got a nickname like “Mad Dog.” This, incidentally, is a rule of thumb that’s going by the wayside. Some really good wine, and here I’m thinking of my personal favorite, Prairie Fume from the Wollersheim winery, has appeared in screw-top bottles but is still as delicious as ever. I have mixed feelings about this: Pulling the cork from a bottle of wine is deeply satisfying emotionally, but I have lived through real-life comedy sketches set at a picnic with a bottle of wine and no corkscrew.

But back to the box wines. I don’t think they’re made from grapes. I’m only guessing, but I think they’re dishwater and whatever else you flush down the drain of your sink. Somebody diverts it to the box wine packaging factory where a few drops of chemical dye are added, maybe it’s strained through a sock or some old underwear, it’s funneled into the kind of plasticized boxes you see soccer moms doling out to teams of kids in brightly-colored jerseys (filled with fruit drinks, not wine, obviously) and dressed up with a eye-catching label before being sold to unsuspecting schlubs like me.

Or rather, suspicious schlubs like me. I hardly expect much from box wines at this point. If it didn’t give me a headache, I’d be pleasantly surprised. In a couple recent newspaper stories, though, I read that box wines are getting better and better, and that I would indeed be pleasantly surprised if I tried some of them. I never remember the names of the wines they recommend, though, because I don’t clip the articles and I don’t write down the names, and therein lies the trap. If they don’t have a goofy (and easy to remember) name, like Monkey Sweat from the Skullcrusher Mountain winery, then they have Italian names that all sound the same to me. It’s taken me twelve months to remember that My Darling B likes Sangiovisi, a kind of red wine, and the previous eighteen months before that I spent memorizing Multipulciano (and I’m dead certain I still can’t spell them and never will be able to, but at least I can recognize the names when I see them).

The latest box wine I tried, on a whim, just to taste something different, was Pino Grigio in a one-liter zinc chromate-colored box from the Three Thieves winery in California and was called “Bandit.” I have a weakness for easy-to-remember, goofy names. The last goofily-named wine I tried was called “Scraping The Bottom Of The Barrel” (I’m not making that up) and should have been a warning. Come to think of it, “Bandit” should have been a warning, as well as the rest of the package. The back of the box listed ten reasons to drink Bandit wine, chief among them being: It’s amazingly affordable, meaning it’s stupid cheap, and the box is not only recyclable, it’ll take up less room in a landfill (those were two separate reasons). Note: Wines that brag about how cheap they are, are marketing to college kids and young couples with no money who want to get drunk fast, and winos. It’s my studied opinion you should steer clear of Bandit wine unless you want to wake up with a thudding headache or will be sleeping in a doorway covered by today’s newspaper.

“Do you know where my cake decorating tips are?” My Darling B asked me the other day. She meant the little pointy metal things that stick out the end of the bag that bakers use to put frosting on cakes. You can get tips with designs cut into them, like stars and wiggly lines, great, big holes or tiny, little holes. B has a carrying case with about three dozen of those little metal tips in it. Last I saw them, back in Misawa, they were packed in a huge white cardboard box with a dozen or so cake pans. It must be somewhere in our basement with the rest of the boxes, bins and bags filled with household stuff. My Darling B thought I might know where. Silly B. As if anybody knows. God wouldn’t know. He, she or it would take one look in the rat’s nest that begins at the bottom of our stairs, roll his, her or its all-seeing eyes and retreat from our basement forever, happy to sacrifice omnipresence (but only on a technicality) if it meant not dealing with our awesome mess.

Funny thing is, B didn’t even want the tips, she wanted the teensy-tiny bristle brush that was packed away with the cake-decorating stuff. I forget why. She asked me if I had a very small paint brush in my hobby junk she could borrow and, as it turns out, I have dozens. “Have they been used?” she asked. Well, yeah, they’ve been used. I’m not quite that inert.

Since she couldn’t use the paint brushes I had and I didn’t know the whereabouts of her cake decorating things, she set aside an hour or so to descend into the lower rings of the basement to do a little search and destroy among the storage bins we have stacked against the walls down there. The brush she was looking for was in there somewhere, but finding it was literally like looking for a needle in a haystack. She would take down a plastic Tupperware storage bin, pry the form-fitting lid off it, and root around among its many and very often unrelated contents, but she added a step that I hadn’t been doing before: She wrote a few short notes about the contents on a label and slapped the label on the side of the bin. She’s always thinking. That’s why I like having her around.

She eventually found the brush, believe it or not. She also found a stuffed fabric shark’s head she made about fifteen years ago as part of a Halloween costume for Sean. Its left eye had popped off but otherwise it looked great, and B crept up the stairs and went from room to room with it on her head mumbling “Land Shark” and giggling like a maniac. Warping time even further back, she found the papier-mache lizard head Sean made for his kindergarten costume. That one hangs in a place of honor on our memory wall now.

About halfway through her expedition she brought a large, heavy package up to the living room where I was reading the last few chapters of Solaris and, throwing herself into the recliner with the package on her lap, she asked me, “Before I make a huge mess unwrapping this, can you tell me what it might be?” I tried to mind-meld with the contents of the package but without any success. “I have no idea,” I answered, so she ripped off some of the heavy brown wrapping paper and found the family computer. When we bought it, the 386 processor was blazing-hot technology and the one-gigabyte hard drive seemed bigger than a planet. Now you couldn’t get four of those processors to do what my already obsolete laptop can do, and the hard drive is, in the world of computer data storage, the size of a shirt pocket. Even the case is a malformed freak. Tim offered to refit it with discarded parts from his many computer upgrades, rendering it somewhat useful, but after removing the cover he found they wouldn’t fit without a lot of cutting and hammering and probably quite a bit of cussing, too. It would have been like trying to shove a diesel engine inside the boiler of a steam locomotive. No point.

There were just two things it was good for: landfill, and export to overseas sweatshops to be stripped of parts by barefoot peasants in desolate warehouses heaped with smoldering computer carcasses. Or, I could do what we’ve tended to do with computer parts ever since we moved: Stack them in the corner of the basement behind the cement sink. There’s a small mountain of computer cases, power supplies, keyboards and other semirecognizable computer parts tangled up in dangling wires back there. Keeping these parts hasn’t ordinarily been a problem, but when Tim began his quest to build the ultimate gaming machine his computer went through several iterations, so we now have what amounts to three or four computers’ worth of parts heaped back there. If the parts would only fit together, we could sell them on e-bay and make a small profit. Thanks to obsolescence, though, they do not.

Before I pack the parts off to the sweat shop, I’ll have to make sure the hard drives are erased. Not that I have anything to hide, but I don’t think our e-mail and computer files are anybody else’s business, not even for grins. I can erase the drives that are stacked on the shelf with the simple, satisfying method of hitting them with a big hammer and, just to make sure, I massage the exposed disk with a magnet. That ought to do the job, don’t you think?

As it turned out, I could still start up the old family computer. I plugged it in at the workbench, punched the button, and a minute or two later “Windows 98” proudly announced its presence from the monitor I borrowed from the corner of Tim’s room. It gave me the opportunity to do something I’ve always wanted to do: Boot in DOS mode and type the command FORMAT C: That is, I’ve always wanted to do it on purpose. It’s one of those things I’ve heard about people doing by accident, and ten or fifteen years ago I used computers in DOS mode a lot more and it could have easily happened to me, too. Not so much any more, though. Never, actually. In fact, I had such a hard time remembering how to boot it up in DOS mode that I got a shiver when it did, and telling it to format the C drive afterward was frankly anticlimactic. The computer warned me, THIS WILL ERASE ALL DATA ON THE DISK! DO YOU REALLY WANT TO DO SOMETHING SO BONEHEADED? and my reply, Y, wasn’t nearly as thrilling as I thought it would be.

Because the computer still worked, I thought it might be fun to install a free operating system on it and goof around. Tim had a CD of a shareware operating system called “Ubuntu” he got on-line and I had nothing to lose, right? I mean, even if it made the computer self-destruct in a flash of sparks and a mushroom cloud, it’s not like we’d miss it. After all, it spent two years wrapped in butcher paper and packing tape in a corner of our basement. But the Ubuntu operating system required a fast processor and four gigs of disk space. Once again, I was forgetting I was trying to drive a Stanley steamer in a NASCAR race. Finding an operating system old enough to run on a 386 would require me to fritter away a whole afternoon to search, download and tinker with it. I love to fritter, but I’ve got lots of other fritters on my plate. Maybe another time.

“If you could be the god of anything, what would you be?” Tim asked after he finished with his dinner and hung around the table to torment us with yet another of what has become a series of dinner-hour questions that are normally a lot more bizarre than this, and usually unanswerable.

Tim, of course, wanted to be the god of war and destruction, and Thor-sized hammers or Zeus-like thunderbolts, or heavy weapons, or just about anything that caused widespread mayhem and disaster, preferrably through the application of a chain reaction of bone-shattering explosions. If I ever find out where we went wrong with that boy, the answer will probably scare the pee out of me.

My Darling B wanted to be the goddess of peace and justice, even after I pointed out the goddess of justice walks around blindfolded and naked. Not that I would object to visitations from naked goddesses, mind you. The more we had, the better place the world would be, if you ask me. It’s just that B is by her nature a rather modest creature and not one to go unclothed in public under any circumstances I can think of, although if she were a goddess I suppose she could wear a knee-length parka and big, furry mukluks, or a classic toga, whatever the heck she wanted. It’s not like anybody’s going to question the goddess who measures the evidence against us and dispatches those who are found wanting into the netherworld with her freaking huge sword.

It’s a bit of a mystery to me why she wants to be peace and justice in the first place. She’s already the goddess of gardening and food experiments, and that’s a job she’s not only miraculously good at, she also likes it. If I could do the stuff she does with foodstuffs, I’d be so satisfied I wouldn’t even think about trying out for a second, thankless job that’s work, work, work round the clock without seeming to make any headway.

My desire is to be the god of steam transportation. It’s not actually a god, it’s more like a demigod. It may not sound particularly god-like at first, but try to keep in mind it’s made of steel and races along at a mile a minute, jets of steam snorting from its mouth and nose. In one hand it carries a fireman’s shovel so broad and deep it can level mountains on the run. In the other, a crank rod attached to a piston with a cylinder head wide enough across the top that the Yankees and the Mets could play nine innings on it. On its broad back it can carry tens of thousands of passengers and millions of tons of freight all day, every day, all in exchange for an offering of water and some coal. Even for a demigod, that’s still pretty awesome.

I’m only sixty-five pages into The Great Bridge so it’s probably a little early to say this is my favorite passage in the book, but it’s going to be up there in the top five, I’m sure of it. Engineer John Roebling, the man who designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge, was a famous workaholic.

His preoccupation with work became almost beyond reckoning ... his immense reserves of nervous energy, his total devotion to the job at hand, whatever it might be, seemed superhuman to all who came in contact with him. Once, quite unwittingly, he revealed the extraordinary and rather ludicrous limits such preoccupation could reach. On New Year’s Day, 1855, his wife had been delivered of still another child, but this apparently came as a great surprise to the bridgebuilder when news reached him at Niagara Falls. “Your letters of the 2nd and 3rd came to hand,” he wrote quite formally to [assistant Charles] Swan. “You say in your last that Mrs. Roebling and the child are pretty well. This takes me by surprise, not having been informed at all of the delivery of Mrs. R. Or what do you mean? Please answer by return mail.” Swan was to waste no money on a telegram, in other words.

It’s only Tuesday morning and I’ve already ruined My Darling B’s weekend. When my alarm started bleeping this morning she was so deep inside the rabbit hole she thought it was Saturday, and she was not happy that I’d interrupted her plans to sleep late. Why the hell did he set his alarm? she wondered to herself, getting ready to strangle me, but luckily I half-sat up to turn the alarm off, and kept tipping right on up to a standing position without a pause. I was tottering toward the closet, reaching for my bathrobe before she could raise a hand against me.

Freakin’ cold today. Last week, forties and fifties. This week, the forecasts are full of teens. You could look at it one of two ways: Mother Nature gave us a little breather last week, or she gave us a little tease before kicking her boot right in the collective seat of our pants. When I was inside where it was cozy and warm I usually thought of it the first way, but when I was outside, waiting for a ride or walking to the library, I felt a lot more like I was getting kicked. Why is that?

And I did take a walk today. After being practically chained to my desk all morning during a “webinar” I wasn’t going to let a little sub-freezing weather keep me from hoofing it down State Street and back. If anything, the intense cold enhanced the experience, forcing me to accelerate my pace or freeze solid in mid-step. I didn’t check my watch, but I’m pretty sure I made it all the way to Paul’s Bookstore in about fifteen minutes, certainly less than the usual twenty. After wandering around the stacks, picking out the one or two books I’d come back for on Thursday (payday!), I hooked south on Frances to Gorham and back to State Street, just to make it interesting. Still made it back to my cubicle without turning into a Omansicle.

On the way back I spotted the Walking Man for the first time in I don’t know how many weeks, plodding slowly toward the university. He’s a homeless guy I usually see circling cap square early in the mornings. In my inner monologue I think of him as Walking Man because he was on the move nearly every time I saw him, marking a slow, steady pace along the sidewalk, heading nowhere. I can recall just one or two times I’ve seen him motionless. I think each time he was eating a sandwich. Not the same sandwich, obviously. I’ve never seen him panhandle; I wonder how he got the sandwiches?

Today he had his hoodie on but not the denim jacket he wore all summer and the previous winter. I wonder if it finally wore out or somebody took it from him? Without the jacket, and with the hood partially hiding his face, I didn’t recognize him at first. When I did, I had to do a double-take. I hadn’t seen him in so long I’d stopped wondering where he’d gone. The frosty cold made his cheeks red as a ripe apples but didn’t make him walk any faster, the way it did to me. He strode along as his usual measured gait, his tired eyes staring straight ahead. He made no sound as he passed me.

I misspoke the other day when I named John Roebling as the engineer who designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge. Silly me. That’ll teach me to open my mouth when I’m not even a hundred pages into a three-hundred page history. John Roebling designed it, but then he went and got his foot crushed between a ferry and the wooden pilings of the ferry slip he was standing on, contracted lockjaw and died in gruesome agony. Since it happened in chapter four, and I knew enough history to remember that there was in fact a Brooklyn Bridge over the East River, then somebody else must have taken over after he passed away so early in the story. It was Washington Roebling, John’s son, who built the bridge, but he hasn’t even begun to sink the foundations of the towers in the bed of the river at this point, so that’s all I’m going to say about it for now.

When I have to wake up to an alarm clock, my head feels heavy and full of lint and my eyes are so out of focus that I bonk into walls and ricochet off door jambs. I generally feel better after I have a shower, but sometimes I’m not really awake until after I’ve eaten breakfast. The ritual of pouring a glass of juice, brewing a jug of coffee and toasting a couple slices of bread gets my brain firing on most, if not all, cylinders and by the time I push back from the table I’ve begun to feel that I might be able to walk amongst the living.

And then there are days like today. I went stumbling around like a zombie, every minute of the day feeling like that first minute I after the alarm goes off. A hot shower didn’t help. Making breakfast didn’t help. Drinking coffee didn’t help. It was a very disagreeable, detached way to stagger through the day. Maybe I would’ve finally felt better if I’d just grabbed the first guy I saw on the way into the office this morning and eaten his brains. I don’t know, I didn’t think of trying that until it was time to go home.

Now there’s a cure to the morning blues you don’t often hear medical experts recommending, not in glossy magazine ads, not in vague televison spots followed by about a hundred side effects disclaimers. (“Eat brains! Possible side effects: continued zombification.”) Probably because zombies don’t go to the doctor’s office all that often, unless they’re hungry and happen to be passing a clinic in which a small band of survivors has barricaded itself. I don’t imagine it happens all that often, on account of most people will head for the mall as soon as they hear a zombie alert. They know they can find plenty of junk food and guns at the mall.

Or at least I think they still can. I haven’t been to a mall in a coon’s age. Okay, realistically more like a mouse’s age. Mice only live to be one or two years old, right? Sounds right. That’s what I’m going to go with, anyway. I’ve circled the mall several times in just the past two months because, while there are still a few stores I want to visit nearby, there aren’t any I want to go to desperately enough that will bring me to actually enter a mall. Not worth the time. If I’m looking for a new mass-market book the shops in town can’t get, for instance, I go to Borders. From the time I get out of my car to the time I get back in, I spend five minutes, ten max! Not that I’ve often got thirty bucks to blow on a mass-market book.

If I go to whatever that huge bookstore is in the mall, the walk from the parking lot alone takes five minutes, if my path isn’t being criss-crossed by malevolently impatient SUV-driving shoppers distracted by the conversation they’re having on their cell phones. Threading my way through the teeming masses inside the mall and working my way toward the store takes at least another five minutes. Getting lost, another five. (The damned stores all look the same to me.) Then there’s the five or ten minutes spent rooting around in the store and checking out. Back through the teeming masses, back across the parking lot — twenty minutes at least, usually thirty. Yikes.

For the second time in as many weeks, one of my coworkers went from cubicle to cubicle in our office to let us know she was going out to Taco Bell for lunch and would get some for us if we wanted.

Covering my stomach with one hand as if I’d just been gut-shot with a scatter gun, I made a face and answered, “Ugh. No thanks, I can’t eat that stuff.”

She laughed. “Yeh, it makes me sick, too.”

“Really?” I asked, frowning. “Then why do you eat it?”

“Because it’s so good!” she said, making a yummy noise. This would seem to be some new use of the word “good” that I wasn’t aware of. I’ve always thought of food that was good as being pleasing to the palate and didn’t make you sick. Maybe I’m not broad-minded enough.

Oddly enough, I had a donut that made me experience just the opposite effects — it didn’t make me sick, but neither did I taste it. Somebody brought in a box of donuts from Wal-Mart and left it in the break room. Family taboos demand that I avoid any and all contact with Wal-Mart, but these were free donuts! Glazed! And I can’t say no to hospitality, that just wouldn’t be right.

So I picked out a chocolate-frosted chocolate cake donut and bit a huge chunk out of it, anticipating a yummy rush of overpowering chocolatey goodness, and got ... nothing. Zilch. It tasted exactly like nothing, dry and unappetizing. I’ve never eaten a donut that had no flavor. Even the bad ones are greasy, or so sweet they make my teeth hurt. This one, nothing. It sort of weirded me out.

For a short time tonight, we were billionaires!

Every two weeks or so, My Darling B settles down at the sofa with her laptop and sorts out our finances. We get paid every two weeks, but the funds drop into various bank accounts all over the world, not because we’re a couple of hotshot high-rollers, but because every time the military moved us to a new and far-off land, we set up a bank account there and never bothered to close it out when we left. It was a huge pain in the tukus before the internet made it possible to juggle it all on-line. Now, it’s merely confusing.

When B logged in to one of our many bank accounts, she happened to notice that one account in particular had an available line of credit of $999,999,999.00!

“Want to jump on a plane to anywhere?” she asked, showing me the screen. I can’t say that, as improbable as it was that either of us would commit such larceny, it wasn’t tempting. But if we were so moved, we wouldn’t have taken it all ... yah, bull, of course we would have taken it all. In for a penny, in for a pound, especially when fraud is the name of the game. Go large or don’t go at all. We didn’t go, and the available credit disappeared about ten minutes later.

I woke up to the four o’clock bonging of the clock in the living room, a tiny bit disappointed that I hadn’t been able to play with my rocket launcher a little longer.

The noise of the clock wasn’t what wakened me, and My Darling B wasn’t stirring at all. The house wasn’t settling, the furnace wasn’t running. Even the cat was curled up tightly between us. There was no sound at all, so I couldn’t see what would have woke me up. It might have been the dream, but I was enjoying that so I doubt it would have started me awake.

I hate it when I wake up for no apparent reason. I lay there thinking, What? What in hell woke me up? What? for a long time, hours, if I’m very unlucky, listening intently to every pop and creak of the house for a clue, but most of the time finding exactly nothing. It doesn’t happen to me very often; I’m not the insomniac my mother is, not yet, but when it happens it drives me up a rubber wall.

This time, thankfully, I fell back asleep after just a few minutes. All I had to do was cuddle up to B, who obligingly rolled my way and began to snore softly in my ear. Like the purr of a big, happy cat, it was just familiar enough to send me back to la-la land. Not only that, but I got to play with the rocket launcher some more. I’d been having this dream that I built a model helicopter about the size of a toaster with a rocket launcher that worked, blasting away at targets with a shower of rocket-like sparks. I seemed to be in a dormitory, or maybe a barracks, because all kinds of people (okay, guys) would stop by, one after another, to ask me to demonstrate it, which I would happily do, knocking over playing cards and blasting away at model tanks.

The excitement in the office today centered around the printer. No, honestly, this really was the big deal in our office all day, and I’m actually going to spend time to write about it. Such is the pell-mell pace of the life I lead.

The printer in our office is one of those all-in-one machines that prints, copies, faxes and scans. It can handle three different sizes of paper, and it will also sort, hole-punch and staple. It’s way beyond the kind of printer I’m ever going to have at home, so I’m not trying to bash on it when I say it’s a dog. All I mean by that is, it’s a little long in the tooth. Past its prime.

Maybe even past time to retire it, although you’d never be able to convince the company that leases it to our office. They’ve sent so many technicians out to work on it, you’d think it was more valuable to their bottom line than the Brainiac Ten Thousand was to the RAND corporation. If it’s not, and I were a technician for their company, then rather than make my upteenth visit to fix yet another jammed guideway in the fershlugginer thing, on my very next call I would crack it open, short-circuit the power supply and wait until the resulting fire destroyed at least two-thirds of it so I could write it off as a complete loss. I wouldn’t even try all that hard to make it look like an accident.

Nobody I work with can figure out why they bother to keep sending techs out to fix it, if “fix” is the right word. Oh, sure, after five or six visits it works pretty well for a month or so, sometimes for as long as six weeks, and then it goes on the fritz again, making pretty accordions and snowflakes out of copy after copy. Once in a while one of us will gamely stand by, unjamming it six or seven times until we finally give up and call for the tech to come out again. By this Wednesday, though, very few of us were feeling game. We called for maintenance every single day this week, and it wasn’t staying fixed for long. Yesterday and today it jammed so often we called a tech out twice each day. A different tech came out each time. Each one was a little grumpier than the last one. I think they’re talking about us in their break room.

The last guy to come out yesterday was clearly not happy about making a call to do little more than pick bits of shredded paper out of the machine. He said, not in exactly these words, that we could have unjammed it ourselves, and when we tried to explain how often it jammed and how long it took to unjam it, he said, again not word for word, that jamming was normal and we should be able to handle that ourselves.

When it jammed again at half-past three we gave up. Somebody called it in but nobody bothered to unjam it.

The Great Bridge has taken an unusual turn. Technogeek histories like this normally start out with a foretaste of The Big Event, typically a stirring scene of the long-sought goal being completed. This book began with an auspicious meeting between John Roebling, the designer of the bridge, and his backers, as he led them on a guided tour of many of his already-completed and very successful bridges, the better to convince them of his bona fides, and not incidentally to give author McCullough a handy way to explain bridge-building to noobs like me.

Shortly after the introduction, the author will fill the next chapter, and sometimes several more, flashing back to the principle player’s boyhood and gradual maturity for some biographical backfilling, and McCullough did just that. In more than a few histories I’ve read, this can be the most tedious part of the book. Authors will very often drone on and on about parents and grandparent and great-grandparents without establishing much relevance to the events in the opening chapter, but McCullough has a special gift of weaving each character’s story into the big picture and keeping their stories interesting, no small talent. He went back and back and back, spending the better part of a hundred pages fleshing out John Roebling’s past before killing him off with a tetanus infection. It was a testament to McCullough’s skill that I was genuinely grieved by Roebling’s tragic death.

By that time, however, he’d had a chance to introduce Washington Roebling, John’s son, in a few well-placed asides. The unusual turn I mentioned was that, after the death of John, McCullough naturally had to delve into Washington’s past. It was almost like turning around and going back to square one, although in this case a lot of the groundwork had already been laid. McCullough backed up to Washington’s education and his service in the army of the Republic during the civil war (war between the states, whatever), before getting back to him as the guy who built the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a long, winding trip unlike others I’ve read, and quite a lot of fun.

Washington Roebling has been shown to be quite a cool cucumber. He had an unusal ability, as McCullough points out over and over, of being in the right spot in the nick of time. The defense of Little Round Top, for instance, is often cited as the turning point in the Battle of Gettysburg, and that success was due largely to Roebling, the first Union soldier to climb it and catch sight of the advancing Confederate soldiers.

But for an example of calm self-control, I like none better than this, one of the few stories he told his family of his military service:

...he was quartered late one night in an old stone jail [in Fredericksburg] ... the place had little or no light, it seems, and Roebling, all alone, groping his way about, discovered an old chest that aroused his curiosity. He lifted the lid and reaching inside, his hand touched a stone-cold face. The lid came back down with a bang. Deciding to investigate no further, he cleared a place on the floor, stretched out, and went to sleep.

Got that? He found what he thought was a corpse in a coffin and, “deciding to investigate no further,” he stretched out and went to sleep! That is an A-1 example of Nerves Of Steel! Maybe if I’d been through a few of the military campaigns he’d taken part in I would’ve been able to close my eyes and go to sleep next to a corpse, but I think it’s more likely I would have run screaming into the night, after I soiled myself. The corpse, by the way, turned out to be a stone statue of George Washington’s mother, stowed away in the jail house for safekeeping.

Insomnia again! This time I woke up much earlier, in time to hear the half-hour bong of the wall clock. Either that, or it’s only one o’clock, I thought, and waited to drift off to sleep again. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited ....

BONG! BONG! — Two o’clock. Crap.

It was one of those maddening cases of insomnia that wakes a guy up like a switch has been thrown, *BIP!* and the brain has the idea, That’s enough sleep! No matter how long I laid there or how methodically I relaxed my arms and legs, every finger and toe, neck, and back, I could not going flip that switch back to “SLEEP.” And still I laid as still as I could, breathing regularly and deeply, relaxing, waiting ....

After the next half-hour bong, I slipped out of bed, pulled on my slippers and a bathrobe, and shuffled out to the living room where I camped in the recliner, rewriting web pages. The laundry list of books I’ve read has gotten a makeover. While searching for a reference to something, I corrected some typos in last month’s collected drivel but not, I’m sure, all of them, not nearly. It’s part of the charm, right? I tidied up some of the markup on the first page of drivel and added a toon I found as I surfed the usual lineup. I did that until four o’clock, when I finally trudged back to bed, determined to fall asleep or lay there until my alarm bleeped at five-thirty. I did eventually fall asleep ... shortly after I heard five bongs from the wall clock. Should’ve known that was going to happen.

This being Friday, luckily, I could take my coffee mug down to the break room first thing in the morning for a piping hot shot of espresso, made just for me by my cool-o-riffic boss. I was even the first guy in line. About half the lending department was stuck in traffic after the morning train rumbled through town and all the crossing gates stayed down, not at all unusual whenever the temps drop into single digits. Cars were backed up along John Nolan Drive all the way to the colliseum. My supervisor was in one of them, within eyeshot of our office for almost an hour.

In spite of having to operate on a couple hours’ sleep, and long after I’d downed the last of my super-sized mug of expresso, I hung in there okay, especially considering that, while the morning’s work kept me busy, there wasn’t much left to do in the afternoon. The day brightened again about mid-afternoon, when I swung by the break room to grab a bottle of apple juice and noticed, as I was leaving, a bag of Sun Chips dangling from the chute in the the vending machine. Banged the window of the machine a couple times with my fist, it dropped — free snack! It’s like finding a dollar in an old coat pocket.

David McCullough’s award-winning biography of Harry Truman was sitting on the shelves at Avol’s for months! Do you think it was still there yesterday, payday, when I finally had the money to buy it? Do you? Huh?

I started off down State Street in high spirits on my usual noon walk, turned off on Johnson with a bounce in my step, breezed through the front doors of Avol’s and made a beeline straight to the biography section to find ... a gaping hole where the volume had been, as if it had been plucked from the shelf only moments before. I stood in the doorway for several minutes, making the goldfish face, before I could tear myself away and shamble dejectedly back out to the street.

Paul’s Bookstore had a copy, but it was priced seven dollars higher than the one at Avol’s had been and I was still so bummed about missing it that I couldn’t make myself shell out the extra dough.

It’s the coldest day of the year! Time to do outdoor home improvement!

This is what I get for putting things off until the last minute. When we moved into Our Humble O-Bode, I noticed the front door sagged so badly that there were gaps at the corners wide enough to see daylight through. There are only two ways to fix a sagging door that I know of: Get a new door, or phone Godzilla and ask him to come give the corner of our house a tap with the heel of his paw to see if that’ll square things up. I’m not going to do either of those two things, because I don’t know Godzilla’s phone number and a new front door would cost way more than I’m willing to shell out until the door sags so far out of whack that it becomes impossible to close.

In the meantime, though, the gap between the door and the jamb is drafty as hell (now there’s a figure of speech that doesn’t make sense at all, given the context) because nobody’s ever taken the time to weatherstrip around it, particularly not yours truly. The simpler the job, the longer I procrastinate. I’ve managed to put off this easy-peasy job for nearly three years.

I might have even made it all the way through this winter to next winter if not for My Darling B, who has been gently lobbying for me to get it taken care of sooner rather than later. Then this morning, while we were in town to shop at the farmer’s market and get a bite to eat for breakfast, we had to walk into frigid headwinds that tried to frostbite any skin we left exposed, which no doubt reminded her of the Merry Little Breezes we’d find dancing in magical circles just inside our front door on our return home.

The final domino that triggered today’s home improvement fell when I left the car running after we pulled into the driveway and told My Darling B that I wanted to make a quick run to Menard’s to pick up a box of ceiling tiles and some spray paint so I could work on my model railroad this weekend. I’ll explain that in a minute.

“You want to look for some weather stripping while you’re there?” she asked, “look for” in this context meaning, “buy some and install it on the front door so our furnace doesn’t have to heat the neighborhood any longer.”

All my many methods of procrastination, and they are legion, had no way out of this one. Besides, it should have been done two summers ago, and I knew it, so it was a penance of sorts to be standing in the doorway with nothing but the single-pane glass of the storm door to shield me from temps in the negative numbers, screwing lengths of heavy weatherstripping into place as I steadily lost feeling in my fingers.

I would’ve finished the job in half the time I spent on it if I’d used power tools from the start, but it looked like such an easy fix-up that I started with a hand drill and a screwdriver. All I wanted was to keep it simple. After drilling out the holes by hand I drove about a half-dozen screws, rubbing my knuckles raw against the door. That’s all it took — that’s all it ever takes — to make me cave in and drag my power drill and extension cord upstairs to drive the rest of the screws in a comparative blink of an eye.

What do ceiling tiles have to do with a model railroad? I piece them together on top of the bench I built for the track so the passing train won’t make as much noise as a full-size freight rolling through town. Unfortunately the tiles come in just one color, white (technically they come in all kinds of colors, such as off-white, eggshell, cream and so on, but as far as I can tell those are all fancy-pants words for “white”), which is sort of a pain because I have to paint them, the easiest way being to stand them in a row along the wall of the garage and zap them with a spray can of the cheapest primer I can buy. I chose a can of red primer, which looks brown to me, but Tim seems to think it’s pink so I’ve begun to doubt my own sense of what color it truly is. But it’s not white.

If you can believe it, I took the box of tiles out to the garage, where it was a whopping ten degrees above zero, I guess because it’s snuggled up against the house, and set them against the wall in sets of four to paint them until the spray can ran dry. After I sprayed each set I retreated to the kitchen where I stood slapping my hands against my thighs, trying to restore circulation, before I dashed back out to collect them and whisk them downstairs to set them out on the bench to dry completely. I ran out of paint after three or four trips, and a pretty good thing I did, too, because the fumes were getting pretty thick in the basement.

Every so often I google the names of people I used to know in high school. It’s a fun game to play because I graduated from a class of seventy-nine people (coincidentally, we were the class of ‘79) in a town so far removed from any place you’ve every heard of that almost none of my old class mates register anywhere on the internet. I mean it, google just flat-out doesn’t know they exist. That’s pretty amazing, when you think about it. It’s almost like having the power of invisibility.

I can guess how about half of them do it: Some of the girls I knew must have gotten married by now, so their last names probably morphed. I might be able to find an old newspaper article from thirty years ago if I wanted to flip through all 22,791 results, but life is short and this is mostly just goofing off. But one of my good friends from back then, Greg Hoffland, has never, in all the years I’ve been pinging his name off search engines, appeared on the net. His name doesn’t even generate a results page with a bunch of links to zoominfo.com and genaological laundry lists of gravestones, just the message that my search didn’t generate any results. He couldn’t have disappeared more completely if he’d emigrated to the moon. (Now that I think about it, a change of address to the moon would’ve probably made the news, so I can rule that out.)

Other searches gave me lots and lots of results, most of them ambiguous. Dave Rohde, for instance, was the name of a guy I went to school with, as well as the name of a Pulitzer-winning journalist who writes for the New York Times, and the name of a web site (www.daverohde.de) belonging to a German guy with a microphone. The guy I knew became a doctor and still lives in Wisconsin, though, so it wasn’t too hard to figure out which search results pointed in his direction.

One search for old school chums I had a lot of fun doing began when I tried looking for Joan Retzke. I didn’t expect much in the way of results the first time I googled her full name because I figured that her family name would’ve changed by now, and when the results I got almost all came back in German I figured it must be a dead end. When you get results from web sites on the other side of the planet, that’s usually an indication that you ought to try a different tack.

I noticed, though, that nearly all of the sites had something to do with music, and Joan was well-known around our town because, as the lead trumpet player in our high school band, she found the opportunity to develop a truly amazing talent: that girl could make a trumpet speak. Honestly, we had some good musicians in our high school band, but she topped them all. And I’d heard a while back that she lived in Switzerland for a while, so I took a closer look at those results.

Then I found this photo in an issue of the International Trumpet Guild Journal. The face isn’t clear enough to make a positive ID — if she had been sitting at the table like the rest in the photo, I don’t think I would have been able to tell it was her — but that pose is pure Joan Retzke. It couldn’t possibly be anybody else. She wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the text, just her name in the caption tipped the all-seeing google, but the article it was attached to had something to do with a convention in Germany, so I went back to the rest of the results from that neck of the woods.

I think she’s a member of a chamber orchestra in Chur, Switzerland. An old entry on a “Where are they now?” list on my high school’s web page mentioned she lived in Chur. There are only a few photos of the orchestra, none of them very revealing except for a tight shot of the group standing on a train station platform. Just one woman, right of center in the back row, is holding a trumpet, and she looks an awful lot like Joan.

No matter where you go, the google will find you.

I was a roving vagabond in my dream last night, if a vagabond is a mooching indigent who returns to his mother’s house to ask for a shower and a place to spread his bedroll for the next few months. She let me doss down with my sleeping bag in the shed in the back yard where, it turned out, my brother had also taken up residence. When Mom said “shed in the backyard” I recalled the chicken coop we had out there, but it had grown quite a bit in the bizarre dreamworld I was roaming this morning. Pete gave me the grand tour, downstairs, upstairs, the stables where he kept the horses and the driver’s seat. Most sheds don’t come with horses and a driver’s seat, but during the tour this one morphed into a huge wooden wagon that rolled out of town and all the way to a small German village (and of its own volition; the horses apparently weren’t needed to make it go, they were there just for atmosphere). When the wagon stopped, we climbed down wandered the streets of the village for quite a while, oooing and ahhhhing at the cut-stone facades of the centuries-old buildings, before I woke up in desperate need of a pee.

I’ve learned by way of a weekend phone call to my mother that a girl I knew all the way back in 1972-ish, a girl I knew when I was still wiping my nose on my sleeve, a girl I practically grew up with, is a grandmother. I still want to hyperventilate when I’m struck by the reality that I’ve got a son who’s a senior in high school and another who’s a college graduate, but this is positively weirding me out!

Her daughter married the son of a guy my brother went to school with and now they’ve got a baby and that fills all the technical requirements of “grandmother” right there, so I should be able to get my head around such a simple fact, but I’m still having trouble. I don’t know how appropriate it is to mention at this point that she’s younger than I am, but I’ve already got a solid reputation for failing to stick with propriety and my foot’s firmly stuck in my mouth now anyway.

Grandparent. That could’ve been me! Neither one of our boys has anything like that in the offing, that I know of, but I supposed I’d better make an honest effort to accept that they’re going to in the shockingly near future and there’s nothing I can do about it but prepare myself. If all I can do is gulp and take a deep breath, that’s at least a start in the right direction.

I sprouted a couple Dennis the Menace-type cowlicks from the whorl on the top of my head this morning that no amount of anybody’s spit could get to lie flat. Not that I asked the rest of my coworkers for help, but wouldn’t that be a hoot? Hey, guys, could you give your hand a big, wet lick and see if you can pat this rooster tail down? Thanks! The funny thing is, there are one or two people in my office who would give it a try. Actually, I think all of them would.

Today is, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday when most of us get a day off from work so we can go to the mattress sale at American Home Furniture, because King couldn’t have had that dream of his without a good night’s sleep on a quality mattress. To keep going with the bed metaphor, I hate to be the wet blanket on the whole idea of a Martin Luther King national holiday, but did we really need another day off to go hang out at the mall?

Federal holidays don’t apply to banks, for some reason, at least not all of them. The big one back in Washington, D.C. is closed, and a couple of the more local offices are, too, but not the one I work in, so I reported to my cubicle today to answer phone calls and process applications. I have to say I was surprised to get quite a lot more of both than I would have ever expected. Maybe they were looking for a quickie line of credit for that mattress?

I got an application from somebody in Monroe, Wisconsin, who gave her address on the 1300 block of Sixteen and One-Half street. I figured she had to be mistaken, or it was a typo, so I pulled up a street plan of Monroe on google maps and it showed not only that there was in fact a street called Sixteen and One-Half, but that there are maybe three streets in Monroe that are named; all the rest are numbered. Monroe is not a small town. So who the hell founded the city of Monroe? Math wizards? Profoundly unimaginative pioneers?

“Who uses a hand drill any more?” my brother asked, in reference to my Saturday story of installing weather stripping around the front door. “Who even owns a hand drill?” Probably not very many people younger than forty-five. I see boxes full of hand tools at the auctions I sometimes visit, and most of them are rusty from lack of use. Thing is, I could really use a good hand drill. The one I’ve got is undersized, made for the thin-as-wire drill bits I use for hobby work. It could just barely handle the one-eighth inch bit I was using Saturday, the chuck slipping every time the tip of the bit dug into something hard, like wood, for instance. A full-sized hand drill would have made short work of the job.

I also have a push drill. I don’t know what the real name for it would be. It looks like a long screwdriver with a chuck at one end and a telescoping shaft that twists as it collapses when you push on the handle. My grandpa had one and I’ve wanted one ever since he let me play handyman with the one on his work bench, so when I saw one at an auction I didn’t hesitate a moment to snap it up. It’s used mostly to drive screws, but in a steady hand it could drill a hole through soft wood quick as a sneeze. A prized posession.

Not so prized is my collection of rechargable electric drills, an outstanding example of flashy technology made to sucker men out of their money by appealing to gadget lust. I have two and they’re both stone-cold dead, never to come to life again because nobody sells batteries for them any longer. Even though I think they’re a waste of money, they’re probably worth their weight in gold to building contractors who can afford to buy batteries by the six-pack and rotate them as they wear out. Since that doesn’t appeal to the skinflint in me, I’ve given up on rechargable electrics.

The best electric drill I own is a Black & Decker variable speed reversable with a gosh-darned old-fasioned cord that plugs into a wall socket. It has the compact, blocky shape of a Colt forty-five pistol and is just as durable; I must’ve bought it twenty years ago and it’s still going strong, although the chuck is getting a little wobbly, which means the bearing’s probably ready to go soon. When it does I’ll have to take it apart and figure out how to replace it because I can’t stand the idea of shopping for a new one. Like a favorite shoe style that disappears in a season or two, I just know nothing that’s on the shelves will satisfy me.

If you’ve ever heard anything at all about the Brooklyn Bridge you’ve probably heard that the man who built it was paralyzed by “the bends” and as a result had to oversee the remaining construction of the bridge from the window of his house. I mean, you would’ve heard that if you’d somehow managed not only to stay awake in history class, but you also had a memory that retained that kind of trivia after final exams instead of immediately flushing it to make room for pop music lyrics and girls’ telephone numbers, useful stuff like that.

The story turns out to be one of those lies your teacher taught you (no offense to your teacher; if you heard it from an uncle, blame him). The builder, Washington Roebling, was crippled by caisson sickness twice, the first time pretty badly, but he recovered and was well enough to go on working. The second time he was struck down so badly that he didn’t return to the bridge for months and was so weakened by the constant pain he suffered afterwards that he could hardly lift his head, but he did continue to oversee the construction of the bridge through correspondence with the engineers on site. He dictated meticulous instructions to his wife as he lay invalid in a sick bed, first in Wiesbaden where he went to take the mineral baths, then in Trenton, his home town. She read the instructions back to him so he could make corrections, then she wrote them out in a formal letter, which she read back to him again. He not only built the bridge that way, he managed the family business, a factory that made three-quarters of all the wire manufactured in the United States.

This reminded me of the story I heard a week or two ago on the anniversary of the birthday of Milton, the poet who composed Paradise Lost in his head as he lay in bed each night, then dictated the stanzas the next morning to whatever member of his family would take the time to write it down. He had to do it that way; he’d gone blind by that time and couldn’t write it down himself. When I think of how hard it is for me to keep a shopping list of no more than half a dozen items in my head, or simple measurements of length and width of a board I want to cut from lumber, it strikes me what a special kind of genius, or perhaps a nearly-debilitating derangement, it takes to keep a mind focused on projects as dense as building a bridge to span the East River, or writing an epic poem that will live through the ages to torment tens of thousands of literature students.

Many people have described a profound inner peace they experience when they’re outdoors by themselves before the sun rises. I got to experience a little early-morning outdoorsiness myself today as I slowly made my way from the garage door to the street with a snow shovel, clearing six new inches of fresh, fluffy snow off the driveway, but I don’t know that I’d describe it as “peaceful.” Our driveway is about twenty feet long and after taking my shower, making and eating breakfast and cleaning out the cat box, I had just enough time left to clear the driveway if I could somehow manage to do it at a rate of a little more than foot a minute. No pressure there.

But hey! Twenty minutes after I started I was back inside, huffing and puffing to catch my breath as I peeled out of my heavy down jacket, but Done! And I even cleared the front walk, too. ‘Ray for me.

Yesterday night, the very same night I described my pack-rat drill collection in an especially drivelish episode of logorrhea, I nearly hacked the nail of my middle finger off while attempting to reverse-engineer one of the battery-powered models by chiseling away at a locking ring with a screwdriver. The first rule of chiseling has always been ... well, the first rule would be to use an actual chisel, not a screwdriver, but I can’t be the only one guilty of that kind of abuse. I believe a smarter man than I once said something like, “Let he who has never used a screwdriver as a chisel cast the first stone,” and I expect nary a stone was thrown even then.

Assuming the use of a chisel, then, the first rule of applying it would be, “Point the chisel away from any and every part of your body, lest ye hack away part of yourself,” and that would include your finger, should you happen to wrap it around the neck of the object targeted for chiseling to steady it. A red light in the octagonal shape of a stop sign should flash before your eyes, ideally accompanied by the OOoooo-gah horn, if any part of you gets on the wrong side of a chisel. I’m equipped with both these warning signs, and yet, despite all these fail safes, I gashed my finger when the screwdriver-chisel pinged off the metal barrel of the drill chuck, as Newtonian laws of physics decree it must do.

Somehow, I seem to always gash a part of my finger that turns out to come into direct contact with the most irritating and repetitive tasks of my daily life. The newly-gashed part of my finger, for instance, gets regularly dragged against my shoelaces as I tie them and the fly of my pants as I zip it, both of which I must do several times a day at least. I’ll bet Newton’s apple konked a law about that into his head, too.

And for what? I was trying to make a Frankenstein’s hobby lathe out of an electric drill, but an adquate power source seems to be a problem. I don’t know how I ever managed to use this thing as a drill; the motor can barely turn the chuck, even now that I’ve got the output from the charger wired directly into it. Needs more amperage, or maybe it just needs killin’.

Tim gave a spirited defense of chicken nuggets the other day after dinner, reminding me my coworker who said she loved eating Taco Bell even though it made her sick because “it tasted so good.” Tim said the same thing about chicken nuggets, even though he knows they’re made of chicken chunks he wouldn’t ever consider touching, let along putting in his mouth, if they were prepared any other way. “So long as they load it up with sugar and salt so it always tastes that good, I don’t care what else they put in there,” he said.

He argued his defense of American fast-food slop after he finished dining at a table laid with yet another of his mother’s finest efforts in the kitchen. I point it out only because My Darling B sincerely loves to cook and uses only the finest ingredients she can find, usually from local farmers. She’s very inventive about it, too; rarely will she cook the same dish twice. For most picky teenaged eaters that would be a recipe for disaster, and to be completely honest there have been times when Tim turned his nose up at a lovingly prepared quiche or similar dish that had a Frronch name or was the wrong color, but most of the time he hungrily downed whatever his mother prepared for him, then asked for more.

And this was the same child who defended chicken nuggets with a vehemance that a trial lawyer would admire. Tim is stranger than fiction.

The best part of reading about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is that it was built back in that era when the workers thought nothing of doing their work as they dangled from the bridge’s cables on chairs made of a single four-inch wooden plank and some rope. To save time and fuss, they would sometimes forego the chairs and go hand-over-hand along the cable to undo a snagged wire.

There was a temporary footbridge rigged from one side of the river across the towers to the opposite shore. It was one of those jungle bridges you see in Indiana Jones movies, planks four feet wide with gaps between them, and had no railing, but spectators asked every day to walk across it, and the management let them! They figured it was good public relations. They drew the line at letting a woman ride her horse across, though. They didn’t want to make it into a show. Got to preserve some sense of decorum.

Walking back from the coffee shop this afternoon, I passed a utility van parked next to the hotel on cap square and noticed that the driver’s keys were hanging from the door, and not just the keys to the ignition but a ring packed thick with at least a dozen keys, free for the taking. Not that I’d take them, but in all of Madison there are probably one or two people who would, so I detoured into the lobby of the hotel to ask the woman at the desk about the van.

“Oh, yes, he’s one of the contractors doing some work in the rooms today,” she said.

“Well, the keys to his van are hanging from the door,” I warned her.

“He’s going in an out a lot,” she recalled. “He probably left them there.”

Gee, ya think? “But maybe he didn’t mean to,” I suggested. “Maybe you could let him know his keys are hanging in the door.”

She mugged and answered, “I’m not sure where he is.” Then her face brightened and she said, “You could tell the bellmen,” and indicated a small office just off the main entrance, where a couple of guys in parkas and knit caps were waiting for incoming guests at the opening to the underground parking.

“’Scuze me,” I said, “that blue van in the parking lot, just around the corner, it’s keys are hanging from the lock in the door.” Both of them stared at me with a blank expression that clearly said, Well? What do you want me to do about it? and then one of them said “thank you” and they turned and went back to their work.

Well, I tried. I thought about just grabbing the keys out of the door and leaving them on the desk, but given the lack of concern from the hotel staff I had the nasty feeling they’d only lose the keys. Also, I’m uncomfortable about approaching anybody’s car these days. No matter how helpful I’m being, it’s not immediately obvious and I’d like to avoid being litigated into oblivion over a misunderstanding stemming from a set of forgotten car keys or an open door.

So I left them. That way, the contractor couldn’t help but find them when he went back to his van. I’d already called the two phone numbers painted on the side of the van but got an answering machine both times, so that was out. The only other thing left to do was go room-to-room through the hotel until I found the contractor myself, and I didn’t have time for that, or to wait by his van until he came back.

It boggles my mind that the hotel staff were so oblivious to the predicament. If it had turned out to be one of their cars, I’ll bet they would have dashed out like a shot to grab the keys from the door, but somebody else’s car ... eh.

Tim called MATC! He now knows when he can sign up for classes and what classes he can enroll in, and we had to remind him for only five or six weeks, but he finally called them!

MATC is the local technical school where Tim wants to take classes to be a firefighter — I'm sure they have a much more highfalutin, something along the lines of “emergency conflagrations response technician” — but I hadn’t heard a word about this until his mother casually brought it up over dinner two or three weeks ago. In fact, I think the way she brought it up was, “Have you called MATC yet?” Since his answer then, and every night since then, was no, I figured maybe he’d thought it over and decided against it, or maybe he never was all that serious about it in the first place.

And then yesterday, as soon as we came through the door, he announced that he’d called MATC and had all the low-down on class dates and enrollment deadlines. Wowzers! One step closer to graduation to the real world!

Supper was prepared in panic mode tonight. If you’ve been paying any attention at all to this drivel, although I couldn’t blame you if you didn’t, you may remember that Thursday is the night the O-Men prepare dinner while the O-Goddess waits in repose on the living room sofa, or wherever she has a mind to relax.

“What are we fixing for dinner?” I asked Tim on the phone, when I called him at home around four-thirty.

“Uhhhh,” came the reply, and a long, no doubt introspective pause followed. “Dunno,” he finally answered.

“Why don’t you have a look in the freezer to see if there’s any hamburger in there?” I suggested, hamburgers nearly always being a good default entree to build a dinner around. He couldn’t find any, though, and wasn’t inspired by anything else he saw in the freezer, so I told him I was going to stop at the market on the way home to pick up some soba noodles. I’d whip up stir-fried noodles and veggies for dinner. Executive decision. There. The menu’s decided.

“We’re stopping on the way,” I told My Darling B as we cruised down Willy street.

“What for?” she wanted to know, so I told her my plan for dinner. “Besides that, we need bread,” I finished up. “I’ve got to have it for toast in the morning.”

“That’s fine, but we already have soba noodles,” she pointed out.

“Really? Where?”

“In the freezer.”

I guess Tim’s ealier reconnaissance missed those.

So we still stopped at the market but didn’t have to get noodles, only bread and coffee, and I wanted some mushrooms to go with the stir-fry. Nobody else will touch them, but I had a hankering for them and we were there anyway. B picked out some dessert bars, too.

Stir fry is really, truly and legally guy food, even though you have to chop up the veggies. That’s the hardest part, and I guess you could even forego that step if you didn’t mind biting into a whole onion or head of cabbage. I would advise chopping them up. You don’t even have to be neat about it; in fact, the messier you do it, the more professional it looks, and presentation does count for something. You pay a lot for it in your finest restaurants. Not that I’m saying I’m going to work in any of them when I grow up, I’m just pointing out that I could get on Iron Chef any time I wanted. It’s like growing up to be President; anyone can do it. (Insert joke about current president here.)

Then you throw the veggies into a pan with some canola oil, stir it around until it starts to sizzle, and dump it on a plate. That’s the “stir fry” part. The noodles go into the pan next, add a little water to keep them moist, and when they start to sizzle, throw the veggies back in. What could be more bachelor-like in food preparation than that? Opening a can of beans is harder. Oh, it is too. Just finding the can opener is harder, and you know it.

My Darling B gratefully wolfed down her helping of stir fry and helped herself to more. Tim picked through the veggies to eat the noodles, but one serving was enough for him. Being that fussy is like work. I guess he wasn’t up to it. That left enough to make up a couple lunches for tomorrow!

As I finished The Great Bridge I kept thinking what a great movie this could be. The problem with making it into a movie, though, was that it would probably be given a poignently dramatic ending. Washington Roebling would manage to just barely hang on until the last brick was laid and the last cable was strung, then utter a few weighty last words as he lay prostrate in his sick bed, and a slow fade as the credits began to roll would suggest he’d finally shuffled off this vale of tears after completing his life’s work.

In fact, he did no such thing. The bridge was completed, obviously, and Roebling stayed on to the very end despite attempts by some political back-stabbers to remove him from the job. With the constant help of his wife, Emily, he oversaw most of the construction of the bridge from his sick bed, continuing to suffer from some kind of nervous hypersensitivity that exhausted him if he left his house for more than a few hours, but with each year that passed his health improved. It all ended in fireworks and a visit from the president (Chester Arthur, remember him? Of course you don’t. Nobody does.) on opening day in 1883.

He lived on another forty-three years after that, outliving even his wife and his brothers and returning to manage the family’s world-class wire factory while he was in his eighties, modernizing the plant and continuing to land fat contracts that kept the business competitive.

But back to the bridge one last time, here’s a bit of trivia for you: He didn’t set foot on the bridge until years after it opened, crossing it arm in arm with Emily on a day trip to New York. Nobody recognized him.

I picked up a copy of The Kite Runner almost three years ago on a tip from my mother, who has never yet been wrong about good books. I started reading it then, but that was just after we’d returned to Madison, and pretty soon job-hunting began to occupy all my time so I had to put the book aside. Last night I picked it up again after finishing The Great Bridge and thumbed through the first few pages; it felt right, so I kept going. A novel usually does after reading a thick history.

I heard about Do You Believe? on a show on NPR but don’t remember any of the details, just that Antonio Monda, a teacher at New York University and documentary-maker whom I’ve never heard of before, interviewed a whole clutch of writers, film makers and I don’t know what category Jane Fonda fits into, asking them specifically about their religious beliefs, sometimes shooting off in different directions but usually sticking to the central question of the book’s title. No surprises when he gets to Elie Wiesel, I bet.

The Kite Runner is good! I somehow managed to zoom through the first nine chapters by reading after lights-out yesterday evening, grabbing another chapter or two at breakfast, a couple more after My Darling B dropped me off at work, snuck in two or three pages during my morning trip to the throne room, gulped another chapter on my mid-morning break, stayed in during lunch hour ... agh, you get the idea. It was hard to stop for anything. I had to force myself to put it down for the twenty minutes it took to rap out this drivel, and I should go to bed right after I’m done because I’ve got to take Tim to his SAT in the morning but I’ll probably stay up way too late. Beware! Pick up this book and you’re doomed to keep on reading until you’re done!

I’m never sure what I want to take away from a book like Do You Believe? I read it with some anticipation that I might see the light; a bolt from the blue is a constant quest, I think, but once again it never came. The believers that Monda interviewed all danced around the question of god’s existence by describing god as “that which I cannot understand,” begging the question: Well, what if you could? Would god, then, cease to exist? And why, by the way, do people seem unable to use contractions when talking about the infinite?

Obviously, there are mysteries in life. Our capacity for self-examination, and our ability to record and pass on our analysis and conclusions, are our most valuable assets. Nobody that I know of has demonstrated once and for all that any of the other animals are able to do either. Why should that be? I have to admit this is a genuine mystery.

But is a mystery like this an indicator of an unknowable intelligence? I can’t see why it should necessarily follow that it is. We may never understand how our self-consciousness works, and at the same time it’s entirely possible that somebody who’s alive right now and has been thinking about it all her life will figure it all out by the end of next week. Einstein observed that “the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is all comprehensible,” and I think that’s probably true, but of course I can’t know that for sure because I don’t have Einstein’s brain, I don’t have even a tenth of it. If he’s even a little bit right, though, we will continue to expand our understanding one order of magnitude after another until a schlub like me will take it for granted that the universe it knowable, and then what?

Until we work up to that, though, we’ll have authors like Monda to ask the really important questions, like: “How do you imagine god?” He got these answers — from Saul Bellow: “I don’t want to talk about that. I’m afraid of banality ...” — from Michael Cunningham, “She’s black.” (He didn’t mean to be facetious, and went on to explain: “When I was very young I had a babysitter, a big black woman I loved extravegantly,” which reminded me of Salinger’s portrayal of Jesus Christ in Franny and Zooey) — from Paula Fox, “I don’t believe in the common image of God as a male ... I think that what is defined as God is the answer that each of us gives in obedience to an inner law ...” — from Daniel Libeskind, “I don’t have a precise idea, nor do I believe that it’s possible to have one.” — from Derek Walcott, “It is difficult, in fact impossible, to separate it from the image inculcated in me from my childhood ... a white man with a beard. Wise and old.”

My workout this afternoon was thirty or forty minutes with an ice scraper and snow shovel, making my way, inch by inch, from the garage door to the curb. That ice scraper takes a lot of the frustration out of getting the tire tracks off the pavement, but it’s slow going. I scraped everything off right to the edge of the asphalt before I stood up at the end of the driveway, straightened my back out with a long, popping stretch, then admired my handiwork for a minute or two before walking up the driveway to put the shovel and scraper away in the garage and retiring to the recliner to read a couple more chapters of The Kite Runner.

Twenty minutes later the city plow came by, dammit. I had half-hoped it would be too late in the afternoon for him to be making the rounds of the back roads. Bowing to the inevitable, I put my boots and gloves back on and trudged out to the garage to get the shovel.

All the alarm clocks here in Our Humble O-Bode started bleeping at six o’clock this morning, just like the previous five days, except that My Darling B and I weren’t getting up to go to work, and Tim wasn’t going to school. We had to drive Tim across town to West High School, where he could sit for the SAT. “Who’s bright idea was it to schedule a test at an hour of the day when they know nobody can think straight?” Tim asked disgustedly as we headed out the door. Good question, Tim, and one I used to ask myself every time I marched down to the education center at o-dark thirty on whatever military post I was assigned to to take my yearly advancement test. My best guess is, they want to put everybody at the same disadvantage.

He went in at quarter to eight and came back out at quarter to one, “the most boring five hours I’ve ever wasted in my life,” he said. And something else: “That test was easy! Anybody who can’t pass the SAT should be shot.” Not that he has an opinion, or would hold back if he did. He was especially proud of his essay, a wrinkle added some time after I took my SAT; it was all fill-in-the-bubble back then. The question had something to do with creativity, if I remember, and he let them have it with both barrels. “I used a little profanity — just to add the necessary emphasis,” he said with relish. I wonder if we can get a copy of that?

B and I stopped at the farmer’s market on the way home after dropping Tim off. The entertainment this week was provided by a string trio: a bass player with the cool presence of a beatnik, a tiny slip of a girl fiddling nimbly at his side, and across from them a woman with a wild shock of hair in leopardskin tights and a gauzy polka-dotted skirt picking on an electric six-string with a body that looked as if she’d cut it herself out of the discarded top of a maple wood table.

As B shopped for apples, I stopped to listen. They were picking out a slow, almost sleepy version of the Violent Femmes tune Blister In The Sun. I was tempted to ask them if they were familiar with any Devo songs. Gut Feeling would’ve followed their version of Blister In The Sun just perfectly, but alas, B was done shopping. It was time to go.

It seems like a paradox at first, that my basement lair gets colder as the weather gets warmer, but it makes sense with only a little thought: The upstairs rooms stay warmer longer when temps climb into the thirties and forties, and the thermostat is upstairs, so when the weather warms up the furnace doesn’t run as often. Thus, the basement, which is comfortably warm in the winter only so long as the furnace is running often and for a long time, and particularly my lair, was warm, even cozy, when the forecast has nothing but single digits, or double digits with negative numbers, but it turns into a meat locker when a warm front blows in and the snow starts to melt.

Today it was sunny and warm enough outside that I stayed upstairs through most of the day, reading the Sunday paper at the kitchen table with a piping hot cuppa in one hand, watching Young Frankenstein as I folded overflowing baskets of laundered clothes, and finishing off the last of The Kite Runner in the recliner while My Darling B filled the house with the yummy aromas of baked hush puppies, another mouth-watering food experiment that turned out oh-so-right. I got to nosh on a couple right out of the oven. I love food experiments!

She followed it up with baked fish & chips, which I guess a purist would turn away from ... more for me! Not that I’m flat-out opposed to deep-frying, mind you. She deep-fried some chicken in one of last week’s food experiments and that was delicious, too. Messy, but that was mostly because that was the first time I tried to pick up a drumstick and eat it like finger food since I grew a beard. Either it’s always a messy undertaking or it requires nibbling skills I have yet to develop.

Thank goodness The Kite Runner didn’t get all sappy and sentimental at the end. When I read in the newspaper that it will be released as a movie very shortly I was a bit worried that the author might have written it with a movie ending in mind, but he never boiled the story down to that. It’s got to be one of the hardest things for a writer to do, to give the reader a satisfying ending without crossing the line into emotional manipulation, especially when it’s a story about courage and redemption, as The Kite Runner is.

The only thing that didn’t work for me was the episode when Amir, the narrator of the story, returns to Kabul to rescue the son of his boyhood friend. Up until that point, I couldn’t help but read the story as a true event. I knew it was a novel, and therefore fiction, but it was so well-told that I could have accepted everything that happened as true. When Amir returned to Kabul, though, and found that his friend’s son was in the clutches of their boyhood enemy, that was one too many coincidences for me.

The Kite Runner is still a good story in spite of this fly in the ice cream, though, and I can honestly say I read every page with anticipation and felt good about the ending, even though it didn’t end happily ever after as the music swelled (especially because it didn’t, now that I think about it).

What I don’t know about economics amounts to a hill of beans so huge that I would have to go to a four-year school just to calculate the size of my non-knowledge, which, ironically, would probably make me rather more knowledgable about economics. But from what little I’ve read about our economy, I know this year the feds will run a deficit of something like two-hundred fifty billion dollars. Put in much plainer terms I can cope with, that means when the feds get done balancing the nation’s checkbook this year, there’s not going to be a cushion. To be a teensy bit more precise, it means they’re going to be short by a quarter-trillion dollars, and if that’s just the shortfall, then it’s no surprise the size of the economy itself is so mind-boggling huge that we have to use made-up words like “trillion” to describe it.

To “stimulate” such a staggeringly enormous economy, our fearless leader wants congress to reach into one of the treasury’s paper shopping bags filled with greenbacks (the social security fund? Medicare?) and fling one-hundred fifty million dollars into the grasping hands of the teeming masses in the hopes they’ll go spend it on iPods. I can understand a measly one-hundred fifty million dollars: That’s just five hundred thousand iPods, hardly enough to stock the shelves at Wal-Mart. Tell me that’s not a flea on an elephant’s back.

If I had a principled bone in my body I’d send their tax refund right back to them ... and in fact, I think I will! No, really. Instead of an iPod, our refund will pay off the income tax we owe the feds. They’re going to send us a fistful of dollars, and we’re going to fling it right back at them. Ironically, that’s exactly what they don’t want us to do with our refund, if I were to believe any of the economists who are quoted in the papers, which I don’t, because they’ve been barking contradictory advice on how to weather this economic mess ever since news of it broke. I told you I didn’t know beans about economics. How am I supposed to know which one of them is right? So instead of running out to stimulate the economy with our windfall, we’re going to pay our bills with it. Maybe that’s not All-American, but it’s not against the law yet.

LATER: I heard on the news it was one-hundred fifty billion, not million, a thousand times more decimal places to the right than I can think about without getting a headache, so nevermind. You have just witnessed a demonstration of how awfully I suck at math, and the key to the cosmic practical joke that I now work in a bank.

A bar of Green & Black’s dark chocolate is divided up into rows of three tabs, each about the size of a slightly flattened die (that’s one of many dice; I can’t make myself say “a slightly flattened dice” no matter how weird the singular looks, so you’ll just have to put up with my being a grammatical nerd). This afternoon I spoiled myself by breaking off a whole row and eating all three tabs, guiltily enjoying every bite but sure I was headed to Heart Attack City before quitting time. As I folded up the wrapper to put the rest back in a desk drawer, I noticed that a serving size is twelve pieces, four times as much chocolate as I had eaten with the thought of the lurching spectre of artery-cloggin cholesterol looking on.

And three pieces is about all I could possibly eat in one afternoon. The bar of Green & Black’s in my stash of snack food is 70% full-strength cocoa. If you’re not used to it, a tab of that is like a gulp of dark-roast coffee with maybe half a lump of sugar stirred into it. It really grabs you by the boo-boo. But what a great snack food — I can eat all I want, all I can stand, and it’s way less than the recommended serving size. Buy a bag of potato chips and the label says it’s something like ten servings, a single serving being about six chips. Who eats six chips? Nobody I know, certainly not me. When My Darling B brings a bag home from the market, pops it open and lays it on the table, it’s a fast and furious race to the bottom.

I thought Coming of Age in the Milky Way was going to be a book about astronomy. I snagged it off the listings at Paperbackswap.com when I was looking for something easier to follow than Voyage to the Great Attractor, which was eye-opening reading but conceptually it was like trying to drink from a fire hose. I needed something a little more basic for my simple mind to chew on before I could digest everything Dressler had to say about the Great Attractor.

As it turns out, Coming of Age is in fact about astronomy, but also so much more than that, or at least the first three chapters are. They tie the founding and growth of astronomy to the history of the world. The author, Timothy Ferris, has a story-telling style that reminds me a lot of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, and Ferris can do it without the drawings. (Although, if he could draw like Gonick did in the early days, it couldn’t have hurt.)

I remember seeing Christopher Hitchens sparring good-naturedly with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show about his defense of the war in Iraq. He really is all for it, and I like the way he writes, so when I saw his book, The Long Short War, in the window of the Veteran’s Museum on cap square during my noon walk, I detoured over to the library and checked it out. I read the first chapter night before last, an introduction to the rest of the chapters which are a collection of articles Hitchens wrote for Slate, the on-line magazine.

Here’s a demonstration of numbers used to describe the real world in ways I’ll never understand: When I checked the National Weather Service’s web page as I ate breakfast to find out what I should wear to work, the weather guys at the airport were measuring a temperature of forty-seven degrees, but the forecast called for a high temperature of thirty-seven degrees. Now, how can the forecasted high be lower than the measured current temperature?

Here’s another one: We’ve seen more than just a few forecasts that call for a 100% chance of snowfall, or rain, or whatever. Only an all-knowing god could tell you with 100% certainty that it was going to rain, right? Do they have some old, out-of-work god behind a desk at the National Weather Service? That would explain the forecasts that don’t quite pan out. I mean, if he was once a god worshipped by millions with the powers of creation at his fingertips, but now he’s consigned to a corner cubicle at the National Weather Service writing forecasts — “Hey Thor! Whaddaya think? Chance of rain today?” — a fall like that would have to make a god more than a little curmudgeonly, I would think. And if he were an angry god in the first place, it’d suit him, wouldn’t it, to fudge the numbers a bit now and then, just to keep everybody on their toes, right? He’d have an especially vengeful grin for each of the soaking-wet meteorologists who came to work without their umbrellas on what was supposed to have been a clear day, scowling at him from the doorway, shaking the rain out of their jackets. “Ten percent chance ... funny, Thor, very funny.”

We have a rule at our dinner table, set and enforced by My Darling B, that there will be no discussion of the evacuation of any bodily secretions while we are seated for the evening meal. If you have a teenaged boy in your family, or maybe if a teenaged boy has merely dined with you, you understand why we have to make a rule like this. The Youngest O-Man likes almost nothing as much as grossing his mother out by mentioning his most satisfying trip to the men’s room that day (he makes several). And that’s not the only subject he knows that’ll make his mom gag. She’s had to amend the rule more than a couple times as he’s explored the loopholes.

I mention this to illustrate the reason, as graphically as some sense of decorum would allow, that there’s almost no subject you can think of mentioning, not even while eating supper, that would gross out Tim — or so I thought.

Lately Tim’s been trying, with great success, I might add (congratulations to eliaslite@gmail.com), to ween himself of chewing his fingernails to the bone and, last night, was showing off the longest nails he’s grown so far, all on his right hand because he’s still chewing the nails on his left, part of the weening plan — he’s never had much luck quitting cold turkey. Quite a long nail was growing from his middle finger and he said he was going to trim that back a bit, which his mother urged him not to do “because you never know when you’re going to need it.” When Tim asked her exactly what he would need it for, forgetting years of being unable to pry up the pull tabs on pop cans, she said, “Well, for example, a long pinky nail is really handy if you’ve got to scoop boogers out of a baby’s nose.”

I’ve seen Tim blanche on only a few occasions, most satisfyingly when he caught My Darling B and I in each other’s clutches, sharing a passionate snog, but the very idea of scooping snot from anybody’s nose made his face convulse in such a violent way that I would normally have expected to see that expression on him only in the moment he was unexpectedly hit by a truck. Once B realized what she had, she milked it for all it was worth, demonstrating her technique, pinky extended, just the right amount of twist in the wrist to keep her hand steady. He couldn’t get over it. “Why would you ever do that?”

“You’ll have to do that some day,” B pointed out.

“No, I will not!”

So, with poopy jokes out of bounds, we discussed Tim’s last semester of high school classes. He got bumped from a class in ethics he wanted to take because he had the teacher for a class in government last semester and liked her a lot, but there were too many students signed up and he was out. The teacher lets him audit the class, though, and he’s just as happy with that, maybe more so “because I won’t have homework and I don’t have to go when I don’t feel like it.”

And his last semester will include a PE class that he’s been putting off forever because he hates PE. It’s not working out he hates, or physical labor; he’ll bend himself to that and work long, hard hours even when he doesn’t like it (except maybe for cleaning the bathroom), but PE is, in his words, “a complete waste of time” and he’s determined not to waste it on any but his own terms. Paradoxically, he should be able to earn a passing grade in the class even if he sits on the bench every single day. He’s got it worked out this way: Tests count for seventy-five percent of his grade, and he knows he can ace every one of those; he did it last time he took PE. The other twenty-five percent comes from participation, and he can earn enough points in that to pass just by showing up and dressing out.

Have you been keeping up with the presidential campaigns, by any chance? Me, neither. I think that if, at the next debate, the moderator would pass out hockey sticks and goalies’ face masks and they just started wailing away on each other when the moderator said “Go!” I’d tune in for that. It’s pretty much what they’re doing anyway, without the bloodshed, and what this campaign could desperately use at this point is a few broken noses. I honestly can’t see what’s holding them back from smacking each other. If John McCain showed up at a rally with a split lip and a mouse under his eye and shouted, “You should see the other guy!” I could possibly get behind him again. I think most people could. Maybe I’m wrong, but I bet I’m not.

It’s funny, I can imagine the Republicans beating each other up with gusto, arms windmilling in a vicious dust-up, but when I try to picture the Dems going hand-to-hand I can’t imagine them going beyond some tentative cheek-slapping and shin-kicking, and I could easily see them crying foul and arguing for way too long over the shin-kicking. “She did it first!” “Oh, did not!”

There couldn’t possibly be a good reason for me to write about the weather, could there? I didn’t go out in it, except to scurry from the house to the car, then from the car to the office building. Stepping outside was like getting hit in the face with a blizzard of throwing knives. Cold ones. So I stayed in practically all day.

When we pulled up to a stop on Carroll Street, where I get out and My Darling B changes places with me, she will usually get out of the car at the same time I do and linger at the driver’s door to say good-bye and give me a peck, but this morning she waited until I’d grabbed my briefcase from the back seat and slung my backpack over my shoulder before she even opened her door to get out of the car. “SeeyaIloveyoubyebye!” she machine-gunned me as she scampered around the back of the car, hardly pausing to smooch on the way past, and tucked herself into the driver’s seat post-haste.

I did lose my mind, for only a minute or two, and decide to take my noon-time walk down State Street, just so I could say I’d done it, but when I checked the current temperature and found it was still a single digit with a negative in front of it, I chickened out. Curled up with a book in my cubicle.

And Tim got to stay home today! Lucky bugger. Most of the kids around Dane county did, even kids in the Madison public school district, which has got to be a sign of the apocalypse — Madison schools never close, not for snow, nor sleet, nor gloom of night, but today, apparently, even they thought it was cold enough to close. Just about all the kids at Tim’s school are bussed in from Cottage Grove, and since they won’t wear hats, mittens or even zip up their coats no matter how cold the temperature, the school’s administrators must have realized there would be nothing but kidsicles waiting at the bus stops, so they called it off. Tim found out about it by accident when his mother checked the morning news for road conditions and instead heard a long list of cancellations being read. After a quick double-check of the school’s internet page to confirm it was a done deal, Tim was all smiles. He even came down to my basement lair to rub it in my face before going back to bed.

I heard Julie Christie won an award from the Screen Actors Guild for her part in Away From Her, a movie I watched last week with My Darling B but haven’t commented on up to this point because it was so utterly depressing I didn’t know what to say about it. Christie plays a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s who puts herself in a home over the objections of her husband, and when he comes back to visit her she’s forgotten about him and is very obviously in love with one of the home’s residents. B started crying from the moment Christie made up her mind to enter the home, and didn’t stop until just before the end of the movie. I simply sank deeper into depression with each passing scene. Christie deserved the honors; she played her part well, and the movie was technically very good, just depressing as hell.

Here’s a bit from Timothy Ferris’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way that I just love. This is the kind of scientific connect-the-dots that made me such a nerd for science trivia when I was a boy (and I’m still pretty nerdy about it, I have to admit):

     ... The more that came to be understood about the distant stars, the more intimate they seemed, as connections were identified linking the earth and the stars. One such insight in particular would have interested Captain Cook. It has to do with the iron that made the nails that the Tahitians found so alluring.
     When the nuclear chemistry that powers the stars began to be deciphered by twentieth-century astrophysicists, it emerged that iron plays a central role in the evolution of stars. Stars burn by fusing the nuclei of the light atoms of hydrogen ... and helium .... In doing so stars release energy, which is how they shine, but they also build heavier atoms out of the lighter ones. As the process continues, each star forges atoms of carbon, oxygen, neon, sodium, magnesium and silicon, then nickel, cobalt, and, finally, iron. At iron the building stops; a normal, first-generation star lacks the energy required to make any heavier nuclei. The Sumerian name for iron, which means “metal from heaven,” is literally true: Iron is a working star’s proudest product.
     When a star runs out of fuel, it can become unstable and explode, spewing much of its substance, now rich in iron and other heavy elements, into space. As time passes, this expanding bubble of gas is intermixed with passing interstellar clouds. The sun and its planets congealed from one such cloud. Time passed, human beings appeared, miners in the north of England dug the iron from the earth, and ironmongers pounded it into nails that longshoremen loaded in barrels into the holds of HMS Endeavour. Off the nails went to Tahiti, continuing a journey that had begun in the bowels of stars that died before the sun was born. The nails that Cook’s men traded with the Tahitian dancing girls, while on an expedition to measure the distance of the sun, were, themselves, the shards of ancient suns.

I remember reading science texts and history books in school and wondering why they were so dreadfully dull, and now when I read books like Ferris’s I wonder, Why can’t schools use books like these? I would’ve been so into this!

I’ve had it with Norton Antivirus and I’m going to uninstall it. I mention it only because I cringe whenever I make a big change to software on my computer, expecting the worst. That’s usually what I get, too. If you don’t hear from me for the next couple days, you can assume it all went blooey.

I’m normally so averse to changing any software or settings because of blowups that I almost never do it, but after a recent product “upgrade” Norton’s been hogging so much of my computer’s processing time that my laptop becomes unusable for as much as thirty minutes at a stretch, typically when I’m writing something and I’ve hit a rhythm that I won’t get back if I have to stop. Before the “upgrade” I would go to my laptop’s systems page and shut down the process, but after the “upgrade” all the processes have new names and I haven’t been able to isolate the ones that are hogging my computer’s processor. All I can do is push the laptop away and pick up a pen.

I don’t know what I’ll switch to. Tim swears by an anti-virus program that he got free. A part of me has to wonder how good it is if it’s free, but I’m so desperate at this point that I’m willing to give it a try. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll look for something else.

I’m not sure what I’ll do if my laptop croaks as a result of the uninstall, either. It didn’t come with a restore disk, so if Norton ganks the operating system as a final FU, I’m screwed. Maybe this’ll be the day I switch to Linux. Or maybe it’ll go smooth as fresh cream. Fingers crossed.

I’m still here! I haven’t uninstalled Norton yet, so the bomb hasn’t gone off. Didn’t cut the blue wire. And I’ll give you the long story, you know I will, but here’s the short version, if you’re not up to plowing into the thick of it: I’m still too chicken.

I spent the evening yesterday making backups of the files I’ve amassed in the last couple years on my laptop, the ones I’d have a cow over if I lost them to something as piddling as a software uninstall. I’ve made backups in the past ... way in the past. I’m not especially fastidious about things like this. It’s my feeling that a computer should be automatically making backups and I feel so strongly about that that I refuse to stoop to doing such menial labor. And one day, I’ll lose those files to a hiccup and it’ll crush my soul. Sest levi.

After I finished copying files and it was time to pull the plug, my hand hovered over the mouse-clicker for a few moments before I took it away and began surfing the web for more information about antivirus software. What do I know about antivirus software? Zero. I used Norton because it was already loaded onto my laptop when I bought it. I kept using it even when it became more trouble than it was worth because I’d already paid for it and I wanted to get my money’s worth. And I thought: I’ve lived with it up to this point. I’ve got twenty-four days left on this subscription. Maybe I should use that time to try to learn something about antivirus programs. It was the skinflint in me speaking. Don’t throw the cheese out; cut the mold off! The inside’s still good! Three weeks is three weeks.

In the meantime, I use stone-age methods to deal with the episodes when Norton periodically calls the mother ship, as I’ve begun to think of these slowdowns. I shut off the wireless connection for a couple minutes, diddle around writing drivel or whatever, then reconnect and go back to surfing for more info. I can usually get twenty or thirty minutes of useful connection time before Norton tries to make another call to the mother ship. Last night, I surfed for nearly an hour before I had to disconnect.

And here’s what I’ve found out about antivirus programs so far: It’s like reading what economists have to say about the recession. Everybody’s got an opinion, and none of them add up to anything conclusive. Quite a lot of people seem to think that Norton’s a pretty darned good antivirus utility, while an equal number hate it with a passion as white-hot as a trillion blazing stars. I’m in the white-hot camp, myself.

But reading these opinions hasn’t helped me suss out which program might be better. The problem I’m having is, it seems as if all antivirus programs have a reputation for sucking up a lot of memory. The program everybody seems to agree is best — reviewers writing for mass-market magazines, computer nerds, hackers and gaming geeks — eats up as much memory as Norton, according to what I’ve read, so what would be the point of switching? Talk about white-hot; I’d be incandescent if I paid for a program that turned out to be no better than the pig I’m using now.

Well, I’ve certainly rambled on for quite a while about this, haven’t I? Yes, I have. I can see it’s time to stop. I’m stopping now.

Today it was cold, but not negative numbers cold. I could take my noon-time walk without flocking my whiskers in the frozen white fuzz of my own solidified breath. All I ended up with was a damp moustache and that quivering jellied drip on the end of my nose. I keep a kerchief for just that eventuality, so I don’t scare young mothers out walking with their children.

And I went all the way down to the university bookstore, after stopping at Paul’s for a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five and coming up empty. I knew they had a used copy at the university bookstore, but I would have preferred to buy it at Paul’s, support an independent book seller and all that. Tim’s reading it for a class and wanted a copy he could scribble in. I would have lent him mine, but I couldn’t find it, and every house should have a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five close at hand. It’s just that good. Trivia question: What’s the subtitle of Slaughterhouse-Five and why? For the answer to this and other questions, tune in again tomorrow on this same channel.

 
More drivel! Onward to February 08   |    All of 2008!   |    I missed something! Back to December 07

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