this is drivel

“Emian’s,” My Darling B said to me as we cruised north on Monona Drive this morning. She often speaks in cryptic, one-word pronouncements, assuming, as many women do, that I’m able to read her thoughts if she only hints at them. And this morning, she was right. (She’s always right.) I explained to her yesterday that today was my turn to bring treats for my co-workers to eat with their morning coffee, and I could think of no better than the treats at Emian’s, a bakery in Monona. Every time we go in there they have something in the showcase that we haven’t tried before and really, really want to. This morning it was a chocolate cupcake the size of a softball, smothered in caramel and sprinkled with crushed nuts. Subtle, don’t you think?

I didn’t get the sinfully chocolate cupcakes for work, though. I was thinking of a dozen doughnuts, but Emian’s specializes in pastries that are so much more, and I ended up with an apple-walnut coffee cake and a very flaky cherry strudel. So scrummy. Rachel, one of my co-workers, also brought in a loaf of banana-chocolate chip bread, so we had quite a lot to choose from.

“Please tell me you went to the dentist,” B asked me later, knowing full well I might have forgotten in spite of the fact that I took the car to work this morning, not her, and that she reminded me last night and again this morning of my dentist appointment. I forgot about my last appointment (I saw we both did, but that’s a quibble) and it was on a Friday, too. Remembered it on Monday, even took the car to work thinking it was scheduled for Monday, but when Friday rolled around I got out of the car and collected my peck on the cheek as usual, didn’t even recall that I was supposed to be at the dentist until I got to my cubicle and logged in to my computer, which dutifully showed me my appointments for the day.

The trick was to keep thinking about it. My appointment this time around was scheduled for eleven o’clock, with the idea that I’d have plenty of time to get back to work and review my appointments, although I could have easily forgotten it by then, which is why I usually schedule them for eight-thirty. If I don’t even get out of the car, chances are good that I’ll keep thinking about it at least up to the point where I get onto Johnson Street. If I don’t shift into automatic driving mode and I can keep going on across town instead of turning into the parking ramp where I’ll instantly take a brain dump and forget all about the appointment until eleven-thirty or so ... then I’ll be all right.

This morning, though, without any special precautions, I somehow remembered. All the planets were aligned, all the angels danced on the head of the pin, the sun shone, the wind did blow, and by eleven o’clock I was sitting upside-down in the dentist’s chair, that little toilet-shaped pillow at the top being the only thing holding me in. How can it do that?

I go to a guy who has to be the happiest dentist in the Northern Hemisphere. He introduces himself with a smile, he reviews my x-rays with a smile, and I know he’s still smiling even when he’s got his mask on. It’s hard not to like him. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a pretty darned good dentist, too. Last time he drilled my teeth he not only talked me into taking novocain, something I swore long ago I’d never, ever sit still for as long as I lived, he had such a light touch with the needle that I might let him do it again.

No cavities, by the way.

My Darling B and I were able to make our customary trip to the yearly Souper Bowl at West High School this afternoon, despite seeing nothing but snow, snow and more snow coming down through the morning and into the early afternoon.

The snow began shortly after we arrived at the farmer’s market for breakfast. We couldn’t talk Tim into coming even though they were serving eggs benedict with baked veggies and cheesecake dessert. Cheesecake for dessert! How much more tempting do we have to make it? But he just couldn’t be moved to get out of bed and we couldn’t wait around forever, so we left without him.

After finishing our lovely breakfast and doing our weekly shopping, we emerged from the market to thickly falling snow. It also felt a lot colder than when we went in, but that must have been a psychological effect of the snow. The dashboard thermometer in the car said it was three degrees warmer, although the difference between twenty-four degrees and twenty-seven degrees is difficult to appreciate unless you live in an igloo.

We made another quick stop at the Willy Street Co-op and a much, much longer stop at Pick More Daisies. I don’t know why we even go in there (Pick More Daisies, not the Co-op). We never get away without spending way more money than we’re worth.

... And the snow was still coming down thickly when we finally hit the road to go home. Come about one o’clock My Darling B asked, “Do you think we ought to chance crossing town to go to the Souper Bowl?” I was shocked. She must have been genuinely worried to even consider skipping the Souper Bowl. But it was still early, the Souper Bowl didn’t start until three o’clock, so we adopted a wait and see attitude, and I went into the basement to waste time while B laid down for an early nap.

Come three o’clock, the snow had stopped and the skies were clearing. How’s that for serendipity?

The Souper Bowl was as fun as it’s ever been. To refresh your memory: For a donation of fifteen dollars, we got to pick any one of the beautiful hand-thrown bowls offered on the long folding tables set up along the back wall of the cafeteria. At the end of the line you pick one of three or four soups (hence “souper” bowl), a salad and free beverages. At the tables there are trays stacked with all kinds of sliced bread and many, many delicious desserts, all you can eat. For some reason, we couldn’t talk Tim into going to this event, either. The kid must be feverish.

It’s a simple concept, but picking out a bowl is never easy. Usually, one on the leading edge of the first table catches my eye right away. Picking it up, I turn it over in my hands, looking at the colors, checking the glaze, getting a feel for it. If it’s satisfying, I’ll hold on to it; if not, I’ll put it down and move on. But even if I hold on to it, I have to move past hundreds of other bowls, any one of which, and usually many more than one, will catch my eye once again, and I’ll go through the evaluation outlined above, but this time also comparing it to the bowl I already have. Maybe I’ll keep the first one, maybe the next one will have more appeal.

This typically goes on over and over, with each and every person moving along the line. My Darling B will normally have at least two bowls in her hands while she looks at the rest on the table. Choosing just one is hell on her. She dawdled over three of them this time and it took here a good ten minutes to finally decide which ones to abandon.

Oddly, I picked out the one I wanted almost right away this year, and didn’t change my mind, not even to the very end, except that I spotted several more that were obviously made by the same potter because they had the same approximate size and almost exactly the same glaze. They would’ve made a beautiful set, if only I’d had the money to buy more than one.

There was a stage set up at the front of the room where short, usually amateur musical acts played. A jazz combo that called themselves “Galaxy Quest” started just as we sat down. After a few bars I leaned closer to whisper to B, “Do you suppose they ever practice together?” She didn’t believe the sax player was playing the same tune as the rest of the band, and she may have been right.

To the side of the room three or four potters were throwing pots for the pleasure of people who wanted to see how it was done, and in the front corner of the room a couple UW students were painting smilie faces and flowers on the cheeks of kids. “Can you do a skull and crossbones?” I asked her. She wanted a sketch to follow, so I did my best skull and crossbones, which sort of looks like a soccer ball with teeth over an x. She did a much better job painting it on my left cheek. B got a matching skull and crossbones as well, and several people complimented us on them.

Click this link to see photos of this year’s Souper Bowl.

Since I had the car yesterday, and I was driving to the west side to pick up B anyway, I took a little detour after work to a hobby shop out on Mineral Point Road. Actually, not such a little detour. Hunkered over a street map in my cubicle, I’d planned the trip in pretty intricate detail so as to pick up B on time, but there’s that saying about plans and mice and men. (Why do they even make up sayings like that? It’s just asking for trouble.) After minute analysis of the route from cap square, down Regent Street to Speedway until I hit Midvale Boulevard, then up to Mineral Point, I figured it would take twenty minutes, tops, to get there, leaving me plenty of time to shop, even browse a bit, then pick up B on time. Such a pie-eyed dreamer I can be sometimes.

Forty-five minutes later I was wandering through the Arboretum, cussing a blue streak and trying to find a street name that I recognized. When I finally crossed Midvale Boulevard I found I was at the beltline, a mile or more south of Mineral Point Road! All I could think to do then was to get on the beltline and head east until I could exit at Whitney Way, so I did. I got lucky with the traffic, which is a relative term when you’re talking about rush hour and the beltline, but even dodging the weavers it took less than five mintues to get to the hobby store from there.

Yes, I still went to the hobby store. The way I looked at it, I’d already taken up all that time and burned the gasoline to get out there, so I might as well go through with stopping and shopping. I knew exactly what I wanted to buy at the store; running in to fetch it couldn’t possibly take more than five minutes, could it? What a stupid question. Of course it could.

All I needed was a couple lengths of track, some track joiners and a Bright Boy, which is a chunk of rubber that looks a little like a Pink Pearl eraser (except it’s a grungy brown and kind of gritty) that’s made to clean off the tops of the tracks so the little choo-choos can get the electricity they need to go. The track I wanted to buy was bundled in bunches of ten three-foot lengths for twenty-nine sixty-five, but I didn’t have that much moolah to blow on track so I dug around until I found some loose at the bottom of the box and grabbed five. That should have been about fifteen dollars, right? Remember that.

I took my haul to the checkout (after one or two brief stops along the way; they put the till in the far corner of the shop so I have to walk through the aisles to get there, with predictable results — Ooooo, shiny!) and when I plopped it all down on the counterop, the guy running the register popped up from behind the counter like a jack-in-the-box, appropriately accompanied by a bee-boop!

“Hello!” I said, affecting great surprise.

“Hi,” he answered. “I was just rebooting the computer.”

Oh, well, naturally the laws of karma would dictate that, after I’d gotten lost along the way and was already late to pick up My Darling B from work, I would dash into the shop only to find that the guy running the till was rebooting his computer. That just makes sense. Why didn’t I see it coming? Five minutes passed while he pecked at various keys and we made small talk. When the computer finally finished booting it couldn’t find the internet connection, meaning I couldn’t use my Visa card. Okay, except that when he rang up the total, the track that I guesstimated would cost about fifteen bucks actually cost double that.

“How much is the track?” I asked.

“Four-fifty apiece,” he said. An a bundle of ten cost twenty-nine dollars and change? How’s that work?

“I don’t have the cash to cover that,” I said, turning to put the track back, but when he pecked at a few more keys and gave me a total price at ten percent off, I reconsidered. The transaction completed, I bolted for the door, was on the road ninety seconds later, and I somehow made my way up to the DMV building to pick up B at the front door in less than ten minutes. I expected a teensy bit of angst at keeping her waiting, but it turned out she’d gotten off work late and was standing at the curb only five minutes or so. Funny how that worked out.

We were in the mood for a movie after we finished our dinner last night (tasty huevos rancheros, lovingly prepared by My Darling B) and I suggested Casablanca, because neither one of us wanted to go out and I thought we had a copy of it. After searchign high and low, however, neither one of us could find it. I was dead certain we had it on tape. It must’ve been one of the worn-out tapes we tossed in the garbage while we were unpacking from the last move. Bummer.

While B was looking through the DVDs she found a copy of The Grapes of Wrath. I believe I found that in a dollar bargain bin a few years ago and snapped it up because I never get tired of watching Henry Fonda. He was just the man to cast as Tom Joad. To my gaping amazement, B mentioned she’d never seen it. I thought everyone had seen The Grapes of Wrath by the time they graduated from high school. Doesn’t every history teacher in America show that during the unit on the Dust Bowl Years? “I don’t remember ever learning about the dust bowl,” she said later. “My history classes taught war, war, and more war.” Must’ve been a guy teacher (although my high-school history teacher, Betsy Huegel, was a hard-core war trivia “buff,” had models of zepplins and biplanes and jet fighters hanging from the ceiling of her classroom, and spent countless hours jabbering with me about my favorite topic, aircraft carrier warfare in the Pacific).

Sixty minutes into The Grapes of Wrath, after the dirt-poor sharecroppers had been evicted, grandpa and grandma dropped dead, Tom’s buddy Casey had been beaten to death with an axe handle and the Joads were living in a shanty town eating one meal of fried dough each day, B said she was depressed enough to blow her brains out just watching. “I can’t imagine living that. How did they do it?” Which is why the latest book about the dust bowl days has the title, The Worst Hard Time.

After our early dinner at the Souper Bowl yesterday, My Darling B and I had all kinds of free time stretching way into the night. B lounged on the sofa with a book (I believe it was titled, Good Germs, Bad Germs, and seems to be quite a page-turner, to go by how she’s sticking to it; go figure) and a cat on her lap to keep her warm. With the luxury of so much spare time I half-expected to find her in her sewing lair, stitching together a new project, but the sofa and the book and the cat must have been that much more appealing on a cold, snowy day.

I descended to the basement and spent most of the evening cleaning up and improving on a hobby bench I’ve been building up since The Big Bang. The whole thing’s made of lumber that came either from the odds & ends in the work shop junk box or from lumber purchased every other week or so from the twenty or thirty dollars I can put aside from my allowance. That’s why it gets built in fits and starts. Luckily for me the junk box had filled with an impressively wide assortment of remnants that were especially useful for the project I had in mind this weekend: extending the top of the bench.

The bench top was a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood I salvaged from a huge box nailed to the wall by one of the previous occupants. Marge, a neighbor who’s been living in this neck of the woods for more than forty-five years, says of all the people who lived in this house, “Johnny” was the handy man, so whenever I run across what was obviously a bit of do-it-yourself home improvement I think of Johnny. The box looked like he’d bashed it together from lumber he’d salvaged from a wood shop, and it was solid as the pillars of heaven, but it was in the corner where I wanted to put my work bench, so I had to knock it down. I took it apart carefully, thinking right from the start that the plywood would be perfect for the top of a desk or a hobby bench.

Johnny already had a table downstairs he used as a work bench, a really old dinner table made out of hard wood so thick I’m dead certain it could deflect a hail of bullets from a Tommy gun. I decided to keep it; the top was not all that beat up yet and the legs didn’t wobble, and besides, if I’d tried to drag it to the curb I would have pulled a groin muscle.

So the plywood I saved became the top of a hobby desk I began building back in July or August ‘05. It was plenty wide, but it didn’t go all the way from front to back, leaving about twelve inches of dead space against the wall. Last night I put a rail in the back and glued some cleats to it, then ran four cross pieces to lay a quarter-inch sheet of plywood on. Now I’ve got a place to set tools, paint bottles and stacking drawers, leaving the front of the bench open to work on.

I felt like watching a sloppily sentimental movie last night and, poking through the tiny DVD library of two-dozen or so cartoons and romantic comedies we have stuffed into the shelf under the television set, I ran across a copy of Love, Actually, a movie that’s nothing but sloppy sentiment from one end to another. Perfect. I don’t like too many movies that openly play with my emotions, and there are a couple threads in Love, Actually that don’t work for me — the one with Colin Firth and the Portuguese girl, for instance, I find pretty boring, and the guy in love with his best friend’s wife never quite catches fire with me — but I don’t mind the shameless sentimentality of Love, Actually because there’s still plenty that’s so much fun to watch. I love the little kid who pursues his crush at school by learning to play the drums; his run through the airport to say goodbye to her at the gate gets me every time. Bill Nighy is so much fun to watch as the worn-out rock-star has-been, and I hate to admit that Hugh Grant’s prime minister falling for one of his staff is one of my favorite bits, but it is. I’ll have to live with that, I guess. I even like the story of the loser who thinks he can meet girls in America in spite of the glaring fact that he wipes his nose on the back of his hand. And best of all My Darling B loves it, too. Moments after I settled down on the sofa and Hugh Grant began to speak the opening lines, B came in to curl up beside me and watch, giggling at all the good parts. A good before-bedtime movie.

Our water heater is leaking.

Not to confuse you, but I can’t help pointing out if you grew up around here you would more commonly hear it called a “hot water heater.” That could mean it’s a heater that makes hot water or it’s hot and it’s a water heater, or maybe even that it heats hot water. Although that last option doesn’t make much sense, that’s the crazy world of ambiguity.

To get down off my tangent (Second Banana: “You don’t get down off a tangent! You get down off a duck!”), there’s been a puddle of rusty water pooling around the base of the water heater for about a week. Or it could have been coming from the brine tank parked right beside the water heater, but no, I could have fixed that myself and it wouldn’t have cost more than a hundred bucks. The cosmic law of the universe decrees that it must be the most expensive possiblity.

Even so, I held out hope as long as I possibly could. I moved the brine tank about three feet from the water heater, set up a fan and dried out the puddle on the floor, then waited for it to form again so I could definitely tell where it was coming from ... and it was very, very definitely coming from the water heater. Excuse me, coming from the water heater, dammit.

There are a lot of appliances around the house I’ll try to take apart and fix myself, but the water heater’s not one of them. What I know about water heaters is: Cold water goes in, fire burns, hot water comes out. The “fire burns” part of it is pretty much all I need to know to make me not want to ever experiment with taking a water heater apart. Were I about twenty years younger, then maybe, but I no longer look forward to explosions the way I used to, particularly those that are up close and personal.

So I put in a call to a local plumber when I got home from work today. He wasn’t at work any more, either. I got his answering machine and, when I came to the “leave a message at the beep” part I started to explain that I was looking for somebody to some check out our water heater, when the other half of my brain kicked in: Do plumbers fix water heaters? That’s a natural gas appliance, like an oven. Plumbers don’t fix ovens. Plumbers do the water pipes, and even though the water heater has water pipes, maybe I have to call a gas guy, too. What do you look under in the yellow pages when you look for a gas guy?

All these extra questions shooting from my head in random directions derailed my conversational train of thought so badly that I left a rambling, some might even say incoherent message on the plumber’s answering machine. It was so bad I think the only thing he’s going to uderstand is my phone number, but I wouldn’t bet on it, and I wouldn’t blame him if he thought I was crazy and didn’t call me back at all, even to poke fun at me. Updates as the situation warrants. Watch this space.

Every morning, after she’s had a bite of kibble for breakfast and lapped up a libation from her water bowl, Boo will mince daintily to the top of the stairs where My Darling B keeps a sack of potatoes and munch on the edges of the plastic bag. She doesn’t eat the plastic, she only chews on it. Actually, most of the time she just licks at it, but when she gets really enthusiastic she ends up chewing. We’ve tried to stop her, because it’s probably not the best thing she could be chewing on, but it seems to be a compulsive disorder with her. We’ve shouted at her, stomped on the floor, squirted her with water ... she can’t stop. She loves ribbons on Christmas presents, too.

After a weekend spent drilling, nailing, sawing and gluing chunks of lumber together to make a hobby bench, I woke up this morning sore and creaky all over from not having bent my body to that kind of physical toil in a while. A set of muscles in my lower back were especially peeved at me today. They started jabbing me yesterday night as I was sitting on the floor under the bench with an electric drill (no hand drills were used in the making of this bench) and, as I turned to reach into the corner in a way I must never have turned ever before, I found that my back was not made to turn and reach like that, or it just didn’t want to. Man, that hurt. I had to very slowly and carefully put down the drill, sit up straight and do some seriously deep breathing as I waited for the stabbing pain to pass. It didn’t want to, not right away. For about an hour I kept reaching back there to knead it with my fingertips, not because I wanted to, but because I had to.

That got better, but this morning I swear I could hear every single fiber of my being moan. It was like waking up to a city filled with zombies. I took a much longer hot shower than usual. That helped a lot. It also helped that I could go to my cubicle and sit pretty much completely still all day long today.

I certainly didn’t expect that rain would keep me from taking my noon walk today. Well, duh. If I’d have expected it, I would have grabbed one of the umbrellas in the car and then I could have gone for a walk.

But ... what the hell? Rain? In February? Not mist, not drizzle, not sleet — hell, I could believe sleet — but no, this was freaking rain! And it wasn’t the kind that makes you scrunch your head down and run, thinking you can get a little bit wet to run to the coffee shop, it was the kind that makes you sadly shake your head and go back to your warm cubicle after a single glance out the window, or at least that’s what it made me do. A downpour is what it was. This may not be climate change, but whatever it is, it’s just not right.

Tim says one of his teachers, a hippy weirdo tree hugger, goes on and on about how we’ve irrevocably changed the world’s climate and we’ve doomed ourselves to extinction because of it. I don’t know if we’ve changed it or not, but I think it’s pretty funny that, when I was a kid, we used to learn in My Weekly Reader that modern science would give us the ability to change the weather. We were not only going to make it rain in the desert, not only learn how to switch off hurricanes while they were far out to sea, we were going to moderate the weather all over the world so every place would be warm and comfy and nobody’s kids would ever have to hide under their beds from thunderboomers ever again. We grew up thinking that would be a good thing.

And now the weather’s changing, and what’s more we might be changing it, but is anybody happy about it? Geeze, no. Well, maybe if we’d ended up actually controlling it with Our Mighty Technology instead of only knocking it out of whack with diesel exhaust, or cow farts, or whatever the reason is this week, if we had actually ended up being able to switch the sunshine on when we want, or send the snowfall to uninhabited places, like the North Pole and Canada, after building up a thick, fluffy base on the slopes at Breckenridge, then maybe climate change might have been better appreciated.

But there will be no more talk of controlling the weather any more. Planes will not fly into clouds spreading sodium pentathol, or nitrous oxide, or whatever that was (I just remembered: silver iodide), and skyscrapers will not be topped with brobdignagian silver orbs from which lightning bolts will spider skyward to dissipate threatening thunderheads. That’s crazy talk, just like the diamond-shaped cities on legs that towered thousands of feet into the air, or corkscrewed down the sides of funnels drilled deep into the earth’s crust.

Last week in Paul’s Bookstore I ran across a tattered book filled with drawings of those futuristic Arcosanti cities. A lot of the drawings in the book were the same ones they printed in My Weekly Reader all those years ago. They still looked fantastic, literally fantastic, like something out of Logan’s Run. I sincerely believed, when those drawings made my chocolate-brown eyes pop back in the 60’s, that as an adult I’d be living in a city like that, maybe taking the morning rocket from its rooftop runway to the moon on business trips. Crazy talk.

The plumber’s on his way, but he won’t be here until Thursday morning. I may have called him just in the nick of time. There was a bit more water pooling on the floor tonight than there was before. It doesn’t look as though it’s headed toward anything as spectacular as a rupture like a forty-gallon steel water balloon, although I can’t help but wonder how close we’re going to get to cold showers or, worse, no water.

I might have angered the gods of ice and snow with yesterday’s rant about rain in February. Or was somebody else ranting about the weather? Oh, well, certainly they were, what a question. Everybody in every office I passed through today was pissing and moaning about all the snow we’re getting, how they’re so sick of it now and it can stop any time. I want to ask them, Where do you think you are? This is Wisconsin! You’re two steps from the border with Canada and it’s the beginning of February! You’ve got another six to eight weeks of this weather, so get yourself a hobby, maybe something like cross-country skiing, or ask your doctor for a couple bottles of Zoloft.

Or drink beer. Southern Wisconsin, where we have dozens of breweries scattered in towns large and small across the map, is an especially good place to take up beer-drinking. I’m trying one of everything a six-pack at a time, a self-perpetuating schedule because they keep coming up with a new brew every season. You can think of it as a hobby and medication conveniently wrapped up in easy-to-open screw-top bottles, although I’m pretty sure medical professionals call that “alcoholism” so this may not be the best advice I’ve ever given.

I’m not sure how I got on the beer thing, but this is as good a place as any to mention that Star Liquors on Willy Street invites braumeisters from the local breweries to stand at the end of the check-out counter and hand out samples of their wares on Friday nights. Last week, a guy from the Lake Louie brewery was pouring samples of three different brews. I was so impressed by their “Mister Mephisto” Russian Imperial Stout that I went home with a six-pack. Good stuff.

(Russian Imperial Stout, by the way, gets its name from the brew that Katherine the Great ordered up from the breweries in Great Britain. Katherine felt that all the native beer in Russia was stinkwater. British brewers had to come up with an especially powerful brew that could survive the long journey from the the British Isles. We got India Pale Ale more or less the same way, too.)

An awful lot of snow came pouring out of the sky at about two o’clock and they said it wasn’t going to stop no matter how much cussing and foot-stamping anybody did ... and then it stopped anyway, shortly after we got home from work. The forecast for tomorrow was so scary that My Darling B was worried she might have to drive to work on iced-over roads through a blinding snowstorm. I may be tempting the fates by saying this, but I don’t think she’s got much to worry about. I’m afraid Tim will be most disappointed in the morning; he’s counting on a snow day. Unless the gods of ice and snow become especially filled with wrath and get to work mighty quick, I don’t see how that’s going to happen. Right now there’s barely enough on our driveway to make a self-respecting snowman.

No school for Tim today! To listen to the weather guys tell it last night, we were supposed to be up to our necks in wind-driven snow this morning. Tim went out to shovel the driveway as we ate breakfast, and when he came back in he said there was no more than three inches of new snow out there. No more was falling then, but the weather guys were still going ga-ga: “Twelve to twenty inches by sundown!” they bleated from the morning television shows. “Stay inside! Go back to bed! Drink plenty of fluids!”

My Darling B gave some serious thought to ditching work. She even called and left a message in her supervisor’s voice mail saying she was not going to be in, then changed her mind at the last minute because the weather didn’t look bad enough to make her want to burn up a vacation day. It was a decision that would come back to haunt her.

Shortly after B dropped me off downtown, it began to snow; not heavily, but in a way that looked as though it could go on snowing for quite some time. I took the elevator up to my cubicle because I felt extravagant, hung up my coat, changed out of my boots, and read the morning news. When my internal alarm clock when BLING! at about eight, telling me it was time to get to work, I looked out the window and whaddaya know? Still snowing. Was it coming down a little heavier? Hard to tell. Maybe.

I’d gone through the first pile of credit card applications pending approval by eight-thirty, stood up to stretch. Glanced out the window. Still snowing. And that’s when I noticed that I was still the only guy in an office where seven other people usually worked. I already knew my supervisor wasn’t going to be in. She left me a message, said she was staying home to watch her son, told me to stay inside and keep warm. I figured one or two other people wouldn’t be in. Scott, for one, who lives halfway to Milwaukee, although as it turned out he came sauntering in a little after nine. “I had the interstate all to myself for once,” he told me.

Chis showed up about fifteen minutes before Scott, and that was it. We were the only people in the corner office on the fourth floor all day. I made a few trips down to my department, just to reassure myself we weren’t in an end-of-the-world movie. We weren’t. Most of the usual people were down there.

At around ten o’clock I heard Scott say, “It’s officially totally crappy outside,” and I looked up to find there was so much snow coming down I could barely make out the oak trees in the square across the street. It was sideways snow. A few pedestrians were making their way along the sidewalks with umbrellas held at their sides, turned into the wind, like shields. Tiny green tractors pushing plows or enormous whirling yellow bottle brushes were racing back and forth down the sidewalks trying to keep a path cleared, without too much success. The city plows gave up clearing the streets around capital square shortly after noon.

I honestly didn’t expect to get out of work early because our bank has a reputation for never closing due to snow. Everybody knows this, which is why the shock wave of disbelief shattered every window in town when the higher-ups announced we were released at two. Most everybody scattered at once, in case the higher-ups changed their minds. My trouble was that I didn’t have anywhere to go. B had the car, as she always does. I fired off an e-mail to let her know I’d be hanging around the office as long as they’d let me, told her my cell phone was on in case I had to leave and hang out somewhere else.

At two-thirty, as Chris and I were watching buses slide off the road, we got word that the city’s snow plows were quitting until the storm let up. They couldn’t keep up with the snowfall. The storm was too much for the snow plows! When I passed this tidbit along to B she just about panicked. “I’m getting out of here as soon as I can,” she told me, and around three, that’s what she did.

She didn’t get into my part of town until around four, crawling along Johnson Street at five or six miles per hour. Johnson hadn’t been plowed for a while but it was still passable and most of the traffic through town was moving along it. I didn’t want her to try to climb the hill to capital square so I wrapped up in my coat and gloves and marched down to hide in a doorway of a book store on Johnson Street, watching for her. She gave me a ring on my cell phone as she was crossing Bassett Street to signal she was coming and I literally leapt into traffic in front of her as she drove by. She paused for two heartbeats as I climbed into the passenger seat, then got moving again.

Johnson wasn’t in bad condition but we couldn’t take it all the way home, we had to get over to Willy Street or John Nolan to get around Lake Monona, and that meant turning up Blair, which looked as if it hadn’t been plowed at all. Still, we were doing okay until come nutburger pulled into the street and came to a dead stop, in spite of his crazily spinning wheels. Two people came out into the street to push him but he kept spinning his wheels and ended up cockeyed across the traffic lane. I’ll ordinarily help push anybody so long as they know how to control their car, but this guy wasn’t even trying, so I sat tight in my nice, warm seat and let him spin to his heart’s content.

Eventually even his buddies got tired of pushing a car that wasn’t going anywhere. The driver got out and they all stood around looking at the car for a couple minutes, shaking their heads as if it had grown up to become a huge disappointment to them, while the traffic backed up. Eventually he got back into the driver’s seat and tried to get his car out of the way, but only skidded sideways and hung himself up on a snow drift. That’s when I got our shovel out of the trunk and helped him dig enough of the drift away that his buddies could push his car off the road and let us all by.

After we crossed Washington Avenue we had to make a choice: Willy Street, or John Nolan Drive? I had my doubts about whether or not Willy Street would even be passable. It’s just two lanes and not a high-priority street for the snow plows, but B was not happy at all with the idea of driving John Nolan in this weather. It’s a three-lane high-speed artery where every driver turns into his favorite Nascar racer or, if he doesn’t know Nascar from bumper cars, an asshole. (“Did you ever notice that anybody driving faster than you is an asshole and anybody driving slower than you is a moron?” – George Carlin) When we arrived at The Moment Of Truth, though, we could see that Willy Street was bumper-to-bumper, but traffic on John Nolan seemed to be moving right along, so B took a deep breath and kept on going.

It was a good bet. After we passed Wilson Street we had John Nolan all to ourselves. We’d never seen it like that before and it freaked B a little bit. What’s more, it had been plowed within the last fifteen minutes. There was practically no snow built up on it, although there was quite an impressively high berm piled along either side. Turning off John Nolan would have been tricky in anything but a Land Rover, or a tank.

B zoomed down John Nolan at the breezy speed of fifteen or twenty miles per, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did. The faster traffic caught up with her by the time we got to the far end by the convention center, but by that time we were practically home free. The on-ramp to the beltline had been plowed, not as recently as John Nolan but still better than nothing. Broadway across Monona was clear, and even Bridge Street was freshly plowed! We didn’t have to try to climb the hill up Monona Drive! And we nearly peed our pants with joy when we found our very own street freshly plowed. “We are such luckly, lucky luck bags!” B said.

That’s when the “other shoe” dropped.

Our driveway was buried under a foot of snow. Tim was working at it from the garage end but I wanted to get the car off the road sooner rather than later, so I ran in, grabbed a shovel and the boy, and we both came down to the road end and started shoveling at heart-attack speed while B waited in the car, parked against the curb on the other side of the street.

We weren’t at it three minutes when a couple snow plows, one of them an articulated orange Cat and the other a dump truck as big as Manhattan with a spade on the front bumper and a wing plow swinging from the right side, came barreling down LaBelle Street, swung out onto Sylvan and headed straight for My Darling B as if he couldn’t see her parked there! He did stop in time, and it was a heart-quickening stop, with the spade hanging not more than a yard from the rear bumper of the car! Then he backed up past LaBelle, turned, and started back up the street with the Cat leading the way.

WHEW.

Hunched over our shovels, it took Tim and I about fifteen minutes to clear a spot in the driveway big enough for the car to park in. B drove off in search of pizza while we worked. That’s not as weird as it sounds; there’s a pizzaria right up the street, but they were closed. She couldn’t find room to turn around and had to back up to our street.

The rest of it was pretty routine: Tim and I finished shoveling the drive, I put the car in the garage, we peeled out of our wet clothes and B fixed us grilled ham & cheese with tomato soup (home-made with tomatoes from her own garden!). The cats jumped in our laps as we sipped coffee after dinner. So the evening and the morning were the third day.

My preferred method to wake Tim up in the morning is to turn on the overhead lights in his room, announce, “Six o’clock! Time to get up!” and wait for him to display some sign of consciousness. He tries to get me to go away by grunting, but the first time I took that for a sign of wakefulness he went right back to sleep. In fact, I’m pretty sure he was never truly awake. Now I wait until he speaks to me, at least twice, true sentences with a subject and a verb, or he can sit up or even, god forbid, get out of bed right away and walk and talk all at the same time! He’s done it in the past. Once. I don’t usually hang around waiting for that, though. It takes too long.

It didn’t take long to get a reaction from him this morning, though. I reached for the light switch and he barked, “Two-hour delay! Two-hour delay!” — meaning that he’d not only already gotten out of bed this morning before I came to get him, but he’d also logged on to the high school’s web site to see if classes had been cancelled on account of the outrageous amount of snow we got yesterday. They hadn’t, but classes would start two hours late. Tim got to sleep late, is the short story.

They start classes late on mornings like this because most of the students at Tim’s school live in Cottage Grove and ride the school bus into town. I guess the higher-ups figure it would take the bus drivers a lot longer to get around on country roads covered in snow and ice. Maybe they’ve never seen their drivers at work, driving those huge yellow buses as if they were sports cars. If you’re watching from a safe distance, it’s pretty impressive. If you’re waiting at a stop sign when one of them come tearing around the corner, however, I guarantee you’ll wet yourself.

So I left Tim to roll over and go back to sawing logs. No such luck for My Darling B, though. She had to be at work today, on time, because the State departments never close for any reason I’ve heard of. Maybe if Godzilla ate the dome off the capital building they’d get an early release, but it seems a little farfetched. The early release, not Godzilla. I firmly believe in Godzilla.

I took the day off from work today to wait for the plumber. It was a rough job, but somebody had to do it. No, it really was a rough job. The plumber would certainly want to bring the new water heater in (and, I hoped, take the old one out) through the front door, so between the time I got back from dropping B off at work I had to dig the sidewalk and the front stoop out from under about a foot and a half of drifted snow, scatter salt, wait for the ice to break up, then chip it off the steps. I had to drag an old rug and whatever cardboard I could find upstairs from the basement to lay down on the hardwood floors. I had to take the door to the basement stairs off its hinges because the way it opens makes it hard to haul heavy, bulky appliances downstairs. I had to sop up the rusty water pooled on the floor around the old water heater, move the window screens stored behind it, rig a trouble lamp so the plumber could see what she was doing in that dingy corner of the basement, and GEEZE that’s a lot of things to do already!

And somewhere in there I figured I’d take Tim to school, but it had to be before nine (the time the plumber was supposed to come) so we left about quarter till. You know that physical law that says when you stay home for the cable guy, he’ll ring the doorbell while you’re on the toilet? It works for the plumber when you’re taking your kid to school, too. Coming back, I turned the corner onto our street at nine-oh-one and there was the plumber’s truck parked against the curb. Luckily, she hadn’t been waiting more than a minute or two.

I shouldn’t say this, but I was a little surprised the plumber was a woman. It’s not that I thought women can’t be plumbers, it’s just that I’ve never been visited by a woman plumber before. It never occurred to me that women would want to plumb pipes and swing monkey wrenches, but there she was in her pink knit cap with her plumber’s bag full of plumber’s tools in hand, ready to drain our water heater and haul it up the stairs. Woman plumber. Okay.

It took her less than sixty seconds to confirm that our water heater tank was leaking. Hope in one hand, spit in the other, I asked her if it could be fixed, and she patiently explained that no, they don’t fix leaking water heaters, they only replace them with new ones. I teased her by asking for the very best, longest-lasting water heater she could sell me, which would have been a tankless on-demand heater, the cutting edge in water heating technology, but they’d have to special order that. I wanted this done today. We’ll have a regular vanilla water heater, then.

She said I’d get a call from the dispatcher to let me know when they could bring the new heater around and I left her to go to her truck to fill out the paperwork. Meanwhile, I grabbed a shovel and cleared a path from the back door across the deck so My Darling B could make Tim take out the composting. He just loves it when I do that.

When I put the shovel in the garage after finishing, I noticed the plumber’s truck was still at the curb but the plumber wasn’t in it, so I peeked out the front of the garage and there she was, patiently waiting at my front door again. “We’ve got the model you need in stock,” she said, “and they’re going to bring it right away, so I’ll get to work now pulling your old one out.” And while she was in the basement draining the old water heater, a kid (he looked like he was maybe twelve or thirteen, but he drove here alone so chances are pretty good he was a bit older) came to my front door to tell me he had my new water heater in his truck.

Is this a great country, or what? It’s got a few spots here and there — torture, secret prisons, zombies in suits running for office — but any place you can get same-day delivery and installation of a water heater so you never miss a hot shower is still doing something right. The torture still bugs me, but so would an ice-cold shower first thing in the morning and, between you and me, I’m not sure which would be worse.

The plumber had the new water heater in and working in time for me to sign a check and get her out of the house by noon. While I was making myself a ham sandwich for lunch I debated the merits of returning to work, and I’m happy to say that the side of me that wanted to stay home for the afternoon won, for sound reasons, I’d like to point out. I wanted to clean up after the plumber and I had a very important phone call I had to make to schedule another appointment for a household appliance (preventive maintenance for the dish washer). I also had at least one very selfish personal reason for staying home: I was going to indulge myself in the most treasured of afternoon luxuries, a nap.

I don’t ask for much, but one thing I would like to have every day is a nap. I don’t even need a long one. I’m happy with just wenty or thirty minutes to close my eyes and catch a few flies. With employer-sponsored health programs popular right now, and plenty of of medical evidence to show that a daily nap makes people work harder and better, I don’t know why more businesses don’t encourage employees to sleep on the job — at a designated nap time. I’ve tried to talk my various employers into cashing in on this little-exploited quirk of human nature but so far only one of them has gone along with it, and that was very, very unofficially.

I was very happy today. I stretched out on the bed, made myself comfortable and said ZAWP for forty-five minutes. Woke up feeling great. Went back to work cleaning up and had the house in ship-shape before I had to start driving all over town to collect the rest of the O-Folk and bring them back.

It was my turn to make dinner last night, so I made blueberry pancakes. Who doesn’t like blueberry pancakes? Nobody who counts, that’s who. Besides Tim, I mean. Yeah, I don’t get it either, but he claims that blueberries are his Achilles’ Heel and he would perish instantly after eating even one. His loss. More for me.

I made a huge plate of pancakes, one-third without blueberries so Tim could have his own stack, two-thirds with. I made the blueberry pancakes bigger, pouring a full ladle of batter over them because they were for My Darling B and myself and because I wanted the blueberries deep inside the pancakes. Turned out I didn’t have to worry about that; when they poof up, the berries get buried inside. It’s a natural law that pancakes were meant to hold blueberries.

The recipe as written was supposed to make ten four-inch pancakes, which sounds like it ought to be enough to feed three people, but I know from cruel experience that recipes always lie about how much they make, especially recipes for pancakes, so I doubled it, and a good thing I did, too. We were all so hungry that there were only two pancakes left over when we pushed back from the table, stuffed. If I hadn’t doubled the recipe, though, my son and dear wife probably would have been so gastronomically unsatisfied they’d have fallen ravenously upon me to tear me limb from limb in a feeding frenzy.

And we ate them with real maple syrup, by the way. I’m not sure how that’s still possible in America, where everything we eat is made of corn or soybeans. Maybe they say it’s maple syrup and sell it to us in authentic-looking maple syrup bottles (a figure of speech, really; B reuses the last syrup bottle she bought by washing it out and taking it to the Willy street market). It doesn’t look like the stringy goop they sell in the Log Cabin squeeze bottles, but what do I know?

Supper tonight was quite a treat as well. I don’t know if she decided on the way over that we would stay in town to eat, but My Darling B is nothing if not a woman of many options, and as we drove away from the capital square she asked where I’d like to stop for dinner, the Harmony Bar or the Blue Plate, if I would like to try some place new? To be perfectly accurate, the first thing she asked was, “Is there a Friday night beer tasting at Star Liquor?” She’s a woman of many options, but she has her priorities.

It turned out there was not a Friday night beer tasting at Star Liquor. Psyche! I’ve got to get into the habit of checking their web site every week so we won’t get caught out by that again. But, so long as we were there, B picked out a sixer of Snowshoe, a tasty libation from the New Glarus brewery we hadn’t tried before. (If the tense is confusing, it’s because I drank a bottle of it in front of the television set later this evening, so I know it’s tasty even though we hadn’t tried it before. If that doesn’t help clear up the confusion, B hasn’t tasted it yet. Focus on that and take deep breaths.)

Once we were back on the road, and that was no easy feat with the slush freezing to ice and the snow banks towering over the roof of the car, B ran down a few more dining options: We could stop at the Jamaican place across from the market, or we could press on to Monona and eat at Angelo’s on Monona Drive, and then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned Mickey’s, a tavern on Willy Street by the Yahara River. We’d driven past it nearly every day on the way to work and had read all sorts of good reviews in the paper and on the web about their food, but we had never yet stopped there to so much as ask directions, much less get a bite to eat. Yes. Mickey’s it would be.

It’s in a turreted corner building made of blonde brick with the word TAVERN painted on the north wall in gold block letters on a black backround. We entered through a weatherbeaten door and were instantly lost in the murk. Mickey’s is a very dark tavern, lit almost exclusively by red neon over the bar and tiny three-watt bulbs behind decorative porcelain knick-knacks on narrow shelves high on the walls. We were a little worried at first that they might have done that to keep us from getting a good look at the food, but we needn’t have worried about that.

My Darling B ordered the Mickeyburger; I chose the chili. I can honestly say without a moment’s hesitation it was the best chili I’ve ever eaten in any restaurant anywhere. B’s burger was so enormously plump she orignally planned to eat only half of it, saving the other half for lunch tomorrow, but soon discovered it was so delicious she polished the whole thing off before I finished my chili. We split a small basket of fries between us. They were good and crispy, too.

I would add they have quite an impressive selection of beers on sale from breweries in and around Wisconsin, and at a decent price, too. If I heard him right, the bartender charged B seven-fifty for the first round of two pints. Have we ever gotten beer this good for less elsewhere? I don’t think so.

Mickey’s was an excellent choice. I’m looking forward to going back.

On the way home, B asked if I knew of any movies just released in DVD I wanted to see. There were, but darned if I could remember what they were. We decided to stop at Bongo on the way home to see if walking up and down the aisles of new releases would jog my memory. That didn’t work, but you should’ve seen B jump out of her socks when she saw a copy of King Corn on the rack. She’s been wanting to see that for months. We had our movie.

King Corn is about two guys who move to Iowa to grow an acre of corn, but it’s much more than that. They also discover how much corn is in the various foods we eat (virtually everything we eat and drink has corn in it), how the surplus of corn has affected the way we eat, the way we live, the way we get sick and die. But it’s way more than that, even. It’s a story of industrialized farming, straight from the farmer’s mouth. It’s oddly saddening to hear farmers laugh at the idea of a family farm.

But it’s not a preachy movie and it’s not a boring documentary. The film’s makers, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, have crafted a telling film with a remarkably subtle hand. At least one of them is quite an accomplished cinematographer, too, with an eye for composing a visually arresting shot. King Corn is a film that’s a pleasure to watch.

I’m still reading Coming of Age in the Milky Way but the last couple chapters have taken quite a while longer to read than the whole first third of the book because it’s all about the four-dimensional curves of space and the relatively absolute speed of light, and I have to re-read whole paragraphs to make sure I understand what’s going on. That said, it’s still what I would call an easy read; at least I eventually understand what he’s saying. When I was readin Voyage to the Great Atractor I’d get through whole chapters and the only thing I could remember no matter how much I went back to re-read was how pretty the pictures of whirling pinwheel galaxies were. Coming of Age is much more my speed.

And I’ve been trying to read The Long Short War but it seems I can get only three or four paragraphs into a chapter before I have to put the book down and walk away to try to cool off. Hitchens is a brilliant writer of beautiful, flowing prose, but he can’t defend our part in the war in Iraq to me any better than anybody else can. His reasoning sounds like the usual rhetoric about defending democracy and freedom-loving people; it could be the same line the higher-ups have been spouting for years, only prettier. Anybody can perfume a sow to make it smell nicer, but I still wouldn’t want to date one.

The “Vocal Challenge” on NPR asks listeners to describe the voices of well-known people. Listener Steve McCormack described the sound of Joni Mitchell’s voice as “The gleeful girl you kissed when you were ten who ran home and brought you the frosting spoon from her mother’s cake.” The guy who dreamed up this program, Brian McConaghy, added after reading Steve’s description, “Steve, I want you to go to the phone right now and call this woman, whereever she is.”

You probably knew that Habitat for Humanity built houses, but did you know they also tear them down? Now that’s a volunteer opportunity I could really get into! Not only that, but when they tear them down, they keep the pieces that might still be useful, like doors, light fixtures, sinks and faucets, and they sell it in a store right here in Monona called the ReStore. For more than a year I’ve been telling myself to drop in and see what they’ve got, but my memory being what it is (full of holes) I just haven’t gotten around to it, until today. Today I not only (1) remembered to go, I had (2) the free time and (3) the inclination — a hat trick! When everything comes magically together like that, it’d be stupid to let the opportunity get away from me, wouldn’t it? Of course it would.

To get to the ReStore I’d have to drive about two miles up Monona Drive, the potholed main drag of our fair city, and when I say “pothole” I’m talking about craters big and deep enough to be seen with the naked eye of astronauts in orbit. Monona Drive is a three-mile-long strip of concrete, possibly the worst material I can think of to pave a road with in Wisconsin or any other northern state. The concrete manufacturers must have a pretty strong lobby in the assembly. Not that any earthly material could stand up to our rapid-fire freeze/thaw cycles for long; even if they paved the roads with foot-thick slabs of granite I think they’d run into trouble with potholes in just a few years. I can’t help noticing, though, that the streets paved with asphalt aren’t kicking the life out of our car’s suspension.

If I fix my gaze on the road just above the artificial horizon made by the top of the hood, I usually have enough time to swerve around the kidney-punchers. Jerking the wheel (as well as the car) from side to side I feel at times a little like I’m playing a video game, although the jaw-clenching SLAM! of the wheels bottoming out in the really deep potholes is like no game I’ve ever played, except maybe dodgeball. Getting smacked right in the face with a big rubber ball as hard as somebody can throw it is pretty close to what hitting these potholes is like.

Two particularly nasty potholes, so deep there almost have to be small cars at the bottom of them by this time, have yawned open at the far end of Monona Drive, one at the stop light by Bongo Video, the other at the intersection with Cottage Grove Road. I can avoid the one by Bongo by crossing to the outside lane and keeping to the curb, and the one at Cottage Grove Road is in the inside southbound lane. The only time I would use that lane would be when I was turning south only Monona Drive from Cottage Grove Road ... as I would have to do today, when I headed home from the ReStore. There had to be a way around it. Think, David, think!

The ReStore looked just about the way you’d figure if I told you it was a rented storefront filled with debris salvaged from demolished buildings. A heap of cabinets were stacked right inside the door, a couple iron shelves in the middle of the room were chock full o’ electrical and plumbing fixtures, and unhinged doors stood like dominoes along the three interior walls. They had more doors than anything, or at least it looked that way. I didn’t count them and compare them to, for instance, the boxes of faucet valves in aisle three, but it would’ve been a close race if I had.

I didn’t take anything home besides a phone cord and a plug for same, although there were quite a few neat-o things to see. I was impressed by the ten-foot-tall sliding glass patio doors, for instance. What kind of Frankenstein’s suburban castle did those come from? And the bank of green steel lockers was pretty cool, but as much as I tried I couldn’t think of a single useful thing I could do with them, and besides I’d have to rent a pickup truck to get them home. Y’know, now that I’m thinking about it again, lockers like that could help solve the storage problem we have in the garage.

To avoid the pothole at the intersection I went around the block until I came out onto Monona Drive about three hundred yards north of Cottage Grove Road. That gave me plenty of time to get into the outside lane and scoot right past it. As I went by, I could just make out a tiny band of survivors huddled around the wrecks of their cars at the bottom. They’d built a bonfire for warmth using the stuffing from their seat cushions and a bit of gasoline. With any luck, rescue crews would soon notice the black smoke.

My Darling B found my jar of juicy dog farts! She spent a few hours this afternoon in the basement opening boxes that had been in storage since we moved from, geeze, I don’t know where, must have been our house in Aurora. That would’ve been in 1999, if memory serves. One box filled with packing peanuts and stuffed animals had a bunch of bubble-wrapped treasures that had been out of sight so long I’d completely forgotten all about them, the jar of juicy dog farts being an item I would have thought had been thrown out with the trash by now.

It’s a small, green pottery jar with a rough cork stopper and the words JUICY DOG FARTS pressed into the side in twelve-point all caps. I forget where I bought it, but I know it was at least twenty years ago and I’ve never seen another one like it anywhere. Small wonder, huh? I honestly never expected to see it again. I certainly believed I’d never hear My Darling B ask me the question she yelled out from the other side of the basement this afternoon: “Are you still looking for your juicy dog farts?” Even though I know she loves me with all her heart, I can’t see how she brought herself to say those words.

And not only that, she found the Warbaby, too! I have to take the long way around the block to explain this one, so you might want to sit down if you're not already ...

The very first car I owned was a green ‘69 Volkswagen microbus. I paid five-hundred bucks for it and the hippie who sold it to me (yes, I bought a Volkswagen microbus from a long-haired hippie wearing grannie glasses who spoke like Dennis Hopper) threw in a bag of assorted hand tools and a copy of John Muir’s How to keep your Volkswagen alive: A Manual of step by step procedures for the compleat idiot, and a good thing he did, too, because that bus’s engine never hit on more than three cylinders. I had to spend quite a lot of time with my head stuck in its engine compartment, or on my back looking up at the oily underside of the engine. I still have that book. I kept it first for practical reasons: I owned three more Volkswagens, but after I sold the last one when we left Denver in ‘99 the book moved to the keepsakes shelf of my permanent library.

But back to the Warbaby, the nickname bestowed on that first bus by some of my buddies. All Volkswagens have a name. When you buy one you don’t normally have to ask the previous owner what it is, he’ll usually live up to his responsibility of passing it on to you. The hippie, though, either didn’t know it or was too stone to remember to tell me, and this being my first Veedub I didn’t know enough to ask, so my first Volks went for several weeks without a name until Jimmie, my roommate, started calling it the Warbaby. It was the right name for that bus. It stuck.

Not long after Jimmie named the bus, I found a tiny statuette in a gift store of a scowling Mongol warrior with an axe in one hand. He was about three inches tall, base included, was wearing some kind of trimmed leather helmet, a heavy protective yoke over his shoulders, and carried what I thought of as a treasure-filled box in one hand. I knew the moment I set eyes on it that it would have to be the mascot for my bus, to watch over all who rode in her. After taking it back to my room and painting it in the most garish colors I could find, I christened it by painting the name WARBABY in red on its base, then stood him in the middle of the dashboard of the bus.

That was back in my San Antonio days, the first year of my enlistment in the Air Force. I sold the bus before I left San Angelo but I must have kept the statuette. Maybe it was in a box, maybe I kept on a shelf, I honestly don’t remember. Today the Warbaby emerged bubble-wrapped from the storage tub where he’s been hiding for I don’t know how long, and I’ve never been more surprised to see a lost memento from my past. I literally forgot all about him.

I stood him on the corner of my desk where he could watch over my lair.

Tim asked me this afternoon if he could have the car to drive to the barber’s to get a haircut. I was so stunned he wanted to go to the barber to cut his hair that I said okay to the car, forgetting it was a ten-minute walk from our house. The last two months or so he’s been stuck in the “I’ll cut it myself to save money and time” phase that every guy goes through at least once. Usually more than once; we’re pretty thick when it comes to learning the hard way.

(I used to cut my own hair as recently as three years ago, but that was an exception to the rule of learning by hard knocks. I was still in the military and I really did save money and time by snapping a number four comb on an electric clippers and doing the same job on my hair that a barber at the PX would have asked eight dollars for.)

I figured Tim would eventually snap out of it, but I didn’t think it would be this soon. The barber shop was closed and Tim came back unshorn, willing to wait until Monday to get it cut after school, so the phase must have passed and he really does want to look as though his hair’s been cut by somebody who had his eyes open to cut it. In the meantime he’s got a mop that makes him look a lot like a 60’s Beatles fan come unstuck in time and popped into our year.

Freaking cold today, the kind of cold that would make you literally fear for your life if you were driving from here to any small town on a little-traveled back road and your engine quit. Walking more than a couple miles in this kind of cold wearing anything less than a parka is asking for trouble. The furnace hasn’t stopped running for more than five minutes all day. The highest temp was two below zero. That kind of cold.

On an arctic day like today it’s the perfect day to stay curled up on the sofa with a big, fat newspaper, slowly paging through every section ... and what luck! Today being Sunday, there’s a thick edition of the New York Times waiting at the end of the driveway. Damn. Getting the Times delivered on the weeked could be better only if the delivery gal rang the doorbell and handed it to me. She didn’t, though, so the morning started off with a frantic scurry to fetch it with The Merry Little Breezes wafting up the folds of my bathrobe. That’ll wake a guy up in a hurry.

I never read the front page first. This is Sunday, a day for rest from the trials of the world. On Sunday I start with the Travel section, with its photos of casually-dressed tourists lounging at far-away get-aways, or the Magazine section, filled with fluff. Lately I’ve gravitated toward reading the Book Review first, as I did this morning.

The Book Review usually tries to stay with a theme in each issue, and this Sunday’s theme is politics. I’m a lot less interested in politics lately, so I spend more time reading the advertisements than the reviews. The title of Tod Wodicka’s novel, All Shall Be Well, and All Shall Be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well, gives me the immediate feeling that all is not going well, neither shall it go well, nor shall it end well. Just a hunch. This Republic of Suffering is Drew Gilpin Faust’s examination of how the staggering number of soldiers killed in the American civil war changed our country, but what caught my eye was the note at the bottom of the full-page advertisement that the book contained fifty-six illustrations. 620,000 dead, summed up in fifty-six photos. Hardly seems adequate, does it?

Only two of the books reviewed in the Book Review section make me stop. I just have to pause and scan a single-page review of Righteous Warrior, Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism mostly because it’s accompanied by a photo of Helms in which he looks, well, gay, in every sense of the word. The Jesse Helms I remember was a rough, often vulgar man with a face like a rampaging steam locomotive with a couple hundred thousand cross-country miles of wear and tear on it. In the public appearances I saw him make, Helms was a profoundly ugly man, and it was an ugliness that wasn’t only skin deep. But the Jesse Helms in the photo accompanying the review was smiling boyishly. There was a come-love-me gleam in his eyes and a fresh carnation in his lapel. His lips even looked as if they’d been freshly touched-up with lipstick, for crying out loud. It’s hard to believe the shot wasn’t photoshopped. (Incidentally, the book didn’t sound too interesting.)

The other book review that caught my eye was Embryo, A Defense of Human Life, and I had to read it because I’m still trying to figure out for my darned self how people are still arguing over when human life begins. I’m a big-picture person and don’t think human life begins or ends until the species is extinct. If the reviewer got the substance of the book right, the authors talk about embryos as if they can make decisions and act of their own volition. I sure hope the reviewer got it wrong.

The Magazine section is fun because I never read the heavy-hitting articles. Too long. I generally stick to the photo features, and the cover story in this week’s issue is a gallery of photos of breakthrough film actors, not very good, but still fun because I love to imagine what the photographer said to convince actors to crouch in a tangle of frozen bushes (Jennifer Jason Leigh), or lie naked on a pile of sticks and stones (Josh Brolin). Does it go, “Josh, just an idea, how about you take your clothes off, lie back on the ice-cold stones and gaze pensively into space?” Josh: “Hoe-kay!” Are actors so used to taking direction that they’ll strip and pose just like that? I can’t help wondering.

Another thing the Magazine section is good for is the slice of New York life I find between the articles. This week, like last week, there’s a two-page spread of a full-floor Fifth Avenue residence for sale (“from $31 million,” if you’re in the market) that is so extravegantly hyper-luxurious it gave My Darling B and I laughing fits. Honestly. How can anybody possibly relax in a living room that’s as large as my entire house? I’m not kidding. The living room measures 830 square feet; Our Humble O-Bode measures 1,025 square feet. Eight copies of home would fit inside one of these full-floor residences.

The master bedroom, with its attendant “sitting room” and his and hers bathrooms, sprawls across a corner of the floor plan with so many convolutions and doorways that a guy could get lost on the way from the bed to his toilet to have a piddle in the middle of the night. And speaking of toilets, “her bath” is larger than the master bedroom; it’s comprised of a dressing room with two walk-in closets, either of which is big enough to play handball in, a room that is literally a bathroom (nothing but a jacuzzi and a sink), a separate room with a toilet and a bidet, and a shower as large as either of the walk-in closets. “His bath” is a tiny broom closet off the hallway; it has a toilet, a sink, and a teensy-weensy shower stall. No bathtub. What’s a guy need with a bathtub? No dressing room, either. The master of the domain dresses himself standing up in the hallway.

If it sounds like the residence has a bathroom for every room, you’re not too far off the mark. If you had to answer nature’s call and started randomly opening doors to find a toilet, you’d have about a one in three chance of opening the right door. A media room and a library take up another corner of the residence, and there’s a full bathroom between them, just in case you work up a sweat in the library or the media room and feel the need to shower off before hiking off to some other distant part of the manse.

The Travel section was quite disappointing today. It usually features at least one place I’d like to visit, but other than a general feeling I’d rather be basking on a warm, sunny beach, there was nothing I had to stop and read. They did have a very fetching photo of the Kremlin taken from the Sofia embankment, but today is not the kind of day I would daydream about a visit to Moscow.

George Romero’s making another zombie movie, it says in the Arts & Liesure section. Do we have enough zombie movies yet? Haven’t they worked out every possible permutation of a brain-eating feeding frenzy? Apparently not. The only zombie movie I want to see any more is a film version of the Max Brooks novel World War Z. I’m starting to get the feeling it’ll never be made.

The Syle Section: I have to flip through it, even though the people in it are so far removed from any circles I move in that they may as well be another species. (I’d even argue that they are a separate species. Although technically we share compatible reproductive apparatus, practically speaking it’s never going to happen.) The well-heeled cavort across this week’s pages wearing candy-striped clothes so garish they might have been candy store awnings, and the lastest “distressed” look in denim jeans is literally falling off the rail-thin models in rags. (That’s enough “literally” for now, promise.)

Speaking of rail-thin, Kiera Knightly is shilling for Chanel by posing naked as a jay bird in their advertisement on page three. She’s holding a bowler hat to her breast, so I supposed I should say “tastefully nude.” Wait, it might be Natalie Portman. I didn’t think it would be possible to confuse the two until Natalie lost all her girl weight and became another Hollywood stick figure.

The cover of the Business section has a photo of a Godzilla-sized animatronic Mister Potato Head with arms that make it look like a cross between a tuber and a Terminator. The arms weren’t skinned over yet, revealing the hard metal armature, motors and wires under the clear plastic cover. It looked like something from a Stephen King movie that would lure little kids to within arm’s reach with its lovable facial features and maybe a pre-recorded patter, then the robotic steel arms would scoop up the little Hansels and Gretels and drag them irresistably closer, inch by terrifying inch, toward Mister Potato Head’s gaping maw of slavering fangs to be dismembered. Why wasn’t this on the cover of the Travel section? Or better yet, Arts & Liesure?

Joe Sharkey, the Business section’s Travel Bug, has a short article about the T.S.A., the agency whose white-shirted goons frisk you at the airport. (I don’t like the T.S.A. Can you tell? I can’t think of anything more Soviet than a federal police force created specifically to search our personal belongings. Hey! How’d that soap box get there?) The agency has set up a blog for travelers to leave their comments in that apparently makes for pretty good reading. “Ever since you started x-raying our shoes,” one traveler commented, “I’ve been forced to carry all my plastic explosives in my pants, which I find most inconvenient.” I like that guy. He’s one of me.

I haven’t been to Burger King in a coon’s age, but a half-page article (I’m still in the Business section) notes they’re doing incredibly well by serving the most eye-popping examples of catering to gluttony ever conceived. I hardly know how to react to the Quad Stacker (four quarter-pound patties, each topped by a slice of cheese, with two layers of bacon “and no veggies allowed”) except to stare in disbelief. It looks like something a kid would make at a cook-out as a joke, maybe dare one of his buddies to eat it, then laugh like a maniac when his buddy took his dare and made himself sick as a dog.

I’ve been watching the shelves at Bongo Video for a copy of Talk To Me and they finally had one yesterday afternoon. As it turned out, this is a biopic about Petey Greene, a disc jockey in Washington D.C. I probably wouldn’t have rented it if I’d known it was a biopic, but I didn’t know. I wanted to see it because I read lots of good reviews about it and I generally like Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor. I was looking forward to seeing the crazy 60’s fasions again, too, although it’s a little weird to me that a movie set in the 60’s is practically a costume drama already. I was born in 1960. I used to wear bell bottoms. So it goes.

I’m not usually very happy with biopics; one looks pretty much like the next, as far as I’m concerned. All through Ray I was thinking, This is Walk The Line with the names changed: Young artist struggles for recognition, messes with drugs until his career is in the toilet and his woman leaves him, then she comes back, he dries out, and his career surges to a big finish. And now that I think about it, Beyond The Sea was very nearly the same movie, too.

So I’m tempted to draw parallels between Talk To Me and Good Morning, Vietnam about another disc jockey working during trying times. Even Petey Green’s signature sign-on, “Wake up, god dammit!” sounds a little like Adrian Kronauer’s “Goooood morning, Vietnam!” Are there more similarities? I couldn’t begin to tell you. Good Morning, Vietnam sucked big, stinky pig’s feet and I’ve tried to blot the memory of it out of my mind, and been quite successful, I’m happy to say.

Talk To Me probably deserves all the praise it got from reviewers. Cheadle and Ejiofor delivered solid performances (and Taraji Henson, playing Petey’s girlfriend, stole nearly every scene she was in) and they worked very well together. The first act of the film, introducing Cheadle’s Petey and Ejiofor’s Dewey Hughes, built the story up well. The second act, following Petey’s rise to popularity and fame, was satisfyingly detailed, if a bit predictable. I didn’t enjoy the third act much at all, after Dewey and Petey became estranged and then, in the final scene, reconnected and made up with one another. I thought it felt rushed and artificial. Too bad, because the rest of the film was well worth watching.

Steve Miller sang his song about the pompetus of love on the radio as we drove to work this morning. My Darling B couldn’t contain her frustration with his obfuscation. She rarely can when he does that. “What’s a ‘pompetus?’ Huh? What the hell is that?”

The meaning of the pompetus of love eludes her, probably because her parents felt self-conscious or ashamed to speak of it in the presence of their children. Those of us who understand our pompetus can feel sympathy for those who don’t or won’t, but really, the best way to fill this gaping hole in our children’s emotional development is to speak more openly. Share your pompetus with your family. Don’t let them grow up always wondering what they’re missing in their lives, especially when it’s all around and so easily touched.

I’m bluffing. I have no idea what the pompetus of love is. It’s not that I haven’t asked. I used to bug my friends all the time with the question. “You know the Steve Miller song The Joker?” And I’d start the song for them: “Some people call me the space cowboy, some people call me the gangster of love, some people call me Maurice because I speak of the ...” And then I’d stop and wait for them to fill in the next word. Nearly every one of them said “pompetus,” or something so close as to make no difference, but not one of them had the foggiest idea what the “pompetus” of love could be. Nobody on earth does, not even Steve Miller.

If you really want to know, Cecil Adams dug up some pretty solid references and wrote a piece for The Straight Dope about the pompetus of love, shortly after actor John Cryer produced a movie called, coincidentally enough, The Pompetus of Love. He traced it back to a song written by Vernon Green for The Medallions titled The Letter, in which Green crooned, “Oh my darling, let me whisper sweet words of pizmotality and discuss the puppetutes of love.” There. That clears things up, doesn’t it? Well, it does if you read the whole story. Short answer: Green coined the word (and isn’t that a polite way of saying he made it up?) to refer to his “secret paper doll fantasy figure.”

Well, there you go. Clear as a bell.

From there, I’m going to leap to quantum physics ... not much of a leap, all things considered, because as far as I can tell it’s all made-up stuff. All physics is, even the Newtonian apple-tree stuff. I’m not saying the apple doesn’t fall from the branch to the ground, that’s pretty much a given, but the way physicists think about these things is entirely notional. A Newtonian physicist will plot the apple’s fall with machine-like precision, but ask an Einsteinian relativist how long it takes to hit the ground and he’ll ask if you want to know the answer from the point of view of the apple or the branch. Quantum physics is not only more relative, it’s never entirely certain the apple will fall from the tree. If it does, though, the objective act of watching it fall will change the time it takes to go from tree to turf. Now does that sound like made-up double-talk, or am I off my nut?

Coming of Age in the Milky Way is divided into three parts: Space, a Newtonian look at the universe; Time, an examination from Einstein’s point of view; and Creation, when the Quantum physicists pick it apart. The first two parts were a lot of fun to read, and I could understand them, particularly the first part. After I got to the second part I had to back up and re-read every so often to keep hold of the thread, but I managed. I’m not saying I completely understood it, but I think I could gist it. The third part, though, is pretty slow going, and I’ve read and re-read several chapters I don’t think I could summarize in a believable way if you gave me all week and let me use pictures. (Ferris uses lots of drawings in Coming of Age, but I can’t say they helped me understand quantum physics, and in particular not the one that looked like broken bedsprings pointing up and down.)

That’s not to say I don’t believe quantum physics isn’t true. Obviously it helps somebody understand the clockwork that runs the tiniest parts of the universe or they wouldn’t use it. It doesn’t help me, though. It sounds like the techno-babble the characters on Star Trek used to explain how the Romulans made their space ships invisible. Remember the “rift in the space-time continuum?” They sure got a lot of mileage out of that one, didn’t they?

So on a story-telling level, the third part of Coming of Age in the Milky Way may leave something to be desired. Ferris is leaning a little too far toward the physics and not far enough toward the interesting stories about cooky geniuses for the final section to be as much fun as the first two. I keep getting the feeling, as I’m re-reading a paragraph dense with explanation and getting nowhere, that I’m cramming for a test, and that’s absolutely not the feeling I had when I was whizzing through the first part of the book and thoroughly enjoying myself.

I went to see George the barber this morning, and besides the great haircut he usually gives me, I also got him to even up my moustache, trim the fuzzy fringe off the chops of my beard and get rid of the hairs that were beginning to bristle from my nostrils. I’ve been a teensy bit lax lately about keep them in check.

When he was all done with my nose hair, George asked me, “You know that saying, You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose? Well, that’s true for everybody except me!”

Tim’s plan to pass the half-credit physical education class he needs to graduate by showing up every day and taking the final, but not actually participating in any of the activities, just might stand a chance of working. He’s got an A in the class so far, all from getting dressed and being present. Crazy, isn’t it? If he does manage to pass by simply showing up I’ll kick myself all the way to the grave for not thinking of it when I was in high school. PE was the class I despised above all others.

“I think they probably graded a little differently back then,” My Darling B pointed out. “We had to participate.” She may be right, if she were talking about passing with an A or B, but I was strictly a C-minus student when it came to PE. I think it’s just possible I may have still gotten at least a C if the only physical part I did was take the test at the end of each unit, or module, or whatever they called each two-week section. It’s not like two weeks of practice made me a whole lot better at vaulting the pommel horse.

We never did much in the way of what you’d call education anyway. It’s not like Mister Lieberman gave us any solid pointers on how to climb the rope all the way to the ceiling, or make it over the bar on the high jump. Even when we played an organized game like basketball that presumably had rules, nobody ever explained what was going on. We just broke up into two teams and started playing. Everybody else knew what was going on except me. The team captain would assign me to guard a guy, as if I knew what that meant. Not that I would have been able to guard him if I did. Virtually everyone else could run away from me any time they wanted. And I somehow always ended up on the Skins team. As embarrassing as it was to be unable to sink a free-throw, it was a thousand times more humiliating with no shirt on.

So I have to admit I not only think Tim’s on to something, I wish I’d thought of it. Even if I had, though, I would have needed a generous helping of his go-to-hell attitude to make it work. There’s no way the teenaged me would have told Mister Lieberman, “I’m not going to play basketball because you never explain the rules, everybody thinks I suck at it and consequently it’s a painfully boring waste of my time.” But I sure wish I could have.

What kind of kinky-creepy fetish was that whole Shirts versus Skins thing, anyway?

As we were watching Talk To Me the other night I couldn’t help wondering, Who is playing trumpet on that awesome jazz recording of Grazing In The Grass? After the movie was over I paused the disc during the end credits to read the name of the performer, but all I could get was “Hugh” and the initial letter of his last name, “M,” so I had to surf the internet a while to find a complete soundtrack list with Hugh Masekela on it (a surprising number of web sites didn’t mention the song or the performer).

How did we ever find this information before the internet? I’ll tell you: We walked down to the record store and pelted the guy behind the counter with a string of vague questions. “What’s that song playing in the background of Talk To Me while they’re driving through New York? It’s got an awesome trumpet player in it. I think his name was Hugh something, maybe starts with ‘M.’ It goes like this: La-daahhhh, dah-dih dah dee dah, de dah.” With any luck, he stopped you before you had to try to sing it. If you were really lucky, somebody else already asked him about the song and he stopped you at “trumpet player.”

I doubt I would have had to sing any part of Grazing In The Grass, because almost everybody knows it, except for the two O-Folk I live with. That’s what they claim, anyway, even after I did the lah-dee-dah thing. I did a respectable job of staying on key, too. If you’ve ever heard me sing, you know how rare that is. Anyway, I know they’ve heard it because we listen to a lot of WOLX in the car on the morning commute and they’ve played a recording with lyrics written in a jive beatnik patois that we used to make fun of. The chorus goes something like, “I can dig it, you can dig it, he can dig it, we can dig it, dig!it!dig!it!dig!it!dig!it!” sung faster than a machine-gun can spray you full of lead. It’s still hard for me to believe they got away with that.

For years it was the only version of the song I knew until I heard it coming out of Hugh Masekela’s trumpet the other night. I hate to admit that, because he not only wrote it, it became a number one hit for him back in the 60’s. For decades, he’s been a hugely popular jazz trumpetist. Trumpeter? He famously plays the trumpet in the jazz style. How’s it possible I’ve never heard of him? I don’t claim to know a lot about jazz, but I certainly haven’t been living under a rock all these years, and yet Hugh Masekela was utterly unknown to me until last Saturday night, except for that beatnik recording.

So I went to Pandora.com, plugged his name into the search engine and listened to several songs from various albums. It’s all the kind of gorgeously groovy trumpet jazz that made me want to jump in the car, drive to the mall and scoop up every CD I could find with his name on the cover, then put them on my CD player and listen to them on shuffle all week long, or until somebody in the family begged me to please give it a rest or threatened me with a pointed stick.

I wouldn’t go to the mall, that’s a figure of speech. I’d go to every half-price resale shop. There’s a good one on State Street I can walk to on lunch break, when it’s not cold enough to make breathing a painful experience. Half-price Books (they also sell CDs and movies) is usually a good deal, too, but it’s all the way out on the far east side, so I generally don’t make the drive unless I’ve got a ton of money to spend there (and when do I ever have a ton of money to spend?) or I’m looking for an armload of cheap recordings by Hugh Masekela. I’d probably stop at Sugar Shack on Atwood, too, and flip through the vinyl, just to make sure I got everything. It’s one of those shops in a tiny corner building that looks as if it used to be a pharmacy and is stuffed with so many records that the LPs are standing in rows on the floor under the display boxes. Well worth the time spent flipping through, if you’ve got a turntable. We’ve got two.

Why? Because we can’t bear the idea of throwing out our record albums and singles, carefully collected over the years back when we firmly believed amassing a totally awesome record collection was one of the most important things we could have done. We weeded the duplicates when My Darling B and I merged our collections years ago and that was painful enough. Was it worth lugging hundreds of pounds of vinyl around from one move to the next? Well, the other night over dinner Tim thanked us for raising him in a house where we encouraged diverse musical tastes. I don’t know how important that is, but if nothing else we got the satisfaction of knowing we did at least one thing our kids appreciated.

I hate to say it, but the shine has begun to wear off the working lunch for me. The first time I was invited along for a working lunch I sat between the vice president of the department I work in and the regional vice president of the credit card company that our department contracts with, and they talked for the better part of an hour about things like “interchange income” and “full recourse accounts,” stuff I understood about as well as I understood quantum physics. They might have even slipped a “space-time continuum” in there somewhere to see if I was paying attention. I wasn’t. I was too jazzed about being part of a business lunch to listen to what was going on.

I understand the jargon a lot better now, and I’m still jazzed about getting a free lunch, but I like talking about the year-end credit card financial summary while I’m trying to enjoy a meal about as much as I like talking about, oh, let’s say dental hygiene while I’m trying to get excited about foreplay. I think that’s a damn tight analogy. You can appreciate exactly how the two are not compatible, can’t you? I can see how important it is to discuss the year-end summary, I’d rather leave it in the conference room is all I’m saying.

And we ate at Brocach’s again. We’re trending toward always eating at Brocach’s, mostly because it’s all of fifty feet down the block from our department’s front door, and because the food’s not all that bad, but frankly it’s not all that good, either. Brocach’s is primarily a bar, and I think the food they serve is prepared with the idea that the customers will be drinking enough while they’re eating that they probably won’t notice the Irish stew’s too salty. Company policy doesn’t allow for us to have a beer over lunch, though, so I was sucking down the icewater by the pint.

Brocach’s is a genuine American-Irish pub (the “American” very definitely comes first) complete with beat-up furnitre, distressed wall coverings, a name nobody can pronounce (some people say “bro CAW,” others say “BROCK uh” and I have a funny feeling neither is very close) and there’s a recording of Celtic pipes continually skirring from the CD player behind the bar. Tangent: Tim buses tables in an Italian restaurant where they also play Italian music on the CD player all the time. He confirmed what I’ve always feared was true about themed restaurants: “They’ve got just one CD in the player. They never change it. It plays over and over and over. God, I hate Italian music,” he added.

But one of the perks of the quarterly visit from the regional manager is that he takes us to lunch and we have a big plate of bangers & mash on his dime while we talk about dental hygiene. No. Income interchange, that’s it. Actually, when we first got there it was just me and him for about ten minutes, so I made small talk, which I’m usually not very good at but he travels a lot in his job and I found out he just got back from a week-long business trip to Hawaii and California. Man, that must be a muh-tha!

The waitress asked if we wanted anything to drink while we waited; I asked for a coke, he wanted a diet coke.

“Did you get any time off to enjoy yourself in Hawaii?” I asked him.

“Naw, and it rained the whole time I was there anyway,” he answered. California was apparently pretty nice, but he was tied up in meetings there, too.

The waitress brought our drinks. “This one’s diet,” she said, setting his down, “and this one’s not.” I took it from her, sucked a big old swig through the straw before setting it down, and nearly gagged it all up through my nose. It was diet. People who like diet soda say it’s an acquired taste, and that’s probably very true. I hope I never acquire it. It reminds me of that tangy metallic taste you can’t get out of your mouth if you happen to touch your finger to your tongue after handling a lot of old pennies.

“I hate to be trouble,” I told the waitress, when she came back, “but I’m almost certain this is a diet coke.” She apologized and took it away.

My boss and supervisor joined us then, and they were babbling about flossing and brushing when the waitress came back and handed my drink across the table while she took their orders. I took a cautious sip. Diet again. Well, I wasn’t paying for it anyway, so I set it aside and said nothing more about it.

I had my first lousy cup of coffee from Michelangelo’s today. The experience gave me a strangely emotional pain, as if a long-time crush had broken my heart, but I supposed it had to happen sooner or later. I’ve been stopping there so long now for a delicious cuppa joe that it’s become something close to an article of faith I’d enjoy every drop they passed over the counter to me. There’s no way that could go on, right?. It’s just not statistically possible. Sooner or later somebody had to lose count of how many scoops they put in the filter, or sneeze into the coffee pot and give me their stomach cramps. I could go on, but I’m already heading down a path that would get really disgusting in very short order.

Although to be frank, at two bucks a pop I have unreasonably high expectations that coffee shop coffee ought to be pretty damned good every time. I guess that’s a reflection of the cheapskate in me. A cup of coffee anywhere costs at least two bucks; it’s the low end of the spectrum, really, so who am I to expect excellence from every drop? But to me, two dollars is still a lot of money to pay for a cup of coffee, even if it’s a beverage with as much overhead as java-to-go from a trendy coffee shop on State Street. If I wanted a bitter cup of stewed coffee I could visit a Denny’s. They’d probably hit me up for two bucks, too, but I wouldn’t expect anything better than bilge water.

Not to make too much of it, but this was the first time ever I didn’t finish it all. Even when I get the really awful coffee from the pot in the break room I toss back the last swig, cold, rather than throw it out. That’s really because I’m too lazy to walk all the way to the bathroom to wash it out before filling the mug with water at the bubbler, but still. A crappy cup of coffee from Michelangelo’s. It may never happen again between now and the day the earth explodes, but whoda thunk it would ever happen in the first place? Not me.

There were two guys standing on the corner of Mifflin and Carroll streets, obviously from out of town. Each of them wore a “Hi, I’m Bob” button and had a lost in space vacancy about them, but the dead giveaway was neither of them was wearing a coat. Dollars to doughnuts they left them on the bus, thinking they would be exposed to the elements for no more than the distance from the curb to the capital, then back again. Only people who came to town on a tour bus would be standing on a curb in cap square without a coat. The townies out for a one-hour stroll were swaddled in layers of fleece and down and wool until we looked like walking papooses.

Bob stopped me as I neared the corner. “Is this a good place to catch a taxi?” he asked. “Our bus left without us.”

I hardly knew what to say. Catch a taxi? My first impulse was to blurt out, “Where in hell do you think you are, fellah? Does this look like New York city?” Luckily I was able to restrain myself. I can successfully do that on occasion, and a good thing, too. As a general rule of thumb it’s bad form to beat up on the out-of-towners. They probably did look at downtown Madison as if they were in Times Square or The Loop. In a state like Wisconsin there’s a pretty darned good chance that better than half the folks you see walking around capital square are not only from out of town, a significant chunk of them are also from a little kink in the road up north named Elbowton or Silage City or Burpee, population two-sixty-two, and Madison is the biggest town they’ve visited in ten years.

“I don’t think you’ll be able to wave down a cab here,” I answered. “It could happen, I suppose, but you could also end up waiting here for thirty or forty minutes.” I offered to call a cab for them but, unfortunately, when I reached for my cell phone I found I’d left it in my man purse, which was stuffed under the desk in my cubicle. Damn. The one time I left it was the time I could’ve used it. Before this all I’ve needed to flip it open for was to check the time. Figures.

So I had to admit I couldn’t help them but pointed out they could probably get a cooperative check-out clerk to call from any one of the store fronts on the square. The Historical Society was right across the street and they’re always very helpful. Bob (or was it Bob?) thanked me and they wandered away. I kept on going up State Street.

I read an article yesterday afternoon on the BBC’s web site about Antonin Scalia, one of the supreme court justices (name ring any bells?), that set me off like a firecracker because he reportedly characterized Europeans as smug for banning executions and equated torture to a smack across the face. As I may have mentioned once or twice, those are two of my very hottest buttons.

I know this isn’t the usual drivel, but it struck me funny that the web site article ticked me off, yet the interview (or most of it, anyway) didn’t, even though I fully expected the web site article was tightly edited and left out a great deal of detail. Articles written for print have become so abbreviated and slanted one way or the other that it’s nearly impossible to get a whole idea of the incident behind the story without reading widely from more than a half-dozen different sources. Even the BBC, a news source I’ve long admired for even-handedness, is very obviously leaving out quite a bit. Most stories on the Beeb’s news site take no more than two or three minutes to read, so how detailed can they be? And still I was amazed at the difference between the written story and the audio program.

The article linked to a streaming audio webcast of the interview Scalia gave for a BBC4 radio show, Law in Action. The interviewer pulls no punches, asking Scalia to defend his “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, which Scalia deftly explains. “You’re seen by many as an archconservative,” the interviewer charges; Scalia defends his record with examples of rulings he’s handed down that angered both conservatives and liberals. And in almost every case, Scalia sticks to his guns by refering again and again to the Constitution, the document he’s entrusted to protect.

I don’t know the Constitution well enough to argue with a supreme court justice, but I plain don’t agree that it must be interpreted in the frame of reference it was written. Scalia points out, for instance, that the Constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment does not forbid execution because the people who wrote the Constitution obviously allowed execution in their time, and didn’t see any conflict there. Therefore, execution must not be cruel and unusual punishment.

I think that argument is crap and I further think many parts of the Constitution were written broadly enough to allow us to reevaluate subjective terms such as “cruel and unusual” as our civilization matured but, as I said, Scalia’s studied law and I haven’t. I’m issuing an opinion without a law degree. That’s probably at least a misdemeanor, wouldn’t you think?

My opinions of his interpretations aside, I have to say that, as long as Scalia stuck to the line that he based his decisions on the Constitution, archaic viewpoint or not, he seemed to be making a reasoned argument. And then a funny thing happened. The interviewer asked him about the rights of prisoners held at Guantanamo. At first, Scalia kept his nose to the Constitution:

“I’m talking about the United States Constitution. The United States Constitution gives rights to Americans, wherever they are, and to foreigners who are in America ... it doesn’t give rights to everybody in the world. I don’t have a warrant to go investigating the actions of my country throughout the world to see whose rights they violated ... and that was the principle issue in Guantanamo, whether indeed Guantanamo Bay wasn’t within the United States, and our courts had no jurisdiction there.”

Technically a sound argument, I have to admit. I believe it’s a slimy technicality, keeping the prisoners at a military base outside the jurisdiction of the United States legal system, but I can’t deny that technically it works.

Then the interviewer steers toward a hot button, asking: “Tell me about the issue of torture. We know that cruel and unusual punishment is prohibited under the eighth amendment. Does that mean that the issue is kind of, if it comes up before the court, it’s a no-brainer?”

And Scalia replies:

“Well, a lot of people think it is, but I find that extraordinary. To begin with, the Constitution refers to cruel and unusual punishment — it is referring to punishment for crime. For example, incarcerating somebody indefinitely would certainly be cruel and unusual punishment for a crime, but a court can do that when a witness refuses to answer, can just commit them to jail until you will answer the question, without any time limit on it, as a means of coercing the witness to answer, as the witness should.”

Damn, he lost me there. Did he just say that cruel and unusual punishment is constitutionally prohibited, but that a court can order anybody indefinitely incarcerated, which would be cruel and unusual punishment? How does that work? Maybe this is something you have to go to law school to understand, or maybe it came out wrong. Whatever. Scalia goes on:

“And I suppose it’s the same thing about so-called torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution? Because smacking someone in the face would violate the eighth amendment in a prison context. You can’t go around smacking someone about. Is it obvious that what can’t be done for punishment, can’t be done to exact information that is crucial to the society? I think it is not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth.”

Does Scalia really, truly believe that smacking a terrorist in the face is going to make him confess? I can follow his argument marking the difference between punishment and coercion, but I can’t believe this lettered man, who was eloquently arguing constitutional law a moment ago, is resorting to the ticking time bomb scenario, equating a smack in the face with torture, and asking me to believe that a terrorist, who has successfully hidden from the authorities a bomb big enough to blow up Los Angeles, will cough up the location of said bomb if you smack him in the face.

When the interviewer points out how unlikely it would be to have on hand the one person who would know where the ticking time bomb is, and how dangerous it would be to use that argument as a basis for allowing torture, Scalia retorts:

“It seems to me that, unlikely as it is, it would be absurd to say that you, you [garbled] I don’t know, something under the fingernail, smack him in the face — it would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that.”

Well, now he’s gone way off into left field. No reference to the Constitution, no reasoned argument, it’s just plainly absurd to agrue that you couldn’t stick needles under a prisoner’s fingers as a method of coercion. Wow.

“And once you acknowledge that,” Scalia continues, without trying very hard any longer to get the interviewer to acknowledge his Jack Bauer scenario, “we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be, and how severe can the infliction of pain be? I don’t think these are easy questions at all, in either direction, but I certainly know you can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and say, ‘Oh, it’s torture and therefore it’s no good.’ You would not apply that in some real-life situations. It may not be a ticking bomb in Los Angeles, but it may be, ‘Where is this group that we know is plotting some very painful action against the United States? Where are they? What are they currently planning?’”

And with those last three questions he tries to regain his footing, but as far as I’m concerned he went over the edge. I was with him up to the point he tried to defend torture, and I sincerely feel he made good arguments before then, but his arguments fell apart, and fell apart spectacularly, when he gave up citing the Constitution. I could respect what he said when he was defending himself in a constitutional frame of reference, but when he devolved to arguing for sticking needles under anybody’s fingernails, I couldn’t respect that at all. I very much feel I can say, Oh, it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good.

What I found most odd about the experience of comparing the written text to the interview was that, when the written article set me off, it was because a writer for the BBC made a conscious decision to use Scalia’s words against him. I wouldn’t exactly say he twisted Scalia’s words, but he did carefully edit what Scalia said to make him out to be an arch-nemesis of free thought, almost tyrannical. Yet, when I listened to the interview to see if I could detect what Scalia meant to say, I found a respect for his defense of the Constitution, but not for his own beliefs. I have to say, it was an unsettling experience.

Valentine’s day. More chocolate. Just what I need.

Actually, I didn’t get more chocolate. I mean, I did, but not from a sweetheart, although it almost goes without saying that, in celebration of Valentine’s Day, a new crop of chocolate has sprung up in the candy dishes that dot the desk tops at work. And we were this close to finishing off the last of the Christmas & New Year’s candy crop. Easter’s just around the corner, you know. We’re ever going to see the bottoms of those candy bowls.

I didn’t get any chocolates as a Valentine’s gift from the one girl my heart goes pitty-pat for, is what I meant. My Darling B knows what I really like, what I need more than anything else. She gave me a bookmark. You can see why I married her.

It’s a fairly tiny bauble, just a thin blade of chrome bent into a crook with a loop on the crook’s end. Along a couple short pieces of wire tied through the loop she’s strung beads spelling out “B&O” and “Love.” Really, does it get any more heartwarming than that? You can give a card and a heart-shaped box of chocolates (that’s what I did — d’oh!), but a gift like that is the sweetest.

Thanks, B! *pitty-pat*

I got to stay home today. Appointments. I love to say that; sounds like I’ve got big, bad things to do. Yeah, I’m terribly important and busy. I’ve got so many appointments today I simply must stay home from work to get them all cleared from my calendar. Can’t talk now, must run. No, nobody I know believes that, but it’s still fun to say, maybe a lot more fun because nobody believes it.

I really did stay home for a couple appointments, though. The first, in the morning, was to meet My Darling B at Java Cat (we had lunch together; I think she likes me) after she ran a personal errand that she had to drive across town to Monona to attend to. (Is that two too many tu-tus?) (Sorry. Won’t let that happen again.) So long as she was going to be here anyway, and I was staying home to help out with her errand, we agreed to lunch at the Java Cat before she went back to finish the day at the DMV.

Java Cat’s a coffee shop, obviously, at the corner of Cottage Grove Road and Monona Drive that’s pretty popular with the locals. It opened shortly after we first settled here, and we used to stop there quite often after we began the job hunt, but since we started working, me downtown and B on the west side, we don’t get too many chances to stop there these days, so grabbing this opportunity made for a pleasant return.

We each had the soup & sandwich lunch special that comes with gelatto for dessert. They make the gelatto, a sort of ice cream, right there in the shop. I don’t risk eating ice cream any more on account of my gut’s astoundingly hyperactive intolerance to dairy (all on my own I can emit enough greenhouse gasses to melt both polar ice caps, and all I would have to do is eat a slice of cheescake and wash it down with a tall glass of whole milk), but their lemon gelatto isn’t made with any milk, so you don’t have to worry about the Atlantic Ocean rising up to the statue of Liberty’s nose overnight.

B’s also been trying for weeks to get me to remember that I should schedule an appointment with the technician at Sears to come give our dish washer its five thousand mile checkup. We keep the mileage low by washing only small stuff, tea saucers and shot glasses, and then only on Sundays. [APPLAUSE]

Well, last week I was looking at my desk calendar, saw that I would have to take time off this morning anyway and asked for the whole day off instead because getting Sears to come over is like getting the cable guy to come hook up your television box: he can come over some time in the afternoon between one and five, but that’s as close to an appointed time as I was going to get.

As it turned out, he showed up at quarter past one, thank dog. I could have been hanging around by the front door for hours. Instead, I got to go do whatever I wanted after he was finished, and he was even quicker about giving the dish washer a checkup than he was about getting over here. You know how they make sure your dish washer is working right? The techie connects it to a laptop and while the two gizmos exchange information, he cleans the lint trap and eyeballs the inside of the tub for signs of wear and tear. Ten minutes later the techie is shaking your hand on the way out the door.

The rest of the day was mine. I wish I could say I felt as though I did something. I can honestly say I stayed busy all day long: caught up on some reading, washed a truckload of dirty clothes & folded them, watched about half of About A Boy while I was folding clothes (I love that movie), washed the dishes and put them away, searched the interwebs for a couple books about technical and freelance writing, little more of this, a tiny bit more of that ... and yet at the end of the day came in a blink and I felt as though I hadn’t been home all day, probably for the very reason that I hadn’t stretched out on the sofa, eating a bag of cheesey poofs, then napped until B came home.

That would have been a very long nap indeed. An inch or so of snow fell across Madison right around five o’clock, but it made the roads just slippery enough that B’s evening commute stretched out to six-thirty. The moment she came through the door she announced her exasperation with rush-hour driving in the snow with a long, theatrical sigh, pressing the back of her hand to her forehead. She elected to forego a swoon.

One good thing about taking Thursday off: When I go back to work tomorrow morning it’ll be Friday!

One more good thing: I won’t have to even think about washing underwear this weekend. It’s done!

And that’s a very good thing, because I’m going to spend all Saturday, from nine in the morning until five in the evening, gaping at hundreds of teensy little freight and passenger trains going round and round the club layouts at the 41st Annual Mad City Model Railroad Show. There won’t be a brain cell in my head available to work out what I’m going to do for boxers come Monday morning.

Talk about Train Nerd Heaven, this is it. It’s organized by the South Central Wisconsin Division of the National Model Railroad Society — there will be card-carrying train nerds at this show. Could it be more official than that? And those that are not certified by a chartered society or regional club will wear their bona fides in the guise of denim engineer’s hats and coveralls, dotted with badges bearing their club’s name and a deep-perspective drawing of their favorite diesel engine, the herald of their favorite rail road, or the quippy, “My other vehicle is a MP40ph-I.” Others will come dressed as conductors, complete with hats with the broad brass name plate across the front and vests dotted with shiny pins. Some of the little kids will be dressed up like that, too.

Tim was truant for ninth period again today. That’s the last period in his day, and whenever he ducks out of it, I get an e-mail from the attendance robot at his school. If it were one of those artificial intelligences that learns to anticipate from doing something over and over, by now it would be sending me an e-mail at the end of every school day. If it was an AI with a sense of humor, it would’ve changed Tim’s first name to Truant, too.

Friday night is huevos night, or at least that’s what it’s becoming. We used to go out nearly every Friday night, but now we head for home where My Darling B begins a kitchen experiment, or prepares a meal she knows she’d never get away with serving if Tim were home. Friday nights he buses tables at a local restaurant. It’s not that she won’t serve a dish he doesn’t like; she does that all the time. What he’d like is steak and potatoes, every single night. He argues for it all the time, and he’s disgusted she can’t see her way clear to be reasonable about the dining arrangements and at least serve him steak and potatoes, which he figures shouldn’t be that hard to prepare, and keep the weeds and other vegetable dishes all for ourselves.

I can’t remember how far back it was that B got a craving for huevos rancheros but I’m pretty sure it happened when we were eating out one Friday. Before that, it was eggs benedict; she spotted it on the menu at the Blue Plate, tried it at another place I can’t remember the name of, but she never did find a place that served them to her satisfaction so she decided to try fixing them at home, and she did, several times, but she had some trouble getting the eggs to turn out the way she wanted them. She and eggs have been at odds for as long as I can remember.

And then her craving for huevos came along, and the same thing happened as with the eggs benedict: She ordered it at a couple different restaurants, but what they served was not what she was jonesing for. Out came the many cookbooks shelved all over Our Humble O-Bode. She thumbed them incessantly and surfed the interwebs for hours, and one Friday night announced she wanted to go straight home and try making them her darned self. And she did. And she made them again, and again.

It’s rare that a kitchen experiment gets repeated around here, so I’m guessing she’s satisfied with the way they turned out, and I use “satisfied” in a very guarded sense, because she’s never entirely satisfied with the way the dishes she cooks turn out. She’s sure, every time, it could have used a little more of one seasoning or another, that she cooked it too long, or that the ingredients should have been fresher. It all tastes great to me; I can’t remember the last time I was disappointed by anything she served. It’s food of the quality I’d pay for, so I’m pretty happy I don’t have to. Well, I guess I do, but you get my drift.

She doesn’t make huevos every single Friday night, not that I’d complain if she did. She goes out of her way to make them to please; until tonight, she even scrambled the eggs for my serving, thinking that I didn’t like fried eggs. I like fried eggs just fine, on occasion. It’s just that, when we go out for breakfast, the places we visit serve such great scrambled eggs that I can’t pass them up.

Because I took yesterday off I had a lot of catch-up work piled on my desk this morning, and while I liberated the forms from their manila envelopes even more came in with the first wave of interdepartmental deliveries. Most of the paperwork was made up of credit card applications. That would have normally been something of a relief as I typically get to send back about half of them for not being filled out completely. Usually it’s something as small as a box that wasn’t ticked, but I can’t process the app without that information so I heartlessly return it to the branch whence it came. On this particular morning, though, all but one of the dozen or so apps on my desk were painfully complete. Curses!

So after I jotted a pile of notes from my voice mail and cleared my e-mail inbox of messages, I was ready to start working on the applications. The connection to the secure server I need to process them picked exactly that moment to freeze up like a squeeze bottle of honey left on the windowsill in February. Well of course it did.

This is the irony of the technological age we live in: We have become so advanced that, from my networked desktop computer, I can know within a minute or two of submitting an application whether or not it’s been approved by Visa, the mighty and omnipotent, and yet, when the network slows to a crawl, I can’t do jack. Okay, that’s not entirely true; I can fax the applications to a pole barn in Fargo, North Dakota, to be entered into the system within the next three to five business days by a devoted herd of data entry LTEs. It’s sort of a back-up plan, but walking to the public library and processing apps on one of their internet terminals would be faster. Not that my employers would let me do anything remotely like that. Ever. Forget I said that.

The network slowdown didn’t last long and I was able to find plenty to do in the meanwhile. One of my newest projects is to compile a list every darned employee, their office phone numbers and their e-mail addresses, eleven hundred and some in all. It doesn’t matter what for. What matters is that I volunteered the opinion I’d be able to knock this job off in two or three days. That’d be true if all the information was all in once place, easy to read off one screen while transposing into another. It’s anything but.

My supervisor got HR into sending me a complete list of employees’ names, and thank dog for that; I could copy and paste the ones I needed in just a half-hour or so, but the e-mail addys and the phone numbers I have to look up one at a time. I can fill in thirty or forty of the blanks before my eyes start to water or my fingers get so fouled jumping from the alpha keys to the control keys and back that I have to stop, take several deep breaths, stand up & stretch, and sometimes walk away entirely, pacing between my desk and the hallway until I can focus on distant objects again.

Going from zero to eleven hundred, thirty names at a time, is going to be quite a long haul, much longer and harder than I bragged it would be. That’s what I get for being such a loudmouth.

I almost, but not quite, took my usual noontime walk today. I got as far as the intersection where Johnson crosses State Street and thought, No way am I walking all the way to the Library Mall on a day as frigidly cold as today. Actually, what I thought was, FREAKING COLD! I think I may have even said it aloud. If I did, nobody disagreed with me.

So I cut the corner, circled around behind the Overture Center and ducked into the library. I planned to paw through the magazines for twenty or thirty minutes but was pleasantly surprised to find the Friends of the Library were having a book sale. Like I need more books to read. These sales are such a good deal, though — all hardcovers are a dollar, paperbacks, fifty cents. Can’t beat a deal like that with a stick, no matter how hard you try.

I wandered a bit through the fiction section toward biographies, ending up in the poetry section where I picked up a slim volume of Keats. I can’t remember ever having read any Keats, even though one or two English teachers somewhere along the line must have assigned him, but I liked the way Hyperion began, and it was such a nifty little hardback for just a buck. I couldn’t put it back.

Then I grubbed through the magazines downstairs, even checked out a few and stuffed them into my pockets, since I didn’t have the time any more to read them before I had to get back to cubicle heaven. I stopped at a sandwich shop I forget the name of, realized I wasn’t hungry but knew that I should eat something so I got a cheese biscuit and, thinking of B, a chocolate-chip scone for after dinner tonight. You really can’t go wrong with a chocolate-chip scone. It even came with a little chocolate brushed over the top, just for insurance. B said it was too crumbly, but I notice she still ate her half.

The second-best thing about eating breakfast at Cleveland’s Diner is, they never let you get to the bottom of your coffee cup. My Darling B, who gulps down coffee as only the daughter of a police officer can, managed at one point to get to within three-quarters of an inch of finishing off her cup before the waitress swooped past our table and refilled her, but that was as close as she ever got, and then only because they had a rush. My cup was never more than a half-inch down from the brim, and never cold. I just love that. There aren’t a lot of places in town where they watch out for their customers as well as they do at Cleveland’s.

The very best thing about Clevend’s is, of course, the food. But I’ve already talked about their food. Let’s talk about butts.

“We should count the butts some time,” B said, referring, in case you’re wondering, to the post cards on the wall. The decor at Cleveland’s would be typical for a man’s college dorm room. The north wall of the front dining floor is papered with concert posters, advertisements for roller derbys, snapshots of friends, season schedules of favorite sports teams, and post cards showcasing women’s very tanned butts, presumably sent from friends vacationing in Spain, Greece, Ibiza, Crete, and wherever else they sell those kinds of post cards. I counted at least six, but there could be more hiding among the collage-like camoflage of the rest of the photos. There are also a few cards showing boobies and, in keeping with the idea of equal time I suppose, one of Michelangelo’s David doing the full monty, a naked Buddha whose belly almost, but not quite, hides his daddy parts, and a rampant fertility god, so there are at least three pee-pees up there, too.

There isn’t much more of this elsewhere in the diner. The rest of the walls bear some grafitti, a few road signs, some old baseball pennants and one or two “no parking” signs, that kind of stuff. The really interesting decor is up front. Try to get a seat up there and sit with your back to the window.

After our trip to the farmer’s market and breakfast at Cleveland’s, B dropped me off at home and ran out to scare up a few necessary groceries at the corner store while I cleaned up in the shower. We rolled out of bed straight into our street clothes to make sure we got to the market first thing and had plenty of time for a leisurely breakfast because, you see, today was the first day of the model rail road show at the convention center and I wanted to get there early enough to have plenty of time for a good look around.

I wasn’t so sure how early that would be. On our way home we went past the colliseum to see what the traffic would be like, and it was bumper-to-bumper from the front gate to the beltline. “This can’t all be for the train show!” I gasped, thinking I would have to walk if I wanted to get to see any of it some time today, but as things turned out, I didn’t have to worry. By the time Tim drove me back and dropped me off at the gate, the traffic had thinned out. And they weren’t all parents and their kids going to the show. Most of them were parents and their kids going to the Shriner’s circus next door.

They were still thick as flies on a cow pat inside the main hall of the convention center, but the kids were mostly bunched up against the railings of the model train layouts and I could see those later, after they got tired and were whining to mom & dad they wanted to go home. (I’ve been to a few of these, yes.) What I wanted most was to prowl through junk boxes, looking for a particular kind of track switch, and to talk with some of my fellow train nerds, particularly the ones who were exhibiting the models they so lovingly crafted.

Every year a dozen or two will spread the fruits of their hobby across a table, often with deftly hand-lettered place cards explaining what each model was, or how it was made. A guy can learn one or two very useful things from fifteen or twenty minutes chatting with these fellahs, and they’re usually more than willing to answer any and all questions. I spent nearly a half-hour asking one guy about his impressively large collection of locomotives and passenger cars, most of them “bashed” from plastic models, meaning he started with a model of one thing and ended up with a completely different model by dint of carefully cutting away the parts he didn’t need and building the parts he did need from scratch, patiently gluing them in place before painting the model in carefully-researched, authentic colors. A lot of people spend years trying to learn to make models that look half as good as he had lined up on his table. [The top photo at this link features a streamlined locomotive he built up from a rather generic steamer.]

I met three or four guys in the front hall of the convention center who were happy to talk my ear off. It was while I was chatting with the fourth guy about how he built the detailed houses and train stations on his table that I noticed, while glancing down at a model, that my fly was open. Either they didn’t notice, or they weren’t too concerned about it. Nonchalantly closing my coat, I excused myself as soon as it was polite to do so and found a remote corner behind a door where I could crouch down over my backpack and pretend to look for a copy of the program while I zipped up.

Then I stepped through the doors of the main hall and dove into the crush of people milling about. The center of the hall was dominated by railroad layouts, but the boundaries of nearly every one of them was thickly crowded in layer on layer of fledgling train nerds, usually standing on milk cartons or step-stools they carried with them for just this purpose. I try to stay away from the layouts for the first couple hours, unless there’s one the urchins have for some reason not yet gravitated toward, but as soon as they begin to weave between my ankles I back off and let them get in good and close. They’re too easy to trip over or, worse, throw off-balance, and then either they or I will reach out and grab for the first handy solid object, the railroad layout. Tragedy is the only way this scene can end.

Besides, we established (I hestitate to use the term “mature”) train nerds know that the only way to perpetuate the species is to let the little guys get in close; nay, to encourage them to hang their little dimpled chins over the edges of the layouts. When parents apologize for their kids getting underfoot, I wave them off and say, “No need, this show’s for them,” and I’m not lying even a little bit. Hook ‘em while they’re young, that’s the plan.

The aisles between the vendor’s tables are just as thickly clogged with teeming humanity, but there’s a whole different dynamic going on there between the fully-grown train nerds. Pushing, shoving and stepping on toes is permitted so long as it’s accompanied by “excuse me” or “sorry about that.” I’m guilty of making as much use of this as anybody else. Heck, I’m not going to put myself at a disadvantage.

What I was looking for was bargains, and by that I don’t mean ten percent off the retail price. Hell, I can do better than that on e-bay. So far as the rolling stock was concerned, I promised myself I wouldn’t buy anything that cost more than ten bucks, and I kept to that. I didn’t walk away with anything that had wheels and cost more than seven, and I felt pretty darned good about it. Smug, even, if you want the whole truth. And I never even picked up a book. That might’ve cost me forty bucks, minimum, and I had a more important objective in mind.

What I wanted most was to spot a junk box filled with odds and ends of somebody’s used railroad track — not too used, as in bent and broken and still covered in the snotty residue we model rail junkies call “ballast,” but just used enough that the vendor wasn’t asking the moon. The cost of new track approximates lunar real estate. I’m not sure why the moon’s so expensive, but I don’t argue with the standard. If I had to blow a wad, I figured I’d go buy new, and by three o’clock in the afternoon I was coming to the sad conclusion that I would probably have to, having found exactly no junk boxes chuck full of track. And then ...

It wasn’t a junk box, it was a hidden corner of a shelf at a vendor’s table I’d already walked past. I was only going past it again on the way to the other side of the main hall to buy some new track, but I happened to take another look and saw what looked like a stack of crossovers, ready-made X’s of track. I stopped and scooped them up, thinking maybe there would be a switch or two buried underneath, and found that they weren’t crossovers at all ... they were, every one of them, used switches made of exactly the kind of track I was looking for! Priced at six or seven bucks apiece! They were painted black but otherwise in good shape. I flipped each one of them over, expecting to find some kind of insanely grotesque flaw that would keep people from greedily snapping every single one of these up the way I was going to in a minute ...

There wasn’t a thing wrong with them, not that I could see. They were just what I’d come to the show looking for. You can’t imagine how close I came to peeing myself when I realized it wasn’t a dream, that I could finally lay some track and get trains moving on the tiny slice of railroad empire I’d been piecing together in the basement of Our Humble O-Bode these past two years. With trembling hands, I passed the collection of switches to the vendor, who tallied up the total (sixty bucks to buy trackwork that would have cost me a little more than three times that for new stuff) and sent me off with a wish to have lots of fun with my new toys. “You have no idea,” I answered.

All day Friday we kept hearing about the Extreme Winter Storm that was going to slash, pummel and bury us on Saturday, or maybe Saturday night and Sunday, or possibly just Sunday. Six to eight inches of snow, or seven to ten, or maybe eight to twelve, depending on whose doomsday scenario you heard on the radio, read in the papers or watched on television. The severity of the predicted amount of snow and ferocity of the storm increased exponentially depending on the media from which the weather guys dispensed their wisdom. Why can’t these guys ever agree on anything? Is “Contradiction 101” the first class they take in meteorology school? No, it’s just that the television guys have flashy, dynamic pictures that get them all excited about the weather, while the radio guys, disembodied voices with no picture to show us, probably not even to look at, come across as much more reserved, sometimes even depressed about making their forecasts. Maybe Tom Ashbrook should announce the weather. Talk about feeling a crushing sense of urgency.

The snows never came. All through Saturday, the day I set aside to go visit the convention center where I planned to peer at model trains all afternoon, I kept expecting to glance out the windows of the main hall and catch a glimpse of a wind-driven, apocalyptically frozen winter storm that would send people fleeing in panic, and all day it was sunny, even what Wisconsin-born folk would call mild for a day in February. By one o’clock, I relaxed and stopped looking out the window. Just before dinnertime the skies were still clear and the temps warm enough that I went out to Bongo Video to rent a movie, that’s how unthreatening the weather felt. I took one last look out the window when I headed off to bed late last night, saw exactly no snow falling past the street lamps, and went to sleep with visions of another clear, bright day ahead.

My chattering teeth woke me up in the middle of the night. The cat had once again stolen her way into the warm spot, leaving me freezing on the fringes of the quilt. Years ago, when Boo was a delicate little kitten and I was loath to make her cross, I would gently snuggle up close to her, reclaiming as much of the warm spot as possible without danger of waking her. Now that I know she won’t wake up under any circumstances, and besides, she’s a big freaking cat, I take back the part of the bed I have worked all night to warm with the heat of my very own body by gathering a handful of covers in a fist under my chin and, using my shoulders as a lever, roll away from the center of the bed until Boo pops out from beween me and My Darling B like a champagne cork from a bottle. If she’s very lucky, Boo gets the pocket left between our legs. Then I slide my butt right up against B’s and go to sleep warm and comfy.

Only last night I didn’t go back to sleep. The sound of dripping water gradually seeped into my semiconscious thought, and after it did all I could think of was, It’s freezing outside. I shouldn’t be hearing the sound of dripping water. The more my brain toyed with this thought, the more I dreaded finding out why I could hear water, a lot of it, dripping somewhere outside my window, but I felt, not immediately but stronger with each passing minute, that I should get up and look for it, even if I had to go outside.

The picture that had built up in my head was of the outdoor faucet cracked open from the cold and gushing all over the snow. The more I tried not to think about it, the uglier the picture got, no matter how much I told myself that it didn’t make sense. For one thing, the washer in the valve had already gone bad, so a very slow drip was already seeping from it. That alone should have made it impossible for the faucet to freeze up. I also knew that it was just barely below freezing outside, thirty-one or thirty at the lowest, and we had just passed through a week of below-zero temps that should have cracked the faucets open if anything would. We’d weathered them just fine. But even if the pipe had somehow found loopholes in my irrefutable logic and cracked wide open, I should have heard the sound of water running through the water meter, and I didn’t. So where was the sound of dripping water coming from?

I padded across the living room floor to the kitchen, where I cracked open the window to listen. Drippity-drip drip-drip — that was unmistakably water dripping from the eaves. From the eaves? What the hell? Sticking my head out the door was a very unappealing option, but I had to know. Luckily, all I had to do was open the door and I could see clearly, even with my myopic eyes, that the trees and phone lines were glazed with ice. An ice storm! It was semi-frozen sleet dripping from the eaves. Well, I can’t do anything about that, I told myself and, relieved that broken water pipes were no longer a vision plaguing my thoughts, I padded off back to bed. Had to reclaim my warm spot from the cat again, naturally.

In the afternoon the rain turned into snow. That probably pissed off Dan Fogelberg a bit, eh? It was falling so thickly and being driven so windily that one look out the window at it would send most normal people back to bed, to say nothing of making them instantly give up walking as far as the distance from their front door to the curb, so My Darling B decided to stroll a couple blocks to the local Italian store to buy some pasta for dinner. Go figure. The store was closed, of course. They had the good sense to stay home today.

My weather mistake was to predict a snow day tomorrow, or at least a two-hour delay, for Tim’s school, but the storm let up only a few hours after dinner time and didn’t make any sign of picking up again. “I seem to remember somebody around here thought we were going to have a snow day tomorrow,” Tim said, trying and failing to get any sympathy from me, the guy who’ll be back in cubicle heaven tomorrow morning either way.

Ever heard of the movie Closer? All I heard was that it got some pretty good reviews and it starred four actors I love to watch, Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. If I’d known what it was about — four people heartlessly tie each other up in emotional knots over four years’ time — I might have had second thoughts.

I thought the movie deserved the good reviews it got. The writing was outstanding; I loved the way the characters spoke to one another, but what they were saying was brutal. Honest, but ruthlessly so. I hung on every word, but it was like watching the victims of a car wreck bleed to death and being unable to do anything to help them.

I know that’s a lot of buts. I couldn’t say I’d recommend it because I’m still not sure how much I liked it, and that’s what it comes down to, for my money. The critics say the question of whether or not it’s a good movie is answered by how well it went about doing what it set out to do. Even by that measure, I’m honestly not sure what this movie set out to do, so I’m not sure how well it passed that test. If you can make sense out of it, let me know.

Tonight’s movie was My Darling Clementine, the John Ford classic with Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, Victor Mature as Doc Holliday and Walter Brennan as old man Clanton, shooting it out at the O.K. Corral. Ward Bond pops up, as he seems to do in every single movie made during the 40’s, to play a relatively small role as Morgan Earp and to whinnie like a horse at a passing woman. I don’t know what that means, but it makes me belly-laugh every time he does it.

I didn’t recognize any of the women except Jane Darwell, the lady who volunteered to take care for Chihuahua, the Mexican hooker, in her house after Doc Holiday operates. She played Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. Linda Darnell, playing Chihuahua, must have been somebody big back in her day to judge by the way they gave her every opportunity to slink around in a sexy, off the shoulder peasant dress, but I can’t recall seeing her in any other film. And Cathy Downs, who played Clementine Carter, the movie’s namesake, was a stock actress the studio used because she gets so little to do that they though audiences would get riled if a big-name actress had to stand around waiting for screen time. (I just love IMDB. It’s a gold mine of trivia.)

It’s a funny movie to watch because when they made it Victor Mature was obviously the big star of the film; he’s got most of the screen time and the camera just loves to linger on his face in obsessively tight close-ups. They released the movie with a theater poster dominated by Mature’s somnolent face snuggled up to Linda Darnell’s. Henry Fonda appeared on it, pushed to one side, mostly in shadow, barely recognizable. Now Fonda’s the only person most people would recognize, and his face is the only face on the cover of the DVD case.

We invited Tim to watch with us. He didn’t ask what the name of the movie was or who was in it, he only wanted to know, “Does it have any shooting and killing in it?”

“Yeah, truckloads of people get shot and killed,” I answered. “As a matter of fact, it ends with one of the most well-known shootings in U.S. history.” He must’ve thought I was pulling his leg, though, because he didn’t come out of his room to watch any of it, not even the end. Too bad for him.

I jumped out of bed straight into my boots after the alarm woke me, wrapped up in a down jacket, pulled on gloves and a knit cap, grabbed the shovel on my way out through the garage and attacked the two inches of snow that fell on the driveway last night. It fell all over Monona, too, not just on my driveway, but that’s the only part of it I was going to shovel. I set to work with the kind of grim, robotic determination mustered only by a man who’s half-asleep, who still has the warmth from bed clinging to his skin, who knows that virtually everyone in town is still flat on their backs calling to Zawp, the Supreme Overlord of the Realm of the Unconcious.

City lights reflected off the low overcast and bathed the snowscape around me in a dim beige glow. That meant there were some thick clouds up there, but I’d been assured by no less than the National Weather Service the storm had passed. They cancelled their severe winter storm warning just before I went to bed last night. It had stopped snowing shortly after dinner, and nothing had fallen since. If it snowed at all today, we weren’t supposed to get more than light flurries. So promiseth the National Weather Service.

Shoveling the driveway uncovered a thick layer of ice that I couldn’t separate from the pavement no matter how manically I hacked away at it. If that was on my driveway, it was probably going to be on the roads, too, polished to a glossy shine by the tires of passing traffic. It was a premonition that turned out to be oh-so-right when we came to a stoplight on Atwood Avenue and the car ahead of us went into a skid that didn’t stop until he was pointing ninety degrees to the left.

The piled-up snow on either side at the end of the driveway has reached shoulder height, a case of double indemnity if there ever was one because by the time I get down there my back’s already killing me. It isn’t fair that I should have to work harder at that point. And if I have a heart attack and drop to my knees behind the snowbank, nobody will see me for hours, not even the snowplow drivers. I’ll be buried alive. I used to slow down when I got to the halfway point, on the theory that I could keep my heart rate down that way, and that might work if I kept myself fit in the first place. I’m not exactly getting a flabby gut, but I haven’t done any physical training since Uncle Sam used to make me. I’m pretty sure shoveling snow a couple times a month and a walk to the end of State Street and back on a sort-of daily basis would hardly count toward a presidential fitness award.

Half an hour after I got out of bed I was standing under a hot shower, feeling a little better than grim. After toast and some OJ I felt even better, and as I took my cup of coffee into the living room to spend a few quiet moments contemplating the beginning of the day through the front window, I was feeling positively bouyant.

That didn’t last long. It was snowing, and not the flurries they predicted but a hard, dense, almost whiteout snow — I could hardly see the house across the street — and just in time to make the morning commute even worse than it would have been if all we’d had to worry about was glare ice. Weather like this is just the kind of crap that made people believe in vengeful gods in the first place.

Well, there was no point in dwelling on it. We’ve had plenty of opportunity to do that in the six or eight weeks since this whole Blizzard of Aught Eight whinefest began and it’s getting old ... no, it’s past getting old. It’s not news. I mean it, even the revelation that the city used up the snow removal budget this month and we’re nearly out of road salt ... was that really unexpected? Did anybody anticipate we’d have more money than needed to plow the streets? Has that ever happened? I haven’t done the research, but I’m willing to bet my next paycheck it hasn’t, so let’s let it go. It’s ancient history and should be left to mummify already, which is not to say I couldn’t utter one explosive cuss word when I saw the snow coming down to re-cover my freshly shoveled driveway, but I cussed percussively and then I left it alone to drink the rest of my coffee in peace and quiet.

This morning was the first in weeks I was ready to hit the road before anybody else, and I mean anybody, even Tim, who counts himself “dressed” as in ready to face the elements when wearing nothing more than jeans and a t-shirt, even when it’s thirty below outdoors. He puts on a fleece and a coat before heading out the door, I’m not saying he’s stupid, but ask him if he’s ready to go when he’s still padding around in his stocking feet and boxer shorts and, nine times out of ten, he’ll answer, “Yeah.” On what planet, I don’t know.

B has all that girl stuff to do in the bathroom, drying and combing her hair, I don’t know what else. I keep offering to help her, but whatever she’s doing is apparently a big secret because I’m not allowed in, ever, no matter how much she bustles around and bangs off the walls.

There’s all that going on and yet I’m still usually tail-end Charlie when it comes to getting out of the house in a timely manner, searching room to room for my glasses, trotting over to the desk for my camera (I try not to leave the house without my camera, always on the lookout for that naked woman on horseback) (this is Madison, it could happen), then hastily grabbing lunch from the leftovers in the fridge, then digging a freshly-laundered pair of socks from the basket atop the drier because I nearly always leave the house wearing the socks I slept in ... it goes like that for me every morning.

But today I found myself in the odd position of being ready to go while the rest of the O-Folk were still trying to put all their ducks in a row. There I was, standing in the middle of the dining room in my coat and hat, wondering if this was some kind of test, looking around for the hidden camera. Didn’t find any so I guess I just got lucky. Since I didn’t know what else to do, I grabbed my backpack and briefcase, went out to the car, backed into the driveway and listened to about ten minutes of Morning Edition and watched the snow fall until B and Tim came out.

There were no accidents on the way to work, just that one guy whose car went all loopy when he tried a little too hard to stop at the light. If wishing could have made it so, however, my all-powerful thought rays would have littered the road with the wrecks of all the trucks and SUVs whose drivers were so much more important than bugs like me that they had to drive up the outside lane, even though half the outside lane was filled with chunks of ice and snow banked into a high wall by the city plows. Pickup truck owners take the commercials that made them buy a truck a little too much to heart. They think they can safely go tearing up the outside lane, climbing over snowbanks that spray the rest of us with ice and snow.

When I’m crowned Supreme Potentate of the Domain of Madison I shall decree that all SUVs will be confiscated and all pickup trucks will be forbidden from entering the city limits. Violators will be given a snow shovel and set to work clearing the curbside lanes to make the roads wider and more easy to navigate for the more sensible drivers. I can be such a smug old geek, can’t I?

Getting home was a lot harder than getting to work. Everybody was in a huge freaking hurry and thought they could ride fast up the outside lane, which worked fine until the city plow came down the other lane and everybody in my lane shied away from it, squishing up as close to the curb as possible. Nobody that I’ve ever heard of has ever won a game of chicken with a snow plow.

It was just as hard to walk around town as it was to drive into it. I had to pick my way down the sidewalk past the capital pretty carefully lest I fall and bust my bum in two. Ah. Well, it’s sort of already broken in two, so I guess I ought to say ‘broken in three,’ but that doesn’t sound right. Anyway, I had to walk real slow until I saw that the guy in front of me had discovered remarkably useful footing in the mixed-up ice and snow on the fringes of the sidewalk where the tires of the rampaging spinning hair brush had dug in and left a track. I could easily stay upright when I stuck to that.

Over by the entrance to the library somebody must have spent most of the morning with a chipper and the better part of a truckload of salt getting the ice off the sidewalk, but they’d managed to expose concrete. Imagine the sense of triumph that must give a guy, not to mention the sense of relief I felt at finally having the friction my feet were meant to have once again. No more worries about broken bums nor how many pieces they’d break into.

We voted in the primary. Stopped on the way home, in and out in no more than ten minutes, maybe even as little as five. Almost nobody was there.

I don’t know why I bothered, given that, as far as I was concerned, my choice came down to three people: one who sucked up to the president for an endorsement, one who makes promises she’ll never be able to keep and one whose name has become a tiresome gimmick. If it wasn’t so much like voting for the prom queen it wouldn’t leave such a bad taste in my mouth.

There’s nothing unusual about sucking up for an endorsement; every candidate does it sooner or later. When you’re John McCain, though, I’m thinking it’s an especially bitter pill to swallow when you go hat in hand to the guy who beat you in a primary race by insinuating your adopted daughter was the result of an affair you had with a black woman. Should I be impressed he’s a forgiving man? Or should I be saddened he’s willing to toss aside what dignity he might’ve still had for the sake of uniting the party? Or maybe I should shrug and have a beer? The beer wins.

Hillary’s got big plans, and she’s all about laying them out for us to examine ... her very detailed, color glossy plans with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, explaining what each one was to be used as evidence of her experience.

I honestly don’t know what to make of Obama yet, but if I hear one more Doctor Seuss-like word coined from his name I’ll puke. Obamania. Obamarama. Obamacan. It’d be kind of funny if it was an election for the top tweedle-beetle puddle battler. As it’s not, if he wins the nomination and then the presidency, how can world leaders be expected to take him seriously as the man elected president because his constituents thought he was Obama-riffic?

Thoughts such as these wake me in the night.

Fifteen minutes after the polls closed My Darling B was surfing local channels searching the banners on the bottom of the screen to see what kind of results were coming in, when a local newscaster broke in to announce Barack Obama won the democratic primary and John McCain won the GOP primary. What? Something like one-tenth of one percent of all precincts had reported their results. How in hell do they get off projecting a winner fifteen minutes after the polls close? “It should be criminal to announce a winner until all the votes are counted,” I grumbled. “At least a misdemeanor, but felony would be better.”

“Death penalty?” B asked me.

“I’m okay with that,” I answered.

“I thought you were against the death penalty.”

“We’re talking about newscasters,” I explained. “I’m against state-sponsored execution of human beings.”

A brochure came in the mail at work for me, inviting me to sign up for a weekend seminar titled, “Communicate with Tact & Finesse.” I wonder, could somebody be trying to tell me something?

I picked up Coming of Age in the Milky Way again (you were on tenterhooks for the latest update, I know you were) after taking a week or so off to read Michael Perry’s Handbook for Freelance Writing, a book I got through paperbackswap.com last summer. I started reading it right away but then put it aside as yard work and home maintenance crowded into my reading time. When I got time to read again I picked up a new book, probably something on reserve from the library I had to read before the overdue fines started piling up, one book led to another and I didn’t get back to Michael Perry.

Then one night last week as I was getting ready for bed I started to reach for Coming of Age and my hand paused in midair. I try to read at least a bit of the book I’ve got going after tucking myself into bed every night. A little reading helps quiet my thoughts; I take a lot longer to fall asleep if I haven’t read at least a few pages, but more often I can put away a chapter or two. I was taking a beating around the head and shoulders from the physics lessons at the end of Coming of Age, though. It’s simply not the kind of thing I can read with my head on a pillow. I’d pick up the book the next day and find I was entirely unable to figure out where I left off the night before.

So I put it on my bedside bookcase, glanced through the titles of the other books waiting for me to pick them up, and my eyes fell on the spine of Perry’s Handbook. I’ve liked Perry’s voice since my mother sent me a copy of Population: 485 and I’ve sought out his other books and stories since then. My motives for reading the Handbook were mixed — first for pleasure, but also it’s hard not get fired up about the how-to, even though I haven’t submitted anything for publication since college. I thought I never would again because, I’ll admit it, I’m a great big chicken, but Perry’s quite encouraging.

If nothing else, his Handbook lead me to several other recommended readings that are quite good.

I don’t think I’ll be able to force myself to finish The Long Short War no matter how many times I try. I’m a bad citizen for not learning all I can about that miserably brutal, outrageously expensive conflict, but frankly trying to understand it, much less get behind it, has got me beat. And it’s not like there’s going to be a test later. Nobody I know is even talking about it.

Something really weird was going on this morning at Our Humble O-Bode.

While it was still very dark, Bonkers came into our room, sat himself at the foot of the bed and began to sing for food. Right off the bat, that’s pretty weird, but you’d have to know Bonkers to understand how weird it is. When we brought him home from the shelter we knew he wasn’t an ordinary cat, and one of the least ordinary things about him was that he barked, not exactly like a dog, but like a cat trying to do a falsetto imitation of a dog. He kept that up for six months, maybe a year, and gradually began to meow more like a cat, but he never entirely lost that mornful howling quality to his loudest vocalizations.

That’s what he wakes us up with in the mornings. I seem to be the only one in the house who is bothered by it enough to get out of bed to feed him in the hopes he’ll shut up, a trait of mine he’s learned to exploit mercilessly. Because it was still dark this morning and I wanted to shut him up fast and get right back to sleep, I hopped out of bed as soon as he woke me up and trotted in the general direction of the kitchen.

I usually check the time when I get up to feed the cats. There’s a revenge factor built in to how much I’ll feed them, and the portions get smaller and smaller the earlier they wake me up. I’m just that petty and mean, I guess. This morning they got exactly nothing because the time was three fifty-one. When I saw those numbers shining digitally from the face of the video player I thought it must be the place counter and tapped the OFF button to get it to show me the time, but three fifty-one was replaced by a display of quad zero: just the opposite happened. It really was three-fifty one.

Just to make sure, I stepped over to the tick-tock clock and squinted real hard to read the big white face through the morning gloom. Ten ‘til four. “Freaking hell, Bonkers!” I grumbled at him as I headed back to bed, closing the door behind me. That doesn’t stop him from howling, and he can even become more annoying by putting his face right up against the crack under the door and singing an especially sad song, but at least I have the satisfaction of locking him out of the room, meager as it might be.

Then the clock struck twelve.

What in hell? That was almost weird enough to make me get up again and see if space aliens weren’t dancing with Elvis on the kitchen table, but the clock in the kitchen struck four while the one in the living room was still bonging away. Since it wasn’t a total space-time inversion, I rolled over and dozed.

But no more than dozed. For the next hour and a half, Bonkers did everything he could to live up to his name, hurtling back and forth from the hallway to a farthest end of the kitchen and back, scrambling up on furniture, scratching the hell out of his post, and howling from every corner of the house. The little whiner went absolutely batshit and again I came close to getting out of bed to see what kind of whackiness was winding him up, but My Darling B had her arm around me and it was too warm and cozy under the covers. I couldn’t bring myself to crawl out into the cold, cruel world.

At five, the clock struck twelve again.

Bonkers is crazy, simple as that, but the clock weirdness is one I can’t explain. After I showered and made a pot of coffee, I made sure I was standing in front of the clock at six, to see if it would overbong again or if maybe all the howling had made me just a little bit crazy. It bonged six times. Yikes.

I woke up freezing last night! How about you? Probably not. I doubt you were in the position I was in. I was freezing because Boo sleeps between My Darling B and I, creating a little pocket of warmth that she kept all to herself. Oh, and also I was sleeping in Wisconsin where it was about five below zero. I’m so glad I came back home to settle down after retiring from the military, just in time for the coldest winter ever conceived of by anybody anywhere anytime.

But back to that greedy little cat. She not only separated me from B, who is my hot water bottle on cold nights like last night, but she took up a spot in the middle of the bed, the very warmest spot, and pushed me aside until my butt was hanging over the edge, uncovered and slowly freezing solid! How the hell does she do that? I outweigh her by a hundred thirty-five pounds, yet somehow he can push me out of my own bed!

I popped her loose with the tuck-and-roll trick I described earlier, spooned up as tightly against B as I could get and I sighed a great sigh of relief as her warmth melted into me. It only lasted a short time, though. I woke up again not an hour later, separated once again from B by that little furball and my butt hanging out in the frigid air. I’ll have to give this some thought because the weather’s supposed to get even colder tonight, something like fourteen below zero — not in our house, but still darned cold — and my butt’s had enough of hanging over the side. I’m staying in the middle of the warm spot tonight if I have to force myself to stay awake to do it.

Our trip home tonight was held up by a car fire on Atwood Avenue, just north of Willy Street near the Barrymore Theater. We were standing in line behind a couple hundred cars backed up for blocks for about twenty minutes, very unusual for Willy Street. Lots of drivers use Willy Street for their commute, but in the two years we’ve been driving through town this way the cars never backed up like that. “What’s with all the traffic?” B asked, and I guessed there was a fender-bender or a hit and run somewhere up ahead. About two minutes after I said that, a fire truck came lumbering down Willy Street headed back to the barn. We had to pull ahead only another block from there to see the flashing lights of the police cruiser standing sentinel behind the burned-out hulk in the road.

Have you ever seen the remains of a car fire? It’s really impressive. Cars burn like match heads once you get the blaze started. I’ve seen just one other car fire, in Colorado, and all the driver could do about it was run away from his flaming Chevy Suburban as fast as he could and wait for the fire to burn out. As we rolled past the smoldering wreck in the left lane of Atwood Avenue, B had a hard time grasping that what she was looking at had been a recognizably modern automobile no more than half an hour earlier. All the windows were out. The insides of the car were all gone, the dashboard, the steering wheel, even the seats. Apparently just about everything in a car these days is made of plastic. If there’s a skeleton underneath, it’s minimal. Outside, only the paint on the hood and front fenders was scorched; the rest looked oddly fine. The shredded remains of the front tires hung in tatters from the hubs.

Our car rolled slowly through congealing foam covering the road all around the hulk. I didn’t see any sign of an ambulance and hoped that was a sign everyone got out okay. After clearing the bottleneck, the drivers around me drove more cautiously for a block or two, then went back to driving too fast on the icy roads and trying to drive in the outside lane where the snowbanks forced them into cutting each other off. Oh, well.

We get milk and eggs delivered to our door from a local dairy. My Darling B floated the idea to try home delivery shortly after we subscribed to a CSA program — that’s community-supported agrictulture, a program thought up by the hippie tree-hugger, love the earth types around here to support small, local farmers. We give them a stack of money and over the summer they give us a box of fresh veggies every week when it’s ready for harvest. It’s sort of like having a neighbor who started a garden and planted too many zuchini and beans, as anybody who’s new to gardening always does, so he leaves baskets of veggies on your doorstep all the time, only the farmers try to plant too much zuchini so they have plenty to give away.

It’s a good thing for the dairy she gets the milk from that she was so devoted to the idea in the first place because they seem to be brand new to the business of home delivery. If I’m remembering it correctly, the first order B placed with them arrived complete and on time, and she was tickled pink with the service. The second order, though, was never delivered. B figured maybe she placed the order too late to be made up on time. I don’t remember exactly how delivery of the next few orders played out, but I remember at least one or two more of them came a day late, some of them were missing bits and bottles, and one of them was switched entirely with a delivery to another house in the neighborhood (the guy who got our order was nice enough to drive over to our house with it so we could exchange them).

They’re just now getting into a groove. It’s been one or two weeks since they flubbed a delivery, although the last one was missing what Tim was most looking forward to: steak. Tim, by the way, is the biggest reason we get milk delivered. He drinks a couple gallons a day and would drink lots more if we let him, and it was awfully hard to carry all those bottles home from the market. The best solution would be a spigot at the sink he could drink from like a bubbler (that’s a water fountain, if you’ve been out of Wisconsin too long) but nobody’s ever offered that in this area. I’ve been watching.

Did you ever get the idea there are a hundred or so faces, and everybody walking around out there looks like one of those faces? I don’t mean I think there are exactly one hundred faces; what I mean is, it seems whenever I meet somebody the wheels in my head start churning away, trying to figure out where I’ve seen that face before, and it turns out he looks like somebody I knew in high school, or he resembles Kevin Bacon. Sometimes the resemblence is pretty tenuous, too. I’m not saying there’s an exact match; it’s more like a nagging feeling that a person I’ve just met reminds me of somebody else.

That happens to me all the time, and I wonder if it’s got anything to do with my inability to remember some people’s names. With some people, I can associate their name with their face right from the first handshake, but with a few people I can’t remember what to call them no matter how many times I say ‘hi’ to them as we pass in the hallway. My hypothesis is this: If there really are only a hundred faces out there, maybe we can attach a hundred names to each face (again, it’s an arbitrary number) until there aren’t room for any more.

The only way to test my hypothesis that I can think of is to gather together as many similar-looking people as I can find in a single room, then introduce myself to each one of them, chat for a bit, and move on. Sooner or later I’d have to meet the same one twice. Could I remember his name? That’s the testing part. The only problem with a test like that is, it would probably go on for months, obviously. To lessen the tension and make everybody feel more socialble I think a little background music wouldn’t be uncalled for. Wouldn’t hurt to have an open bar, either. And just like that it goes from being a rigorously tested scientific experiment to a garage party. It’s so hard to keep a handle on these things, not that I’m sure anybody would want to.

I mentioned my idea to Tim, who knew right away what I was talking about. When I mentioned it to My Darling B, though, she looked at me as if I was barking mad, so it’s not the universally known truth I thought it was.

My spell checker tried to stop me from using the spelling “whups” in an e-mail message to another coworker that expressed my regret over a mistake. The spell checker suggested “whoops.” Somebody out there was assigned the job of determining the correct spelling of “whoops.” Is that even a word? It’s really just a noise you make when you screw up, like shouting “argh!” when you hammer your thumb or hit your head, isn’t it? (Although I, myself, shout very recognizable words, mostly verbs and names. You’ve probably heard me, even if you weren’t in the general area, or even in Wisconsin.)

There’s no correct spelling of “argh!” (I checked) so I put it to you: How could there be a correct spelling of “whups?”

My supervisor called me into her office to give me the news I’ve been selected Top Performer of the quarter, based on a nomination from a nomination from an unnamed and unknown employee at one of the branches, possibly somebody who’s never met me face-to-face. Greatness was then thrust upon me by a peer vote.

In recognition, I get a lunch. This is the first place I’ve worked in years and years where they didn’t recognize the performer of the quarter with a plaque, or a photo on the wall, or some kind of engraved trinket AND, he added quickly, I’m glad of it. Wall photos are a garish challenge to my dignity and strip me of the anonymity I crave, and I’ve always thought the trinkets were especially tacky.

Plaques can be very cool, though. I particularly liked the ones the Air Force used to give away, great hunks of dense wood cut into the shape of a shield, the unit’s emblem carved into the center and painted in bright, primary colors. I always coveted those with a lust that bordered on the pornographic, but they never gave me one of those, just the boring, framed certificates and knick-knacks.

Your friendly neighborhood O-Folk will grab at any excuse to go out for dinner, and celebrating an award like this was better than most of the excuses we’ve used. We ended up at Angelo’s, a pizza joint not three blocks from Our Humble O-Bode that we’ve been to once or twice before, with mixed results. They did well by us tonight; their special was a large pizza that came with breadsticks and a bottomless pitcher of soda. We passed on the soda but the breadsticks were crispy-good and the all-meat pizza was delicious! B ordered a pasta dish, so we went home with plenty of pizza left over for lunches and dinner tomorrow.

I had a crazy beard day. That’s like having a bad hair day except with, y’know, a beard, and there’s even less you can do about it. You can’t fix it by running a wet comb through it or spitting on your palms and trying to grease it down with that (I won’t say I’ve tried it, I’ll only opine it won’t do any good). Unless you keep a scissors in your man-purse or you’re willing to resort to such dire emergency measures as using your Carmex as a pomade to slick it back, you’re screwed.

Although there is one other thing — it’s still an emergency measure, but it’s not as gross as spitting on your hands or quite as questionable as slicking it down with the first lip balm or skin lotion you can lay a hand to. What I was having a problem with were two or three particularly lengthy strands that were very energetically charged with static electricity that I couldn’t discharge no matter how I tried. The peck on the cheek I get from My Darling B when she drops me off in the morning will usually leave me static-free the rest of the day. A spark passes between us when we touch noses that is bright enough to light a fashion show photo shoot. This morning’s snap, crackle, pop was no less sizzling, but still those beard hairs were charged up and ready to wave in the air like they just didn’t care in only ten or fifteen minutes’ time.

Crazy beard is much worse than bed head or any other bad hair day by a factor of ten because you can’t see the hair on your head, but you can plainly see quite a lot of the hair on your face, and especially so when it’s trying to reach out past the end of your nose. If you’ve never had a beard you can take it from me: Ten minutes of watching your beard hairs pointing everywhere but down and you’re ready to try anything I can suggest to you to tame them, no questions asked.

Only two or three hairs were giving me serious trouble, as I said, and they were all long enough to pinch between thumb and forefinger, then wrap around the end of the finger, which I did. A quick jerk was all it took to remove each one, but mustering the courage to jerk that finger was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I count the time I trimmed my own hangnail and cleaned the wound it left using only a toenail clippers and a mason jar filled with salt water. There was a disturbance in the force that day that even Luke felt all the way to Tatooine and back. Yanking three beard hairs didn’t shake the pillars of heaven in quite the same way, it was more like stabbing myself in the face with sewing needles. Made you wince, didn’t I?

Now that I’ve gone down that road, I might as well keep going: I’ve finally gotten my knuckles to heal up. The air’s so dry this winter that they kept splitting open if I didn’t rub some kind of lotion on my hands every day, morning and night at the very least. You’d think split-open, bleeding knuckles would be a good reminder to do that, but no, not for me. Not right away, anyhow. When the outside temps got below zero last week, though, my knuckles would split open if I curled my fingers even a little, like to grab a pen or type on a keyboard.

It wasn’t just painful, it was pretty gross. I had to bandage my fingers to keep from leaving spots of blood on everything I handled. At one time or another every one of my fingers was bandaged. Ever try to type with bandages on the ends of your fingers? Talk about frustration. And I couldn’t do much about the knuckles on the backs of my hands except daub them with unguent and try not to wipe it off. Naturally I was constantly wiping it off, painfully, doing the most mundane tasks, like grabbing a folder out of a file cabinet or reaching for my coat. It sucked.

My Darling B has had the same problem for years, only worse, sometimes lots worse. While we were living in Colorado where the air’s a lot thinner and apparently a lot drier, her hands tore open at every knuckle, and not a single, simple tear, either; the backs of her hands looked as though she’d been dragging them across a cheese grater, and the cuts hurt every bit as much. She used to slather her hands in creams and lotions before bed, pull on cotton gloves to keep from rubbing it off in her sleep, and they’d still crack and bleed. It was awful.

Just a month or to ago, though, she asked me to pick up a jar of all-natural hand cream at a hippy-dippy pharmacy downtown, and it worked so well that I bought a jar for my desk drawer at work. The next time I felt the now-familiar sting across the backs of my hands as I banged out an application on my computer keyboard, I stopped, dug the jar out from my desk drawer and slapped plenty of it on, leaving a nice and goopy layer across my knuckles. A week of that and they were healed, mostly. I still get the sting from time to time, but I still have plenty of cream in the jar, too.

Tangent: The same thing happens to Tim, who has an entirely different take on this, as I should have expected. “Check this out,” he said during dinner conversation, “my skin’s so dry I can crack my kunckles open and make them bleed at will! It’s so cool!” And he demonstrated for us. This was over dinner, remember. He sneered at me when I told him how well the skin creme worked. “Creams are for wussies,” he hissed. “A real man toughs it out.” Or bleeds to death.

And now it’s time for Real Phone Conversations! I was trying to find out the phone number for some place called Ben & Phil’s. It was at Edgewood College, so I googled the general information number of the school hoping that a student would answer and hoping a lot harder that Ben & Phil’s was a sandwich shop that every student on campus would know about as opposed to, say, a couple of dermatologists working out of the campus clinic.

The phone rang about fourteen times before a student answered, “Edgewood College Information.”

“Hi there! I wonder if you could tell me the phone number for Ben & Phil’s?”

“Sure,” he answered.

“Great!” I really did mean ‘great.’ I love it when I get the right person on the first call. Unfortunately, the right person put me on hold for a minute or two, and then the wrong person picked up the phone.

“Hi, this is Phil.”

“Yes, hello, I called to get the phone number of Ben & Phil’s.”

There was the barest of pauses. “Yes, this is Phil.”

“Hi,” I said awkwardly, because what I wanted to say was, “Well, if you’re Phil, of the aforementioned Ben & Phil’s, and assuming you were listening to me closely enough to hear the question implied in what I just said, and that you know your own business’s phone number, would you give it to me then, please?”

I had the feeling that this wasn’t the most tactful way to put it, however, so I backed way the hell up and gave him a whole lot more information than he really needed, but I figured he asked for it. I salvoed with my name, my title, my employer’s name and location, and then spun out the whole story of how I was processing an application made by one of his employees, who had neglected to include the business’s phone number on the application. “I can’t process the application until I have the business phone number,” I wrapped up.

“Okay,” Phil said, “I can give you that.” And then, so help me, there was a pause long enough to make me think he was going to wait for me to ask him again, as if life isn’t hard enough already. If he made me go there, I was going to pull out my big-bore scattergun, pump a couple custom-loaded shells filled with sarcasm and wrath into the breach and let him have both barrels. He must have begun to feel the near-lethal waves of frustration radiating from me all the way across town, though, because a heartbeat later he reeled off his number, area code and all.

“Thank you,” I sighed heavily, and hung up.

With just sixty pages to go to the end of Coming of Age in the Milky Way, author Timothy Ferris has launched into String Theory, the idea that the elementary particles making up all matter in the universe are not particles at all, not precisely. They are particles, but they act like strings. Really short ones, so short that they still look like particles. Okay, sure.

Science is full of mind-bending weirdness like this, or like, “Photons are the electromagnetic units making up light that look like waves but act like particles.” Well, that’s not confusing, is it? Because a wave and a particle, they look just like each other. I mix them up all the time. Same thing goes for particles and strings. I don’t know how many times I’ve reached out to yank a loose string from a guy’s shirt and said, “Hang on, you got a particle dangling from your — aw, shoot, I did it again!” So embarrassing.

Ferris says string theory is a big deal in the world of particle physics (and in my world too, I suppose, but on the same level that wireless internet connectivity is part of my world; it’s there, but I don’t know anything about it except that they want to charge me $39.95 a month!) because it looks like a key to the unifying theory. Einstein showed that mass and energy were two versions of the same thing, like steam and ice are two kinds of water, when he worked out his relativity theory. What bugged Einstein, though, was that he could make out that heat, light and other kinds of radiation are on the energy side of the equation, but he couldn’t figure out how gravity fit in there. Apparently, string theory is shooting for that: unifying gravity with the whole shebang.

The very best thing about string theory, though, is that whenever I hear the phrase I get a mental playback of comedian Brian Regan pantomiming scooping Doritos out of a bag, shoving them into his face and sucking the crumbs off each of his fingers. I’m still trying to get the guys at Bongo Video to buy a copy of I Walked On The Moon so I can see it on a full-size television screen instead of the postage-stamp YouTube video.

Looks like we’re squeezing toothpaste from the bottom of the tube now, after the last disaterous tube-squeezing.

I tried to set the example by doing it the right way, but they insisted on squeezing from the middle, or the top, or any old way they felt like, and they got away with it, too, until B began to buy a tree-hugging, love the earth variety of all-natural organic toothpaste from the Willy Street co-op that comes in the old-style metal tube with a screw-off cap. I’m not sure why a metal tube is greener than a plastic one; maybe it’s easier to recycle.

Anyway, the last tube ended up so horribly mangled you could hardly recognize it after the other O-Folk stubbornly wouldn’t figure out my way of squeezing from the bottom worked best. They had to be rebels. They insisted on squeezing from just any old place, when anybody with half a brain knows you start from the bottom and roll it up as you go if you want to stay out of trouble. But they didn’t. What a mess. It was an awful chore toward the end getting just a dab out to brush your teeth before bedtime.

Now we’ve got a new tube and I couldn’t help noticing it’s being neatly rolled up from the bottom, and no dents in the middle. Looks like last week’s lesson in toothpaste tube destruction may have had some useful effect.

Goodness, but My Darling B was especially generous with the coffee this morning. I made a pot filled to the brim and managed to eke out a little more by draining the last of the dregs into my coffee cup. There was some dim part of my hindbrain thinking I might have a chance for some extra to take with me to work, but I wasn’t holding out much hope the way B was guzzling it down mug after mug while she got ready for work.

It’s hit or miss on most days. Sometimes there’s quite a lot left over in the pot, sometimes I can upend the pot over the sippy cup I sometimes take to work but get no more than a trickle. Today, though, I came in from starting the car and leaving it in the driveway to warm up, and found B filling my sippy cup. I didn’t check to see how much she gave me until I was at work, settling into my cubicle. Full! And just what I neede this morning, too. Just goes to show you, wait until you find exactly the woman who’s right for you. It all comes down to coffee.

Tammy came into work this morning even though she had a headcold that was beating her up pretty badly. She toughed it out for an hour or two before she threw on her coat and announced, “I’m going down to Walgreen’s. Does anybody need anything?” Nobody did, but there followed an in-depth discussion about the best over-the-counter drugs for headcolds. Sudafed seemed to be the favorite, followed closely by something I wasn’t familiar with called, I think,,“Mucinex,” which Tammy’s mother in law apparently recommended.

Rita threw in her opinion: “Mucinex is good.”

“That’s what she said,” Tammy agreed, causing me to spit coffee out my nose. It was Tim’s standard comeback to nearly everything we say to him, especially when we’re trying to make dinner conversation.

“The sausages are very tasty.”

“That’s what she said, heh-heh.”

And Tammy even said it in the same Michael Scott kind of nudge-nudge tone of voice, purely by accident. If only Tim had been there.

Speaking of Tim, his grade in pre-calculus rocketed up to a B-minus after he aced the last test he took. I mention it because he’s been struggling in pre-calc all year. I didn’t get to congratulate him tonight — he was working late and I couldn’t keep myself awake long enough to wait up for him. Maybe it was an especially good day, maybe it was an easy test, or maybe he’s finally gotten into his groove, but whatever it was he deserves to bask in the sunshine a bit (not that he would leave his room even if it was sunny and warm enough outside to bask; it’s just a figure of speech).

Today was home improvement day. I made a not-so-quick trip to Menard’s (is there such a thing ever as a quick trip to the hardware store?) to pick up a few raw materials, nothing special, just some things I needed to put together one or two projects on my Honeydew List. I came straight back home and kept myself busy for hours.

I wasn’t even planning to do anything in particular. Although the Honeydew List is long, I would have to spend thousands of dollars and dozens of hours to wipe the board clean. As it was, I spent a little over a hundred bucks, and what I got was one of those plastic storage drawer unit thingos so I could clean the scattered screws, nuts and bolts off the workbench, maybe bet a chance to use the thing again; a special drier vent that’s supposed to keep the cold air out of the house, something I should have installed months ago if only I’d known about it then; a pair of flourescent light fixtures for My Darling B, who wants to start growing plants in the basement before the snow melts; and a couple thermometers to hang in the windows.

I feel a little odd about admitting to this, but I took a list of things I was looking for. I don’t normally shop from a list, mostly because I go to the store for just one thing at a time, like any guy. It’s not the most cost-effective way to shop for hardware and home improvement sundries, though, and this time I knew of more than one thing I needed to buy so I couldn’t play stupid. Besides, I had the Honeydew List to work from. I copied about a dozen items I knew I’d need for the projects on the board, made a guess at the cost of each item, and tallied them up, then crossed off what I couldn’t buy today for less than a hundred bucks. That was as simple as I knew I could keep it.

One of the items on my list was “hand drill.” I figured I could get one of those for ten bucks or less, but I figured wrong. They don’t sell hand drills. Don’t you think that’s a little weird? Sure, hand drills are archaic and maybe nobody buys them any more for other than display in museums, but the store sold all kinds of other hand tools I was sure nobody used any longer. Why single out the hand drill for extinction? I had to look for one on e-bay when I got home. Ninety-nine cents for the winning bid (five bucks for shipping; still a steal, I’d say).

Setting to work, I put up the drawers first. I wanted to get the workbench cleaned off in the worst way. It’s the first step in getting anything done. I hung the drawers from the wall in an alcove of the work shop, but first I had to clear a space for it, then nail a couple brackets to the wall. Seems as though there’s always something you have to do before you can do the thing you’re setting out to do. To start on the Honeydew List I had to clear off the bench; to clear off the bench I had to buy a storage gizmo in which to stash all the crap on the bench; to hang the gizmo on the wall I had to clear a spot away and put up a bracket. Three steps backward to go one forward. Why does life always have to be like this? (Or is it just me?)

The drier vent was my next project. Working backwards again, I found I would have to dig a path through a waist-high snow bank to get to the side of the house where the exhaust duct poked through the siding. That spilled snow all over the driveway and, which I was cleaning it up, I noticed that the inch-thick layer of ice covering it had weakened in the day’s bright sunshine enough that I could easily scrape away a satisfyingly large patch of it, from the garage door all the way to the front walk. No more slipping and sliding when I got out of the car! I tried to scrape all the way across the drive to make egress easier for people on the passenger side, too, but the banked snow threw a shadow across the ice and it was still as solid as ever. Still, now that most of the concrete was laid bare it would soak up the sunshine all day tomorrow; maybe it would warm up enough to loosen up the ice so I could get at it then.

Where was I? Oh, yeah! The drier vent! That job turned out to be laughably easy. The cheap louvre covering the duct came off in my hand when I gave it a yank. Good thing the squirrels never figured that out or they would’ve been in the kitchen like a shot to steal all the kitty kibble. Probably would have taken the pasta and peanuts under the counter, too. They’re pretty brassy that way. The newfangled vent screwed onto the siding over the end of the duct and for once everything fit together on the first try. I had to switch on the clothes drier to make myself believe that it would work, but it did. In the morning I should have a better idea of how well it keeps out the cold air; tonight the temps are supposed to drop way below freezing again.

The last project I planned for was pretty straightforward: Shovel snow off the back deck. There was a lot of it blocking the door but I’m a pretty skinny guy, so I didn’t have to push it open much to squeeze through with the shovel. Once I was out on the deck it was a simple job to clear away enough snow around the door to get back in.

While I was out there I tacked up one of the thermometers to the window frame. It’s not that I want or need to know the temperature; looking out and seeing heaps of snow tells me it’s still way too cold. A thermometer out the window is one of those added touches every Wisconsin home has, though. We had one in the front window but it went crazy last summer. Whenever the afternoon sun swung around to bake the side of the house where it was stuck to the window it would peg out at one-hundred twenty degrees and stay there, then back down after the sun set, never getting any lower than sixty-two degrees. Eventually it froze at sixty-two, never twitching up or down even when the temps plunged below zero this winter. Whenever one of us O-Folk whined that the winter lows were getting ridiculous, the usual response became, “Whadaya mean, too cold? It’s sixty-two!” But that got old at the end of January and one of us, I’m not sure who, ripped the thermometer off the window before The Great Big Freaking Blizzard of Ought-Eight. It didn’t seem right that we had no thermometer outside the window, so I bought a pair while I was at the store. I meant to tack one up out the front window, too, but I’d have to climb up on the planter and I never did work myself up to that today.

All the planned projects were out of the way by three o’clock, time for a coffee break. Yay, me.

“Why is there a brassiere in the bathroom trash can?” Tim asked nobody in particular. I’m not all that sure he even wanted to know the answer, but his mother gave him one straightaway because she thought it would very probably make him squirm.

“Because I threw it away,” she told him, waiting for him to eeeyewwww at the realization he’d laid eyes on her underwear. Even when she’s not wearing it, he’ll still curl up into a trembling lump of jelly when that happens.

Except this time. “You’re just going to throw it away?” he shot back. “Did you know you can get serious money for that on e-bay?”

Her face pruned. “Eeeeyewwwww! Don’t tell me that!”

“I’m not kidding,” he said, pursuing his advantage. “That’d probably bring in at least fifty bucks.”

“There’s some easy extra cash,” I joined in.

“I don’t care!” she shouted, rejecting the idea completely. “I don’t want to know there’s some perv out there with my underwear!”

Well, that didn’t turn out the way she thought it would.

Mike wasn’t watching over the active auction ring from his camp chair when we finally showed up at nine-thirty, an hour and a half after the action started. He’s such a standard feature at every Black Horse auction we’ve been to that his absence threw us off a bit. It’d be like showing up at the tomb of the unknown soldier and finding the honor guard had left to have a nap under a shade tree. The small crowd threw us a bit, too, but after we had a look around it seemed there didn’t seem to be much on sale, either. Quite a few people were leaving as we walked in. They’d taken a look at what was up for grabs, apparently decided not to stick it out and hit the road.

Which is very nearly what we wanted to do after poking through the boxed-up jetsam stacked on the tables at the Arlington Research Pavillion just north of DeForest and finding nothing we had to have and, worse, nothing that made us want to have it. I think we decided to stick around only because I had my eye on a box of junk tools thrown together that included a hand drill; for a buck it would have been worth the trip. Unfortunately, the high bidder went more than ten bucks. Since I’m way too cheap for that, I hung around a little longer to see what a small transformer I could’ve used in my work shop would end up selling for. That would have run me more than ten bucks, too, but only because the auctioneer threw it into a box with a bunch of other tools that somebody badly wanted and I didn’t.

It took them only another half-hour or so to finish selling off the rest of the stuff at that ring before moving on to the next one. It’s a natural law of auctioning that, the more items we want on a particular ring of tables, the longer it’s likely to take for them to get around to working that ring. Having seen that law in action too many times, we were thinking they would take way too long to get around to the tables we wanted to buy from, so I just about wet myself when they moved on to the one ring of tables I most wanted them to sell from next. He really blazed through it, too, selling off whole boxes for a dollar or two, but when he came to the item I wanted to bid on, an old Remington portable typewriter, the bids quickly climbed above fifteen dollars. I probably should’ve stuck with it to at least twenty, now that I’m thinking about it enough to feel a little bidder’s regret, but I’ve a feeling the guy who won it would’ve gone even higher, he appeared to be that pleased to walk away with it.

All the planets must have been aligned with the pole star this morning, because the auctioneer went on to work the next ring with the things we most wanted to bid on. What should’ve happened, if their past behavior is any guide, was they should’ve shut down all the rings and started selling repo cars. That usually goes on forever, and we drop out and go home. Today’s move from our most-wanted ring to our next-most-wanted ring marked a once-in-a-lifetime change to the way the fates wove their tapestry. And to think we were ready to head home in the first half-hour after looking things over.

My Darling B had her eyes on two boxes of glassware; one had a pitcher and a jar she particularly liked, and the other had a bowl filled with glass fishing floats. There were so few people at the auction, and the auctioneers were selling the items so quickly, that she might have gotten both boxes for just a couple bucks each, but too bad for her there was a woman in the audience who ran a shop in Fitchburg selling pottery, jars and glassware. She’d been collecting it all day long and, when the glass jar and the fishing floats came up for bid, B was not going to go any higher than ten bucks for them. The shop lady, however, was. We go to these auctions for bargains, but sometimes maybe we’re both way too stingy.

Mike showed up halfway through the auction at the third ring, by the way. The crowd respectfully parted for him as he made his way to the table, unfolded his camp chair and sat down. The guys at Black Horse must hold ticket number one for him every time because that’s the number he always waves, although, come to think of it, he didn’t wave a ticket to bid today, just his hand, and they recorded his winning bids as buyer number one. That’s how regular these things are.

I was a little let down by 3:10 To Yuma, the new western with Russel Crowe and Christian Bale. It was a good enough movie, but there was nothing much new about it and quite a lot that was a rerun of any other western. Russel Crowe played Ben Wade, an outlaw so badass that he shoots his own men down when they make the mistake of letting themselves be taken hostage by the good guys. Christian Bale played Dan Evans, a rancher being run off his land by the Southern Pacific railroad. He’s been down on his luck since he lost his foot in the Civil War and is in such desperate straits that he volunteers to be part of the party escorting Ben Wade across the prairie to the nearest train station to catch the 3:10 to Yuma prison. DUH - DUH - DUHHHHHH!

Dan and Ben strike up an aquaintance during their time together that develops into a weird sort of mutual respect, weird because neither appears to respect the other much until bullets start to fly, and they do, hundreds of them, with great abandon, over and over. They first meet before Ben is captured. Dan and his sons are out rounding up their cattle when they happen across Ben and his gang robbing a coach loaded with payroll money. The gang has been utterly ruthless up to this point about killing off anybody who interferes in their business, but Ben only takes Dan’s horses so they can’t follow, and even tells them where he’ll leave the horses down the road. Much later, when Dan is escorting Ben to the train through a hail of bullets, Ben follows along as though he wants to go, instead of heading in the opposite direction as soon as Dan is pinned down. It’s a very odd buddy movie.

I’ll grant that Crowe and Bale did a credible job of pulling it off, most of the time. There are two buddy scenes that didn’t work for me, though, and I’ll touch on just the one in which Ben tells Dan he’s not going to run with him through yet another hail of bullets to the train station. Dan is wounded and Ben easily throws him to the ground when Dan tries to jump him. When Dan tries to jump him again, Ben doesn’t merely beat the snot out of him, he jumps on Dan’s chest and presses the chain of his handcuffs across Dan’s throat with a look of enthusiastic determination on his face. Incredibly, Dan manages to choke out a few heartbreaking words, confessing the reason his older son looks down on him, and Ben’s heart of gold compels him to stop choking Dan. I just didn’t buy it. And I didn’t like the ending at all, either, but I’ll leave that for you to decide.

There was one other performance in this movie that’s worth a mention: Ben Foster played Charlie Prince, Ben Wade’s sidekick. His name may not be one you’re likely to have heard of before; the only place I’ve seen him was in the HBO series Six Feet Under, playing Claire’s boyfriend Russel. He did such a remarkable job bringing Prince to life in 3:10 to Yuma, though, that he all but stole the show. Prince was a genuinely frightening, amoral badass who could determine at a glance how to scare people into doing what he wanted them to do, and Foster made his every move believable.

Peter Fonda popped up here, too! I hadn’t heard he was in this movie, and barely recognized him until just before Ben Wade finished him off. (I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by giving that away. If you don’t get the feeling that his perpetually grim expression doesn’t mark him as a dead man from the first scene, I’ll pay the cost of your video rental.)

A hundred dollars’ worth of underwear doesn’t amount to much, I am now able tell you. It just barely fills the smallest bag they keep under the checkout counter at Kohl’s, and as we walked out of the store with it I kept looking back, the way I do when I scoop up an armload of dirty clothes and head for the wash machine, constantly checking to make sure I didn’t drop something along the way.

All I bought were four pairs of boxers and six undershirts, and My Darling B bought the women’s roughly analogous version of the same. No, she doesn’t wear boxers, she wears those skimply little unmentionables which, I couldn’t help noticing, were wrapped up one to a packet versus two to a pack the way boxers are. What’s the deal with that? Like we don’t have enough plastic bags blowing across the highway next to the landfill. But actually, yes, she sometimes wears t-shirts. I don’t remember the last time she bought them her own self, though. She only has to wait a bit to nab the ones Tim or I buy too big. We tend to overestimate our chest size embarrassingly often.

I went into shock after the guy at the checkout rang up our total: one-hundred ten dollars and eighty-seven cents. And that was on sale! “Easy come, easy go,” B sighed as we walked out the door to the car with our teensy-tiny bag, referring to the day’s wages we handed over in exchange for just enough underwear to last a week.

I really had to, though. I’m your typical troglodyte man-thing when it comes clothing; I’ll wear it until it wears out. The only underwear factoid more revolting than the price we paid was the idea that the last time I bought underwear I was living in Japan — almost three years ago. Small wonder the arms started coming off my old tees not long ago.

I reminded B about Tim’s recommendation to defray the cost with a little auction action on e-bay. She asked me not to remind her about that again.

When I return books to the library, I should slip them through the slot in the door, turn sharply on my heel and walk away. Instead, I leave the books I checked out, usually overdue, on the counter and keep on going into the library until I get to the new books, or the shelf of “themed” books (when it’s spy history week, for instance, or the anniversary of a poet’s death, the shelf is filled with books on the subject under scrutiny), or the “too good to miss” books, and by the time I can tear myself away again I’ve got an armload to check out and my book bag is just as heavy on the way out the door as it was on the way in.

I meant to snatch only Caring For Your Aging Cat because we’ve got a cat who’s in what’s considered feline mid-life and I figured it couldn’t hurt to learn a little about what he’s in for, particularly considering the last medical tightrope we had to walk for him. The book’s about half photos and most of the text is in bullet statements and sidebars, so it ought to be easy to knock off in a couple evenings by just browsing through it.

Just a little more to the right, though, I spotted Flush, How The Plumber Saved Civilization. How was I supposed to pass up a book with a title like that? It’s set with wide margins and a lot of white space between lines. I figure it’ll be a good before-bed book.

And as I put Flush in the crook of my arm with Caring For Your Aging Cat and was all set ot leave, my eye wandered across the spine of Art Spiegelman Conversations, a collection of interview with the creator of Maus and In The Shadow of No Towers. Well, I was already walking out with more than I intended to; what’s one more book?

Reading Running With Scissors is like passing a road accident; you want to turn away, but ... wait, what am I saying? You can turn away. You don’t have to look! There’s nothing that justifies the kind of road rage that torques people up to the point of pulling out a handgun and blasting away at other drivers, but when I get stuck behind rubberneckers I fully understand that kind of rage. There’s almost nothing that pops my safety valve as quickly as getting stuck behind rubberneckers. What are they looking at? That’s somebody’s life going to hell out there! It’s not entertainment! If they’re going to watch, the least they could do is pull over and let the rest of us by.

I wrote the following after reading only the first hundred or so pages of Running With Scissors. That makes me a skiver, trying to pass off criticism without having gone through the experience of reading the whole book, but dammit, it was a dull book, and I think giving it a hundred pages was pretty generous. If an author can’t hook me in fifty pages he’s not doing his job. Burroughs couldn’t hook me with twice that much bait.

If Running With Scissors is truly a memoir, then it’s one of the most frightening I’ve read, but I have trouble reading any page of it, any one at all, and believing that more than two or three words are true. I’m not suggest they’re not true, or that what Burroughs describes as the early years of his life couldn’t happen. What I’m saying is that I didn’t believe it. I’m suggesting that he never in the space of a single paragraph convinced me to suspend my disbelief and go along with his story. It may have been his life story, word for word, every bit of it, but as my creative writing instructor Jane Colville Betts used to tell us, nothing is less important to making readers believe your story than facts.

An elevator cable dangling a car from the top of the Empire State Building snapped and the car plummeted to the bottom of the shaft. “When they opened the doors, they found the passenger alive,” Jane said, “but if you wrote that in a story, nobody would ever believe it.” And she was absolutely right. Burroughs may have lived through something like the life he describes in Running With Scissors, but he doesn’t write as if he expects me to believe any of it. So I didn’t.

What’s more — and here I’m going to veer off into criticism that so easily could be read as mean-spirited, but I’ve got to at least mention this — so many reviewers described this book as “hilarious.” Here, let me quote a few: “Screamingly funny,” Deirdre Donahue, USA Today; “It’s funny as hell,” Elle; “Deftly written, smart and funny,” GQ; “Often wildly funny,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune; “Burroughs tempers the pathos with sharp, riotous humor,” Booklist.

I read one-hundred two pages of Running With Scissors and I laughed just once, when Burroughs described a rooomful of people goading each other into eating pet food. Other than that, not funny. Or, rather, I guess it might be what a lot of people consider humorous now but I just don’t get. My youngest son watches videos on the interwebs that he thinks are screamingly funny; almost all of them involve people getting hurt, the kind of humor that kept America’s Funniest Home Videos on the air for so many years. I don’t find other people’s agony funny. I find it painful to watch.

And that’s why Running With Scissors was painful for me to read. I didn’t think what happened to Burroughs was funny, but much more to the point I didn’t find the way he wrote about it funny, any more than I found it believable. It was a chore to read one-hundred pages of it. You can have my copy. I’ll send it to you and pay for the postage. You can find it on paperbackswap.com right now.

Somebody stole my piccolo.

I don’t have a piccolo. Not because somebody stole it; because I never had a piccolo. Somebody stole it in a dream I was having this morning, just before the alarm clock woke me up. I played trombone in high school and still have it, but that’s the only non-dreamed-of musical instrument in my posession, except for the accordion I bought in a toy shop years ago that I can get away with playing only when nobody’s around. Same goes for the trombone any more. If any of the O-Folk are within earshot when I play either of them, I get pelted with catcalls, rotten eggs and sent to bed without my supper. Musically inclined I’m not.

I’ve always wanted a piccolo because they’re so cute. I’ve been sorely tempted by a few I’ve seen in hock shops for a hundred bucks or so, but if I took one home it’d end up as a cute wall hanging that would remind me every time I looked at it of a hundred bucks I could’ve spent on an icebox full of beer or a month of Sundays eating breakfast at my favorite greasy spoon. You can see why having a cute wall hanging always lost out.

I suppose if I bought one I could learn to play it instead of hanging it from the wall, but teaching myself to play a piccolo could take years and cost thousands of innocent lives.

And I’ve never stolen a piccolo or any other musical instrument, so the dream I had about a guy stealing a piccolo from me wasn’t about guilt, not that I can figure out.

My world-famous piccolo was stolen while I was staying in a rustic hotel in the highlands of a foreign country, the night before I was scheduled to give a command performance. Naturally, I wouldn’t be able to play a note without my beloved, custom-made piccolo. Catastrophe! The nefarious deed had obviously been committed by someone who was out to besmirch my sterling reputation as a master of the piccolo. As a matter of fact, I knew exactly who’d done it and, very oddly for a dream like this one, it wasn’t anybody I knew.

The thief had disappeared from the hotel for no more than three minutes or so, and when he reappeared, he wasn’t winded, he wasn’t mussed and he didn’t have my piccolo on his person, so it must’ve been somewhere very close by, just outside the hotel. Casually snagging my windbreaker off the hook on the back of my room’s door I slipped out the kitchen entrance and had a stroll down the road. After walking for barely a minute, I spotted the piccolo clumsily hidden among a tangle of tree roots at the edge of a stream.

After fishing it out, drying it with a hankie and stuffing it in my hip pocket I continued into the village. The corner post office was open and, for a crazy moment, I considered mailing the piccolo to myself at home, getting on the next plane and ridding myself of the lot of these ungrateful swine! But, upon reflection, I realized that’s exactly what my nemesis must have wanted, and so, resolved to put on my best performance ever, I went back to the hotel. I have no memory of what I played (what does one attending a piccolo recital expect to hear?) but I remember it knocked ‘em dead.

You know, that may have been the one dream I can remember that not only made any sense at all from beginning to end, but stayed in one place and didn’t feature anybody turning into animals.

While my brother gets to troubleshoot database problems as part of his extra duties at work, I clean the fish pitcher. We have quite different jobs, he and I.

It’s not exactly a pitcher, but I’m not sure what to call it. It’s not a bowl, it’s not a pot, it’s not exactly a vase, but it’s made of glass, has a narrow neck and a flared rim and it holds about a quart of water. It’s not what I would put a fish in but they seem to be very popular desk ornaments in our building. As on other desks, the fish shares the pitcher with a plant, swimming among the roots and occasionally nibbling at the algae that grows between them.

Although nobody has any idea what kind of plant it is, everybody says the fish is a “betta,” something I’ve never heard of before, although the only tropical fish I can remember from my aquarium period are guppies, tetras and a revolting worm-like thing called a khuli loach. I got it because of its hideous appearance and equally ugly name. That’s the kind of fish guy I was, but taking care of fish is way more trouble than their colorful, darting distraction is worth and I gave it up.

Now I’ve got this betta thing on my desk. It looks like the bright blue fish with long, wavy tails that you win at the carnival by throwing a hoop onto a peg or knocking over milk bottles. He’s not my fish, he’s my supervisor’s, or he was. I took care of him once while she was on a weekend junket, and then again while she was on another trip to train some employees, and after she took a couple more trips the fish was on my desk more or less permanently. I feed him, change his water, make sure nobody taps on the glass. He’s pretty much mine now.

And now, the portion of my blog where I rail against something stupid. Today’s subject: Planned obsolescence, the concept that makes you go buy a new toaster when the old one breaks because it’s so much easier and cheaper than trying to get the old one fixed. I’m on this soap box because My Darling B bent the cord from her laptop’s power supply until the vinyl layer of insulation cracked and the wire underneath broke. She bought a replacement power supply on e-bay but her laptop doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t want to blow another fifty bucks on a new one so she limps along with it as best she can.

This looks like a job for ... O-Man! If I picked up a new plug at Radio Shack, snipped off the wire and soldered a new plug to the end of the old power supply, it ... just ... might ... WORK! Quit snickering. It could. I used to tinker with this stuff all the time.

The guy who helped me at Radio Shack wasn’t exactly inspiring, I’ve got to say. I showed him the plug at the end of the broken cord and he sized it up by squinting at it a moment, then matched a replacement plug from the many in his sliding metal drawers by squinting at them, one after another. Must’ve had a bionic eye with a built-in micrometer. Anyway, he got it wrong. I took it home and soldered it on, but the plug wouldn’t fit in the socket of B’s laptop.

So I did what any red-blooded American does these days: I got on the interwebs and searched for an example of the power supply so I could find out if there was a size or a part number for the plug that would allow me to ask for it by name and leave out all the squinting. And that not only makes sense, it even sounds pretty easy ... to naive non-parts-buying-on-the-interwebs searchers like me. I found plenty of examples of the power supply on the web, but nowhere did anybody say precisely what size plug was on the end of the cord.

And that’s why I’m torqued up about obsolescence. I’m at the point where I’d rather throw the old one in the junk, buy a new one and give it to B as a prezzie. I wouldn’t be riding to her rescue but from where I stand rescue isn’t as sweet an option any longer as just getting the original, crappy electronic part out of my house, even if it would be taking up valuable space in one of the dwindling number of landfills. I used to tinker stuff like that together for laughs, but finding parts to do it now is as frustrating as trying to learn Russian by reading nothing but the ingredient labels of cereal boxes.

I didn’t catch the debate between Clinton and Obama last night, only the highlights on public radio this morning. I’ve long admired NPR for its even-handed reporting, but those guys really love Obama. Every clip they played for the morning news summary made her sound like a crabby adolescent. Shrill, even. Or I guess maybe she actually sounded during the debate. I’d have to YouTube it to find out which, but I just can’t work up the interest.

Shrill Hill and Smooth-Talkin’ Obama. The exchange I remember most clearly is the one where Obama implied Clinton was a whiner. She complained he was mailing fliers that wrongly trashed her policies and he responded something along the lines of, “She sends out lots of negative mailings, but we don’t whine about it.” ZING! Point, Obama (if you’re keeping score).

My Darling B thinks Hillary’s like the good student who’s been working hard to make straight A’s since her freshman year and now along comes this new guy who’s way more popular than her, and he’s cool and good-looking and always says just the right thing to make people laugh, and he gets straight A’s in every class without even trying! And now it’s looking like he’s going to be valedictorian instead of her! It’s not fair!

I’ve got to admit it: I’d really like to see Mister Smooth up against Grumpy-Pants McCain. Clinton against McCain would just be more of the same boring crap, and to a certain extent so would Obama against McCain (they’re both pols, right?), but watching young, popular, smooth Obama up against jumpy, grumpy, quick-draw McCain would be like seeing Kennedy make Nixon bust out in a jacket-soaking sweat all over again. That’d be worth staying up late to watch again and again on tape.

We met a fire engine storming north on Willy Street this morning as we came up the hill from the river on our morning commute. I pulled out from behind a city bus waiting at the curb and there it was, flashing and howling and scattering commuters like chickens in a barn yard. I managed to get around the bus with plenty of time to pull over to the curb and let him by. The car behind me managed to sneak through, too, but the guy behind him wasn’t as lucky and had to snuggle up tightly as he could against the side of the bus.

Meanwhile, right across the street from the bus and his cuddly little friend, a gasoline tanker pulled over to the curb. A gasoline tanker! Is this like a setup for a scene right out of a Michael Bay movie, or what? I mean, you can already see the fireball boiling up through the trees into the sky, right? And the fact that a fire engine’s going to be involved, well, that just buries the needle on the Irony-O-Meter.

Sorry, no fireball. Didn’t mean to tease you, but those fire department drivers are good. The fire engine roared between them at forty miles per with barely a foot to spare on either side, but he never slowed down that I could see.

A guy with green hair made lunch for me today.

I didn’t make myself a lunch this morning, thinking I could survive the day on the can of nuts and a couple tabs from the bar of dark chocolate I keep in my desk drawer. Silly boy.

By noon my stomach was screaming, “CARBS! I need CARBS!” It was impossible to do any work with all that shouting going on, so I put on my coat and boots and headed for the far end of State Street where I broke my last sawbuck to buy an Everything bagel with hummus. At two sixty-five I’d be surprised if you could buy a cheaper or more filling lunch anywhere in town. I’d add “tasty” but I know how some people feel about hummus.

The Mister Green Hair acted a little zoned out, as if he’d just come back from huffing some paint fumes in the men’s room. I was a little concerned he might not end up with all ten fingers after sawing my bagel open with his honkin’ big bread knife, but he must have lots of practice using that thing, maybe even while he’s stoned.

All the people behind the counter were college students of the same stripe; they either dyed their hair in primary colors, had tattoos on their faces, studded themselves with hooks, knobs, rings and wires, or any combination thereof. The same kind of crowd, but a few years older, works at Monty’s Blue Plate on the east side of town, but not at Potbelly’s, right next door. Those are all clean-cut kids straight out of Wonder Bread advertisements. At Marigold’s, just off the square, the staff who run your breakfast to your table are all upscale-looking young women, while the folks blasting off at Michelangelo’s latte machine are the polar opposite of upscale.

Do employers plan to hire from a certain crowd, do you suppose, or does it just work out that way? And if they are looking for a certain crowd, how do they get that crowd to come in? Does a simple “Now Hiring” bring in enough people to pick and choose from, or do they find it necessary to write a want ad that includes “hair must be anything but natural color; piercings and tattoos a must.” These are not necessarily the questions that keep me awake at night, but when everybody behind the counter has green hair or tattoos or both, it does give me pause.

My laptop is eerily quiet now that I’ve uninstalled the Norton antivirus software suite that used to keep it whirring without end. I was hoping for it to respond faster to mouse clicks, pined for the days when I could use it for more than a half-hour at a time without a system slowdown, but I’d become oddly used to the constant buzz of the hard drive as it spun incessantly and I didn’t expect to miss that. Go figure.

“Uninstall” is such a cumbersome verb, don’t you think? I know it’s supposed to be a high-tech “undo” but considering the way software programs insinuate themselves into every part of your computer it’s more like saying “unimpregnate.” I’m partial to the more descriptive, and more satisfying to say, “eradicate.” “Exterminate” would be almost as satisfying but it’s a little too obvious.

And while I’m on the tangent, a “suite” of software sure sounds classy, doesn’t it? They could’ve gone artsy-fartsy and called it a “collage” (I imagine everybody in that alternate world would mispronounce it “college,” though), or tried for mil-techno nomenclature and dubbed it a “cluster” (and it is so very much a cluster), but jutting their chins out and naming it a “suite” to give it that certain je ne sais quoi was a stroke of genius. There’s also the double meaning, hidden by the alternate spelling, that it’s as desirable as candy or a refreshingly cold fizzy drink. Brilliant.

Just before I closed up all the programs and hit the uninstall icon with the mouse cursor, I grabbed a beer and a book and settled down at my desk because every other computer software adjustment taught me I’d have to stay at the keyboard to respond to various pop-ups asking me to answer yes/no or to agree/disagree. I’ve been through too many downloads and upgrades that stopped dead in their tracks five minutes after I walked away from the computer, foolishly thinking it was an automatic — what did it need me for? — only to find the clever little progress bar frozen at one percent when I returned half an hour later to see how it was going. Talk about the heights of frustration.

I was drop-dead surprised when it didn’t ask for any help at all. Clicking on the uninstall icon invoked a box with the Norton logo, a brief lecture regarding the dangers of exposing my computer to the evils of the interwebs and the usual “Do you really want to do this?” question. Clicking on the “yes” in response made me wince just a bit, probably because I’m indecisive by nature and hadn’t done this before. Some questions I can answer in a heartbeat, but only the ones I can answer by rote. “Cream?” No. “How do you like your eggs?” Scrambled. “Are you sure you want to delete this sprawling, tentacled tumor of software and, by doing so, expose your computer, however briefly, to the legions of hackers and viruses who have been waiting just the other side of your firewall to wreak devastation upon it?” Errr ....

But I’d had about three weeks to think this over, so it took only a moment, maybe three, to summon up the courage to click on the “yes,” and that was the last time it asked me for any help. I kept looking up from my book, expecting I’d have to troubleshoot software conflicts, tell it which directories to delete, but no, it did that all on its own. When it was done, a final pop-up confirmed it had been uninstalled, gave me one final dire warning about exposed, about which I felt a little dirty, and the last Norton icon on my screen blipped into non-existence.

After it was gone, the laptop restarted itself. I held my breath as it booted up, thinking, This is it, this is where I get the Blue Screen of Death. But no, it still worked just fine. Better than just fine, it worked great. The hard drive didn’t grind and grind and grind through every request I made, the system wasn’t slowed down, the computer didn’t have to stop every half-hour to call the mothership for instructions or updates or whatever the hell it did without asking or telling me. Writing on my laptop was fun again.

And protecting my computer against the evils of the interwebs? I downloaded a free antivirus program from a recommended web site, pctools.com. There’s a part of my common-sense brain cell (yes, I have one) that wonders how a free program can be any good at all, and the answer to that is, I don’t know. They sell a souped-up version of the same program along with a couple other spyware and firewall programs, so maybe that’s how they pay for the free version. Or, maybe, the free version is crap and my laptop’s software is being ravaged by viruses at this very moment. I’ll let you know.

Ordinarily this would be the last day of February, but Mother Earth has gone around the sun four times now (unless you’re one of those nutburger geocentrists; in which case, for you the sun has gone around the earth four times; we aim to please everyone here at the home office of the one, true drivel — ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES) (sorry about the “nutburger” crack, but, dude, there are libraries filled with books about how dumb an idea that is) and each trip around the sun takes three-hundred sixty-five and one-quarter days, as you might have heard. This is the year we add up the quarter days and, for no good reason at all, stick them on the end of the second month of the year which, for even less good reason, is the shortest month of the year. Does that sound like a snafu the government dreamed up or what?

Legend has it that Ceasar Augustus stole a day from February to add to August so the month named after him wouldn’t be shorter than any others, but the time has come to deal with the fact that Augustus is dead. I’m sure he was a swell guy (or maybe he was one of the despotic ceasars; I’m pretty shaky on my Roman history, but for the sake of argument I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt), but now that he’s drifting around in the infinite, or wherever the Romans went after they kicked the bucket, I’m thinking he’s not going to be all that shook up over a petty little thing like stealing a day away from his month and putting it permanently back on February.

And as long as we’re moving days around, why do we even have thirty-one day months? Why don’t we have eleven thirty-day months and one thirty-five day month? You’ve got to admit that would make the months a lot easier to remember; you wouldn’t have to mumble, “Thirty days has September, April, June and November,” under your breath every time you were trying to figure out your calendar, and wouldn’t it be great to get rid of that social embarrassment, tiny though it may be?

So how about we plunk the thirty-five day month in the spring (I’m all for naming it “Dave,” but this is a very flexible plan, we can come up with something else if you like), say it’s the beginning of the year and cram it full of three-day weekends so we could all have plenty of time off to get the garden started and sit in our yards in lawn chairs with a cool beer in one hand, soaking up rays and trying to forget winter. Are you with me?

Tonight was man-food night at the O-Folks’ home. It began several months ago as the night that My Darling B decreed Tim and I would make dinner for her. For several weeks the youngest O did indeed join me in the kitchen to cook dinner, but the problem we increasingly ran into was that, between the two of us, we knew how to cook five, maybe six dishes at the most, a variety that was reduced to just two if we had to stay indoors and cook without fire.

And by “we” I mean yours truly. Tim will willingly prepare just two dishes: mac & cheese, and grilled cheese sandwiches. And don’t even suggest variations like grilled ham & cheese. It’s out of the question. Now I’ll admit he makes a perfectly-toasted grilled cheese sandwich, but I think anyone would quickly tire of grilled cheese, perfectly toasted or not, so I began to try making meals that didn’t involve boiling a pot of noodles or frying sandwich bread, and coincidentally I noticed he spent less and less time in the kitchen helping me until, about a month ago, he dropped pretense entirely and stopped even showing up when I began to cook.

No problem. I can lick this one on my own, can’t I? No, I can’t, not right away, anyway. When My Darling B asked, two or three weeks ago Wednesday, what we’d be having for dinner on Thursday, I answered with the question, “I’m not sure. What’s in the freezer?” She wasn’t very happy with that answer. Nobody ever looked in the freezer on her behalf, but I contended that was because she already knew what was in the freezer, having purchased all the contents at the market and put in there herself.

That wasn’t going to fly, and to combat my professed ignorance she dug up a whipe-off whiteboard from somewhere deep in the bowels of the basement, carefully wrote out an inventory of all the food-type items in the freezer (don’t even ask what items are in the freezer that aren’t food, you won’t like the answer) and asked me to hang it in the stairwell where it would be easy to consult from the edge of the dining room, almost within arm’s reach of my chair. When she asked last Wednesday what we’d be having for dinner, and gestured toward the whiteboard, I couldn’t pretend to be a big, dumb guy any more. I got up and went to the list.

Lucky for me, “beef bratwurst” was the second item listed; I didn’t have to read any further than that, hem and haw, try to figure out which two things went together, run to a cook book. I only had to blurt out, “Brats in beer with saurkraut and onions,” almost as if I had planned it. I don’t know how impressed she was then, but was satisfied with the results tonight.

We stopped at Star Liquors on Willy Street to pick up some fine oatmeal stout (brewed right here in Madison at Gray’s Brewery — well, in Verona, anyway), and I scampered to the kitched to prepare the meal as soon as we were in the door and I’d changed to my house clothes (sweat pants and a flannel shirt — always comfy and warm, never a wrinkle). After dropping the wurst into the stewing pot and emptying a bottle of stout over them I left them to simmer while I sliced the onion into thin circles and lovingly can-openered the saurkraut. Thirty minutes later the brats were plump and juicy and ready for the move to the skillet where I browned them to perfection, tossing the onions in with them for added flavor. Scrumptous! I, of course, was the only one enjoying my brat smothered in saurkraut; more for me.

Is anything sadder than breaking your coffee press first thing in the morning? I wasn’t any more bleary-eyed than I normally am at that hour of the day, I only got careless while rinising the soap out of the glass. The spout glanced off the edge of the sink at just the right angle, broke off with a *tink* and I was left standing there with a great big hurt hanging from my heart. Coffee press broken! How make coffee? (My inner monologue has very limited power to speak right after I get out of bed.)

Since the spout was a relatively small piece and most of the glass was otherwise intact, I went ahead and made coffee in it anyway, although I noticed after I poured the coffee into a carafe that one jagged crack had started down the side of the glass from the broken-off spout. That was the one and only time I’d be able to get away with pouring boiling water into it without ending up standing in a growing puddle of coffee dripping over the edge of the dining room table.

I was still pretty bummed about it halfway through the day when, as I was on the return leg of my noon time walk up State Street, I passed a kitchen gadget store, a pretty good one, too. I’d been there once before with My Darling B so I knew they had almost anything you can imagine needing for your kitchen, and quite a lot of things that would never occur to you — frog-shaped butter keepers, recipe holders that looked like big noses, that kind of thing. They would certainly have a coffee press, but even as I walked through the door I was not at all committed to buying one. They usually run at least thirty bucks, and that’s for the small ones that make only two cups of coffee. The one I broke made five cups, six when I filled up past the “fill to here” line (yeah, I did that all the time), and I imagined the price would just about double for one that big. I wasn’t mentally prepared to pay fifty or sixty bucks to replace a coffee press I picked up for two bucks at a garage sale.

They didn’t sell any complete coffee presses as big as the one I broke, but they did sell just the glass and that was only fifteen bucks. I could put a crowbar into my wallet and part with fifteen bucks. I was pretty happy to do it, in fact. Can make coffee! Sooo happy! My inner monolgue’s command of grammar is pretty slipshod when it’s really happy.

We bought tickets to see They Might Be Giants perform at the Barrymore Theater as soon as they went on sale the week before Christmas, and ever since then I’ve been shivering like a schnauzer with a dog biscuit balanced on the end of its nose, waiting to snap up that biscuit and tonight, finally, was the go-ahead. My Darling B picked me up at work as usual, we swung past Our Humble O-Bode to get the Timster, parked the car behind the Kennedy condos in Atwood-Schenck and walked up the street to Harmony Bar for dinner before the show.

The Harmony was packed. We’ve been there before when it was busy, but tonight was much busier than we’d ever seen before. Unbelievably, B found a table in the back room we could claim before making our way back to the bar to order. Always wanting to try something new, B asked for The Walnut Burger. It’s exactly what you think it is. I had a good, old-fashioned, American cheeseburger with all the fixings (lettuce, tomato, onion, mayo — what better burger than that?). Tim had a cheeseburger, too, but he wanted his naked. He wolfed it down in three bites. These are hamburgers so huge I’ve got to hold them in two hands. I’ve never seen anybody make a hamburger so large disappear so fast, not even his big brother. Twenty minutes later I was finishing up my cheeseburger and washing it down with the last of my beer.

Although the Barrymore is barely a block down the street from the Harmony we froze our little nippies off walking over and standing in line. Luckily we timed it well and hand to wait only five minutes or so before they opened the doors to let us in.

We’ve been to the Barrymore twice before, the first time to see Leon Redbone and Leo Kottke play a double bill (probably the best concert we’ve been to so far, in my opinion), the second time to see Suzanne Vega. Both times there were folding seats set up in the space between the permanent seats and the edge of the stage, but tonight there were not and a clot of standing people was slowly growing in it. That should’ve been a warning sign.

The opening band was two guys from Belfast who called themselves Oppenheimer. Never heard of them, but we never heard of Paul & Storm before we went to see Johnathan Coulton, and they turned out to be as good or better than the main act. In fact, I said words more or less exactly to that effect to B just before tonight’s show started. Just like me to go jinx things.

One guy played drums while the other guy jumped across the stage from one keyboard to another, whanging on a guitar while he was in between keyboards. Their music is hard to describe, in large part because it was too loud to make any sense. I know this makes me sound hopelessly cranky, but I honestly couldn’t understand a note they played or a word they sung until I plugged both ears by jamming my pointer fingers into them so deeply it hurt. But, and this is the important thing, it hurt less than the over-amped music, which was really more like hearing an entire city being dynamited than listening to somebody sing a tune.

As a handy side-effect of plugging my ears I could catch a couple words they sang here and there and even get a sense of the melody, but I have to say it made the experience worse. Both the guys sang, but they seemed to have a musical range of about two notes between them. No problem, though, because the microphones were fixed up to make them sound like robots. Cylons, actually, the old, shiny ones. Really, really loud Cylons. They used to blow things up all the time. Maybe that’s the effect these guys were going for.

Between songs I pulled my fingers from my ears for relief from the pain. During one of these breaks I felt a tug on my sleeve. “Do your ears hurt?” the nice girl in the seat next to mine asked, and held up a paper napkin. “Mine did until I jammed some of this in my ears. It helps a lot.” I thanked her for her concern but demurred.

The clot of people in front of the stage grew until it engulfed the first two or three rows of chairs, blocking the view of the stage from where we sat. I reconnoitered the rows of seats on higher ground in the back of the theater but didn’t find a better place for us to sit until I went up in the balcony where there were lots of open seats, probably abandoned by the swelling ranks of the standing people. We moved up to the balcony in the middle of Oppenheimer’s set, where we suffered through their last three or four numbers.

Between the two acts there was an intermission of biblical proportions, as they say. I had enough time to knit an afgan, read War And Peace, learn to speak German, frame, plumb and wire a house, fly to the moon and back, write a symphony and still have time to clip and file my nails. I’ve grown a beard in less time. George Bush doesn’t take that long to finish a sentence. Why they had such an insufferably long intermission wasn’t clear. They had to break down Oppenheimer’s gear and they set the stage for TMBG, but even all that fussing took only half the intermission.

After we’d been waiting about twenty minutes, Tim roused himself from a nap and asked, “They’re sure taking their sweet freaking time, aren’t they?” After more than a half hour he asked if he could go home. “Give it a few more minutes,” I begged him, but what I really wanted to say was, If I have to suffer through this, you do, too. This was not the way I’d pictured the concert in my hopeful heart.

By the time They Might Be Giants took the stage I felt more relieved than festive. It got worse from there. The first song, if it can be called that, was awful, and the volume was so loud that astronauts in orbit could hear it. Honestly, I read that on a breaking news bulletin tonight. They asked mission control to turn it down at least a notch or two and were flabbergasted to find out it was coming from a live band in Madison. It kept them awake half the night.

I grabbed a paper napkin from my pocket and began to tear of bits and pieces from it, rolling the bits together until I ended up with two wads that were just the right size to block out the worst of the noise without obliterating it entirely. How could the people standing right in front of the stage even survive an onslaught of sound like that? I looked around expecting to see people near me bleeding from the ears, but they all seemed to be fine, even enjoying the performance. It made me feel ancient. Fossilized, even.

After ten minutes of that I was ready to go, but we spend a lot of money on tickets and I felt weak about just giving up, so I sat tight through three more songs before I turned to B and said — and I had to press my lips right against her ear to make sure he heard me — “I can’t understand a freaking thing they’re saying.”

“We don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” she answered, looking more than a little relieved. When I asked Tim if he still wanted to leave he practically bolted for the door. And that’s how, in the middle of the fifth number, we all got up and walked out of a They Might Be Giants concert I had waited months to see. The people standing in the aisle behind us were aghast. I was a tad aghast, myself.

Tim wants a car. More accurately, Tim wants us to buy him a car. He’s been saving a large portion of the paltry paychecks he brings home from bussing tables at a local restaurant and he’s got enough put away to buy what in this neck of the woods we call “a piece of junk.” Even though I still have fond memories of my very first five-hundred-dollar junker, I also vividly remember the time I was rear-ended and nearly run off the insanely busy ring road just south of San Antonio. A junker is not the kind of car I want to think of Tim driving along the beltline.

We’re not going to buy Tim a car. We’re just not. However, we are considering buying what we would think of as a second car. Up until now we’ve resisted the urge to buy a second car. No matter how we spin it, the cost outweighs the benefits by about a thousand gargantucents, each gargantucent being roughly equal to all the pennies ever struck by the Federal mint (one gargantucent is also equal to five-hundred million megacents, a megacent being all pennies under the cushions of every sofa in America).

Legally it would in fact be our emergency back-up O-Mobile in every way. We would, of course, let Tim use it to get to his job or go to school when he’s enrolled at MATC, but when the time came that B wanted to go to a quilt show and I wanted to visit a steam train, Tim would end up the far end of a creek without a paddle, until such time as he was drawing a regular paycheck that could make car payments and insurance premiums.

 
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