this is drivel

Last night’s concert at the Barrymore was meant to be the opening gun on the weekend, but this morning I felt a lot less like I was running with a fun-loving crowd and a lot more like I’d been trampled under the feet of a stampeding mob. I needed a re-start for the weekend. I needed breakfast at Cleveland’s.

We ate at the counter this morning. First time for everything. It took My Darling B a little bit of fiddling around to find a way to stow her purse by slinging the strap over her stool and sitting on it. The up side to counter seating was that we were able to observe the artist at the griddle in action. B envied the way he could crack eggs open one-handed and watched him intently every time he made an omlette to see if she could pick up any secrets. I think the secret might be that, to make them as good as the omlettes at Cleveland’s, you have to start with a honking big griddle hot enough to make the eggs stand up and sizzle.

I had the usual, two eggs, scrambled, with bacon and a couple flapjacks on the side. I considered trying B’s new favorite, the sausage and egg sandwich, but I love griddle cakes and, as I said, I was desperate to get a fresh start on the weekend. I had a very good feeling that pancakes with lots and lots of syrup would do the trick; and what the heck, they did.

After breakfast and a quick stop at the farmer’s market to pick up meat and eggs and a truckload of onions (B really loves onions) we took the Beltline back but drove on past Monona to check out a furniture store on Stoughton road that sold the unfinished stuff. A saleswoman latched on to us before the door swung closed, even though we said we were there to have a look around, nothing more. “Let me just introduce you to the store,” she said, running down a list of the things they had on offer. “But this is just a sample of what we offer. We’ve got a huge cataloge you can order from, or you can browse through our web site, custom design the furniture you want and order directly from there.” Okay, why am I talking to you then?

Back home for a few hours, I helped by make shepherd’s pie by thawing out the ground ostrich meat and helping her figure out what to call it. When it’s made out of beef it’s called “cottage pie,” but we couldn’t decide what a pie made from ostrich meat should be named. I think it should be something along the lines of “My Darling B’s Best Meat Pie Ever” but I admit that’s because I’d like the hugs and kisses she’d likely give me when she heard me say that. My motives may be easy to read, but they’re sincere.

We left the house again in the afternoon to stop by a gardening shop B learned about on the east side of town, not far from the furniture store, as it turned out. She was looking for some supplies to start seedlings under grow-lights and this store was supposed to have just what she needed, and boy, did it ever, and the guy running the store wanted to tell us all about it, especially the light bulbs. That guy is more infatuated with light bulbs than Uncle Fester. He spent the better part of a half-hour telling us all the ins and outs of flourescent bulbs and wattages and lumens, and I felt genuinely bad that we couldn’t oblige him by dropping a thousand bucks on the very best grow lights he had to offer. Okay, not so bad.

With the gardening supplies loaded into the trunk, we went back into town to Willy Street where Star Liquor was hosting a visit from the good people who import Guinness beer to the United States, bless their loving and generous souls. The luckiest young lady in the world poured me half a shot of three different Irish beers to sample, and I call her “lucky” because this is her day job. She gets paid to give beer away. Who wouldn’t kill for that job? I would. I’d kill you right now, but I’d give you a beer first.

I can’t imagine why more people don’t show up for these tastings. Maybe a dozen or so people showed up while we were there to sample the beers on offer, but wouldn’t you think the place would be mobbed if they put up a big sign in the window three days in advance announcing they’d be giving away free beer? Heck, we made a special trip from Monona for it. Well, more for us.

We parked right in front of Pick More Daisies, the antique store on Willy Street, so we had to stop there, too, and B found a table cloth that was a perfect match, she said, for the upholstery on our dining room set, but it was made of linen so we couldn’t use it very often. Only on very special occasions. Next time you’re over for dinner, check out the table cloth. If it’s not made of linen, you’re just not considered special enough.

The Departed has all the random complexity of a road accident with none of the watchability that makes people slow down and stare as they drive by. I’m virtually alone in my opinion; ninety-seven percent of the more than two-hundred critics tallied by RottenTomatoes.com liked this movie enough to give it a good review. I’m verklempt. Martin Scorsese assembled an impressive cast of characters — Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Leonardo Di Caprio, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Alec Baldwin — to do little more than mug for the camera and make wise cracks.

Half the cast play cops, most of them corrupt as cancer; the other half are gangsters who have perhaps one redeeming quality, their utter ruthlessness. The movie is centered around Damon and Di Caprio, both cops, one of them a very bad one who appears to be one of the best, the other trying very hard to be a good one but who looks to everyone else like the baddest of bad guys.

You’d think a movie with a setup like that would be easy to watch, and at first it is. It opens with a montage of Damon and Di Caprio growing up, going through the police academy and earning their positions. The intrigue builds as you begin to understand the machinations playing behind the police force and the gangsters and how they mesh — and the way the montage is put together, working this out is no easy feat. It goes on way too long and is convoluted as hell. The whole movie goes on way too long and is convoluted as hell. I’d guess that was supposed to make the plot more intriguing, but at about the halfway mark it becomes about one-hundred percent less about intrigue and almost entirely about splattering more blood than Sam Peckinpaugh ever saw in his wildest dreams every time the camera starts rolling.

Before the second half when everybody shoots everybody else, I got the impression this was supposed to be a quirky comedy movie in the same vein as Ocean’s Eleven. Most of the actors delivered quippy lines with a half-smirk. I liked Ocean’s Eleven and I like quippy lines delivered with a half-smirk. I like them enough that I kept on watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip long after it fell apart. That kind of show would seem to be a whole different animal than a corrupt-cop, intrigue-filled drama that kills characters off in fountains of blood, though. Martin Sheen literally became a fountain of blood when his character was killed off. It was the most grotesquely comic killing I’ve seen outside Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Was I supposed to laugh at it? Or was I supposed to sympathize with the panic and revulsion Di Caprio expressed in the scene? I had no idea.

I wouldn’t contend that a movie can’t be comic and dramatic at the same time, but the comedy ought to balance the drama, not tip it on its head. Same goes for the acting. Jack Nicholson appears to have been turned loose with no instructions other than “go ahead and do your best Jack Nicholson impression.” He’s playing the same psycho bad guy he played in Batman, A Few Good Men, and The Shining, only with a lot less control. In a scene with Di Caprio that I can only guess was supposed to make him look malevolent, he rants, he slaps his face, he does a spit-take, he sets fire to his paper place mat — about the only thing he doesn’t do that Curly, Moe and Shemp did was throw pies.

While I was watching that scene I couldn’t help but be reminded of De Niro playing Capone in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables. Capone is sitting at a huge, round dinner table with all his mob cronies. He starts telling them about how their organization is like a baseball team. He’s got a baseball bat. You know what he’s going to do with that baseball bat the moment he hauls it out. His cronies know what he’s going to do; he’s probably done it before, but his story fills the room with bon homme and everyone’s having a good time listening to him right up until the point that he bashes in the brains of a rat fink at his table. That was not a comic scene. De Niro didn’t mug, didn’t play the stooge, his smiles and jokes were the work of a malevolent sociopath. De Niro was scary. Nicholson wasn’t.

After two and a half hours of this muddled mess, Scorsese tries to resolve the plot, such as it is, by killing off everybody. Whups, almost everybody, and if you’ve got half the brains I have, and I think you do, you’ll figure out how it ends fifteen or twenty minutes before the final shooting. The closing scene ends with a cartoon rat scurrying across the background. Ho! I get it! It’s a movie about rats, and here’s one last comedic poke in the eye! Sheesh.

More Real Phone Calls: I can hardly believe this happened to me again, and not once but twice in the same day, literally within ten minutes of each other.

I had to call a university campus to get the phone number for employment verification. “I don’t want to verify employment,” I pointed out, “I just want the phone number.”

“You mean like for hiring people?”

“Sure, like that,” I said. “Wouldn’t that be the HR department?”

“Oh, HR,” he said, “hang on a minute ...” There was the familiar *bip* as he transferred the call, followed by the ringover and a new voice: “Hello, human resources department, this is Joe Blow, how many I help you?” Aw, dammit!

Not ten minutes later I had to call a different university campus to ask for the same thing. Once again I explained very slowly and carefully that I wanted the phone number of the HR department, that I did not want to speak to the HR department and that I did not to be transferred anywhere else.

“What’s this in relation to?” he asked.

“I want the phone number to call to verify employment at the university,” I answered.

“Sure, hold on a minute.” And then the hold music, the transfer *bip* and the ringover before somebody in the HR department answered.

How’s this hard at all? What am I doing wrong? Can it even be possible to misinterpret the request to “give me the phone number for the HR department?” Should I be offering them a tip if they do it right? “I’ve got a five-dollar bill in my hand and I’ll mail it directly to you if you can tell me the phone number of the HR department!” Or should I be more brusque, more commanding, more rude? “If you transfer me I’ll drive over there right now, this afternoon, and find you and tie you up with your own phone cord and read the entire campus phone book to you so you’ll know the phone number to every department.” I don’t get it. These are supposed to be the smart people I’m calling.

Hodding Carter, the author of Flushed, invites friends over to his house so he can sit outside his bathroom door with his laptop to record their reactions while they poop on his Australian-made toilet, topped with a Japanese-made toilet seat. Not only that, he does it so he can write magazine articles and a book about toilets, in which he publishes the names of his friends and how they reacted to pooping at his house on his new toilet. This is a guy with some very broad-minded friends.

Parenthetically, I can tell you from experience that the Japanese make toilet seats that will make almost anybody laugh with glee, sigh with pleasure or yelp in surprise. The really good ones are heated (that’s the sigh), and when you’re done a tiny wand washes your bottom with warm water, then dries it with a gentle jet of air. I regret not bringing one back with me; we talked about it, but the cheapest ones were in the neighborhood of three-hundred bucks and I quit my job just before we left Japan. Blowing hundreds of dollars on toilet seats wasn’t in the cards just then.

Carter had an Australian-made toilet because, he said, it had a gullet so wide as to be uncloggable. I know nothing about Australian toilets, but apparently they make them like that because they’re very conscious about how much water they use, fresh water being harder to come by in Australia than I thought it was, and Carter says a toilet with a gaping throat doesn’t need much water to flush. I didn’t think I’d say something like this, but I sort of wish he’d told me a little more about it, although he did mention that he’d flushed a roll of toilet paper down it to see if the claims about never having to plunge it were true. They were.

Carter is into plumbing as seriously as most guys are into their favorite football team. This is a guy who travels to India to learn more about a revolution in toilet technology instead of being satisfied with reading about it on the web, as any other American would. Carter’s a travel writer of sorts, so flying to India isn’t something new to him. Neither are toilets. It was only natural he’d want to combine the two eventually.

About the rest of plumbing and pooping, Carter has quite a lot to say ... in one or two chapters, a bit too much, for my money. The second chapter, for instance, goes on and on about how water gets to your house, complete with the sizes of the pipe and where all the connections are. This would be good stuff for aspiring plumbers to read and I’d keep a copy of it in my work shop as a reference, but for pure enjoyment, a litany of various pipe sizes becomes as tedious as Genesis after twenty generations of “begats.”

I was tremendously surprised that he spent more than two-hundred pages writing about toilets and championing a grass-roots effort to make people less self-conscious about pooping, yet he didn’t see fit to mention toilets in space, not because they represent anything like a revolution in sewage disposal but because they’re so unlike anything on earth that the sheer novelty of them is worth a mention. So does the training required to use one safely in orbit. Because nothing falls down, the toilets on the space shuttles or on the space station have a fan inside that sucks a steady stream of air down the gullet. In order to keep everything inside the toilet that’s supposed to be there, the astronaut using it has to know how to perch himself exactly in the center of the seat, and for that there’s a training toilet here on earth with a video camera inside so the astronaut can watch his own bum on a video screen on the wall in front of him. Talk about leaving your self-conscious attitude at the privy door.

When I went to bed last night, the temperature outside was forty degrees and it was raining. I was pretty happy about that. After spending most of yesterday chipping ice off the driveway I couldn’t help noticing how much more difficult it was to shovel it away when I had to hoist the snow over the waist-high berm of snow that had built up along either edge of the drive. Down at the street end, the heaped snow was as high as my shoulders. A long night of warm temps with some rain thrown in would go a long way to melting off some of that snow.

I got up a little after four in the morning to use the commode and it was still raining then. I couldn’t go back to bed without taking a quick look out the window to see how much of the snow had melted away — quite a lot. It must have kept on raining right up until about five o’clock when my alarm clock woke me up. The house was strangely silent then, so I stole another quick look out the window before I hit the shower.

My eyes literally popped out of my head and rolled around on the floor between my bare feet. It was snowing.

I think I’ll have to join the local chapter of the Wisconsin Weather Whiners. This sucks.

I still don’t mind that it snows. I still like snow. It’s the timing of these storms that’s wearing me down to a nub. The daily commute to and from work is scary enough without freezing rain and snow falling at five o’clock every freaking day to make the drive a little more life-threatening. Okay, so it’s not every day. It’s more like once a week, but even that’s getting really old.

The storm seemed to have caught the city crews flat-footed. Two or three short stretches of the main roads looked as though they’d been plowed but by no means all of them, and the intersection of Willy and Blair was a sheet of ice that continued all the way up Wilson Street. It’s not a steep hill, but it’s just enough of a climb to make stopping at a light a white-knuckle experience.

On top of ice-skating to work down the streets of the city, it’ll take me a little while to get over putting in a full day’s work cleaning off the driveway. Yesterday was the first day the weather gave us a break in over a week. That huge dump of snow and ice we got on the eighteenth glazed our driveway under a sheet of ice I couldn’t break through until the sun came out and temps soared into the fifties Sunday. As soon as the sunshine began to melt through the ice I cleaned off a small patch near the garage, then went back out at one-hour intervals to see how much more I could scrape away.

If shoveling snow is hardest on the lower back, and I think I speak for most of us when I say it is, then chipping away inch-thick ice is hardest on the arms. I could scrape off the thin stuff no problem; even the thicker stuff was easy to shave off after the heat got to it and I could get the blade underneath to peel it off the pavement. The really heavy-duty stuff, an inch or more thick, would give up only if I hacked at it, raising the chipper as high as I could and bringing it down like a pile driver. An hour of that and I found I’d traded my arms for cooked pasta. It wasn’t until just before bedtime that I felt I could raise my arms over my head again.

But I got all the ice off, all the way down to the road and I even hacked a channel in the gutter so the melt water would drain away instead of pooling and freezing overnight into a skating rink, and I was feeling all smug and good about that until this morning when I woke up to see another damned winter storm crapping all over my nice, clean driveway. It’s like the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan where the medic finally gets the bleeding stopped on the wounded kid only to hear the *whang* of a bullet going right through the kid’s helmet, and the medic jumps up yelling, “Gimme a chance at least, will ya? Gimme a freaking chance!”

Oh, all right, my recently-shoveled, freshly-snowed-upon driveway isn’t a tragedy anywhere near the scale of D-day. It’s starting to feel like that, though. I’m ready for spring, is I guess what I’m saying.

I got a call on my cell phone the other day, but it was from a number I didn’t recognize so I hit the “ignore” button.

I want that button on my home phone. In fact, I want my home phone to ignore all calls from numbers that I don’t know. I don’t want to hear the ringer, I don’t even want it to ask them to leave a message at the sound of the tone. I want my home phone to check the incoming number against a phone book of people I know and, if it can’t find a match, I want it to shrug its metaphorical shoulders and ignore it without my having to push a button.

Best of all would be if it would automatically answer calls from numbers I don’t know with a message of my choosing, maybe one of several, starting with the usual, “I’m not home right now ...” to one that’s a little more lippy, then one that’s abusive, and the worst of which would be not only profane but ear-splittingly loud, too. The phone would choose which message to play based on the number of the incoming call. My dream phone would remember the numbers of telemarketing call centers, election campaign phone robots, agencies soliciting donations and the like, all of whom would received a blast of profanity if they called during the supper hour, but wouldn’t get any more than some indignant abuse if they called in the evening while I was trying to relax with a book.

Do they even make a phone like that? And if not, why not? I’d pay through the nose for that phone, and if phone makers ever got a look at my nose they’d be climbing over each other to sell it to me. Seriously, I’d pay at least a hundred bucks for a toy like that, although I’ve got a feeling it would cost at least two hundred, probably a lot more, which is a little odd because I think Tim could cobble together a pretty basic computer that could answer the phone and do all that good stuff, and use nothing but the junk in the basement.

Tim rented Gladiator on Sunday and curled up in the chair to watch it. I had to go buy a carload of lumber and hardware at Menard’s or I would’ve settled down to watch it with him, but it’s probably better I didn’t. He gets all misty-eyed and choked up at the end and I wouldn’t want to embarrass him. “It’s a very sentimental movie,” he explained later over dinner. “The guy just wants to go home to his wife and kids.”

I remember that part of Gladiator, too, but I also remember the part where he cut the head off a big beefy guy he was fighting when he was a slave, and that was one of the less gruesome scenes in the movie. I never considered it to be a tender story of a homesick man, but I guess it’s different things to different audiences.

Anyway, I sat down later to watch it myself, fast-forwarding over all the gabble-gabble (there’s way too much talking about the glory of Rome, truth and honor, that kind of crap) to get to the good stuff. When Russell Crowe fixes his steely eyes on Joaquin Phoenix and utters the immortal lines, “I am Maximus Decimus Meridius, General of the Armies of the North, Commander of the Felix Legions, husband to a murdered wife, father to a murdered son, and I will have my vengeance in this life, or the next,” you know old Joaquin’s going to get his ass kicked before the movie’s over.

Phoenix turns in a remarkably good performance in this movie, by the way. I don’t know if director Ridley Scott told him to play his part as a simpering weirdo pervert or he came up with it himself, but it was beautifully done. Just the way he drew breath convinced me he was a sociopath.

My copy of Empire of the Bay was a Christmas present from Sean. It’s a history of the Hudson Bay Company, first established in Canada in the seventeenth century as a fur trading business and apparently still going strong as a department store. If I ever heard of the Hudson Bay Company before I can’t remember it and I couldn’t figure out at first why he gave me that particular book, but as it turns out he read a big chunk of it in the bookstore before he bought it. Sean’s got an eye for a good story and he figured I’d like this one. He was right. I started it on Sunday night when I was looking through my TBR stack for something to read before bedtime. The first chapter hooked me and I’ve been reading it before bed since then.

My Darling B wants to raise seedlings for her garden in the basement, and rather than grow them in a heap of dirt on the floor, or perch pots on any flat surface she can find, she’s enlisted me to build a shelving thing for her, “thing” being the technical term for two pieces or more of any lumber I cut to size and nail together.

I’m not a carpenter. I’ve never even played one, on television or in the backwaters of my mind. I have a lot of the same tools that carpenters use, but that’s strictly coincidental. I have a toilet plunger, too, but it doesn’t make me a plumber. And yet, when B asks me to build shelves on which she can stack pots to grow seedlings, I say yes as if I knew how to do that, proving for the nth time that men really will try to do anything to win a woman’s affection.

Or promise to do anything, I should say. I had only the vaguest idea how I was going to build this thing she wanted. I knocked together some storage shelves in the basement several months ago and they’re still holding up, against all odds. I used caveman carpentry because I wanted to put them together and be done with them in an afternoon. I measured and leveled everything using the T.L.A.R. method (THAT LOOKS ABOUT RIGHT), but I squinted really, really hard and it fit together more or less as I thought it would. All the pieces were joined using a single-speed electric drill driving drywall screws through the two-by-twos, no pilot holes and no second tries. That’s what I mean by brute force carpentry. Zog smash.

If the storage shelves collapse, everything on them will tumble to the floor but it’s all closed up in Tupperware storage tubs, and it’s all old clothes and photographs so it’s not like a fall’s going to mess them up much. I’ll just rebuild the shelves and stack up the tubs again. I wanted to make something a little more dependable and sturdy than that for My Darling B’s garden goodies, though. I’d have to measure dimensions with a tape and square off the measurements before I cut them.

She showed me a drawing of what she wanted, or I thought she did. “You don’t have to make it like that,” she said, “I just wanted to give you an idea, if you needed it.” That sounded suspiciously like girl talk. “You can set the table now, if you like,” is not a suggestion when it comes from the lips of your beloved bride.

“Is the shelf you need?” I asked, working to tease an answer out of her.

“Yeah, sort of like that,” she quasi-agreed.

“Do you want three shelves like this?” The drawing she had showed a stack of three shelves, but when we talked about it earlier in the week she’d asked for only two. Showing me a drawing with three was derailing my train of thought.

“It doesn’t have to be,” she waffled. “Two’s fine.”

That’s not as good as a go-ahead, but I decided to plunge ahead anyway, figuring there wouldn’t be much danger of fallout. If she had two shelves instead of three, she’d still have shelves.

I made a relatively quick and painless afternoon trip to Menard’s to get the lumber and hardware I needed, and last night I went downstairs to come up with some kind of plan for cutting the wood and piecing it together. I had a plan when I bought it, but that same afternoon I came up with a different plan while I was napping. A lot of my plans come to me while I’m drifting off to sleep, and I work out the details by standing in front of the lumber and staring intensely at it. You’d be surprised how often this works. I still am.

I had set aside an hour or so for some pretty intense gazing but firmed up my plan in only ten or fifteen minutes, so rather than leave it to tomorrow and risk forgetting what I’d decided to do I hauled the lumber into the workshop and began measuring and marking the pieces I’d need. That hardly took five minutes and I was already in the work shop with all that marked-up wood, so I pulled on some gloves, grabbed the hand saw and started cutting.

Each shelf was going to be a two-foot by four-foot sheet of chip board. Ugly stuff, chip board, but cheap as dirt and these shelves were probably going to end up dusted with potting soil sooner or later anyway. A quarter-inch-thick sheet of chip board will bend like a swayback horse if you set a bunch of pots on it, though. The lumber I was cutting was meant to stop that. I cut two rails four feet long, and three cross pieces two feet long. Notched in the right places, they’d all fit together like Lincoln Logs. Then all I’d have to do is lay the chip board on top.

I even notched them last night. I hadn’t planned on doing anything more than staring, but once I had the momentum it didn’t make sense to stop, especially when it was going so well. To notch them I clamped two rails together, marked the notch I wanted to cut out and fired up the circular saw. In two or three quick passes, a circular saw will cut out a three-quarter inch gap in pine faster than you can say “count your fingers.” (Still have ten.)

But that was as far ast I got. A quick test-fit revealed I’d have to get the chisel out after all because the notches had to be about an eighth of an inch deeper and I wasn’t up to it last night.

On this day in 1865, Abe Lincoln uttered the words that are inscribed on his memorial: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him that shall have born the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

In the crowd, John Wilkes Booth watched and listened.

I was standing standing out front of the office building, trying to hold on to my briefcase and juggle a coffee mug from hand to hand when a guy I’ve seen around at work stepped up to the door and opened it for me. “Thanks,” I said, and we chatted about the weather, or something equally ordinary, as we rode the elevator up.

That was Monday. Tuesday morning came along and the same guy was at the front door again just as I began to juggle my coffee mug. “That was a pretty weird coincidence,” I said after I thanked him.

“We couldn’t have timed it better if we’d been waiting at the corner.” He quickly added that he hadn’t been, which I had no trouble believing. He was wearing a short coat and no hat in twenty-degree weather, and would have frozen solid if he’d been nuts enough to wait just for effect.

This morning as I topped the hill to Main Street I caught sight of him coming up Carroll just as the light changed so he could cross. I waited a moment at the corner for him to catch up. “You’re late! What’s with that?”

So I finally asked him: Is there a certain bus you take? A television program you watch that ends at the same time every day? “It’s pretty random,” he said. He walks six blocks to work and doesn’t have any set routine. Sometimes he stops to pick up a paper or buy a coffee, or traffic holds him up, or the lights are against him. This week, though, the planets all lined up so he arrived at the front door the same time I did.

Will he show up again tomorrow? Watch this space.

I went wandering the streets of Madison during my noon-hour stroll looking for Elephantmen. Don’t worry, I haven’t been sniffing gasoline. It’s a comic book. And from what I can tell, it’s a book about, well, elephantmen. And hippomen. Rhinomen, too. They’re not from some bizzaro world, they were animals turned into men by meddling scientists ... that old story. It looks like fun, though; the covers are rendered in the style of old pulp fiction magazines and the artwork throughout appears to be supurb.

If only I could get ahold of a copy. There were no stores in downtown Madison where I could find comic books for sale, other than the University bookstore where they had about a dozen titles on sale (including Betty and Veronica! Can you believe they’re even publishing Betty and Veronica any more? Who even reads it? Wally and The Beav have got to be pushing sixty by now). The closest shop that might carry it is probably Barnes & Noble, out by the East Towne mall. That’s a travesty, if you ask me.

There were just three places I might have found a copy of Elephantmen in downtown Madison: There’s a store than sells fantasy games on Mifflin Street near the grocery, there’s the University Bookstore, and according to google I should have been able to find a comic book store on Gilman Street called Blue Dog or something like that (when I googled it again later in the day it had weirdly disappeared from the listings, so I’m going from memory here).

The fantasy game shop on Mifflin was a bust. It was a bit of a shot in the dark to begin with. Gamers like comic books, especially any comics that are connected however tenuously with their fantasy worlds, but this is a new title, I think, so they probably haven’t released a line of little pewter statuettes for gaming yet. It was worth passing by to gape through the front window, though. I was mostly out to stretch my legs anyway.

The University Bookstore has a few comic books: mostly the more well-known Marvel superhero titles, some manga, a few “graphic novels” like Persepolis and Maus, that kind of thing. No Elephantmen.

In my last gasp on the way back up State Street to the office I stopped in Avol’s used book store where they’ve got a small shelf chock full o’ comic books, mostly Ultimate Fantastic Four back issues and a few collections of political cartoons. I was grasping at straws, but I got to hang around the book stacks for another five minutes.

Sometimes I turn in for the night first, sometimes B does. On occasion we both curl up together at the same time. Who goes when depends a lot on how cold the house is and what we’re reading at the time.

Night before last, I was in bed first, reading through yet another chapter of Empire of the Bay. B came in some time after me with a stack of books and magazines in one hand and a glass of water in the other. If you think I read a lot of books, you should see how many she goes through in a single night. She used to heap them up in the middle of the bed — big, thick books that weighed as much as a planet all together and pinned down most of the bed covers, or the ones I was planning on using, anyway. Do you suppose there’s a factory anywhere on earth with the capacity to make a set of sheets and a comforter big enough to cover two people in one bed? I seriously doubt it.

B more or less gave up stacking a library of books in the middle of the bed after a few years of me kicking them around, and except for a relapse now and then she stacks them on the floor beside her pillow now. I have all the bed covers I need until she reaches over the edge of the bed to pick up a book and takes the covers with her as she turns. And the warm spot’s got a cat in it now instead of a heap of books. Oh, well.

After reading for about forty-five minutes my eyes began to bang shut and, after I don’t know how many readings of the same paragraph I figured it was a best that I turned the lights out, so I put my book up, puckered up to receive my good-night peck, then buried myself snugly under the comforter. When I was halfway to la-la land, B switched her lights off and began to tunnel her way into the warm spot at the center of the bed.

When she’s all settled in she’ll usually cuddle up to me a bit, taking my hand or curling an arm around me. I can tell she’s there but usually I just barely wake up for it. Last night she misjudged her reach a bit and poked me right in the left nipple with the points of her fingers. I was startled, to put it mildly. An ice cube down the back of my shirt is about the only thing I can think of that comes even close to it.

It’s Thursday. That much should be as apparent to you as it is to me or Tim or My Darling B. If you live where I live, you even know that Thursday is trash pickup day. We certainly know that. We were talking about it just last night before dinner. Think we remembered to take out the trash this morning? Course we didn’t. No need to be polite.

You’d think that between the three of us we’d have enough combined brainpower to remember only two words, just three syllables: Thursday, trash. We were all looking right at the trash cans that were standing at attention in the back of the garage. They were practically within arm’s reach as we were sitting in the car backing out, but there wasn’t enough wattage between us to make the light bulb go *fzzt!*

I closed the garage door. We drove away.

And this morning was not our first time forgetting to put out the trash. We’ve been having one heck of a lot of trouble throughout the winter. Can’t say why. It never happened before, especially not in the summer. Of course, then those really hot, sticky months cooked the trash so it stunk like a hundred plump babies who’ve been sucking gallons of apple juice from their little sippy cups and have begun to emit greenhouse gasses faster than a coal-fired electric plant. Put into perspective, it’s not at all odd we never forgot back then.

When I finally remembered it this morning, it came to me in the same place I remember the last two or three times: At the beginning of Atwood Avenue, as we’re driving up the hill before the lights at Fair Oaks Ave. I don’t know what it is about that spot that jogs my memory, but it seems to be the one place on earth I can reliably remember to take out the trash. Too bad I don’t live there.

This morning I began to laugh out loud when that one crucial, dormant memory cell kicked in. B was too sleepy to ask why I was laughing, so I cuffed her on the shoulder. “It’s Thursday.”

She nodded. “It is Thursday,” she agreed, with no particular enthusiasm for the sentiment. Then her dormant memory brain cell stirred to life and her face registered shock as the memory came back to her. “Oh, shit! It’s Thursday!”

I kept on laughing. I had to. We’d gone from forgetful to pathetic to comically feeble. If we want to stand a chance of remembering next week, I’m sure we’ll have to pin big notes to the fronts of all our coats, “Take out the garbage!” Or line up the garbage cans in the driveway behind the car Wednesday night. Those are two darned good strategies. Only trouble with them is, we’ve got to remember to do them if they’re to work.

In response to this drivel my Mom noted, “...you and your wife are on the verge of passing into the “little yellow sticky notes” age of your lives. I'm giving Tim a pass since garbage pick-up in teenage lives jingles no bells in their brains. Sticky notes are a part of my life. The trick is to manage the time between when you THINK about what you need to remember on the note, and when to actually write the note and stick it onto the window, wall, commode, whatever. For instance, if you THINK about the garbage on Monday and write the note and stick it up somewhere, by the time Thursday comes around it will have become part of the foliage and you won't notice it. It has to go up on Wednesday to remain visible.”

And, actually, I have already begun to think this way, grabbing the thing I have to remember and putting it where it’ll remind me later to do the thing. That’s where we were going with the idea of putting the garbage cans behind the car Wednesday night. I put everything behind my mental car now, as soon as it occurs to me. If I have to take a book back to the library, I grab it when I’m reminded of it, no matter if I’m eating supper or clipping my nose hairs, and stuff it in my back pack. If I remember something I had to buy at the hardware store I run to the white board and jot it down, often interrupting a movie or cutting short the chapter I’m reading. Wait, no, I don’t interrupt movies or cut a chapter short, but you get the idea.

The trick to this, though, is to do it as soon as I think of it. If I don’t get up from eating, chances are excellent I’ll have no memory of what I wanted to get later and it’ll keep me awake. I’ve got to do it the moment I think about it, or write it down on a sticky note, which I’d have to paste to my shirt. That would look as comical as getting up from eating would look weird, so I just get up.

It’s just as important, as Mom pointed out, not to do the thing too soon, unless I arrange things so I can’t help but run into them again. Hence the trash cans behind the car. Leaving them in front of the car, in full view of all the O-Folks, doesn’t do any good, so neither would posting a note on the door Monday night. I’d just get used to seeing the note and ignore it come Thursday morning. A note that I wouldn’t see until Thursday morning would work, or an air horn that went off at quarter to seven Thursday morning, or even better, trash cans that wheeled themselves out to the curb, but I’m not that kind of tinkerer. Another solution will have to present itself.

Tim and I took a drive across Monona to look at a 2000 Toyota Corolla five-speed on the lot at A - Z Auto Sales. He says he doesn’t have to have a car right now, but he sure seems to be in a hurry to start looking.

The rational side of my brain knows there’s no harm in looking, especially when I don’t have to commit to anything yet, but my hindbrain, the part of me that whimpers and sucks its thumb and has tantrums, feels that if I had to name just one thing I could hate with the searing white heat of a thousand exploding stars, it would be shopping for a car. Nothing I’ve ever done, not even submitting to security searches to fly on commercial airliners, comes close to the aggravation I’ve experienced at the hands of used auto sales personnel, by some estimates the lowest form of life on the planet. Okay, my estimates.

I have to admit my frustration stems from dealing with a particular subset of used car trogs, the ones in the Denver metro area, as the only used cars I’ve owned anywhere else I bought from individual people. I bought my first car from a hippie in San Antonio, my second from the owner of a gas station in Haynes, England, and the third from a couple of gentrified hippies (he was an architect, she was an interior designer) in Boulder, Colorado. I married shortly after that and, following our next move to Berlin, Germany, we didn’t have enough money to buy a car, not that we needed one. It wasn’t until our return to Denver that the seed of my deep-seated hatred was planted.

We had two children by then so we figured we had to have a car with plenty of room. Diaper bags and booster chairs, don’tcha know. Minivans, the perfect solution to our transportation needs, were just reaching the peak of their popularity and we must have looked at a dozen of them. Every one had something wrong with it, usually the result of a past catastrophe. I lifted the mat in the back of “a really clean unit” to find the floor littered with broken glass. “Looks like this one’s been in an accident,” I guessed. The sales lady had nothing to say to that, the first time I stunned one of them into silence.

The second time was shortly after a van we took for a test drive got vapor lock, stranding us a couple miles from the showroom. “What do you want me to do about it?” the salesman said to me on the phone (I’m not kidding). “I want you to get in your car and come pick up me, my wife and two infant kids,” I told him. He had no reply to that and didn’t say more than a half-dozen words to us on the drive back, or as we left, either.

The rest of our used-car hunt was similarly hellish and the mental scars from it still make me flinch away whenever I catch sight of a used-car lot in the corner of my eye, so when Tim asked me to go look at a car with him my answer was not what you’d call enthusiastic, but all I had to do was look at it from his point of view to make myself go along: he was buying his first car. I still remember what a very big deal that was, so I bit the bullet and rode over to A - Z Auto Sales with him.

It was the smallest used-car lot I’ve ever seen, maybe a dozen cars parked on the asphalt around a corner business office, watched over by a woman and her three- or four-year-old son. She gave us the keys for a test drive and ran a check of the VIN on Car Facts while we were out; I had to make the test drive because Tim doesn’t know how to drive a stick. “It’s nice and clean,” Tim said after we got in it, but from a teenaged boy any car is clean if there isn’t a week’s worth of fast-food bags on the floor and it doesn’t stink of vomit. The upholstery had faded to grunge under eight years of soda pop and ground-in food; and my fingernails scooped quite a bit of guck out of the cuppy places on the arm rest. Eeyoo.

The door didn’t fit right, either. I could hear a lot of wind noise when I got it up to speed. That usually means the car’s been in an accident — and, in fact, it turned out the sales lady found an insurance payout on Car Facts. “It probably wasn’t more than a fender-bender, though, or they’d provide more detail,” she said. Maybe, but I’m not crazy about buying any used car, even a Toyota, if it’s been in an accident already, in spite of what Garp said about buying things pre-disastered.

So Tim had his first car-shopping experience, and he seemed to be pretty happy to be on the hunt. Gotta teach him how to stick shift, though. I feel as though I’ve been delinquent in teaching him an essential masculine skill.

Taking a quick look at the NOAA’s web site just before lunch time to see what the current temp was outside, I nearly chickened out of my noon-time walk when I saw that it was only twenty.

Then I reconsidered. I desperately needed the fresh air and a good stretch of the legs, so I pulled my sweater on over my head and wrapped my scarf up tight around my neck and hit the pavement with a pace fast and steady enough to keep my blood going full-tilt. And actually, it wasn’t too bad. I zipped straight down State Street to Lake, crossed over to Johnson and came back to where it crosses State at the modern art museum. I don’t have a pedometer so I don’t know how far that is; maybe a mile and a half. I did the whole thing in three minutes. Kidding. I was out and back in thirty or forty minutes; I didn’t check the clock so I’m not sure.

Last night being Guy Food Night, I served up breakfast burritos. Talk about total guy food. One skillet: brown a pound of sausage, stir in six beaten eggs, push it around as you warm the tortillas on the oven rack, and when the eggs are firm and just before the tortillas get crispy, shout “DINNER!” into the living room and put the skillet on an oven mitt in the middle of the table. Brownie points for serving it with diced onions. Probably would have gotten even more brownies if I’d chopped up some green and red peppers, too, but I didn’t think of it until I was picking my nose the next day.

My Darling B was enjoying her breakfast burrito (we eat a lot of breakfast food on Guy Food Night) when suddenly she stopped and an expression crossed her face that made her look as though she had just bit down on something that resulted in a beetle-like crunch, and in fact something had, but it was not in my burrito. It was the crown of one of her teeth parting from the roots. Don’t you hate it when that happens? She sure does.

This was not her first dental emergency — or was it an emergency at all? We debated the point for a little while last night. She felt bad calling the off-hours emergency backup dentist to declare an emergency when she wasn’t bleeding or her life wasn’t otherwise in danger, whereas I say, when your teeth are falling out of your head, that’s a dental emergency. They don’t have to be exploding or strangling you, although I would have to conceed that that would be an emergency also. The dentist is getting paid handsomely either way.

My alarmist attitude convinced her to call and she went in to see the dentist this morning before she even went to work, after she tried to phone her boss at the DMV. Not surprisingly, she couldn’t get hold of a real human being, just an answering machine, so she tried to get her supervisor on the horn. No luck there either. Next, she dialed a coworker’s number, then she tried to reach any of her coworkers, without success. I could have told her she was wasting her time trying to call anybody at the DMV, and even if the call had gone through she would’ve been on hold forever. That’s what always happens.

You don’t want to know what the dentist did to her. A quote from My Darling B will tell all without getting too gruesome: “It started out almost pleasant,” she explained, “and then it turned into a scene from the operating room on M*A*S*H.” When they finished with her she swung by cap square with wads of cotton stuffing her cheeks, looking for all the world like a chipmunk packing nuts away for the winter, or maybe one that’s just been assaulted by a dentist shoving stainless steel hand tools in its mouth. That’d make one hell of a Mark Trail center panel, wouldn’t it?

She stopped by cap square so I could drive her home, put her to bed and let the Vicodin take her away to la-la land, although funnily enough it didn’t. A single Sudafed, a pill so tiny you could loose it on a plate speckled with bread crumbs, will knock her out cold for twelve full hours and leave her so groggy after she wakes up that she bumps comically into furniture and walls, but a big old horsey-pill Vicodin doesn’t do a thing to her, other than kill the pain, mostly. I thought Vicodin was supposed to be all big and bad. My wife can beat your Vicodin!

After dinner we sat on the sofa watching Jon Stewart videos on the interwebs, a hopping Friday night at the O-Folks Home, with or without horsey pill pain killing drugs.

Brian Schweitzer, governor of Montana, is either the biggest blowhard in the United States or he’s the one politician on earth I would vote for without cringing. I heard him say this during an NPR news story about the Real ID mandate handed to the states by the federal government:

“We’re putting up with the federal government on so many fronts. Nearly every month they come up with another harebrained scheme, an unfunded mandate to tell us that our life is going to be better if we just buckle under on some kind of rule or regulation. We usually play along for a while, ignore them for as long as we can and we try not to bring it to a head, but if it comes to a head we found it works best just to tell them to go to hell and run the state the way we want to run it.”

I love this guy. I don’t know if he’s for real or he’s only shooting his mouth off — I suspect he’s only shooting his mouth off, on account of he’s an elected official — but I have to admit I’d like it if our elected officials would tell the feds to go to hell once in a while. Or just once, even.

Here again, the governor:

“But, Governor Schweitzer, what happens in May if somebody from your state wants to get on a plane ... that’s supposed to be the deadline.”
 
“Blah, blah, blah, ‘supposed to be the deadline ...’”

Isn’t he great, folks? A big hand for the governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer!

One of My Darling B’s relatives e-mailed. Who she was I’m not sure because she used terminology like second-cousin-twice-removed-by-hypotenuse-of-y, and I never could follow that stuff, even when I was into genealogy. The only when I understand family relationships is to draw trees of names connected by solid and dashed lines. Tell me you’re my third cousin on my mother’s side and all I hear is “cousin.” Draw me a picture, even if you’re just tracing your finger in the air, and I understand immediately. I should’ve been born in Missouri. (Do they still put “The Show Me State” on the license plate?)

B’s new, yet distant, relative is Diane in Connecticut (and it’s a measure of my cranial density that I never realized who in Connecticut might be reading my blog until I started drivelling today) who wrote to B in January after googling a photo of her and the boys I took outside the village of Tarbert when we were on vacation in Ireland. Arthur Harley Marshall was born and raised in Tarbert before he emigrated to Ohio, married Ida Alice Starkey and their daughter, Josephine, was born in Springfield. Josephine was My Darling B’s grandmother.

We learned about Arthur and Tarbert by accident when B’s sister-in-law showed her a will made by Arthur’s father. I copied it in longhand and kept it for years until I got a little deeper into genealogy, learned enough to look up the documents connecting Arthur to Josephine, and when the Air Force assigned me to England I took some vacation days and we all went to County Kerry in Ireland. Beautiful place. Tarbert’s a bit of a dump, though. All the same, I got B and the boys to pose beside the sign at the edge of the village, snapped a photo and posted it on the interwebs with the rest of our vacation shots.

Eight years later, Diane from Connecticut googled “Marshall + Tarbert” and one of the hits was our photo, so she sent e-mail to My Darling B introducing herself. She asked about the will — I must have mentioned it to somebody when I was researching B’s side of the family tree — so I dashed off a copy of it from the diary I kept. The will itself had been lost and all my genealogy files were still packed away somewhere, but I knew where my diaries were. The will named everyone in Arthur Marshall’s family; Diane was pretty happy to have it.

Almost coincidentally, Diane’s e-mail came just a few months after a phone call from Susan, a distant cousin of mine, who was also researching her family history. She sent me a thick packet of photocopies and notes and wanted to know if I had anything she didn’t already have. Leafing through the copious notes I sort of doubted it, but I couldn’t say for sure because my files were still buried somewhere downstairs. It’s almost two years after we moved in and there’s still an awfully rich vein of cardboard boxes down there.

I’ve been planning to build a stack of bookshelves in my basement lair along the blank wall opposite my desk. To do that, I would have to be able to get to the wall, against which a heap of boxes and other detritus had accreted (Excuse me. I had a very wordy frog caught in my throat), so I spent most of a Saturday breaking up the boxes, sorting binders filled with notes and filling a thick plastic bag with what had once been very important papers but was now garbage.

At the top of one three-ring binder I found a letter from my Dad to the General Motors Corporation that began, “Please file this letter under Complaints!” After establishing his bona fides as a Chevy Man, he went on to tick off all the problems he had getting a 1953 Bel Air convertible after he “piled her up.”

To sum up all this ranting and raving, I’ve been a Chev’ man for nigh onto four years now but I think I’ve had enough. When a man pays a price like he has to pay for a car, he should be entitled to better service than that. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I will never buy another GMC car, but I sure will think twice before I do. And for pete’s sake, put an electric windshield wiper on the car or I won’t even think once.

Yeah! Tell ‘em, pop!

The rest of the binder was chock full o’ letters, notes and photocopies I gathered while I was researching my family history. Alongside the binder I found the files I kept with the rest of the notes I pulled together that once let me see the branches of a spreading family tree. I don’t remember how I found half this stuff. I’m not even sure how to make sense of it now, but I figured the next time a distant relative called, wrote or e-mailed I’d be able to respond with a barrage instead of a diary entry and a shrug.

(And in fact I got my chance today when Diane wrote again with some more information. I had a few things in a file that I didn’t have before; hope she liked them.)

Tim wanted to go shopping for cars again today. He scours Craigslist every day (who is this “Craig” and why does he keep such lists?) and found a Honda Accord he liked the looks of. It happened to be at the same lot we tried earlier this week. The sales lady even remembered us and still had a copy of my driver’s license on file. Not sure if that’s a good thing any more.

Tim took it for a drive this time — it was an automatic — and immediately liked it. “I’m not going to lie to you: I want that car,” he said. “It’s not a color I like, but I don’t care. I want a car, any car. That’s a nice car. I want it.”

I was getting the feeling he’d like to buy that car, so we called a mechanic to ask about having it checked out. All the guys who give advice on buying used cars, from Click and Clack to Consumer Reports, say you must have any used car checked out by a mechanic before you buy it, and it’s advice that makes good sense, but how exactly is it done? Four out of every five mechanics we called were closed on Saturday, the one day that used cars are bought and sold faster than my oldest son scarfs up a pizza. That’s a crap simile but it’s all I got right now. Most mechanics didn’t even leave an answering machine on to pick up the phone, and the ones that did answer couldn’t look at the car we wanted to buy until Monday at the earliest.

The sales people at the lot said it would be sold before the end of the day, and I believed them. Their cars were selling as fast as they could put them on the lot. Everybody in and around Madison was out shopping for cars. Does nobody get their cars checked out before buying them? Are used cars bought like disposable combs and batteries now? Just pick one up with the money you got at the paycheck loan place down the street and hope there isn’t too much wrong with it that you can’t fix in your own driveway? Wowzers, that’s rough.

We traveled across town to a dealership that had another Accord for sale, this one much more basically equipped. “It doesn’t have a CD player,” Tim noticed right away. “I don’t think I can drive a car that doesn’t have a CD player.” I admire a man who’s got his priorities straight.

I thought it had a warranty, too, but the ad only made it sound that way. We left a little disappointed, but not quite as disappointed as the salesman who went along with us for the test drive and lured us in to his desk but couldn’t get us to sign papers before we shook his hand and left. If he’d given us a hint that he could bring the price down a thousand bucks I would have gone a few rounds with him, but right off the bat he left us at his desk a little too long to “talk with his manager” and he didn’t play ball at all on the price. I told him to give me a call on Monday, we could talk more then.

On the way back from looking at cars we stopped at Bongo Video and I snagged the last copy of Michael Clayton, a movie My Darling B’s been wanting to see since it was released on DVD two or three weeks ago. We kept stopping by the store on the way home from work, but it was very popular, never a copy on hand. Either demand is finally tapering off or I got lucky because it was still early.

We didn’t even know what the movie was about, just that it was popular, received good reviews and starred George Clooney. It turned out to be all about intrigue, like Syriana with lawyers instead of Arabs and we could follow the plot this time. No fingernail-pulling either, thank goodness. Even with my eyes shut I cringed all the way through that scene. I couldn’t go through that again.

After it was over we were trying to think of a movie where the lawyers were the good guys. They always seem to be a pack of jackals. If there’s a good lawyer he’s the lone oddball and the jackals try to kill him. There’s never a firm of all good lawyers trying to catch the one bad one and bring him to justice. I wonder why that is?

If I had one complaint about Michael Clayton, and if you know nothing else about me by now, you know that I have at least one complaint about everything, it was the abrupt shift in technique used by the very, very bad guys hired by the evil chemical corporation. This is going to be something in the way of a spoiler, so if you want to be surprised by the movie, skip this and come back after you’ve rented it.

Are you back? Did you notice the same thing I did? The chief legal counsel for the evil chemical corporation hires a couple of vaguely Aryan-looking “black ops” guys to keep an eye on a lawyer working their case. When he literally goes off his meds, the black ops guys are told to “contain” the damage, so they carry out an elaborate, stealth assassination that’s meant to make it appear as though the lawyer overdosed, which would not be incredible considering the way he acted earlier in the movie.

His friend Michael Clayton, though, gets a little suspicious, starts digging around and the black ops guys go after him. How? Car bomb. Seems a little inconsistent. Worse, Clayton avoids getting blown to smithereens by mere chance. He pulls over to the side of the road and walks across a pasture to look at some horses for no apparent reason. I think there had been an explanation for why he got out of the car, but it ended up on the cutting-room floor.

It’s an odd blemish on an otherwise interesting movie. I enjoyed watching the rest of it, I even liked the ending, but those two hit men botching their job so spectacularly seemed unsatisfyingly wrong.

It’s the day we lost an hour. As I was eating breakfast and reading the morning paper, B stumbled into the dining room with a profoundly puzzled-looking expression and asked, “What time is it, really?”

I’d reset most of the clocks when I got up except for a small clock on the desk and the one on the video player. I have never found my way through the menu on the video player to the clock, so I don’t even try any more. The clock on the desk I just forgot.

It was really eight o’clock, and I told her so, but her confusion persisted for several more minutes, partly because of the sloppy way I reset the clocks and partly because she thought we didn’t spring ahead until tonight. Psyche!

If the Inscrutible They are going to keep screwing with our heads this way, couldn’t they do it first thing Friday so we could have all weekend to get used to it? Just the one day, Sunday, isn’t enough, and doing it in the middle of the night so we wake up an hour later into the day doesn’t help at all.

I think they ought to do it at quitting time Friday. Five o’clock — BANG! — Six o’clock! I know it wouldn’t be a popular idea at first, but it’s not very popular right now and it seems to me that would be perfect timing anyway for both the party animals who go out drinking until they don’t know what day it is, as well as for the homebodies who sit on the sofa and watch television late into the night. A missed hour right out of the chute before everybody goes to bed and forgets all about it has got to be better than waking up Sunday morning to the realization that they lost an hour, and going from clock to clock “springing ahead” on the last day of the weekend is adding insult to injury.

I woke up at six-thirty and laid in bed for ten or fifteen minutes enjoying the idea of going back to sleep until I realized it was really seven-thirty. That’s how long it took me to remember that I was already an hour behind schedule. I rolled out of bed as soon as the thought hit me, fetched the morning paper from the end of the driveway, took it to the kitchen and started making a pot of java as I mulled over the headlines. Who is this rock star they call Obama? I wondered to myself as B wandered into the dining room wearing a puzzled look.

Appealing to their sense of family togetherness, I enlisted the help of the other resident O-Folk in the basement as I assembled the shelves for My Darling B’s seedlings. Given enough time I probably could have figured out how to hold the uprights upright, fit both shelves into place and drill the holes needed to bolt the whole thing together, all while it was wobbling back and forth and threatening to come apart at any moment ... but that would have resulted in deep-seated slivers, painful cuts and lots of cursing. I don’t mind cursing, but the first two suck, so I talked Tim into steadying one upright and B into holding the other while I knocked the shelves into place and drilled out the holes. In just ten minutes the shelves were up and I could finish the details on my own so I thanked them profusely on bended knee for their contribution, and they left.

Penny let me borrow her three-disk DVD set of The Addams Family on Friday and I’ve been wolfing down an episode every time I had a half-hour to spare. The set was released months ago and Bongo Video still doesn’t have a copy of it! They don’t have I Walked On The Moon, either, even though I keep dropping hints. What’s with those guys?

I made the same complaint to Penny last Thursday when we were talking about television shows we used to watch every day after school. A whole bunch of her favorites were released on video just before Christmas and she got them as prezzies under the tree. She says she’ll lend me Land of the Lost after I’m done with The Addams Family. All I’ve got to do is ask. What a pal.

The Addams Family is every bit as much fun as I remember it. The zany over-acting is almost vaudevillian, the characters are so wildly drawn. I get an especially big kick out of the things they thought would look goofy and scary, like the mounted moose head with one crooked antler that every guest to the Addams home inevitably cringes away from when they walk through the door and catch sight of it. Maybe that would’ve been a ghastly sitting-room decoration back in the 60’s, but who wouldn’t kill to have it over the mantle piece now?

John Astin may have had a full and varied career in film and television (he nailed the role of the goofy social worker in West Side Story and was a good fit for the Cary Grant role in the television version of Operation Petticoat), but I’ll bet if anyone remembers him now it’s for his performance as Gomez. With his comically bugged-out eyes and rascally grin, he was made for the role of a psychotic lawyer at the head of a house filled with spooks and ghouls.

The only other actor I recognize in the show is Ted Cassidy, the butler Lurch (with uncredited appearances as Thing). He showed up in various television shows, usually as a giant alien (he was the lizard-headed Gorn in Star Trek) or some other monster (Bigfoot in The Bionic Woman), and his basso-profundo voice made him a natural voice-over for evil overlords on Saturday morning cartoons from Space Ghost to Scooby-Doo, but the role I remember him best for (outside of playing Lurch, of course) was Harvey Logan in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As the biggest guy in the Hole in the Wall Gang, Logan challenges Butch to a duel to decide who will lead the gang. He crouches, Bowie knife in hand, ready to gut Butch like a fish, but Paul Newman, playing Butch, asks, “Oh no, not yet, not until we get the rules straightened out!”

“Rules!” Logan barks back at him. “In a knife fight? No rules!”

“Okay, no rules!” Butch answers, and delivers a nut shot so brutal it makes me wince just to recall it. It may seem pretty infantile to revere an actor based on a scene like that, but once you’ve watched it you’d have to admit it takes a special kind of concentration for any actor to stay in character when he knows he’s going to get the pointy end of Paul Newman’s cowboy boot right in the crotch.

As for the rest of the regulars on The Addams Family: I don’t know who Jackie Coogan is, but he played Fester with a kind of glee that bordered on mania, nicely complimenting Astin’s cheerfully crazed Gomez, and Carolyn Jones’s subdued portrayal of Morticia was a perfect foil. Jones and Adams must’ve made some kind of television history as probably the only married couple during the era of Ward and June Cleaver to make goo-goo eyes and chase each other to the bedroom in almost every episode.

I coyly invite you to take a look at a few new web pages I’ve added to O-Broze.net, Meandering in Madison, an aimless review of things to see on the isthmus. I’ve been collecting these snapshots and trivia for a couple years now, and sometimes when I trot out one of these stories the person I’m telling it to says, “You should write that down.” So here it is.

I’d hoped to post these pages on the interwebs by the first of the year but held back because, believe it or not, a good title escaped me. Not only escaped, but blended into the crowd and was never to be found again, so I had to synthesize a new one. Does “Meandering in Madison” work for you? It came in a flash of inspiration to me this afternoon, so if it doesn’t work, don’t tell me. I don’t like to upset the muse. It makes her sassy.

Wisconsin Winter Syndrome: Easily recognized when people walk the streets in their shirt sleeves while the temperature climbs just above thirty-three degrees for the first time in weeks. Technically it’s no longer freezing outside so people think it’s not crazy, but it’s dangerously close to the side effect of hypothermia known as “paradoxical undressing” that makes people feel so unbearably hot even as they’re freezing to death that they tear off all their clothes, sometimes even as they’re laying in a snow bank.

So many people in downtown Madison fell victim to Wisconsin Winter Syndrome today, peeling off their coats and jackets as they walked in the sunshine, that I felt oddly overdressed wearing my sweater and overcoat, but I rarely fall victim to the Syndrome until the temps climb well above forty degrees. It was damned close today, but not close enough. The coat stayed on.

I’m looking forward to Spring as much as the next guy, but I’m too much of a beanpole to take up with that nonsense. What little insulation I’ve got comes entirely from my wardrobe. I did go out for a long walk today, but the only article of winter clothing I did without were my earmuffs, and I eventually regretted not putting them on.

It was a gorgeous day today, I had to admit. Though the sunshine wasn’t what I would call all that warm, it was bright and the sky was a deep, clear blue. I strolled to the end of Carroll Street to overlook Lake Mendota, still an unbroken sheet of white, then worked my way toward the campus, staying as close to the lake shore as I could. It’d be nice to be able to stroll along the lake but Doty platted the city to make a profit, not establish a park, so there are few places where you can even get to the shoreline without tramping through somebody’s back yard, and very few lakeshore residents take kindly to that.

The closer I got to campus, the more people I saw not wearing clothes. Tim’s close to the same age as most of these students and in fact goes almost everywhere now wearing only a t-shirt and flip-flops. You should see the reactions he gets from real, normal people. Every place we stopped to look at cars, for instance, the first thing the sales person said to him was, “You’re not wearing a coat?” One of them actually accosted me! “How can you let him go out without his coat?”

“He’s seventeen,” I pointed out. “You think he listens to a word I say?” It’s a brilliant tactic to throw them off their game. I wish I could say I’d thought of it. Tim hasn’t worn gym shorts on trips outside the house yet, but it can’t be far off as we’re supposed to get a forty-degree heat wave coming our way as the week rolls along.

Around the campus the guys were all similary togged out and the gals were wearing leggings and long t-shirts, but I didn’t see anyone wearing sandals yet. Not even homeless people, the people who are used to being outdoors all the damned time, not even they are taking their coats off yet, but the students are bustling down the street wearing what amounts to pajamas.

Today left me tired as a one-legged man in a kiester-kicking contest. (Think about it. Now stop.) It’s quarterly direct-mail promotion time (not my idea, so don’t get testy with me, young man!) which means a lot more apps are coming to my desk by return post, and I have to mail every single one of them right back to the applicants because there was nobody to check them to make sure they were complete, or it seems that way, sometimes.

Today I got pretty lucky and had to send only two of them back with a nice letter and a postage-paid envelope. That left about forty-two dozen applications on my desk to focus my feeble mental skills on, and it’s not like I didn’t already have a lot on my mind, but I’ll get to that tomorrow. I managed to bang them out by eleven o’clock, just in time to go run a few errands in other departments around the building and still get my lovely stroll around town in the heat wave.

Coming back from walkies, though, there was another pile of applications six feet deep on my desk! I didn’t know there were this many people in Madison who didn’t have credit cards! And nearly all the damned things were filled out correctly again. Yeesh. So I bent to work and had them done by three, leaving me two hours for a couple more runs to other departments and time left over to revise a how-to handbook I’m working on for my supervisor to use to train people at this job of mine, should I get hit by a meteor as I wait for My Darling B to pick me up after work.

I have to admit, it was nice to get home before the sun set tonight, but that’s not to say I like daylight savings time, which sucks hairy jackel toes. Jackle? Heckle and Jeckle. All their toes. I’m just saying.

[Okay, I had a brain cramp. It’s jackal.]

Breakfast this morning was a banana. I’m normally a toast-eating kind of guy but we were fresh out of butter and I can’t eat dry toast. I’ve tried before in similarly desperate straits but it’s just no good, so I grabbed a banana off the bunch in the basket on top of the fridge and tried to make do with that. I thought I’d be fine until lunch but it wasn’t enough.

So on the way into town I made a detour into the parking lot of Emian’s bakery and got myself a Cinnamon Crunch Muffin. I shouldn’t have eaten the whole thing because it was only a little smaller than Mount Saint Helens, but it was sooooo cinnamony good. And it had chocolate chips. How can I be expected to stop once I’ve gotten a taste of that? The upside of breakfasting on a muffin large enough to feed the Chinese army is that I didn’t have to eat lunch. Around noon time I finished off the mixed nuts at the bottom of the can in my desk drawer and I was good to go until supper time.

Best work-related story of the day: I had to run up to accounting to get somebody to help me pay a bill on a business card. I knew they did that up there, but I didn’t know exactly who did it. The department was literally right over my head, hardly far enough away to qualify as a quick stretch of the legs. I ran up the stairs and stuck my head in the front door.

Ingrid looked up from her computer monitor with a chilling expression. “I’m not here.”

“Oh?” I asked.

“I’m at school,” she elaborated. “I left ten minutes ago.”

“Well, is anybody here who can help me pay the bill on a business card?” I asked.

She mouse-clicked some icons on her computer screen. “I’ll get you the routing number and account.”

I gave her my best puzzled expression. “I thought you weren’t here.”

“I’m not,” she said, and she rattled off the routing number.

I copied it on the statement I was carrying. “When you get back, I’ll thank you.”

As I was on the way out, somebody from the IT department came in, saw Ingrid and said, “Aha!”

“I’m. Not. Here.” she told him.

That was a better work-related story than the one that follows, but only because the first was short, sweet and ha-ha funny, and the second was pretty drawn out and full of mixed feelings. Still pretty good from my point of view, though.

“I think I’m going to take that job offer after all,” I had to tell Penny, my supervisor, this morning. She was not nearly as bummed that I was going to be leaving as I thought she would be. I was sort of hoping she’d burst into tears, clutch at my ankle and beg me to stay. On the contrary, she congratulated me and wished me well. So much for being indispensible.

I’ll back up a little. Mike called me up Friday afternoon and said my first boss, Jim, recommended me for an opening in Mike’s department. He e-mailed me a copy of the job description, asked me to take a look at it and call him if I had any questions.

Huh. After I took a good look at the job requirements I had about a million questions, starting with the most obvious one: He wanted me for this? I had a pretty good idea what most of the duties were about, because sometimes I overhear things as I’m walking past various offices in the building. There were quite a few items in the job description, however, that I could only guess at. The learning curve would be enormous, Mount Everest-sized, to the moooon, Alice! Bless Jim for recommending me, but how did he think I was the guy for this job?

My first impulse, I’ll be honest, was to say no, thanks. I’d become very comfortable where I was. I wasn’t looking for a change. I figured it’d be poor form to turn down an offer without looking into it, though, so I called a few people who might know more about it. I even called the guy I knew who used to work in that job, but he was gone for the day. And I e-mailed someone I knew in the HR department to ask about the pay raise, thinking it might be nice to have a few more bucks at the end of the month, and that’s when I got my next shocker: It wasn’t an hourly position, it was salaried! And the pay raise made my eyes spin like roulette wheels. It was such a perfect simile I could even hear the tinkity-tink-tink of the little ball bouncing over the numbers.

All weekend long I tried to think it over, but there were too many unknowns. I had a very generous offer for a job I knew almost nothing about. I didn’t know the department head very well, or the department, either. On the other hand, I already had a job that I liked a lot, working with people I liked in a department I liked, at an hourly wage that wasn’t too bad. On the other hand, there was that salary to think of, and a high school senior to help through tech school soon, and the price of gas at the pump was up twenty cents a gallon this morning, all of which made that salary look pretty darned good.

My head was still buzzing over it Monday morning so I could barely concentrate on my job. I called a couple more people to gather as much information as I could, but finally I had to call Mike. “You got a minute to talk?” I asked him.

“You want to come down to my office?” he asked.

“Yeah, that would be great.”

“Why don’t you come down right now?” he suggested, so I headed straight down there.

“Thanks for seeing me,” I said, taking a seat across the desk from him, “and thanks for considering me for this.” I put the job description on the desk between us. “I have to be frank with you, though: I don’t know what half that stuff means.”

Heck of a way to begin a job interview, eh? Way to play the cards close to the vest, Dave-O! But even though Jim recommended me, and by inference I had to believe he thought I could do the job, I felt I had to make sure Mike didn’t harbor any unrealistic expectations. I admit it was an odd tack, but I wanted it out there.

It wasn’t necessary, though. He already knew what I didn’t know. “What I need is somebody with experience supervising entry-level people,” he said, referring to my illustrious military service introducing airmen on their first tour of duty in Japan to our Great Way Of Life. (It’s the old USAF motto, before they changed it to “We Bomb Stuff.”)

Mike wanted me to get on the supervisory hamster wheel all over again. Now there’s something I hadn’t pictured myself reconsidering after retirement from the military. Then again, I hadn’t pictured myself working in a bank, either. All my diplomas, degrees and certificates were awarded for my proficiency in the liberal arts. I never had a class in accounting. I never took statistics. I got C’s and D’s in every math class I ever had to attend. And yet being a supervisor in the military landed me a pretty darned good job in a bank. Go figure.

After one more night to think it over I had to admit to myself that if I passed it up I’d kick myself over it later, really hard, probably over and over. That’s how I found myself trying to corner Penny in her office this morning, which is almost as easy as trying to catch a bullet between your teeth, to tell her I was going to take Mike up on his offer.

I gave myself the most vicious paper cut I’ve had ever. Nowhere in memory do I find any record of a mere paper product that has wounded me this deeply. Before this, I thought of paper cuts as no more than a nuisance, but this one cut so deep and drew so much blood that it was like being gored by angry, rampaging bulls.

In the interests of complete disclosure I should point out that, technically, it wasn’t a paper cut, it was a cardpaper cut, but with a freshly-cut, straight edge, cardpaper and its bulked-out cousin cardboard are both sharper than a newly-stropped straight razor. I was tucking papers into a manilla file folder when the corner of my ring finger ran no more than a half-inch along the edge of the opening and I instantly resembled Sissy Spacek in the prom scene from Carrie.

Perhaps I exaggerate a tad, but I had to finish stuffing file folders and if I didn’t do something to staunch the bleeding besides sucking on the tip of my finger, I was going to get a lot of dirty looks and worse when I passed the folders out to the employees at the training session I was hosting in the afternoon. I wrapped the wound up in a Band Aid so tightly that the end of my finger turned purple as the pouches under an insomiac’s eyes. That did the trick.

I carried out many, many vital functions today, but presenting the portion of the “product knowledge” class at the training center that has to do with the credit card program is actually something of a treat. I get to check out a company car, which is always parked on the sixth floor of the company parking ramp. How a corkscrew parking ramp has six floors is sort of a conundrum, don’t you think? If you straightened out the turns there would be just one long, twelve-foot-wide pavement, so maybe in the interests of splitting semantic hairs it ought to be called the sixth story. Or, to pick even smaller nits, the sixth helical iteration. I like that one.

The elevator up the parking ramp is being rehabbed, an apparently very complicated undertaking that lasts weeks and weeks and is the cause of some grumbling. You can tell which helical iteration people park their car on by the length and volume of their grumbling. Climbing up the stairs of the parking ramp doesn’t bother me as much as driving down. It’s very compact construction on a corner of a three-sided city block makes for some very tight turns, and after going up or down six helical iterations I’m left rather dizzy. I don’t know how normal that is, but I’ve never been much worried about being normal.

After reaching the exit I pause and count to thirty, usually more than enough time for my head to stop spinning, then turn left up Doty, headed for East Washington Avenue. The trip from capital square to the East Towne Mall can probably be made in no more than ten minutes if all the traffic lights cooperate and every moron with a driver’s license doesn’t try to cut in front of you. I don’t get many green lights, only about half. Tim seems to get them all. Some people have that lucky star, I guess. Amazingly, this must have been the first time I’ve gone all the way up East Wash without weaving through cone zones, crossing over the median into temporary two-way traffic on the inbound side, or stopping to wait for a flagman signalling road construction.

East Wash has been under construction since I moved here almost three years ago. Whole lanes were stripped of their asphalt, the roadbed was plowed up and re-leveled, new curb and gutter laid. For years it’s been less a roadway and more a torn-up track of riprap and clay, and as recently as last August it was still such a mess that when we tried to cross the road to turn in to Ella’s Deli we ended up in the lot of an abandoned used car dealership. So today’s trip across town was a traffic watershed for your friendly drivelling O-Man. Whoopee, huh?

Because I expected to drive through a lot of construction and get snarled in the resulting traffic tailbacks, I set out from the home office about forty minutes before I was scheduled to make my presentation, but because there was neither construction nor difficult traffic I arrived twenty-five minutes early. I bought along an issue of The Comics Journal for just such an eventuality, and sat reading an article on the conundrum edgy comic strips pose to newspapers unwilling to offend even one reader.

[I]n editing the comics page for the young, editors end by treating adult readers like children. If I were Joseph Pulitzer or William Randolph Hearst or Joe Patterson — back in the days when publishers gave marching orders and everyone, including readers, marched accordingly — I’d probably respond to the so-called concerned parents by saying something like this: “In today’s Name of Strip you found something that you were afraid your child might be affected by, and you objected to the strip for that reason. I urge you to regard this objectionable content as creating an occasion for you to teach your child something about the world he or she lives in and how you hope your child will conduct him/herself in it. If you don’t have the intellectual capacity for teaching your child, then you shouldn’t have had one, but since you have had at least one whose education you aren’t equipped to conduct, then their education is clearly our responsibility, and we’re doing our part by exposing them to humor based upon real life. If, on the other hand, you have the ability to teach your offspring but you don’t have the time to devote to it, why should we care about them? You clearly don’t. And if you don’t care about your children, why should we care about you? And if we don’t care about you, why would your opinion of our comics matter to us? Go away.”

Clearly this is a man who has an opinion about the role of the funnies, as well as a man after my own heart, bless him.

When finally it came my time to make my presentation, I found that I had neglected to stuff one of the necessary forms in the file folders, but other than that all went well. Today’s audience was a little lost in la-la land. I always end up scheduled in the last half-hour of a day spent listening to a parade of presenters flashing Power Point slides festooned with bulleted percentage rates; Ebeneezer Scrooge would have a hard time staying awake through hours of that, so when I get up front I try to use my most lively game show host voice to prod them toward attentiveness. Alas, it wasn’t enough this afternoon. I lost several of them to the Sandman, but rattling the fanfold application at them usually snapped their eyes open again.

Being the last presentation of the day, I try to keep it short and can usually cover everything in about twenty to thirty minutes. I’ve found the attendees appreciate that a lot. After answering a few questions I packed my bags, saddled up and headed back into town.

Tim picked me up after work today. My Darling B wasn’t feeling well and went home at noon to try to get some rest, with mixed success. She sent Tim back with the car to fetch me. The best part of that is, I don’t have to drive home. I get to sit on the passenger side and look out the window. After decades of driving with my eyes focused on the butt-end of the car in front of me, I can now see what dogs get out of hanging their heads out the window and simply watching the world go by.

Today was all about compliance, or half the day was, anyway. Everyone in the department had to attend a morning training seminar to refresh our memories of banking regulations and policies. It’s three hours or so of gazing at one Power Point presentation after another and hoping that at least maybe some of it takes root so I won’t have to fumble for my notebooks every time I want to recall established procedures for satisfying a balloon mortgage. (That almost sounded as though I knew what that meant, didn’t it?) They call this training “compliance” for short. Was there ever a more Orwellian name for a room full of people staring at a never-ending slide show of regulations? I don’t like to think about it too much or I get a seriously debilitating case of the creeps.

Best thing about compliance training? Free breakfast. Rolls, jelly doughnuts, muffins, bagels, some foul-smelling concoction called “breakfast pizza” (it looks every bit as awful in person as the mental picture forming before your mind’s eye right now) and all the fruit juice, coffee or soda pop you can drink. I don’t mean to make myself out to be above the rabble, but those who drink soda pop with breakfast ought to be rounded up and taken away, preferrably to a nice countryside retreat for a couple weeks where they can decompress and learn to eat real food again.

Weirdest thing about compliance training? It’s held in the biggest play room at the back of a Rocky Rococo’s pizza joint near the East Towne Mall. The bank has a contract with Rocky’s to host these all-day things and provide plenty of grub for us to eat and drink. If you’ve never been to a Rocky’s, it’s got all the cartoon ornamentation of a Chuck E. Cheese without the cartoon animals.

Kyle Cassidy spent two years photographing gun owners and recording their answers to the question, “Why do you own a gun?” to publish the coffee table book Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners In Their Homes. The result is a realistic cross-section of Americans, some of them clearly trying to look odd, others not trying but still looking a lot like their photo would one day appear on the front page of a newspaper under the headline SCHOOL SHOOTING KILLS EIGHT, WOUNDS SIX, one or two very oddly out of place in this book (the artist with pieces of a gun in a bucket; the former gun collector who made his antique pistols into a lamp).

My Darling B brought the book home from the library and we spent the evening after dinner counting the unusually high number of kilt-wearing second-amendment proponents. (I wonder how many of the other amendments they can recite from memory?) A drifter and a homeless kilt-wearing guy got into a street fight in Madison last summer; the guy in the kilt shot the drifter. I don’t know that it means anything, but the association seems strange.

Besides quoting the second amendment, an awful lot of gun owners also seem to think god wants them to have guns. Where does that idea come from? I’m not as familiar with scripture as many gun owners seem to be, but quite a lot of them are fiercely certain that god has conferred an ironclad right upon them to wield armaments large and small and I’m not at all certain they’re correct in their assumption. Maybe the right to self-defense is in there somewhere, expressed implicitly or blatantly, and I overlooked it, but my eyes wouldn’t have passed over If Thine Enemies Offend Thee, Smite Them Surely With Thine Heckler & Koch; Yea, Verily, Upon Thy Trigger Clench, And All Thy Ammunition Spray Upon Them; Thy Rod And Thy Gat, They Will Comfort Thee, Forever And Ever, Amen.

I’ve been reading Maus, A Survivor’s Tale in the mornings with my toast and coffee, a little dose of cartoons and Holocaust to start each day. I figured this would happen when I started reading the interviews in Art Spiegelman Conversations and I made a promise to myself not to. I dug the two-volume set out of a bookcase and set them aside to read later, much later, after I’d finished the books I’m already reading, but Monday morning both those books were in the bedroom and I didn’t want to wake up My Darling B by tiptoeing in there. My eyes rested on the cover of Maus as my daily two slices of bread were toasting and the java was filtering from the grounds into the carafe. I grabbed it and read the first five or so pages as I munched away, and have read another five or ten pages every morning since.

I’d remembered what a great book it was, but I forgot just how great. Even though they’re rendered as cute little mice, Spiegelman has transmuted the cutesy-pie Awwwww we all get for cartoon animals into real emotion for the plight of the Jews at the hands (paws?) of the cat-like Nazis. And the tooning is artistry; tiny as the panels are, there’s a wealth of detail packed into each one.

And the first volume of Elephantmen: Wounded Animals came in for me at the main library. I called up the library web page, I searched for “elephantmen,” I requested the first volume and a week later a book from the Monroe Public Library is waiting for me downtown. I still haven’t gotten used to that, but it’s pretty darned cool. Not as cool, though, as a public library system that has books featuring the classical paintings of Matisse and Gaugin virtually side-by-side with “graphic novels” of elephantmen.

The book was a bit of a letdown, I have to say. Some of the artwork is pure eye candy, especially the stories illustrated by the Mexican cartoonist Jose Ladronn and American cartoonist Justin Norman (professionally known as Moritat), but the stories behind the toons are pretty thin. Too bad. I was all set to eat this stuff up with a big soup ladle.

Why does everyone keep talking like it’s going to snow? It’s not going to snow any more! I have decreed it. We have done with snow. I can see most of our front lawn and a good part of the back yard, too. Everywhere the snow is melting and There Will Be No More Snow. Just don’t even mention it again. Snow. Done. Fini. Kaput.

My freaking printer doesn’t work. I printed an address label this morning but it looked a little sketchy, white lines through the solid black parts so I ran the head cleaner and the next time I tried to print — nothing. No sketchy print, no ghost print, no specks here and there. Nothing. White sheet of paper. Blank. The colors print fine but the black, nada.

Thinking maybe the cartridge was empty I took it to the work bench and refilled it, then brainwashed the chip in the cartridge into thinking that it was full (it really was full, but I don’t know how to say it another way), plugged it back into the printer and tried printing again. A sketchy, ghost-like page print came out. Progress! So I called up the utility, cleaned the heads and printed a test page.

Zip.

Man!

No matter how many times I cleaned the head, checked the print alignment and a bunch of other technical stuff that sounded good but didn’t mean a thing to me, nothing worked. I printed page after page from different utilities, web pages and et cetera. Got nothing but blank pages.

So I stepped away, put my hands on my knees, took a deep breath, and drop kicked the effing thing into next week.

Well, I wanted to.

Computers are pretty darned useful when then work. Or, as one of my customers asked me this morning, “What did we have to get mad at before we had computers?” I don’t know, fellah, I just don’t know.

I was supposed to work my first half-day in a new department today. Mornings, new department; afternoons, old department. That way we have a little overlap to maintain continuity, reduce wear and tear on the corporation as a whole, and save big money at Mendard’s. Don’t try to figure that out. I’m just babbling.

But my supervisor did tell me this morning was my first morning downstairs, so I knocked on Michael’s door and announced myself. He was looking a little pressed for time, though, and someting about the piles of folders on his desk told me he wasn’t going to get free any time soon. “Why don’t we start on Monday?” he suggested. That was probably better, I agreed, so I went back to my cubicle and did the same old thing I’ve been doing for months.

Which has seen a sharp uptick in activity lately and I’m not sure why, but it’s keeping me plenty busy so I’m not complaining.

Morning, shopping for veggies and a decent steak

Afternoon, shopping for cars

Evening, eating steak and drinking beer.

I ask you: What better combination?

The only one I can think of right off the top of my head is substituting “chasing lingerie models through the mattress section at American Home Furniture” for “shopping for cars.” That’s shooting straight from the hip, mind you. I’m sure I could think of an even better substitution if I put more deliberate thought into it.

Shopping for veggies and steak took only ten or fifteen minutes at the weekly farmer’s market. The steaks were a special treat for Tim, who has victoriously brought his precalculus grade up to an A-minus and is similarly pillaging other academic subjects as well. All he ever asks for when his mother wants input to the next week’s menus is steak, and this evening he got buffalo tenderloin, rare and juicy. The potatoes and salad he had to eat along with it were a small price to pay to get what he wanted.

But backing up just a tad, after lunch Tim asked if I was still willing to go with him to look at a few cars. Between you and me and the dog I’d rather have my teeth knocked out one at a time with a tack hammer, but neither do I want him consorting with used car salesmen on his own so I went along with him to several of the lots scattered across town.

Our first stop was supposed to be at Mad City Motors but I, acting as navigator, directed him down the wrong road and we ended up speeding west along the beltway, exactly the way we intended to go to the next dealer. We could have turned around at the next exit, miles and miles down the road, but that would have added at least thirty minutes to our day. “Screw it. Keep going,” I told Tim, and we went on to the next stop.

Which was Smart Motors, a used car lot filled with old Toyotas. We were after a 98 Accord that rattled on the test drive a lot more than either of us were comfortable with, but they also had a 97 Accord on the lot that sounded solid when we took it for a spin. As salesmen will always do, Jeff wanted me to sign papers right there and then but I made him back off by tucking his business card in my wallet and promising to call him later. I can’t believe that worked.

We’ve been to the second lot, A-Z Motors, several times already and test-driven many of their cars, but every one had a teensey little something I didn’t like about them, a rattle or shimmy or a chunk falling off. For all I know these may be harmless idiosyncrasies that develop in all old cars but they could also be the last warning before a strut shatters or a gasket blows. I’m only trying to avoid buying Tim a car and a bonus problem he’ll have to piss away a couple hundred dollars on as he’s trying to pay for school.

Our final stop was at Mad City Motors, the place we zipped past after my bad navigation sent us down the wrong turn. Their 95 Honda Civic was a very basic car, hardly a bell or whistle to be seen anywhere after the power windows, but the engine was a good puller and everything outside the cabin sounded as though it was still solidly attached to the frame. The doors fit tightly. The heater was stiflingly hot after the engine was running only a minute or two. Tim liked the way it handled, and he really liked the car’s compact size that allowed him to squeek the car into right traffic lanes and infinitessimal parking spaces. I liked that it came with a three-month warranty. I’ve never seen a used car offered by a dealer as other than as-is.

Best of all, the price was in our target range. We had hoped to buy a 95 – 98 Honda or Toyota for about four thou to five thou but had begun to get used to the idea that we would probably end up spending at least six. This little Honda, though, was forty-eight, and the salesman was agreeable to forty-seven. My Darling B wanted me to try to ratchet him down to at least forty-five, but I didn’t want to sit through thirty minutes of “I’ll go ask my manager” and said good enough right away, just to get the negotiations phase over with.

After a brief consultation with the Chief Financial Officer of O-Folk Corp we decided to call Steve (our salesman) back with an agreement in priciple to buy the Honda after our neighborhood mechanic checked it out. Tim’s on spring break all week and can start calling around eight o’clock Monday morning to find a garage that will give it a going-over Monday night after we come home from work. If all goes well, the car-shopping nightmare/honey dream (depending on whether it’s me or Tim) will be over Monday night before lights out.

Every single one of your friendly neighborhood O-Folk has gazed out the window several times today, as well as yesterday and the day before, and joyously crowed, “Look at how much of the yard you can see!” Today, though, was the first day we could see more of the yard than the snow that’s been covering it for months. There are still a few patches of snow here and there but none of them are very big, and so much of the ground is showing now that the snow isn’t going to last much longer.

And I found buds breaking out on the branches of the maple tree beside the deck. I know it’s only mid-March and last year we were still getting snow in April so I shouldn’t get my hopes up too far, but I am so ready for Spring that I can’t help but look for buds, listen to song birds and soak up all the other signs that we’re steadily making our way toward longer, warmer days.

My Darling B was so excited about the sunshine and warm temperatures that she put on her gardening shoes and tramped out to the back yard with her spade/fork (spork? I have no idea what half her gardening tools are called, and end up asking for “the claw” or “the hula-hoe,” prompting cross-eyed looks from the missus). She wanted to see if the ground was still frozen or had thawed enough to turn it over and get it ready for planting. To her giddy delight it was, and she spent the rest of the afternoon curled up on the sofa with her box of seeds and a sketch pad, plotting her garden on graph paper to see how she could fit all the veggies she wanted to grow into the enlarged plot. I doubled the size of both patches last fall with the help of a Honda roto-tiller; the effort didn’t quite kick my butt, but I felt bad enough to wish it had. Even so, she hasn’t been able to devise a plan that will include all the goodies she wanted to grow. I get the funny feeling the garden plot may get even bigger this fall.

Even though the temps were warm and the snow was rapidly disappearing on its own, I ended up shoveling! We had a waist-high heap of snow built up on our deck out back, the result of digging a path from the door to the composter after every heavy snowfall. By this afternoon it had melted to a lump no higher than my shins, but I was tired of looking at it, so I attacked it with a scoop shovel, hacking away everything but the hard-frozen inch-thick layer at the very bottom. One more day of sunshine like today’s and it’ll be nothing more than a Wicked Witch-like puddle by dinner time tomorrow.

The forecast is calling for snow and sleet, but I refuse to believe it’ll happen. Those goofballs have been wrong before and even if they get it right, I deny that it’ll stick. I firmly believe any snow that might possibly fall will melt immediately! What’s that ten-dollar word for the power of positive thinking? Oh, yeah! “Delusional.”

I’m happy to report that the only other productive thing I did today was wash and fold some laundry, and that only because I didn’t have a stitch of underwear or a single unmatched pair of socks in my clothes dresser. And I watched another episode of The Addams Family while I did it, so it wasn’t even like I had my heart in it.

What I did instead was play with my train set in the basement, which still isn’t up and running but is getting closer. I laid several more lengths of track bed today and set several turnouts in place, paving the way for some track to be laid. After that I have to wire it so the engines get some juice for their get up and go. I’m expecting to have it all in working order just about the time the sun explodes and the earth disappears into a pifft of hydrogen and carbon, ten billion years from now.

While I was watching Jindabyne this weekend I couldn’t help trying to figure out where I’d seen Gabriel Byrne before. It’s an automatic thing with me; my memory latches on to a face and digs around for anything to associate with it, usually something useless like a phrase or a smell, very rarely a name, which makes passing coworkers in the hallway a bit awkward. “Hi, Rotten Eggs!” is not the kind of greeting others take kindly to.

Actors are easy because the only thing I associate them with is in the films they’ve made, which usually comes back to me as I’m watching them work, but the last film I saw Byrne in never did come back to me until I googled his name this afternoon and came up with his role as one of Kevin Spacey’s gang in The Usual Suspects, a movie more than ten years old. No wonder it didn’t come back to me. He’s done a whole raft of other movies since then but I don’t believe I’ve seen even one of them.

Laura Linney played his wife in Jindabyne. It’s easy to come up with films she’s been in because she’s always so much fun to watch. Most recently we saw her in Breach playing a hard-boiled FBI agent. More often we see her in Love, Actually, one of our favorite films; that one gets played over and over when we’re folding laundry because it’s so easy to watch in parts.

The rest of the actors in Jindabyne were mostly Australian. I think I’ve seen John Howard before, probably from Japanese Story, but the others were new to me. The story’s been filmed before as Shortcut starring Fred Ward (Earl in Tremors) and Anne Archer (Jack Ryan’s wife from the Tom Clancy movies), but that movie focused on the two of them. Jindabyne casts a wider net, recollecting the reactions of an entire community after four men find the body of a brutally murdered aboriginal woman in a remote mountain river late on the first afternoon of their annual fishing trip. They trice her body in the branches of a fallen tree to keep her from floating away, then oddly spend the next day fishing, all four of them, happily catching trout and roasting them over a camp fire exactly as if they had never seen the dead body still floating a little way from their tents.

On the third morning they hike out. From the trail head they manage to call the police on their cell phones, lead them to the body, then drive home. They would like to imagine that could possibly be the end of their involvement with the law, the only time they’ll have to explain to anybody how they found the corpse and why they spent the day fishing afterward, but of course it doesn’t turn out that way. Their faces and names are splashed across all the local papers and television programs. People in town stare at them. Their lives come apart.

Jindabyne focuses on the deteriorating relationship between Stewart and Claire Kane, the couple played by Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney. Kane is portrayed as having a very casual attitude toward death. He’s the first one to wake and go fishing the morning after they find the body, and says later that cutting their fishing trip short wouldn’t have helped her any more. His wife is horrified by his nonchalance. Kane’s mother, a classically meddling mother-in-law who causes quite a bit of friction between Stewart and Claire, oddly says almost nothing about the way he handles it.

The other fishing buddies aren’t so sure how to handle things, although the youngest in the group is apparently happy to stand in the limelight no matter how it makes him look and talks to the press just minutes after the police chief throws the four of them out of his office in disgust. For some reason, he doesn’t get a fraction of the heat from the community the others get, even though it’s his photo that appears first in the papers, smiling and holding a prize trout.

The film meditates on death across many other levels besides the murder of the aboriginal woman. Nearly every one of the characters seems to have been touched by death in one way or another: Carl’s daughter died for reasons that were never made clear, and his wife Jude does maybe a little too much drinking to self-medicate in response. Their young adopted daughter, Caylin-Calandria, has developed a fixation on death that seems a little creepy because she tries to involve Tom, Stewart and Claire’s son.

The town of Jindabyne itself is a metaphor for death and rebirth, having been relocated to higher ground from the valley before it flooded behind the dam built across it. The electricity from the hydroelectric plant has something to do with motivating the town’s electrician to commit bizarre murders, but I didn’t get how, and the movie ends without anybody finding out what he’s been doing.

And I rented the concert video Stop Making Sense, supposed to be one of the greatest ever filmed. I thought it was so-so, even though I like the Talking Heads quite a lot and had fun hearing the old songs again and watching David Byrne jerk and shout as if he were speaking in tongues (coincidentally the name of a later Talking Heads album).

Boo sat on my lap this evening after dinner, an occurrence of nearly cosmic significance because she deigns to grace me with full-body physical contact no more than perhaps once a year. Seriously, it’s an event so rare that My Darling B ran for her camera to get a snapshot before Boo changed her mind, but I didn’t think that seemed likely. Once Boo gets an idea in that tiny little brain of hers she seems determined to go through with it.

I stretched out on the sofa, my legs crossed, my heels resting on the corner of the coffee table, watching Princess Mononoke with Tim as I enjoyed a cup of after-dinner java, when along came Boo, coyly making her way toward me along the edge of the cushions. She nonchalantly sniffed at my leg, then tested my lap with a forepaw before climbing up and tenderly prancing about to find the warmest, coziest stretch of lap, free from knobby knees. When she was satisfied that she was in exactly the right spot and she was curled up just so, she put her head down and had a little nap.

She snoozed for the better part of an hour, even while I shifted my butt from right cheek to left in an effort to get some circulation back and take the pressure off my knees, which had begun to petrify in the locked position. I think she would have stayed another hour at least if I hadn’t arbitrarily set eight o’clock as the time to clean up the dinner dishes. Her disappointment at being so rudely ejected from my lap was not comforted when I offered her the warm spot on the sofa, so I left a little kibble in her dish. That seemed to make it better.

Today was my first half-day on the job at my new position. It was only a half day because my supervisors, past and present, agreed to job-share me so I can learn the loan services trade the morning, then run upstairs to my old job to process credit card applications in the afternoon. What a couple of great guys, those supervisors, eh?

Like any introduction to a new job I spent the morning trying to soak up everything Michael showed me. It was like trying to mop up the kitchen floor with a hanky after teams of firemen broke through the back door and hosed the place down. There was not a lot of soaking up going on, is what I’m trying to say. For a while he only explained things to me, then after a while we opened up a couple windows on the computer work station and I started doing things. That helped. A huge helping of word salad doesn’t do anything for me, but if I can get my hands on the meat of the subject my sufficiency feels a bit more serensified.

We kept at that until noon. I was so damned hungry by then and I’d been half-daydreaming of a Potbelly’s Italian sandwich with everything (easy on the oil), so when Michael endeth the lesson I ran up to get my coat, then speedwalked down to the far end of State Street where the only downtown Potbelly’s stands just a block from campus, put in my order, paid the man and speedwalked all the way back. Took about thirty minutes. I was beat, but that was one satisfying hoagie.

The only hiccup of the day came when I returned to my upstairs cubicle and found that the IT department had already converted my computer account so I could access the files in the loan services department. Since very few people get to work in more than one department they assumed they could shut off my access to the consumer lending department’s computer files and I was a man without a country for an hour or two, unable to process the short stack of applications on my desk. I passed the time tidying my desk and adding up account balances while they figured out how to flip the switch that would let me see both sets of computer files so I could get to work.

To celebrate St. Pat’s, My Darling B cooked up a corned beef brisket in the crock pot for dinner. It wasn’t properly corned beef, since it was made from buffalo meat — B called it “corned buff,” as she was entitled to do, having dreamt up the recipe her darned self. The buff was deliciously tender, as was the cabbage. I washed mine down with a bottle of Irish Ale from Gray’s Brewery, and that’s about as close as I get to wearin’ the green for Saint Paddy’s.

Tim, who has never heard the saying “feed a cold, starve a fever,” nevertheless wolfed down five servings of corned buff, so much did he like it. He spent the weekend fighting off a variety of head cold that seems to have come all the way from the lowest ring of hell for the expressed purpose of taking up comfy-cozy residence in the deepest, most inaccessable regions of his sinuses, and not incidentally to also kick his butt several times around the block. I wasn’t sure he’d have an appetite at all, but he had enough for ten grinches, times two.

When he gets a cold like this he makes me wince every time he blows his nose, partly because I’ve been there before (not this season, thank dog) but mostly because you wouldn’t believe the terrible sounds he makes, like the combat boots of an entire regiment tramping though sucking wet mud. It’s awful. And with a head cold like the one he’s got he has to blow his nose pretty much non-stop until he’s over it. B bought him two boxes of Kleenex on Saturday (or was it Sunday?) and they’re gone already.

My Darling B suffered a somewhat milder case of the same bug last week that still kicked her solidly in the head. She was almost entirely over it this weekend and still she went to bed at nine o’clock tonight. Or maybe that’s just her way now.

The bug somehow skipped completely over me, unless the runny nose I’ve had for the past five or six days is another, even more watered-down version that barely makes me drowsy and doesn’t kick my butt at all, just makes me sniffle. So far, I’ve managed to cope with it. I never get the really kick-ass bugs anymore that force me to call in sick and stay in bed and sleep all day, which is just as well because nobody would be around to bring me hot drinks and stroke my forehead and say, “there, there,” which is the only thing that makes it worth staying home sick all day. Staying home sick by myself sucks. Better to go to work and sneeze all over the mail and make everyone else sick so at least I have someone to commisserate with.

Tim asked me and My Darling B to name our three favorite movies. We’re so cantankerously old we’ve seen hundreds of movies by now and had a very hard time picking out just three, so Tim trotted out his three most absolutest favorite movies of all time to get us started:

The Professional, about a Mafia hit man who rescues a prepubescent girl from the drug-fueled rage of a police detective gone off the tracks. More shooting and dead people than in the two World Wars combined. Bonus points: Natalie Portman tarts herself up like Marilyn Monroe and sings “Happy Birthday, Mister President” in a come-hither tone of voice that makes costar Jean Reno turn away and blush.

Gladiator, in which Rome’s greatest general is sold into slavery after a coup d’etat deposes Marcus Aurelius. No shooting, but dozens of gruesome beheadings, disembowelings and amputations as star Russel Crowe shows the other gladiators how, armed with only a short sword and a shield, it’s possible to defeat chariot-riding archers, giant armor-plated man-freaks swinging maces, and wild tigers springing from camoflagued trap doors. Totally credible historical fiction.

It’s A Wonderful Life. Yes, the Christmas story with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. Don’t ask me how a heartwarming story of redemption fits in with gunplay and gore because I can’t explain it. I’ll add that Tim finds both this movie and Gladiator to be “sentimental.” I leave it to you to figure it out.

Even after his frank and generous prompting, we were unable to satisfy his request by naming our most favorite movies. B gave it a good try by starting off with Casablanca, but that only made Tim roll his eyes. “I can’t believe you’re wasting a top-three favorite spot on that old thing,” he commented, then crossed his arms, took a deep breath and apologized: “Sorry. Go on.”

Well. You see how it is. I started off with Roman Holiday myself, for which Tim responded “Never heard of it” with a fuzzy expression.

“Gregory Peck. Audrey Hepburn,” I prompted him.

“Gregory Peck’s awesome,” he answered. “Still never heard of it.”

And so we stalled at this impasse. He wanted to know our favorite movies but our choices were so far from his sphere of normality that he couldn’t fathom the reasons for our choices, nor we his. Or they, mine, for that matter. I threw out 2001: A Space Odyssey as one of my favorites, a movie My Darling B has never seen from beginning to end; she always falls asleep at some point in the middle, usually about the time Heywood Floyd lands on the moon. Okay, it’s a very enigmatic film. Okay, there are only twenty lines of dialogue, most of them spoken by a computer in a tone of voice used by hypnotists trying to lull their subjects to sleep. I still like it. I suppose it’s the space ships.

And I still love Star Wars, the fun one with Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, Peter Cushing and Alec Guiness, before George Lucas made more money than Rockafeller off it and got carried away with the idea of building a franchise. Tim says the story’s lame and the special effects suck, entirely overlooking the idea that it’s meant to be enjoyed slumped in a stinky velour-upholstered theater seat over a bucket of slimy popcorn and a huge pail of soda pop. It’s hardly about special effects, although with all that shooting going on you’d think he’d overlook the cheesy effects.

And anyway, It’s A Wonderful Life has some of the cheesiest effects ever but he can apparently overlook those. That opening scene with the talking comets and nebulae? Talk about cheeseball! I love the movie, too, but man!

I know you’ve been holding your breath, so I won’t keep you waiting any longer: We didn’t buy the car Tim wanted. It seemed like such a sure thing that we had money set and were talking about bringing it home tonight, but our friendly neighborhood mechanic took it for a spin, crawled underneath it with his flashlight, then poked his head into the waiting room and asked us, “Can I show you a couple things that kind of scare me about this car?” A thing like that’ll pop your bubble in a heartbeat.

We took it back. “How’d it go?” Steve, the salesman, asked when we came through the door.

“Not so good,” I answered, and told him what the mechanic said. The hood, the bumper and a quarter panel had all been replaced and the metal around the radiator had obviously been wrenched and hammered straight after a fender bender. “I just don’t feel comfortable buying into that,” I told Steve, and waited for him to go all frosty on me the way countless other used car salesmen had done in the past, but he didn’t. He showed us two other cars on the lot. This was a man with a mission to sell us a used car.

He let us drive a pretty nice white Honda, too. We’re going to get it checked out on Thursday.

Fun With Language: In the news stories I’ve heard on the radio about the self-destruction of the investment bank Bear Sterns, the reporters keep saying the firm “lost billions of dollars,” then in the next breath explain that the problem was they never had the money to begin with. So how’s that losing money? Just wondering.

I started reading Einstein’s Dreams last week when I needed a book that would fit in my coat pocket. Sometimes I’m such a picky reader and other times my requirements are as arbitrary as “How big is the book? Can I carry it in my pocket?” I was reading John Keats last week only because the book was small enough to fit in my pants pocket without a single corner digging into my leg.

I found Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams in Paul’s used book store, remembered a good review I read in the paper, found it on Paperbackswap.com and had it in my hands the next week. It was an edition bound in an extra-small cover, about three-by-four, easy to carry around, and some time last week when I had to go out and knew I would be waiting I wanted something to read instead of sitting idle, so I grabbed the first small book I could lay my hands to.

It’s kind of a weird book. More than kind of. So far it’s all been musings about multiple universes where time is a circle, people repeating the same actions over and over again; or time is a tree, people’s lives branching off in different directions as a result of each choice they made; or time is acausal, people doing things without cause or effect so that nobody knows how any actions are related.

I used to just love stories about time paradoxes but eventually they drove me nuts. I thought this book would be more about Einstein and how he came to his theory, but so far it’s just flights of fancy. I’m only halfway through. Maybe it gets better.

Another fine day at the office has come to pass — excuse me, at the offices, because actually as well as technically I have two desks, two cubicles, and two jobs! Do you think they pay me twice as much? Well, it was a pretty sweet raise so I really can’t complain, but still. When I finally took lunch and had some time to myself it finally came to me that I’m working two jobs! And I asked for this! So I smacked myself in the forehead, twice. It seemed like the only reasonable way to react.

To recap: In the morning I go to my new job in my glass-walled cubicle for the first round of learning to do the simple daily stuff ... review the daily receipts, draw up the morning reports, make sure the boss’s toe pillows are well and truly fluffed. I don’t know what toe pillows are, I just made that up. Sounds decadent, though, doesn’t it?

The walls of my cubicle are transparent to allow coworkers to stop and press their noses flat against the glass as they marvel at my monkey-like attempts to walk and talk like one of them. Okay, they don’t really do that. They’re really very amazingly patient with me. It’s a forced simile, but it captures pretty accurately what I feel like as I try to soak up the million little details there are to lending.

I take notes in my own half-assed version of shorthand, catching perhaps a quarter to a third of everything they try to tell me. I’m hoping that, after the fourth or at most fifth time they have to repeat it for me I’ll finally have all the pieces, and all I’ll have to do then to make my training complete is figure out how they all fit together. If you’re looking for me I’ll be in the cubicle with the cut-up scraps of steno paper taped all over the walls.

In the afternoon I return to my more conventionally carpet-covered, steel-walled cubicle where I can shut the door and try to cram into four hours what I had sort of gotten used to doing in eight. They told me when I took this job — these jobs — it would be a challenge, but I had no freaking idea how much of a challenge they were talking about.

Even so, it was surprisingly simple to get a whole day’s applications processed in an afternoon, but I think it’s only because I’ve been doing it for two years, and that only made it simple, not easy. I think I could do it with the lights off, too, but that wouldn’t make it easier, either.

Well, there you go, my hump day summed up in six paragraphs. Shake it up like a snow globe and it’ll all come swirling down in a blizzard of paperwork again tomorrow.

Speaking of snow, remember when I decreed it would not snow, even though the weather forecasters were telling us again and again that it would? I hope you noticed we ended up with no snow! My awesomely irresistable willpower vaporized the coming storm across the vast distances until the precipitation that eventually fell on us was nothing but drizzle and a patchy fog that hung over our fair city all afternoon. Better than snow. The power of delusional thinking still reigns victorious!

But I fear the next wave of heavy weather will prove too much for even my much-vaunted psi-powers. I can easily vaporize flurries of up to an inch, given at least twenty-four hours’ notice, but it’s too much to ask my muscle-bound forebrain to tussle with the five to six inches forecasted for tomorrow night, following so closely on the heels of my last mental exertion. I may have to let this one get through. That snow’s not going to stick, though. I can guarantee that.

You should have been here last night when Tim finished watching Citizen Kane — I’ve seen him get stomping mad before over other things, but this is the first time he’s stalked away from a movie kicking and cussing. “I can’t believe they ruined such a good movie with such a bullshit ending!” he fumed at us afterward.

He really did believe the movie was great and went on for quite a while about everything he liked, which was nearly the entire movie, and especially the character of Charlie Kane. Only the ending had him in a lather. “I’m just going to pretend the movie ended with what the reporter said, and try to forget that last thirty seconds ever happened.”

Arthur C. Clarke has died. What a colossal bummer.

I wasn’t the kind of Clarke fan who obsessively collected his books, the way I did Heinlein’s, in the years when I read virtually nothing but science fiction, but I liked Clarke’s style. He was the very best of the technical science fiction writers, no question, and that kind of attention to the subject matter was at the heart of the “golden age” of sci-fi. I can’t remember the last Clarke novel I read; I think it must have been one of the Rama books — the first one was the best, like the first 2001 movie was golden. Now that I’ve got it stuck in my head, I’ll have to rent 2001: A Space Odyssey and watch it again, and probably have to read Rendezvous With Rama once more, too.

It’s Thursday. Guess what we forgot to do today.

If you said “take out the trash” you may advance to Park Place. Don’t forget to collect $200.00 if you pass “Go.”

Isn’t it stupendously amazing that three grown people can forget something so simple? It’s like forgetting to walk to the toilet before relieving yourself, for pete’s sake! (Note to the other O-Folk: I don’t want to know if you’ve done that.)

On the up side, we may have have finally found a used car worth buying for Tim, a white Honda automatic, from a dealer not far from here. Tim took it to our neighborhood mechanic, who once again looked it over at no charge (he’s getting our business form this day forward), and it checked out fine. When Tim called me to tell me he tried to be very cool, but I could tell he was obviously jazzed out of his mind. I got the mental picture of one of those super-hyper dogs, like a lab or a husky, going totally bonkers over a puppy biscuit, although Tim wouldn’t have been jumping all over the place, yapping like a maniac. Okay, yeah, he probably was.

The only thing we had to work on was making an offer. Tim wanted to buy it as soon as possible; he even wanted to head straight over there after he picked us up from work, as if buying a car were an in-and-out transaction. (Oh, grasshopper, you have so much to learn yet, and so many hours to sit and fume waiting at the desks of used car salesmen!) Walking into the dealership and dropping stacks of C-notes on the desk until the salesman was happy would not have seemed unreasonable to him. “Oh, you need more? How many more? They’re wrapped up a thousand to a packet. Two more packets? I’ve only got one ... can you lend me a thousand bucks more, Pop?” That’s Tim’s idea of dickering.

My Darling B, on the other hand, lives to dicker. “You know better than to give them the asking price,” she said in a shame-on-you tone of voice. I was caught in the middle. I know that it’s stupid to give them what they want, but of all the ways my time is wasted, I loathe dickering with used car salesman so intensely that I vibrate with rage as he’s playing that “I’ll have to talk to my manager” game. It makes me want to turn green, grow fifty feet tall and pound every car on the lot into little pieces, and I’ll gleefully pay several hundred dollars extra for the privilege of not doing it.

Not B. After Tim picked us up and we went home, she sat Tim down and made him set a price. Then she called Steve, our salesman, and began to weave her magical spell. Steve tried to tell her that the asking price was fifty-three and some change, three-hundred more than he quoted us, but that turned out to be because he wanted to charge us four hundred to fix some rust. Since he was high-balling us, B aimed for his knees and offered him forty-four. “I don’t mean to insult you,” she apologized. “Maybe we should just keep on looking.” He said he’d have to talk it over with his manager. “That’s okay, take your time,” she answered. “I’ll be here all night.”

He called back about fifteen minutes later, said he could go forty-five but that was his absolute rock-bottom price. “Well, I really should call Tim at work and ask him if he’ll take that, but you know what? I think it’s a good price and I’ll eat the difference if he doesn’t like it.”

Is my wife awesome or what?

The more I think about the Second Amendment, the more I feel bizarrely anti-constitutional, and I’ll tell you why — well, of course I’ll tell you why, that’s the whole point of blathering like this, isn’t it?

First off, and most significantly if you ask me, nobody can agree on what the second amendment means. You’ve got your main clause, your dependent clause, your historical context versus your contemporary context, the meaning of the word “arms” — we’ve had over two-hundred years to parse this one sentence, and the further down the road we get, the foggier the meaning of the amendment becomes.

I’m getting the idea it’s not doable. The ultimate test would be to have my sixth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Zuege, do it. We dug up some insanely complicated grammar to put on her chalk board in an effort to “stump the chump,” but she’d parse anything we could throw at her and do it with a smirk on her face. If only we’d thought of chalking the second amendment on the board before class, we might have had her in a corner. Mrs. Zuege is unfortunately no longer available so the second amendment will have to remain lexically inscrutable.

Here’s my take on the bizarre phrasing of what ought to be a simple statement: I’m thinking it’s probably the result of a transcription error. That’s my best guess after hearing dozens of people attempt to make sense of such a tortured phrase — essentially, to translate English into English, for crying out loud. A transcription error is the only explanation that makes sense to me at this point. The guy who copied it from the draft notes to the final parchment just dropped a word or two. Why not? It happens.

Not that an explanation like this helps make sense of the second amendment. We might never find out what the missing word or words were, but even if we did find them on a preserved, authentic first draft, it’d literally take a miracle to get congress to ratify a clear and concise restatement, so if an honest-to-goodness missing word or two, forget about restoring them.

But what if it’s not a transcription error? What if all the words are there, but they’ve been comma-spliced to death? To find out, I asked the one person I know who’s smartest about comma usage in the whole wide world, My Darling B. You may never have heard that she’s the final word on commas and their use, but believe me, there are few grammarians on the planet who understand commas the way she does. If she could get paid for what she knows about commas the way Brett Favre gets paid for what he knows about football, Our Humble O-Bode would be a penthouse on a downtown high-rise. Actually, if she had Favre’s money she’d be puttering away her afternoons in the garlic patch of an organic farm down below Madison or Janesville, but I’ve gotten off-track again.

“Just what do all these commas mean?” I asked her, and after a few minutes mulling over the comma placement of the second amendment:

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

... she concluded that it was a bunch of babble and didn’t mean anything. Told ya.

Kidding. She says the gun nuts are right: the second amendment says that we sould all be allowed to arm ourselves. The main clause (paraphrased) is the last part, “the right to have and use guns shouldn’t be messed with,” and the dependent clause, “a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state,” explains why the main clause is necessary — we ought to arm ourselves to keep the nation free.

Ironically, our right to arm ourselves has been abridged up the yin-yang. I’m not talking about the assault rifle ban, or the laws against concealed carry, I’m talking about our right to keep and bear rocket launchers! Flame throwers! Land mines! If we can’t have these, then the security of a free state is pretty much moot, isn’t it? I mean, movies like Red Dawn notwithstanding, no scrappy, rag-tag band of resistance fighters armed with shotguns or a deer rifles will be able to hold off the mechanized army of a tyrannical government, will they?

More importantly, B pointed out that the dependent clause of the second amendment sets up the main clause — the right of the people to keep and bear arms is guaranteed only if a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. They didn’t have a standing army back then. We have a massive and well-supplied professional army now. A militia isn’t really necessary now. Continuing to enforce the second amendment makes about as much sense as making you put up with a bunch of swearing soldiers in your guest room and waving the third amendment in your face when you complain.

Oh my god I really did write “Froiday” when I started today’s drivel! That is so whacky I’m going to leave it!

On the first day of spring, we got snow. Well, what’s so weird about that? There are lots of ways to say “Welcome to Wisconsin,” but that has to be the most poignent.

I became a member in good standing of the Winter Whiners when I looked out the window this morning and saw our yard cloaked all in white where just the night before it had been bare of snow and the sprigs of grass and buds of leaves were poised, ready to break out in a verdant orgy of Spring. I’ve had enough winter. I like it, and I like snow, but it’s enough already.

I need splattering mud and bone-chilling rain. I need to carry an umbrella to work every day for weeks, and that wet sheep stink to radiate from my overcoat when I come into the warm office out of a dank drizzle. It’s so rank it makes the decorative plants on people’s desks wither as I walk past. I need that.

I need to ride my bike to work in the cold morning air. Not the freezing cold morning air, the kind the seriously deranged bikers have been biking through all winter. That’s just nuts. I can handle morning air that’s just cold enough to make me wear gloves and a neck gaiter. When I get ice in my beard, though, that’s crossed the line into too cold.

I need to see green things sprout and grow. I’m ready for spring.

Did you hear the news that maybe the globe isn’t warming all that much after all? I caught the first half of a squib on NPR’s All Things Considered news show a day or two ago. From what little I heard, I gathered that robot submarines have been roaming the seas for years and have returned data that don’t show an appreciable increase in water temperatures. And I thought: Robot submarines? That is SO freaking coooool!

Boy, was I disappointed when I looked into it. Far from being a fleet of malevolent hunter-killer automatons that send pirate ships into the arms of Davy Jones with a flash of high-explosive torpedo fire, and oh by the way here’s that water temperature data you asked for, it turns out they’re just floats! Friggin’ buoys about as cool-looking as highway construction cones with CB radio antennas poking out the tops of their little tin funnel heads. Sure, they can dive a thousand feet, the better to carry out their precious scientific observations, but where’s the action? Try to poke a hole in the bottom of a pirate boat with that aerial and it’s good-bye, robot sub! Well, you can have your science or you can have robotic gun battles, but you can’t have both, apparently.

As it turns out, the governments of the world have invested an insane amount of money and manpower seeding the world’s oceans with sensor-crammed buoys, deep-water sleds and weather ships, all linked by orbiting communications satellites, and I have to wonder: Why? So we’ll have this mind-bogglingly detailed record of the planet overheating? (Or maybe not, they’re not sure.) It’s not like anybody’s done anything practical with the information yet. Al Gore got a book deal, a movie and a trophy, big whoop.

Tonight was huevos night. Always trying new ways to prepare food, My Darling B made them tonight in what she called the traditional fashion by poaching the eggs in a simmering pan of salsa. I thought it was pretty darned good, but she preferred the way she did it before, by frying the eggs and serving them on hot tortillas, then adding salsa on top.

Tim was home tonight. He’s normally at work on Friday nights, the reason it’s become the one night of the week that B can try preparing food that’s too weird-looking to put in front of him. Huevos rancheros very definitely fits that description.

First of all, the eggs, salsa, beans and tortillas are not only touching one another, they’re all mixed up. He’s positively neurotic about separating his foods. If at all possible, he’ll eat them one at a time, so if we’re having steak and potatoes, for instance, he’ll eat the steak before he even puts the potatoes on his plate.

Second of all, on his planet some foods just don’t go with other foods. He’ll eat salsa, for instance, but only with nachos. Not on tortillas. Not in burritos. It’s as good as a physical law with him.

And then there’s something to do with texture. I can sort of understand that. I could never eat bugs, not even on a dare, because I don’t think I’d ever extinguish the memory of all those scratchy little stick legs in my mouth, and I just couldn’t live with that. There are lots of really normal foods, though, that Tim categorically won’t eat because of the texture. He’ll eat only Romane lettuce, for instance, because every other green leafy veg doesn’t feel right. It’s all leaves, but he says there’s a difference. Go figure.

The portions B served were so big I should have saved half my huevos for lunch tomorrow but I’d been hungry since about three o’clock and we didn’t eat until after seven. I ate half, then sat looking at the other half a good two or three minutes, sipping coffee, before I said Screw it! and ate the other half, too. It really filled my belly up, that and the cups and cups of coffee I brewed fresh while B was preparing the huevos. I’ll probably have lurid dreams all night long.

This is the day that we promised to go buy a car for Tim. He was out of bed at seven o’clock this morning to shower, the first of his daily troika of half-hour cleansing sessions, no doubt to be ready well in advance of nine o’clock when the dealership would be open and he’d be there to accept the key.

I asked My Darling B about the possibility that we might go out to have a leisurely breakfast at Lazy Jane’s first, though, just to mess with him. I’ve got to admit the temptation to string him along for as long as I possibly could, and it would be a long time, was nearly irresistable, but in the end I couldn’t do it. Just about the first thing he did after putting some clothes on was shovel the driveway, probably in anticipation of parking his first car there but not incidentally to suck up some brownie points, too. Then he borrowed the O-Mobile to make a quick trip to the grocer’s and bring back his weekly box of Cap’n Crunch cereal. He offered me a bowl. As much as I’d like to, I can’t mess with the brains of a guy who’s willing to share his Cap’n Crunch with me.

We didn’t get there right at the stroke of nine. Instead, I believe it was more like nine-thirty, and Steve, our salesman, was already getting the car ready for us. Good man. Steve made a copy of Tim’s drivers license and mine, too, because both our names were going to be on the title, and made a few notes on a worksheet to give to the finance guy who was making out the bill of sale, the motor vehicle application and the warranty. “Did you tell him you wanted to be first on the title?” B asked Tim.

“Yeah, I told him,” Tim answered.

“You might want to make sure he got it right,” she insisted. He rolled his eyes at her but went to ask Steve anyway. When your mother works at the DMV you don’t argue with her about stuff like car titles.

“He’s putting me first on the title,” Tim confirmed as he came back. Still, it was no surprise at all to me that, when we sat down to sign papers, the motor vehicle application showed Yours Truly first, then Tim. I knew there had to be a glitch, no matter how small, to make the occassion memorable.

I pointed it out to Matt, the finance guy, who apologized and quickly swapped our names around but who was obviously in a big hurry to get the whole thing over with. “I’m not even supposed to be here today,” he muttered at one point. And when the bill of sale and motor vehicle application came out of the printer this time Tim and I were in the right order, but we both had the same birthday, Tim’s. Matt drew a line through mine and penned in the correct date.

Once the paperwork was in order, the rest of the transaction went quickly and we were on the road headed home in short order. We had just about reached the turnoff to Bridge Street when B said the amount we paid was too much. “We paid too much?” I echoed.

“It shouldn’t have added up to more than five thousand,” she said, clearly confused. When we got home I asked Tim for the paperwork. When Matt reprinted the bill of sale, he transposed two numbers so the sale price, $4,570, became $4,750, almost two-hundred dollars more, and somehow all three of us had been in such a hurry to get the heck out of Dodge that we missed it! “We’ve got to go back,” I said, so Tim jumped into his car and we followed.

Just before I was about to make the turnoff onto Rimrock Road from the Beltline, B asked, “You’ve got the paperwork, right?” Meaning the warranty and the motor vehicle application and, rather significantly, the bill of sale with the sales price we were about to dispute with Steve.

I shot her a look out of the corner of my eye. “You took it into the house with you when you went to get your notes.”

“And then I gave it back to you, right?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have it.”

“You must’ve passed it to Tim, then.”

By this time we were rolling up to the stoplight at Rimrock. “I didn’t give it to Tim and I don’t have it,” I said. “You must have it in your purse with the rest of the papers you brought out.”

“I only have my notes,” she said.

“Then the paperwork must be back at home.”

“No, Tim must have it.”

“Did you give it to him?” I asked, even though I was pretty darned sure that she got straight into the car without handing anything to Tim, but what the heck, it never hurts to ask.

“No, you must have.”

“I didn’t give it to Tim and I don’t have it ...”

... and so on. When we got to the dealership and I parked behind Tim, B ran up to ask him if he had the paperwork and of course he didn’t. I think we both already knew that but it was one of those straws you grab at when you’re slipping over the cliff’s edge even though you know it’s never going to keep you from falling, falling, falling. She came back to the car where I was waiting. I could see she was laughing.

“Well, we couldn’t do this without something getting screwed up, right?”

And we headed back home for the second time. She quickly ducked into the house and came out with the paperwork that she left on the table when she went in to get her notes the first time and we headed back to the dealership to talk to Steve, not knowing how to even start the conversation that would clear this up. I mean, we signed the bill of sale, we drove away with the car, it was all said and done. He probably didn’t have to give up anything if he just played stupid, at which point I suppose we could have threatened to report him to the Better Business Bureau, or called him a stinking rotten scoundrel, or stomped out the front door, or a combination of all three. Big whoop.

But to his credit he allowed right away there’d been a mistake, said he remembered the price we agreed to, and took us straight to his office where he gave us our check, drew up a new bill of sale and set everything straight. You don’t meet upright guys like that in every used car lot, or any used car lot, for that matter.

One of the things Tim had to have in his car was a CD player. I know just what he means. I can’t go anywhere without Doctor Dre busting rhymes at full volume from my car’s stereo speakers. “I feel sort of dirty driving a car without one,” he said after the drive back from the dealer.

And that’s why he ordered an in-dash CD player as soon as he knew which car he was going to buy, or thought he did. Unfortunately that deal fell through when the mechanic didn’t like the first Honda Civic we were looking at. “Maybe you should wait to order a car stereo until we actually pay for a car and bring it home,” I suggested.

Luckily for him the car we bought this morning was a Honda Civic, too, and he hadn’t sent the CD player back yet, so when we finally got all the paperwork straightened out (fingers crossed, touch wood) and brought the car home, the first thing he wanted to do was install his music box.

It came with three pages of instructions that made installation look as simple as removing the old radio and plugging in the new one, hardy har-har. Like I believed that fairy tale. Yanking out the old radio in ten minutes, sure. As a matter of fact, any moron with a screwdriver and a wire cutter can do it in sixty seconds. Just ask people who’ve parked their cars on a bad street in Milwaukee.

Tim’s new CD player came with a pigtail of rainbow-colored wires dangling from its ass-end and every wire ended in bare metal, a do-it-yourself job that required a soldering iron, lots of patience and considerably more than ten minutes. If you think you can just plug those in, I want a tall glass of whatever you’re drinking, straight up.

The old radio truly was a factory-installed plug-in job. All we had to do was unscrew it, slide it out and yank the plug from the outlet in back. Then I had to stare at the plug dangling from the gaping hole and ponder how we could ever hope to figure out where all those wires went. Ponder, ponder, ponder. My best idea was to look for a Chilton’s manual to see if there was a wiring diagram in it, maybe. Pretty lame, I know, but it’d been a while since I’d had to do anything like this.

Then my eye wandered over the carcass of the old radio lying on the floor of the car and happened to stop on a sticker that conveniently labeled what each pin in the plug was for ... a pair of pins for the front left speaker, another pair of pins for the front right speaker, a pin for the ground wire, and so on ... exactly what we needed to connect the right wires together and make the music play. Wowzers.

Only trouble now was, I didn’t have any way to connect the wires dangling from the new radio to the plug dangling from the old car, except wading in with a wire cutters and laboriously soldering together each and every wire in situ, not a prospect I was all that thrilled about. The car was cold and the space under the dashboard was cramped. But wait! The plug fit into the recepticle on the old radio ... what if I salvaged that, soldered it to the pigtail on the new radio, and plugged them together?

Well ... it could work ...

I took both the old radio and the new one down to the work bench, broke open the old radio and dug out the circuit board that the recepticle was mounted on. It had been soldered pretty solidly in place by an assembly-line robot. To salvage it I had to carefully cut it apart with a Dremel tool and a razor saw, two expensive toys I bought years ago so I could play with electric train sets. Who knew they had a practical use, too? (Honestly, I already knew the Dremel tool was massively useful for all sorts of jobs. I cut a frozen toilet fitting apart with a Dremel years ago; saved me a couple hundred dollars I would have had to give to a plumber. Dremel tools rock. I have two of them now.)

Then I clamped the recepticle in a vise and carefully soldered the wires from the new radio to the pins as per the diagram I found on the old radio carcass. I even got Tim in on the job. Kludging together a car stereo is something every kid should know how to do.

When we were pretty sure all the wires were connected to the right pins in the recepticle we swaddled it in a coccoon of black electrician’s tape and trotted it out to the car to plug it in. No response when we tried to power it up, though. After careful review we were absolutely, positively certain we’d connected each and every wire to the right pin, except one. The label we found on the old radio wasn’t very specific about a pin labeled “SWD” that I took to mean the switched positive lead. Obviously it wasn’t, though.

There was one other pin labeled “BATT” but it was also the only pin that didn’t have a plus or minus. I didn’t want to touch a wire to it and risk shorting Tim’s brand-new CD player, but it was the only connection we could think of that might be wrong, so we toted it back down to the work bench and swapped the wires around. It was a heart-stopping moment when we plugged it back in. Would we hear music, or whatever that stuff is Tim listens to? Or would an expensive electronic car stereo system go *poof!*

The answer was: Music (or whatever it’s called).

And it only took ten minutes ... plus three hours.

Over the river and through the woods! We made the long trek north to sup on glazed ham at the ancestral O-manse and relax over coffee in the Great Room with Mom and Tom, always a pleasant way to pass the day, any day.

The ancestral manse is quite a long drive from Our Humble O-Bode, although we discovered the last time we went that if we take the interstate we can cut half an hour or more off the trip because on a four-laner all the other drivers fly! If I wasn’t doing at least seventy-five miles per, everyone else would be passing me at a clip hazardous to life and limb, plus I’d stick out like a guy trying to waltz in a room full of slam-dancers. I don’t like calling attention to myself, especially in traffic, so I try to keep up, but I’m a little timid about driving as fast as the others do. When I say “fly,” I’m exaggerating only a little bit; I’m pretty sure the wheels of the other cars actually do leave the ground from time to time. I’ve got the moxie to get the O-Mobile up to seventy-five before the speed becomes more than I can deal with, but the others don’t seem to mind it so much as when I used to go no faster than the speed limit, which is just asking to get rear-ended.

At interstate highway speeds it takes no more than two and a half hours to get from Monona to Manawa versus about three hours plus on the back roads. A half-hour difference might not sound like much at first blush, but I feel the advantage in the most basic ways: When I climb out of the car after three hours of driving I feel as though a Marine drill sergeant spent the afternoon kicking my butt around the block. I admit that after two and a half hours my fundament doesn’t feel all that much better, but the kicking is over with a half-hour sooner. Who wouldn’t cash in for that kind of savings?

We had a wonderful day to drive north, clear skies and clear roads, but somehow, not more than an hour after we got there, it began to snow. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I was absolutely certain I decreed there would be no snow. But the longer we watched the snow come down, our jaws agape and our eyes bugging out, the heavier and windier it kept on snowing. Damn. In the end we did the only thing we could do under the circumstances: We sat down to dinner. I couldn’t make it stop snowing (my decrees work reasonably well in advance, but have very little effect on the current weather), and it wouldn’t have been any easier to drive back through it at two o’clock than it would at six, so we relaxed and enjoyed ourselves.

Mom set out a sumptuous feast of glazed ham, mashed potatoes, asparagus sprouts and corn. Let the record show that I not only sampled the asparagus, I finished off three spears. That’s more asparagus than I’ve eaten at one sitting in my whole life. I’ve never been a fan, and I’m still not sure why people go gah-gah over it, but I did like it. It was tasty as any other green veg, but it wasn’t something I’d scour roadside farm stands to the ends of the earth for, as I’ve heard many asparagus lovers will do. My dad was one of those asparagus lovers, but the gene apparently never transferred to me. He even tried for years to grow his own, fussing over a small plot in the back yard that never did bear edible sprouts until some years after he passed away. He would have chuckled at the darkly humorous irony of that, and probably cussed just a bit, too.

After dinner we retired to the lounge to relax and swap stories for a while. I always like that part of the vist quite a lot. But then suddenly it was six o’clock and there was only an hour or so of daylight left. I had hoped to get back home before dark because the place where I-39 crosses I-94 just north of Madison is one of the worst junctions I’ve ever driven through. The designer doesn’t seem to have been trying to work out the best way to join the two roads as he was daring drivers to make it through alive. Last time we came back that way I turned off early and rocketed up a corkscrewing exit that was wound so tight my two inside tires nearly left the pavement.

If I hurried, I thought maybe I could make it there before total darkness fell, so we excused ourselves as quickly as decorum would allow and hit the road. Tim really, really wanted to drive (and I wanted to let him) but he had a beer before dinner and his mother has decreed that he absolutely, positively will not drive during the same twenty-four hour period in which he’s consumed any amount of alcohol whatsoever. It’s a good policy, I have to say. Candidly, though, I still wanted to let him drive, but only because I prefer a poke in the eye with a sharp stick over driving six hours in one day.

Most of the way back the drive was uneventful; traffic was light and, though we ran into a few snow flurries here and there, I never didn’t run into any weather that was too difficult to handle UNTIL about thirty miles north of Madison when, coincidentally the traffic got a lot heavier. I can’t remember where in hell they all came from, just that suddenly I was surrounded by a wall of SUVs and blazing red tail lights. Then we all hit a snow squall that was so blinding it slowed everybody down to about sixty per. When interstate traffic slows down, you know you’re up to your eyeballs in the serious doo-doo.

Even though it was white-kunckle driving it was mercifully short, lasting only ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Then the skies cleared again and we went back to flying along at seventy or eighty miles per. The big trucks even picked off a few of the smaller cars just for fun, spraying plastic and engine parts into the ditch.

After the snarl of traffic, the driving wall of blinding snow and the crazy, twisting turns of the interstate junction we reached the Beltline. That’s always such a huge relief I tend to let my guard down, but not any more, not after last night. As we approached the Dutch Mills exit I watched a Winnebago camper signal and merge into the fast lane, then slow down as though he took his foot off the gas and began to let his huge, wallowing pig of a vehicle coast. I kept an eye on him for as long as it took for me to pull up beside him but I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, and once I was passing him I didn’t care. I was in the far right lane anyway so I turned to focus on the road ahead and emptied my short-term memory of him. Stupid.

The pickup truck behind the Winnebago had been following a little too close, and when the Winnebago slowed rather suddenly, as if he’d tapped his brakes, the pickup had to swerve hard around it into the center lane in order to avoid what would have been a rather spectacular collision. I hardly saw any of this. All I heard was howling tires biting hard into the pavement as the pickup truck swerved into the center lane, just a foot or two from my left rear quarter panel. The noise instantly doubled my pulse and flooded me with enough adrenaline to light the city of Toledo, Ohio. I locked my hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, prepared to take evasive action, but the event was already over. There was nothing to try to escape. I took a few deep breaths, trying to blow off steam, then signalled for the Monona Drive exit and pulled off the Beltline.

Heck of a way to end the trip.

Finally home again and out from behind the wheel, I could relax with a bottle of Fat Squirrel as I pecked at a square of what Mom calls “funeral cake,” which is a lot more delicious than its name makes it sound. Funeral cake is chocolate cake with chocolate chips baked in and sugar sprinkled over the top. There are probably two or three more kinds of chocolate or sugar in there that I’m not aware of. Whatever else there may be, it sure is delicious. Mom packed up a pan full of the stuff for us to take along before we left.

Holy crap! I sat at my desk for more than two hours listening to news clips on NPR this evening before an alarm sounded in the pit of my brains and I remembered: I must drivel!

“Have fun at your two jobs,” My Darling B wished for me as she dropped me off on Carroll Street, in the shadow of the office building where the two jobs she mentioned lay in wait for me.

B was in an especially good mood this morning because she would not spend the day working two jobs, or even one. Shortly after I collected a peck on the cheek from her she climbed back into the O-Mobile and headed home where she passed most of the day poinking little holes in the potting soil that she used to fill row upon row of plastic trays, then planted seeds in the little holes, carefully covered them and, in my imagination anyway, patted each little mound with the palm of her hand, pinky delicately extended.

She stowed the trays on shelves in the basement where they ought to germinate under her constant doting. An electric mat keeps the seeds warm from below and banks of flourescent lamps urge the tiny seedlings, when they finally emerge, to reach skyward. Apparently this is the way gardening is done now. Nobody simply pokes seeds in the garden plot, crosses their fingers and hopes for the right combination of rain and sun. Soon B will have hundreds of seedlings in anticipation of planting season, which is allegedly already upon us but will have to wait another week or so for the retreat of the glaciers temps that rise above freezing for more than a few days at a stretch.

After she dropped me off at work I descended to the lower level (we don’t say “basement” ... but I have heard more than a few of us say “dungeon”) where I began a second week of trying to learn what was going on and how to help a little bit more. I’ve picked up a few basic tasks by this time and can do them almost unassisted, and today I learned how to order coupon books! Yippee!

Oh, and I went to a meeting. I suppose I’ll have to get used to going to meetings again. If there’s one really good thing I took away from the meeting, it was that we didn’t spend two-thirds of it telling stories and arguing over the best way to do ordinary stuff like organize a fund-raising weinie roast. You start a fire, you put the wienies on it, you sell them. Seems simple, but I’ve seen supposedly grown men draw that out to an hour-long discussion filled with personal drama and back-stabbing ingrigue.

The guys in this morning’s meeting weren’t talking wienie roasts, they were talking about loans and collateral. Maybe if they did have to figure out how to sell wienies for money they’d have to turn it into a fubar, too. It’s just possible that painful complications are inherent to the wienie roasting. Thank dog they avoided the subject is all I’ll say about that. I sat to one side taking notes and occasionally raising my index finger to ask what must have been a painfully basic question, but they patiently explained every little thing for me and the meeting still lasted just under one hour. These guys are good.

Shifting gears, I went upstairs to my other job after lunch with the hope I could get all caught up and go back to the lower level to tie up some loose ends, but that never happened. I had to prepare a stack of documents for scanning and that means taking out hundreds of staples, undoing dozens of paper clips, and cutting fan-fold applications in half to make them small enough to scan completely. It means making copies of the documents that have chewed-up edges or are smothered in layers of heavy tape that would solidly jam the scanner and land well-earned curses upon my head. And it means generating hundreds of bar codes, one for each application.

It usually takes all day to prepare a month’s worth of applications, partly because there are all these little things to do and partly because it’s so mind-numbingly boring that I have to get up every half-hour or so to stamp around and slap myself or go gah-gah. Lately I’ve been breaking it up over two days, and a good thing, too, because that’s the only way I’d get it done now that I’m working mornings in the lower level. I did half of it last Friday and finished off the other half today. I’d hoped to have about an hour left to do the aforementioned tieing off of the loose ends, but my computer kept killing off the bar code generator and all the extra futzing around with it added up after a while. I got done just in time to shut all my files and cabinets, throw on my coat and run out to the curb where Tim was waiting to take me home.

He was sitting in the O-Mobile, reading a book as he waited. “I can’t believe you didn’t bring your own car,” I said, shocked.

“I’m not going to put miles on it picking you up from work,” he answered, pulling away from the curb. This is the same guy who’ll drive two blocks from our house to the restaurant where he works, but he wants to avoid the wear and tear of driving it to pick me up. *Sheesh*

Time to hit the hay. For more drivel go listen to NPR, it really makes the time go by. I recommed the story about Long Duk Dong.

I had one of those days during which I don’t get to do much of anything besides press my nose to the grindstone. The two or three minutes I stood outside Penny’s office gazing out her window as I waited for her to come back was my recess. By the end of the day I was knackered, and it’s not like I was even bent on hard work! Mostly I was chasing people around asking questions, but even when I was sitting comfortably behind a desk I was still asking people questions, and during one notable hour and fifteen minutes I babbled like a man who would never be allowed to speak again. I have to admit I liked that part.

That was the web conference I hosted, a training seminar my supervisor made me call a “webinar.” Yuck. The way it was supposed to work was, I talked five or six people into joining me in an ordinary telephone conference call by promising to tell them all about the wonders of our credit card program. Sounds like something you’d happily set aside an hour of your day to participate in, doesn’t it? Yeah, don’t lie to me, I know the answer to that.

The icing on the cake was that, while we were talking on the phone, each of the participants would ideally be gazing in rapt attention at a web page that would flash a series of Power Point slides at them illustrating each of my talking points. It worked that way in rehearsal, anyway, and that little success made so jazzed about having this kind of technology at my disposal that I whizzed through ten or eleven slides before I stopped to ask if anybody had any questions about the subjects we’d covered so far.

“Yes, I do,” piped up one of the participants. “Are you showing us differnet slides? Because I only see the first one.”

“Me, too,” somebody else chimed in, and a flurry of agreement followed her. Just one person said she could finally see the second slide filtering through the download, but an apparent bandwitdth bottleneck was choking the connection so badly that nobody else could see anything but the first slide I showed them in the first thirty seconds of the presentation.

Well, crud. I had to resort to e-mailing the slides to a couple of people and asking the rest to follow along with a printed training packet I mailed to them on Monday. So much for the wonders of technology. Next slide.

The webinar wasn’t my first project, though. I’m supposed to work in the mornings downstairs sopping up how-to’s like a sponge and in the afternoons thrashing my way through credit card applications in my usual cubicle, but because I knew today would be an inverted webiriffic day I went straight downstairs after My Darling B dropped me off on Carroll Street and I knocked out the daily morning reports I’d need later. Some reports not only still have to be printed, they have to be painstakingly pieced together. It’s not a scissors-and-mucilage kind of cut-and-paste, but the more modern Microsoft kind. Still, it’s tedious and it takes time, so I wanted to get it out of the way as soon as possible.

One of those reports is a collection of printed pages on which I found files that had the number nine as the fourth digit of the file number. That’s the quick and dirty way I was instructed to find those files, and I believe I may have even been told the reason I was looking for those files, but if so I’ve forgotten it in the flood of information overload that’s come my way in the past week plus two days. This morning while I was searching out those files it occurred to me to wonder why, so when I handed the report over to Katie I asked her, “What exactly is it I’m looking for here, anyway?”

“You want to find all the files that have the number nine as the fourth digit of the file number,” she answered, pointing helpfully.

Fair enough. I followed up with, “I mean, why?” but her answer boiled down to “Because those are the files you have to report on.” All I need to know about them, apparently, is what the file name looks like. Someday I’ll know, I told my inner kitten soothingly, someday.

After webinizing for an hour or so I went back downstairs again to listen in while Katie and Whitney answered phone calls. Whitney’s been working there a couple weeks longer than I have and can actually pick up the phone and answer questions. Were I to pick up the phone at this point, and I have, by mistake, two or three times now, I have to grab a pen, take lots of notes, then ask the caller if he could please hold while I go find somebody who knows what’s going on. (I say only the “please hold” part out loud.) It’s a painfully drawn out way to answer a phone call and I listened in to Katie and Whitney hoping I could pick up some of the lingo and maybe even a fact or two that would help me raise the needle on the customer satisfaction meter a point or two.

But answering the phone in our department isn’t as easy as it might sound at first, on account of the fact that I’ve taken a job in the department you would call if something got horked up with your loan — the payment was short, the statement didn’t arrive in the mail, your dog ate your copy of the mortgage. The phone calls we get are from customers who are typically interrogative, confused or mad. Mostly confused. The bulk of the rest have questions. Only a few of them are mad, but what they lack in numbers they make up for in naked anger. I didn’t hear any of those today, but I’ve been told it’s just a matter of waiting a few days.

When we broke for lunch I returned to my upstairs cubicle to curl up with a stack of card applications I read while I noshed on a bowl of potato salad lovingly prepared by My Darling B the night before. Scrummy stuff. She knows how to pack a lot of love in a deceptively simple lunch dish.

I finished processing all the applications by the time I was done eating lunch, so once again I tramped down the stairs to listen to the phone calls, write some more reports, learn a few more things I didn’t know before and just generally get in the way. It’s sort of a mixed blessing to know virtually nothing about what’s going on around me; on the one hand I’m much like an inert substance that doesn’t interact much with the wild rush of activity passing me by, and on the other hand my deer in the headlights glassy stare trips some instinctive response in everybody else to stop a moment and carefully explain every little thing. I don’t have to ask about much at this point because they all lay it right at my feet. It won’t be long before they begin to expect me to retain some of the stuff they gave me, though, and then I’ll have to go back to working for a living.

Astoundingly, tomorrow will be hump day already. Somehow, today felt just like Monday and I have a funny feeling tomorrow will, too. I sank into the driver’s seat of the O-Mobile feeling as though I’d never been more ready to go home and relax. Not even the heavy traffic on John Nolan drive was crazy enough to interrupt my decompression.

This was “Top Performer” banquet day! I got a free lunch and a pin! You only wish you had a pin as nice as mine! It looks like an old sailing ship’s spoked wheel, it’s rimmed with blue enamel and it’s embossed with the words “Top Performer” and the name of our very employer-friendly bank. I’ll put it on e-bay so you can see it. Bidding starts at fifty bucks.

The banquet was in a conference room at the Hilton. I guess that makes it sound very frou-frou, but the room was much like a conference room in any other hotel in the city. One thing the Hilton had that was special, though, was a banquet meal that tasted pretty darned good. I tend to order the chicken kiev cacciatori whatever because that’s the one dish that even the worst chef can’t screw up too badly. At the award banquets I’ve been to, any kind of beef usually ended up tasting exactly like old boiled boots, although I’ve been served a plate of chicken at several banquets that could’ve been hot, soggy cardboard drizzled with white glue. It’s safe to say that having to attend an awards banquet at several of my old job assignments was the biggest disincentive to do a good job that I’ve ever had dangled in front of me.

But I have to say our bank did it right. The Hilton came through with a delicious meal and even served chocolate chip cookies for dessert. That’s like a kiss on the cheek from a pretty girl right there. Can’t beat chocolate chip cookies.

The Hilton also happens to be just a few blocks away from the home office, just a short walk through the beautiful sunshine and warm weather that was very relaxing after being cooped up in a cubicle all morning. And on top of all that, a pin! Such a deal!

I got a heck of a kick out of finally seeing a lot of the people I’ve been talking with on the phone these past two years as the credit card manager. Most of them don’t look much like the person they sound like. I wonder if they were thinking the same thing about me?

On top of a delicious, free lunch I went home in the evening to a delicious dinner, too! This day just kept getting better and better! My Darling B served up buffalo burgers with a side of salt & vinegar kettle chips, the scrummiest potato chips anywhere on earth. I’m serious, there’s none better. The only thing wrong with them is that, after we open the bag, we are compelled by irresistable gastronomic forces to eat every last chip, and today we fell victim to double jeopardy: in a moment of weakness, B bought two bags. Naturally, we opened them both. It was not the most healthy meal we’ve eaten this month, probably not this whole calendar year.

It’s a short one today because I’m a great big wimp, worn-out and ready to hit the hay at nine o’clock sharp. My Two Jobs have worn me down to a nub and it’s only Wednesday. Okay, not actually a nub. I’m still pretty sharp, but I don’t want to be a nub so I promised myself an early bed time tonight. Go ahead, call me names — weakling, geezer, slouch, piker — I can take it.

I got to work way too early this morning. We’re still getting used to driving to work without making the stop to drop Tim off at school. He drives his own self now, don’tcha know, even though he has to park a couple blocks away and walk five minutes or so. He seems to think it’s worth being able to sleep in until six-thirty and come home in a flash. Well, I suppose it is, now that I spend half a second thinking about it.

Since we don’t have to go past the high school any longer we exit Monona through the Bridge Street back door, run up Broadway to the Beltline and zip into town on John Nolen Drive. It’s a lot easier and quicker. Too quick, really. Most everyone wants to go really, really fast and some mornings can be a white-knuckle experience when a pack of Nascar wannabes surrounds the O-Mobile, floating inches away from every side, threatening explosive destruction if they so much as sneeze. I’d feel more confident in their ability to avoid colliding with me if they weren’t all talking on their cell phones.

At those speeds on such an expedient route we usually get into town in less than ten minutes. This morning it seemed as though we’d barely gotten started when I pulled into a parking slot on Carroll Street and got out. When we drove in on Willy Street I didn’t arrive at work until seven-thirty or later, but now we’re in the fast lane I’ve been getting in at seven-ten or seven-fifteen. I don’t want to be at work at seven-fifteen — I’ve got too much paperwork on my desk. On my two desks!

My day at work passed in a blur and the less said about it, the better for all concerned, and maybe especially for you. I will note that I’ve been electronically banished from the department I previously worked in. Many of the doors in the bank are locked all the time, but with a wave of my ID card I can open the ones I need to pass through. This morning, though, when I got there early, I tried waving myself into my upstairs job but couldn’t get the door to unlock. Neither could I get into the department’s break room through the back door to sneak away with a hot cuppa joe. When I was keyed into my new department they apparently figured I didn’t need to get back into my old one, so I’m persona non grata there now.

Today being payday, I treated myself to a molasses cookie from the bakery on cap square. In fact, I bought a half-dozen and gave the rest away to the first five people I ran into when I went back to work downstairs. I’m not above a little sugar-based bribery to win friends and influence people.

Tonight was guy food for dinner. Tim fried up strips of bacon, I scrambled the eggs and we had an evening breakfast, our favorite. It worked out especially well for My Darling B who suffered an icky tummy all last night and today. I suspect the big old juicy cheeseburger and the bag of potato chips she ate for dinner last night may have been a bit too overpowering for her delicate constitution. She only nibbled on the bacon tonight and stuck to the eggs and toast, a wise choice given her condition.

We had a pretty good day here, weather-wise, if that interests you. We’re especially keen on watching the skies for warm, sunny days just lately, and although we didn’t have one today that was much of either, it wasn’t too bad.

My Darling B didn’t think so, however. She was obsessing over a few little flakes of snow she saw falling on our fair city this afternoon. I saw them, too, but they weren’t there when the day was over and the temps never fell much lower than forty, so who cares about a few flakes? I took care of the winter weather warning last night and I brushes aside the flakes that fell today, and still she’s not happy. I don’t know what else I can do.

So I went straight downstairs after cleaning up the dinner dishes, in order to re-configure the lights over her garden seedlings the way she wanted them. I built her a set of shelves and hung flourescent lights over them, but she wanted the lights hanging over the bottom shelf where they could hover the merest fraction of an inch above the seedlings’ pots. It took me just five or ten minutes to move the lights around and she was so happy that she spent the better part of the evening getting the teensy little pots and trays set up just so in their new, well-lighted home.

This being Thursday, I thought I’d note: We — every one of us — remembered that this was trash day. I don’t know how, but we did.

It’s Friday! Hallelujah! It’s Friday! Thank dog! It’s Friday! I’ve never been so ready for the end of the week as I have been this week!

On this weekend I promise I will:

Sleep in late. For me, this will be something like seven-thirty or eight o’clock, not because I feel I have to get up then or because I set my alarm clock on the weekends, but because that really is sleeping in late for me. I usually wake up at five o’clock because that’s when I’m used to waking up, but on Saturday and Sunday I can usually make myself go back to sleep until about six or six-thirty, when the cats come in to walk on my face and sing the breakfast aria from Carmen. Bet you didn’t know there was a breakfast aria in Carmen. I didn’t either.

Consume mass quantities of beer. That’d be round about a six-pack. Any more in a forty-eight hour period would only put me to sleep. You can see how my beer-drinking has become self-regulating that way. (Bonus points if you can remember where the catchphrase “mass quantities” came from.)

Clean the bathroom. It’s not something I’m looking forward to, but it has to be done. For months Tim has been cleaning the bathroom as he promised to do when I took over the chore of washing the dishes. He hates washing the dishes more than, um, a great big hateful thing, so I agreed to swap with him and I have to say he tried very hard to keep up his end of the deal for quite a while. Every week he cleaned up the bathroom as best he could, which was pretty good by teenaged standards: Most of the hair got swept up, the toilet and the sink were shiny white where you could see it, and he scrubbed the shower down pretty well. We were happy with his work.

Somewhere along the line he let the schedule slip to a cleaning every two weeks, and the thoroughness of the cleaning became a matter of opinion. There’d be a waterlogged dust bunny left cowering in the corner, or the grout between the tiles had an ugly bruised color, or maybe the mineral build-up around the faucet fixtures was left to build up some more. To be fair, those faucets are hard to clean. I’ve been meaning to replace the faucet for a long time and I’m thinking it’ll finally happen this spring.

Lately the cleaning has taken place whenever. I’ve really got to get in there on Sunday and sterilize the whole place until it reeks of vinegar and bleach.

And it was not only Friday, it was training day today! Not like the departmental training I did last week, this was at the corporate training headquarters at a branch on the east side of town, and it didn’t start until nine o’clock and it ended at four and I got lunch. What a freaking great schedule! Although as it turned out I forgot it started at nine and showed up at eight. Nobody was there, of course, and the teller lines don’t open until eight-thirty, but this branch had a drive-through and they open at seven thirty so I pulled around. The teller looked a little puzzled when she popped open the drawer and I didn’t drop anything in it.

“Good morning!” I said in what I hoped was a friendly voice, but not the kind of friendly voice a stalker would use in an attempt to ingratiate himself with female drive-up window tellers. I quickly added, “I’m an employee and I’m supposed to be here for training today, but I guess I got a little stupid and showed up too early. Do you know when the training office opens up?” It turned out she didn’t. It was a long shot anyway.

Lucky for me, Chris from training was pulling up as I came around the building again. She’s one of the most unfailingly happy people I’ve ever met. Either that, or she’s got one of those faces that always looks happy, but I don’t think that’s it. I think she really is as giddily happy all the time as she appears to be. I may have to ask her for pointers, but I wonder if they’ll apply in my new line of work. Anyway, she dropped everything she was doing and checked the calendar to see when I was supposed to be scheduled for class. Sure enough, I didn’t start until nine. After I thanked her, I returned to the O-Mobile and went looking for a coffee shop where I could hang out for about forty-five minutes and read my morning paper. Cool Beans was right up the road and they had morning buns as big as my head. Perfect.

Back on time at nine I got right to work with Patty and even though I know this is going to sound geeky as hell I have to say it was one of the best training classes I’ve had since I’ve worked for this bank. It was a pleasant surprise because — and I’m more than a little ashamed to admit this — I thought this was going to be a pretty darned boring day. As it turned out, I was the only one taking instruction this morning so we had a one-on-one session all morning long and I got to ask her any clueless question that crossed my mind. In my new job I have lots, so I tried out a bunch on her and she not only gave me the answers I was looking for but she had virtually all the time in the world to restate and repeat them until I could sort of begin to wrap my brain around them.

The afternoon was very nearly more of the same, except that Chris came in to lead the class while Patty and Tim sat in. They’re all from corporate training so I guess Patty and Tim were learning how to teach the class for the time when Chris, who was pregnant as a rabbit, went on maternity leave. Again they let me ask lots of questions and I still had quite a few, even though I was pretty familiar with the software application we were reviewing. Three o’clock, the time the class was supposed to end, rolled around and I was still asking questions so they hung around until half-past. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I want to ask to go back for more training.

“Mass quantities” was a catchphrase from “The Coneheads” on Saturday Night Live. This is apparently not as mysterious as I thought it was, but then I’m never sure what’s popular any more and what’s not. The first thing I said to Tim last night after work was, “What do you know?” (in Wisconsin the vernacular rendering, “Whaddayaknow?” and the most common answer, “Not much, you?” has been turned into a catchphrase by Michael Feldman for his radio show) and he answered, “About what?”

“It’s a conversation starter, Tim,” I explained, “like What’s up? or How you doing?”

“What is that, some kind of old person thing?” he asked with a puzzled expression. “I’ve never heard that before in my life.”

Which isn’t true, of course, because I’ve heard him complain about the way it’s spelled for the radio show (Feldman calls his show Whad’ya Know?) although I’ll grant that this may have been the first time he heard it used as a greeting. “Okay, so now you’ve heard it,” I said. “What do you know?”

He winced. “That’s stupid. I’m not answering that question.”

Oh, that’s stupid, but he’d answer, “What’s up, dog?” if his brother said it. Not when I say it, though. Again, in the vernacular, it’s pronounced something like “Tsup, dawg?” but when I do it, he just rolls his eyes and walks away. Dialect is a tricky thing to master.

I wallowed in bed until eight this morning! My Darling B was out of bed before I was! I didn’t even brew the coffee until after B reminded me I hadn’t done it yet. Such a sloth was I.

And when I finally got out of bed, we sat around another hour or so sipping coffee and waiting for our turn in the shower. Once Tim gets in there we’re locked out for at least a half-hour. We just hung out on the sofa, B reading the latest gardening news on the internet (you think I’m making that up but I’m not) and I reading a book about South African choo-choos I found yesterday on my lunch hour while I was at Half Price Books looking for a copy of Sleepless in Seattle. Even though the book cost fifteen bucks, and I had other plans for that money, it was a price I could not only afford, it was a steal considering the subject matter. African railways ran some of the most magnificently huge, beautifully painted steam locomotives anywhere on earth, and it’s not easy to find second-hand books about them at that price. Last time I did was eight years ago at a flea market in England. If I walked away from it, I’d kick myself forever.

Then I remembered I had a five-dollar gift card at home, which brought the price of the book down to ten bucks. I still had plans for that money but I for ten bucks I couldn’t let it go, so I drove home, got the gift card and drove back to get it. I guess I ought to finally get those “Dave Okonski, Train Nerd” personal cards printed up.

They had a copy of Sleepless, too, by the way. We had it on tape, which is probably around here somewhere, but I’ve been searching for it for weeks and haven’t found it yet, and it was an old tape of a television broadcast so it was starting to look fuzzy. For seven bucks I got a DVD (which is already obsolete, than you Blue Ray).

And because the DVDs were right next to the music CDs, I caught sight of a Peggy Lee record for just five bucks that I added to my pile, then went flipping through the jazz disks and found a Wynton Marsalis retrospective of Thelonius Monk tunes. I love Thelonius Monk, and Wynton Marsalis is none too shabby, either. Again, it was just five bucks. I grabbed it, then got the hell out of there before I spotted something else irresistable.

The happiest waitress in the world was not working this morning at Cleveland’s Diner when we stopped by for what’s become our customary breakfast after visiting the Dane County Farmer’s Market. I didn’t ask where she’d gone because this was only the first time we’ve noticed her missing and we weren’t in last week. If she’s still MIA next week, though, I think I’ll have to express my concern in some way.

We reached something of a milestone this morning at Cleveland’s: Nico, one of the two brothers who runs the place, took our orders. I began mine, the usual: “Scrambled eggs, two strips of bacon ...” but that’s as far as I got before he jumped in and added, with a smile, “And a plate of pancakes?” I guess that makes us regulars.

One more amazing first at Cleveland’s: B drank her way to the bottom of her coffee cup. Typically, the Happy Waitress is on a constant patrol with the coffee pot and won’t let anybody drink more than half a cup without a refill, but today was busy and the emergency back-up waitress didn’t appear to be filling anybody’s cup, so I had to ask Nico for a refill. The earth trembled.

Let’s see, how many of my pledges for this weekend did I keep?

I did indeed sleep in, not only on Saturday but again this morning, rising no earlier than eight o’clock both days. I would have slept in even later this morning but B was beginning to stir and I couldn’t have lived with myself if she’d gotten out of bed before me yesterday and today.

I also drank copious amounts of beer, two yesterday and two on Friday. Plus I had a glass of wine with dinner Friday night. Yowza! Somebody do an intervention on me before I become alcoholic! Better get a move-on, though. I think there’s still enough wine left to drink with tonight’s dinner as well, and a bottle of beer I can have with popcorn for the movie tonight.

We watched American Gangster last night. Every time I see Russel Crowe I like him better and better. This time he played an honest cop in a New Jersey precinct rife with corrupt officers. He gets picked to assemble an anti-narcotic unit of untouchables going after a drug kingpin played by Denzel Washington. He didn’t get to do as much as Washington, but he did a great job of convincing me as his character went from rookie cop to an Elliot Ness-like crime-crusher.

The story unfolded slowly and meticulously, and without an unbelievable amount of constant gunplay and fistfights. Not that there wasn’t gunplay, and when there was it was gruesomely violent, but for once I didn’t find it objectionable because it made Washington’s drug lord a thoroughly evil, unlikeable guy. And it wasn’t just the gunplay. He had style, he acted like an upright, professional businessman, he treated his wife like a gentleman and took good care of his mother, but the film’s director, Ridley Scott, deftly intercut scenes of his idyllic family life with gritty scenes of the addicts he destroyed with the heroin he was selling.

Í forget what tonight’s movie is. B rented it along with American Gangster the other day and I looked at the title but I’ve never heard of it.

Finally, I kept my third pledge for the weekend and cleaned out the bathroom. Took me two hours and I had to have a break between the first and second hours to rest up and get some nourishment in order to continue. There were bacteria colonies in there so big I had to tranquilize with a dart gun, load into a sling under a helicopter and airlift to a wildlife preserve where they wouldn’t be a danger to themselves and others.

I somehow forgot to mention the first robin of the season sighted in our yard yesterday, news that rates right up there with all the snow melting and the first buds appearing on the trees and bushes in our yard. It was three robins, by actual count, happily digging up worms and chasing each other from bush to tree. My Darling B was just as tickled as I was but voiced some protest when she saw one of them gobbling up worms. She said she needed them for her garden. “Let them have a few,” I soothed her. “We’ve got plenty.”

And she did let the robins alone, mostly because she has a surrogate garden in the basement that she’s been fussing over morning and night, a set of trays with seedlings growing under banks of grow lights. This morning she informed me, in alarmed tones, that we might have to buy another pair of grow lights for her seedling garden. A grow light, by the way, is what gardeners call an ordinary flourescent light when it’s suspended over a tray of teensy-tiny green seedlings. There’s nothing different about the light other than that. You don’t have to put a special bulb in it (although you can buy a twenty-dollar “daylight” bulb but it won’t make the tomatoes taste any better) or wave a magic wand, just use it to grow seedlings. Amazing!

Anyway, she said we might have to add two more to the double-banked lamps that were already hanging over her surrogate garden because the seedlings were getting “bendy,” the very technical gardening term for plants that are curling into question marks from seeking the light. I trained my trusty Mark One eyeballs on the situation and darned if she wasn’t right! Another set of lamps, though, was asking for a hot socket, what we in the know about electrical circuits call an outlet that has burst into flames. “We” meaning me. And “we” just made that up. I hopefully suggested she try rotating the trays to see if her seedlings wouldn’t un-bend themselves, or at least counter-bend, and if that doesn’t work maybe we can splint them, or get them to try yoga.

I tried to have a nap in the afternoon but fate conspired against me. Normally I can spend hours and hours hidden away in my basement lair and nobody will bother me. There’s something about settling down to take a nap, though, that sets off all kinds of alarms in every life form within a city block so they all start to make noise. You’d think modern science would have figured out how this works by now and developed an aerosol spray to block it, but I guess not.

As soon as I wrapped myself up in a quilt and stepped over to the cushy chair in my lair, Tim came in to tell me how much he liked an internet cartoon I showed him earlier this morning. (It’s Kate Beaton’s page and it’s one of the links under “Toons” over there on the right, if you’re interested.) Tim hardly ever comes out of his room on weekends, much less comes to visit me in my lair, so this should have been a warning sign that my plans to nap had been transmitted and the alarm had been sounded.

Once I had sunk into the comfy cozy chair, found just the right place to set my head and closed my eyes, I heard Bonkers come trotting down the stairs, crying for attention. He found me in the lair and stood in the door a minute, crying some more. Getting no response from me (I didn’t even open my eyes) he jumped up on the arm of the comfy cozy chair and sniffed every inch of my face, incidentally sticking his whiskers up my nose. After a minute of that he gave up and went away, but I had pretty much lost the napping frame of mind by then.

And still I persevered. When I got a tickle at the back of my throat that no amount of gulping could make go away I gave up, though, folded the quilt and went into the next room to fiddle with my choo-choos. Who needed a nap, anyway?

Yesterday I took my bike in The Village Pedaler, the bike shop on Monona Drive (clever business name, no?), for a tune-up. It’s not the kind of tune-up where they change the oil and replace the spark plugs, it’s more like cleaning the chain and gears, making sure the brakes have grabby new rubber on them(and a good thing, as they’ve been a little mushy lately) and generally tweaking all the parts that tend to fall out of adjustment. I expect the mechanic will find plenty of doo-dads to tweak back into adjustment on my bike. It hasn’t seen the attention of a trained bicycle mechanic since I bought it about eight years ago. All it’s had to keep it going is little old me and my air pump. I think I may have oiled the chain a couple times. Other than that, nothing but riding. The only thing that’s kept it going this long, I suspect, is that I haven’t been riding it that much in the last three years.

Three years! In July it’ll have been three years since we left Misawa and settled here in the Madison area! And I think I’ve ridden my bike twice a year since then. I keep saying I’m going to ride it to work but I’ve been so monumentally lazy (I love the implications of that phrase; aspiring to be a monument to laziness sort of seems counterintuitive, don’t you think?) that I’ve given up any physical exercise more exhausting than mowing the lawn and I haven’t yet found a way to commit myself to riding my bike every day, or most days, to work, even though it’s barely six miles from our house and all but entirely level terrain. I figured that, if I spent a wad on having a professional clean and lube it, I would feel guilty enough to get on it and ride to work at least once or twice a week, so I took it in.

For some reason, I expected they’d have enough free play in their schedule to be able to do the tune-up yesterday afternoon and have it back to me sometime today. I was a little surprised when he said it wouldn’t be ready until next Saturday. Oh, well, I’ve waited this long to commit to cycling to work. What’s another week?

It seems that every single hand soap dispenser in our corporate headquarters building has been replaced. Up until today we had the kind that squirted a little curlicue of pink goo into your palm when you pulled on the little black paddle, but over the course of the day they’d been snatched from every bathroom I visited, replaced by a white pod that spoofed a cottonball-sized puffball of lather, and in theory all you had to do was hold out our hand. “In theory” because I waited at several of them for what seemed like forever and got my foofy foamball only after I smacked the underside of the pod to wake up the snoozing gremlins inside.

Replacing the soap dispensers must have been somebody’s idea of saving money. Maybe we were all being a little too liberal with our use of soap, or they’re shaving away razor-thin margins in areas like hygiene thinking we won’t miss it, but really, how much of the savings is going to be left when they have to replace all those double-A batteries? And did they know the properties crew was going to stick the new soap dispensers to one side of the sink instead of over it, insuring that probably half of all the soap dispensed would end up unusable on the floor?

The phrase “... like a man just released from indenture ...” has been repeating itself in my head like a scratched record all day long, for no good reason I can think of. No matter what I was doing, and I was pretty darned busy all day long today, whenever I had a few minutes to let my brain rest that phrase echoed off the walls a couple times. Not that it bothered me. I like the word “indenture,” even if I don’t like the concept much, so hearing it over and over didn’t bother me at all. I even enjoyed it quite a bit. I think everybody’s got a favorite word they don’t mind hearing or saying over and over again, even if they won’t admit it.

There was one thing bothering me about it, though: I knew it came from a poem or a song, but I couldn’t remember anything more than that phrase. It was a very familiar phrase, and not just because it had been on “repeat selection” all day. I knew I’d sung it or heard it recited as the opening of a story, something like that, but no matter what I did, from tapping my fingers to the meter, humming various tunes, or trying very hard not to think of a song or a poem, the rest of the phrase would not emerge.

To complicate the puzzle a bit, the first line of the Emily Dickenson poem, “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away,” sometimes surfaced from memory, too, but I knew (okay, I was pretty sure) the two phrases were unrelated. Or so I thought.

Then the phrase repeated itself for the megajillionth time today while I was washing dishes after supper, backed itself up, and kept on going:

As the son of a son of a sailor I went out on the sea for adventure
Expanding the view of the captain and crew like a man just released from indenture
As a dreamer of dreams and a travelling man I have chalked up many a mile ...

It’s Jimmy Buffet! Not even close to Emily Dickenson! Not to put down Jimmy, but he’s no Emily. He doesn’t make me want to stick my head in an oven, for starters, any more than Dickenson makes me crave beer. I suppose that reference to a ship at sea was the link my subconscious made between the two. Cheers, Emily!

The sound of rain on the roof woke me up very early this morning. I love being able to say that again.

It rained pretty much all day today, and I know the people in the soggier parts of the state don’t want to hear me say it, especially not those in the flooded parts, but I for one was happy to see it rain. It made the world feel like spring was on the way, it even made a few green shoots spring up from the ground here and there. People walked the streets under brightly-colored umbrellas instead of wrapped up in heavy layers of fleece and wool and down-filled nylon. It’s finally raining instead of snowing. Someone in the break room summed it up best: “At least you don’t have to shovel it.”

Last night’s dream was about coming home to find the front door open and a couple young women I didn’t know sitting in my living room. Always the gracious host, I introduced myself and asked them their names. I had to ask them several times because they seemed reluctant to answer. “And just what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” I asked next. They really didn’t want to answer that one but were willing to show me instead, so one of them took me to my library. That’s how I knew this was going to be a bad dream. I had a huge library in my house, but my house had been broken into, the people who broke into it were still there, and I had the awful feeling they were waiting for me because they weren’t going to let me enjoy my library much.

There were two guys in my library. One of them was plinking away at the keyboard of my laptop, the other was taking some books off a shelf and replacing them with a couple LED-eyed computer peripherals plugged into the laptop’s USB ports. Before I could ask them what the hell they thought they were doing, one of them explained that he’d loaded my computer with some very foolproof software that would set off a bomb in half an hour and blow up my house. He never said why, but he did say I could have five minutes or so to say goodbye to all my books.

Then he and his buddy went into the front room with the two women I found there and together they made a short statement to a couple of television reporters who’d shown up. Actually, more like a long statement. They had quite a lot to say. So much, in fact, that I went back to my library, which was shortly going to be no more than smoke and confetti, called nine-one-one and told them, in what I hoped was a convincingly panic-stricken voice, that a couple guys in ski masks were menacing me with a bomb. The ski masks were just to add drama. I figured they weren’t going to be in any hurry to dispatch too many squad cars if I calmly explained that two nerdy-looking young men in polo shirts calmly wired my laptop to explode for reasons they had yet to divulge.

I don’t remember the last part of the dream, so I don’t know if the cops showed up to brutalize them or not. Sorry. I do remember that some time later I was in a book shop (books seem to have been a common theme during last night’s subconscious recreation) where a set of shelves that reached eight feet to the ceiling suddenly toppled over and I caught it on my back to try to keep it from dumping the books all over the floor. I failed, so I volunteered to pick up the books instead and spent the rest of the night picking them up and packing them in impossibly small boxes.

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

Every gosh-darned word © 2008 Dave Okonski