this is drivel

I tried all day to think of a decent April Fool’s joke to play on you when you got here today, but for sheer foolishness what could top the consistently drivelish content you find here every day? When I realized that, I gave up and vowed to continue in the usual vein.

My Darling B wanted to get some potting soil and a plastic seedling tray from the gardening shop at the other side of town after dinner tonight. “Would you do me a big favor and drive me?” she asked Tim. B won’t drive the O-Mobile anywhere if she’s had anything to drink, and she washed down her salsa tonight with a bottle of delicious Mad Town Nut Brown from the Ale Asylum brewery right here in our fair city.

Then she checked on the internet to see what the store’s hours were and was instantly dejected. “They close at seven,” she said with a whimper.

It was quarter to seven. “Plenty of time,” Tim said confidently. B had her doubts, but she was game to give it a try so they jumped in Tim’s car and were gone in a flurry of chicken feathers.

Barely ten minutes passed before they were back. Not only had they made it to the other side of town and back in the time it would have taken me to drive one-way, they’d managed to get there before the store closed and B had time to shop for the supplies she wanted to buy. She looked a little frazzled, though. I think maybe next time she has to go across town after dinner, she might just take the chance of being stopped even if she’s had a beer or two.

Congress got officially mad at Big Oil this morning for making too much money. No, really. They invited a bunch of CEOs of the biggest oil companies to come visit them in Washington D.C., then read them the riot act for charging four bucks a gallon for gasoline. How’s that work?

I’m still kind of mystified as to why the guys from Big Oil even RSVP’d in the first place. If I know Congress, and I’m not saying I’d like to, they never set out any free pizza and beer when they subpoena you, and the only reason they ask you around to their place is to yell at you about something they just read in the newspaper. Hey, Big Oil! Next time the phone rings and there’s a D.C. area code on your caller ID, let that sucker ring. Make them come to you. That’s what I’d do.

And what’s with that crap about making too much money, huh? I thought that what was so great about being an American was that you could be a poor, lazy bum if that’s what you want, or you can work your tail off and be rich, rich, RICH, but in the end it’s up to you. I thought that was the secret of the American success story. I guess Congress heard another version. And besides, it’s not like the ladies and gentlemen of Congress don’t make way too much money every single freaking day, not that I have an opinion or anything.

The hearings were allegedly about ending cash giveaways in the form of tax exemptions to Big Oil, and I have to say I’m all for that. They can drill for all the oil they can get their hands on and they can sell it at any price they like, if you ask me, but I’m a little annoyed they get truckloads of money from the feds to do it. If it were up to me, I’d say give oil companies the choice of having the welfare teat yanked from their suckling gobs or threaten to federalize every last one of them.

But as for charging way too much for gasoline, it’s not like they’re forcing it into the twenty-gallon gas tank of anybody’s honking gargantuan pickup truck. Sure, people carp and whine about how much it costs, but most all the carpers I’ve heard live in the suburbs and none of them would ride the bus if fares were slashed to four bits. Not that I would, either, until our fair city stops systematically dismantling what used to be a pretty good bus system and sets up a few stops along Monona Drive I can walk to.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the oil guys are only doing what businessmen are supposed to be doing, selling a product at the highest profit the market will bear, and congress egged them to do it in the first place with some big, fat tax breaks. If anybody was entitled to yell at today’s hearings, it ought to have come from the other side of the table and sounded something like, “What the hell did you expect us to do?”

I washed my wallet last night, and I didn’t realize I’d done it until I tried to pull on my trousers this morning and felt a cold, clammy lump in my back pocket. It was as if someone had stuffed a phone book down the back of my pants and poured a pitcher of icewater in after it. I jumped out of them and poked around in the seat until my hand thudded into the sodden lump in the left rear pocket. It was swollen up to at least twice its usual thickness so getting it out of the pocket was quite a project, involving lots of twisting and wrenching and lots and lots of cussing.

All the credit cards were okay, of course, and so was my laminated medical card, although it was looking a little ragged around the edges. Unluckily for me I had collected about two-dozen business cards over the years, and there were several shopping lists and about a half-dozen receipts I had neglected to hand over to My Darling B. I also had a fresh wad of cash from payday in there. When I compared the whole thing to a drenched edition of the Yellow Pages I wasn’t exaggerating all that much.

Peeling it all apart with great care, especially the cash, and spreading it out across the quilt on the bed to dry, I set the scraps I didn’t need any more to one side and took the rest to B’s sewing room, where I unfolded the ironing board and set about drying out the essentials with a hot iron and a pressing cloth.

I still had my last wallet, kept for just such an emergency. I think all guys do that. Check out their sock drawers and see for yourself; I’ll bet you’ll find the vacant carcass of at least one old wallet. It’s too hard to throw away an old wallet after carrying it on your hip for so many years, no matter how worn-out it’s gotten, so we keep them and tell ourselves it’s an emergency back-up wallet that we’ll hang on to for a while. I fetched mine from the sock drawer, stuffed it with the salvaged cards and bills, and packed it off to work.

Today’s earworm (the honest-to-god word for a song that gets stuck in your head) was “Black Hole Sun,” a dirge originally recorded by Soundgarden for the mascara-wearing goth crowd but, thanks to the genius of Weird Al Yankovic, rendered as a catchy, hummable tune. Sometimes it takes a goofball to make a song better. I would never listen to “Black Hole Sun” for the pleasure of it unless it was the Weird Al recording, because the Soundgarden version isn’t pleasant at all to anybody, while the Weird Al version is pure fun. I know the whole point of the song is to not be fun, that’s not lost on me, but I can take only so much wallowing in self-pity before I either switch to bubble-gum pop tunes or blow my brains out.

Another great example of re-defining a song was “Satisfaction,” originally recorded by the Rolling Stones as a plaintive wail of sexual frustration and re-recorded by the musical satirists Devo as a critical slam against skewed modern social norms. I still like the original recording by the Stones, but I’d argue it would be hard for anyone to deny that it took Devo’s magical touch to make it a respectable song.

The other day I mentioned a book I found filled with photos and some travelogue about the South African Railway and waxed poetic about their steam locomotives, calling African steamers some of the most beautiful ever built, but I neglected to show you an example. I’d like to take this opportunity to correct my omission.

This photo is courtesy of the web site LiveSteaming.com and illustrates a loco used by the East African Railway. It’s a Class 59 steamer, my very favorite, built by the British company Beyer, Peacock and Co. in Manchester, England and shipped in pieces to East Africa about five years before I was born.

These locos are different from the kind you’re probably used to seeing in two very important ways: First, if you take a moment to look closely, you’ll see there are two locomotives at either end of the boiler, one set of four big driving wheels under the coal-filled tender closest to the camera, and another set under the water-filled tender at the other end. Second, each set of driving wheels swings like a big windshield-wiper blade, sweeping from side to side in front of the boiler and behind as well.

A steam locomotive that is two engines in one is almost magically endowed from the get-go to pull heavy loads up steeply-pitched, tightly-winding track from coastal cities through mountain valleys to high passes into the interior of the continent. These locos are the monster trucks of the railroading world.

But even cooler than that, it simply looks great, doesn’t it? This one’s been given a paint job for its new job pulling tourist excursion trainss that’s much more regal than the fire-engine red it normally wore back when it was in service pulling freight and daily passenger trains, but I think it wears the deep burgundy color so well, and the brasswork has been shined to a gorgeous finish. This is classic Victorian engineering, an elegantly designed solution to a mechanical problem complete with laquer finish and gold-leaf pin-striping.

We remembered to take out the trash again. That’s two weeks in a row.

Friday is only a few hours away and I still don’t know how we’re going to plant a fence in the rain. I promised to fence off My Darling B’s garden so the evil bunnies that menace our neighborhood can’t mow down her seedlings before they have a chance to grow into full-grown veggies bearing fruit, and I promised to make a start on the fence this very weekend, but the forecast has been calling for rain on and off all weekend long. It started raining this very evening. I don’t mind digging a trench around the garden for the fence and two-dozen holes for the posts if I can spread it out over a couple weekeneds, but digging in the mud is miserable work, and digging holes in the mud while it’s raining is not something I’m looking forward to at all.

Even more vexing, I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to rig a remote control to flip the switches on my basement model railroad empire. These are the switches that I got at rock-bottom prices at a recent swap meet and they didn’t come with any kind of remote control the way new ones sometimes do. The nicer ones come without remote controls, believe it or not, so you can have your choice, and the remotes often cost as much as or more than the track switches themselves. I’m not going to buy those unless I can get them for rock-bottom prices, too. I already looked on e-bay. Zip.

There’s an electrical problem I’ll have to solve at the same time to make the switches work that has to do with isolated frogs. I’ll let you roll that around in your head for a while before I launch into a thorough but confusing and utterly esoteric explanation of that.

Tim’s biggest problem this weekend will be finishing Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible Man for a school assignment. To say he hates the book would be like saying there’s a slight problem with sub-prime mortgages. Ellison’s novel is supposedly one of the landmark novels of American literature but I remember feeling about the same way Tim’s feeling when I had to read it for a college class, only I didn’t hate it with the white-hot intensity of a thousand exploding stars, the way he does. I thought it was boring, and that’s about all.

I hate having dreams about work, don’t you? Last night I dreamed I sent that fax that gets you fired.

We put cover sheets on our faxes and there’s a space at the bottom where we can tap out a message to whomever will receive it. In my dream I sent a fax to a guy I knew pretty well, and in that little space I asked him if he had a good time at his birthday party last night and inquired about the status of his personal relationship with his girlfriend, only I used terminology that was a little more, shall we say, naked than that. He called me and we had a good laugh. No harm done, or so I thought.

A short time later I sent a fax to a client who was a lot higher up the corporation’s food chain than my buddy. I got myself into trouble when I didn’t bother editing the cover sheet I printed for it. The cover sheet is a standard form saved to a common computer file and nobody ever saves their old copies, but the computer will auto-save it if you don’t un-check a box somewhere in the “features.” I made another copy without thinking much about it, or even looking very closely at it. I put the papers in the fax machine, dialed the number, watched it go through, took it back to my desk, and it wasn’t until I sat down that the line “Did you get any last night?” jumped off the paper at me and I realized this would probably be my last day at work.

I woke up from a dead sleep with a cold shiver still churning through my stomach. The weird thing is, I did send several inter-office memos (“Did you get the memo?”) with a line I’d added to the cover sheet that got auto-saved. It was nothing as career-ending as the one in the nightmare but still I thought it was pretty amazing I overlooked it.

Every morning I make use of the wonder of the internet to read my favorite comic strips on-line. Seriously, that’s how I start every weekday morning: I fire up my laptop computer, a gadget that would have looked like a cheap movie prop twenty-five years ago, and flip from one web site to another to catch up on the latest two-line gags and four-panel soap operas, and I start at the Comics Curmudgeon, where a guy makes money by making fun of comic strips. For this, I bought and maintain a computer. Weird, no?

Most cartoons are easy to find on web pages maintained by their creators, or on sites run by the syndicates that distribute the strips, but the two that are among my favorites, Bizarro and Zits, weren’t easy to find at all until I discovered the on-line cartoon pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer more or less by accident this past winter. I was so happy to finally satisfy my daily jones for Bizarro that I just about wet myself.

One of the features of the cartoon page in the Seattle PI is a little box in the upper right-hand corner titled “featured galleries” with three tiny pictures linking to a slide show of all the photos they got off the wire that day but couldn’t print in the paper because there are dozens, sometimes hundreds in a single slide show. This morning’s three photos linked to: “star sightings” (candid shots of film stars, pop music singers and other celebrities at ball games, appearing in fund raisers and walking their dogs), stupid pet tricks, and full-length shots of the Miss USA swimsuit competition.

I’m not even going to pretend I didn’t click on that last one, but I am going to make the possibly unbelievable claim that I wish I hadn’t. I hope now that these women have hit the big time, somebody will buy them a sandwich for lunch. Most of them are so gaunt I’ll bet you a doughnut there’s at least one fifteen-year-old boy in drag among the contestants. Take a peek at Miss Illinois and tell me I’m talking out my butt.

Tim did a complete turn-around on his opinion of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man that was so profound he came to my lair at six-thirty this morning to tell me about it.

Since he adamantly hated the book barely twelve hours earlier, I had to ask him what he found in the book to change him opinion so completely.

“I don’t know, it’s just so cool,” he said, not very helpfully. For a kid whose literacy is expanding by a factor of ten every week, he’s remarkably adept at not saying anything sometimes.

If you put a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you what exactly I did today. To say it passed in a blur would be like saying it’s going to sting just a bit when you pass a kidney stone.

Oh, wait! I brought a box full o’ doughnuts in to the office! So I guess I can remember even if you don’t put a gun to my head! (You didn’t, did you?) I popped into Scott’s, the bakery next door, to grab as many cake doughnuts as I could carry back with me and I almost got out the door with them, too, before the biggest guy in the shop stopped me and insisted I pay for them. Bugs me when they do that.

I really didn’t know how many to get because, even though I’ve been working downstairs for about three weeks now, I’m still not sure how many people I work directly with. I counted twelve as I drove in to work, fourteen as I walked up the street and around the corner to Scott’s, and fifteen as I was looking at the doughnuts and mentally superimposing a coworker’s face over each one. In the end I simply asked her to keep stuffing doughnuts into the box she got for them until there wasn’t room for more and she squeezed fourteen in there.

It turned out that was exactly how many I needed. I ate two, and three more lingered in the box past lunch, but they were all gone by the time we closed up at five. “Are you trying to bribe us with sweeties?” Alma asked me, when she first saw the open box of sugar-frosted, sprinkled, glazed and chocolate-smothered doughnuts.

“Would that work?” I wondered aloud. She laughed, but didn’t say yea or nay.

Right in the middle of a freaking busy day at work I got an e-mail from My Darling B inviting me to a pasta dinner at The Fork And Spoon, a small dining room off the RP Pasta factory floor. “How does dinner tonight at RP sound?” she asked, and I shot back, “I don’t remember how it starts, but if you hum a few bars I’m sure it’ll come back to me.” She absolutely refused to respond to my vaudevillian dexterity.

We did stop at the Willy Street neighborhood restaurant for a beer and a giant platter of freshly-made pasta. Their prices have gone up (whose hasn’t?) but the food’s still delicious and there’s always enough left over to take home and warm up for lunch the next day.

At the next table over, a curly-headed toddler was hammering the bejeezus out of the table top with a soup spoon big as a tea saucer. “Wouldn’t you just love to pound on the table like that, if only to see if somebody says something to you?” B wondered, then pulled a face as if she were backtalking a complaining patron. “What? He’s doing it!”

Well, this is it — the weekend! Forty-eight hours of free time! What’ll we do with it?

After the events of the past week what I’d like to do is book a hotel room and lie inert on the bed until Monday morning. Truthfully that would probably drive me up a rubber wall, but as an idea it has a lot of appeal. Here’s one thing I’ll say for my new job: It keeps me on my toes. In my old job I could spend literally all day at my desk, barely moving anything but my fingers on the keyboard and my eyes clicking back and forth from computer monitor to applications and back for eight hours.

That’s just not possible at my new job. I suppose with practice I’ll eventually be able to cut in half the number of times I jump up from behind my desk to help troubleshoot a problem with a concerned customer, fetch a freshly-banded stack of bills from the massively Scrooge McDuck-like money vault, run to my supervisor’s office for the nth time to pester him with an elementary question (example: “Michael! I forgot! What’s two times two?” I can’t imagine how he’s not getting tired of that yet), tear through a stack of boxes that’s taller than me and filled with thousands of bank statements in order to find five or six that were mistakenly printed in Congolese — and that’s just an example of what happens before I take my first break at ten o’clock.

I might possibly learn to wave the magic wand that makes half those problems go away, and then again I might end up like the sorcerer’s apprentice, doubling my problems with each wand-wave. Watch this space.

The very first thing I did when I got up this morning was make a fresh pot o’ java and take a piping hot cup to my basement lair, fire up my laptop and replace “who’s” with “whose” in yesterday’s drivel. “Dude, I’m very flattered that you think I’m all literary and stuff,” Tim came into my room last night to inform me, as I was reading myself to sleep, “but when you say who’s literacy instead of whose literacy it sort of blows your whole point right out of the water.” As egregious as the error was, I couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed right then to bolt downstairs and correct it, but first thing this morning — okay.

After reading the cartoons I spent about a half-hour cleaning out my e-mail inbox, toward the end of which I could hear My Darling B’s dainty little feet pitty-patting across the floor upstairs, so I grabbed my by then empty coffee mug and trotted upstairs to find out if the e-mail she sent me about the breakfast menu at the farmer’s market was a hint that she wanted to go. It was.

So after a relatively quick shower I rolled the O-Mobile out of the garage and, after collecting B and her shopping baskets, we raced into town for a bite to eat and then collect our usual armload of fresh produce, only it was a much smaller armload this week. I don’t know what the story was, but there were many, many fewer farmers at the market. I didn’t see the bee man or the buffalo man, for instance, but the potato guys were there and we picked up a ham steak from one of the other farmers. And that was about it.

Oh, and a couple cookies from the Cress Springs Bakery. They seem to specialize in bread baked in a wood-fired oven and every so often we’ll get a couple loaves to have with dinner, but every week without fail I buy one of their “trail cookies.” Filled with nuts, oats, raisins and chocolate it’s practially a lunch all by itself. B usually gets a ginger snap for Tim, too.

The gal who sells the baked goods is a tiny slip of a thing who can’t weigh more than eighty pounds dripping wet, but I’m pretty sure she could beat the crap out of me if she took a mind to. She probably gets out of bed at about four in the morning to start kneading the forty-two dozen loaves of bread they bake for the market and has muscles like whipcords because of it. Her tank top showed off a brightly-colored tattoo of flames up the bicep of one arm that B was too shy to ask about although she wanted to. I’m guessing it has something to do with the mystical phrase in Sanskrit or Tibetan that circles her opposite arm. Probably an ancient recipe for crusty bread.

On the road back home through the Shenck-Atwood neighborhood I nearly made road kill out of a couple joggers who jumped out in front of our car, and that’s no exaggeration. They were marking time at the corner, I had the green light, there were plenty of other cars cruising along the road around me so it wasn’t like they even saw an opening in traffic, and when I was not five yards from them they stepped off the curb like they wanted to die. I hit the brakes, but if they hadn’t hopped right back up onto the curb I’m pretty sure I would have flattened them.

They had a good laugh about going too soon but B wanted to kill them, an odd reversal as I’m usually the one who blows a gasket at the other drivers, cyclists and pedestrians who are too moronic to go on living, which is most of them. I’ve rarely seen B get so mad. “If I had a gun right now I’d shoot them both,” she said, trying to catch her breath after the cussing stopped, “because they obviously don’t want to live.”

I walked up Monona Drive to The Village Pedaler after we got home to fetch my bicycle from the shop. Eight years I’ve had that bike, it’s never had any work or maintenance done on it until now and all they had to do was clean and lubricate it. They didn’t even replace the brake pads, only adjusted them. I was going to buy a Cannondale instead, but Cannondale had just made the switch from building bikes in the USA to shipping the work overseas, and Trek was still made in America, so I went with the Trek. Awfully glad I did, too, even though you can’t get an American-made Trek any more, either.

I took it for a spin around the neighborhood and it hummed like a top. Bought myself one of those new helmets from the shop, too, the kind that’s all full of holes and looks sort of like a spongy fungus. They’ve all got quick-fit knobs on the back now, so one size truly does fit all. Helmets used to be such a pain to adjust; I remember spending an hour or more futzing with the old one, moving sticky foam pads around inside and playing with the strap forever to get it to fit. All I had to do with the new one was crank the knob until the band was all the way open, plop the helmet on my head and crank it back down until it was snug. Ten seconds, and done! What took them so long to think of that?

The weather was beautiful for a ride so I went all the way up Dean Street to the lake and rode along Tonyawatha, the million-dollar road along the lake front. There can’t be a single house along that road that isn’t worth at least a million dollars. Some of them are just gorgeous, but an awful lot of them are just huge without much style. Their only claim to fame is that they’re on the shore.

After my bike ride I cleaned out the garage, but I didn’t mean to. I went out there to sweep the floor of all the built-up winter road grit and dried mud, but I made the mistake of moving a few things to one side to get at some out-of-the-way dirt and ended up reorganizing most of the things in storage out there. And when I say “reorganize” I’m using the term in the loosest sense. It wasn’t all that organized to start with. At least half the stuff out there was just lying around on the floor, so “reorganizing” started with putting up shelves and drilling holes for hooks. By three o’clock I had a lot more room to move around in there and the floor was swept. Bonus points! Not bad for something I didn’t start out to do, but in the future I think I'll have to try a lot harder to control myself.

Yesterday when I was moving things around in the garage there was one piece of hardware screwed to a crossbeam in the rafters I wanted on the other side of the roof, so I got out my trusty Black & Decker electric drill, chucked a Philips head screwdriver in it, switch the motor in reverse and backed the screws out in short order.

They were drywall screws, long ones, and they were still in good shape so I grabbed each one as it came out in order to used it again. Damn me if the last one didn’t get nicked on the way in and grow a spur. When I grabbed it coming out it cut the bejeezus out of my thumb and forefinger. No blood at first, so I kept right on working, but by the time I drove the last two screws in I was splattering my fingerprints all over the rafters. I figured: Who’s going to care?

Later, while I was cleaning up my hands before bandaging them I realized I could’ve daubed HELP ME and left the hardhats something to puzzle over when they demolish the place in a few decades. It’ll have to wait until next time I do some home improvement without bothering to put on my gloves.

Digging up the old fence around the garden wasn’t as big a pain in the pooper as I thought it would be. When I put it up last summer, I buried the last six inches of it below ground, curled the bottom out and piled stones in the trench before filling the dirt back in, to discourage the bunnies from digging their way under the fence and into the garden. Trouble with that idea was, it also made it pretty damned hard for me to dig my way to the bottom of the fence in order to pull it out of the ground. Not impossible, not even as excrutiatingly difficult as I thought it might be, but no walk in the park, either.

I started at the end that was half-pulled up already, and that turned out to be the hardest to dig up because the ground was littered with sticks and branches and other yard waste that was almost more trouble to dig through than rocks. The secret to speeding it up was to knife the ground along the fence until it was loose, grab a fistful of chicken wire and pull on it until it came up.

I tried the same tactic on the long side of the garden, but no joy. The ground was too wet and there was too much clay mixed in with the black dirt. Barely the first inch of the shovel tip would penetrate, not deep enough to loosen the soil. I could wobble it out, though, levering the handle back and forth until a chunk the size of my fist came up. I slowly made my way along the fenceline that way.

Some of the rocks I found buried down there were the size of month-old human babies! And I had to dig a hole big enough for two babies to crawl through in order to get them out. I don’t remember burying those there, and I won’t do it when I put in the new fence, I can tell you that. If I see any bunnies trying to tunnel in I’ll just pop them with the BB gun and hope My Darling B doesn’t catch me.

I got the old fence pulled up after an hour and a half of work that felt like a full day digging roadside ditches. I’m so out of shape. When I was done I dragged my butt into a hot shower and stood there for half an hour more. And that’s just the first step. Now I have to dig about a dozen post holes and a trench all the way around the newly-expanded garden. I’m trying to think of ways to get Tim to help but I already bought him a car. What do you dangle in front of a teenager that’s better than that?

I spent the afternoon in Fitchburg at the monthly meeting of the South Central Wisconsin Division of the Midwest Region of the National Model Railroad Association. Nice group but they’ve got to work on their name. Most model railroad clubs have a catchy name, like the Cream City Traction Club in Milwaukee, or the Kettle Moraine Ballast Scorchers in West Bend. Now that I look at the list of Wisconsin model railroad clubs, though, I see most of them have names like the Sheboygan Society of Scale Model Railroad Engineers Ltd. I don’t see any Cheese-Eating Choo-Choo Chuffers anywhere. Maybe I ought to found a club.

The SCWDofMRofNMRA meeting opened with the members casting yearly ballots to elect a seven-member board, and since I wasn’t a member I sat quietly by while they took care of business. About five minutes later they were done and Sean stepped up to the podium to demonstrate how fast & easy it was to lay ballast. “How serendipitous,” thought I, “that’s a skill I’ve needed to master and will shortly need as the track-laying stage of my own model railroad nears completion.” My inner monologue sounds like a pompous ass sometimes, but — It Always Speaks The Truth. Then, even more serendipitously, Sean asked for volunteers who had never laid ballast before. I just had to wave my snot-picker in the air.

Ballast is the name for the gravel you see spread between the ties of real track. It drains water away from the ties and holds the track in place. Model railroaders spread fine grit between the rails of their toy train tracks for much the same reasons, although we typically don’t have the rainwater problems the full-size train guys have. Model track is sometimes spiked in place, but a lot of model railroaders just glue it down and adding ballast makes it rock-solid. It also makes it look more like real railroad tracks, for guys who are into that.

Sean had a piece of track glued to a chunk of styrofoam he gave to me and similar chunks he gave to two other guys who volunteered. Then he showed us how to paint the rails, spread ballast between the ties and glue it down, and he was right, it was dead simple and didn’t take long at all. And for the cherry on top, I’m going to be famous! The guy who prints the club’s newsletter snapped photos of us showing off our ballasted track. Watch this space for a link to the photographic record of my handiwork.

After a short break, a musical trio (guitar, drums and of course a harmonica) sang a bunch of railroad songs like City of New Orleans and Wabash Cannonball. Do these guys know how to party, or do they know how to party?

We watched the original Ocean’s Eleven last night, or tried to. Tim gave up after about twenty minutes. B and I gave up five or ten minutes after that. It was probably a hip-bop-a-doo-wop swingin’ time for Rat Pack fans when it was released in 1960, but it’s pretty squaresville now, daddy-o.

After thirty minutes of what boiled down to cameo shots introducing each of the Rat Packers I knew as much about what was going on as I did when the credits first started rolling. Skipping ahead a few chapters I found out the plot was about the same as the remake: Eleven old army buddies planned to knock off five Vegas casinos by knocking out all the electrical power to the city. Frank Sinatra drew their plan on a handkerchief, a sketch of a street with the names of five casinos written along one side and a power line along the other side. That was it. That was their detailed plan. I pretty much had to give up after that.

Oh my freaking god I am so tired. It’s all I can do to lay myself down to a nap.

I’ve been in a sleep deficit since Saturday, I think, when I stayed up late (by which I mean: past ten) doing something pointless and self-destructive, like maybe blogging or reading cartoons on the interwebs, and when I’m abusing myself like that I always keep a cup o’ java close to hand. I don’t know how many times I refilled it but I must’ve gotten a snootful, and although it doesn’t usually keep me awake, every so often it catches up and hammers me hard just to remind me it can. I laid awake in bed staring at the ceiling (or the window blinds, or the cat, whatever) until after one in the morning, and slept fitfully on and off until about six when I finally called it quits, fetched the newspaper from the driveway and sat down to read it through a fog.

So Sunday night I went to bed early, about eight-thirty, and didn’t stay up reading past nine-thirty, happily drifting off to sleep and not rousing until My Darling B crawled under the covers after eleven. Finding not the slightest possibility of nookie, I rolled over and was snoozing again in less than thirty seconds. I’m pretty much a cad that way. I woke again after lights out when a sound like a wrecking ball hitting the house jolted my senses and got up to check it out, but no matter where I looked I couldn’t find any holes in the wall or smoke rising from severed and buring electrical conduits, so I returned to bed and slumber.

I next woke at exactly four, signalled by the bonging of the wall clock and the sound of cats padding across the floor, searching for food. Don’t waste your time thinking they were looking for mice, they’re not that kind of cat. Bonkers will grab a mouse if it gives away its position but Boo would rather suck on the slop in a grotty old soap dish than go after a mouse. Except for the purring and the way she can bend herself in half to perform her toilet with her tongue she’s hardly a cat at all any more.

I don’t know why I woke so early that time. I doubt very much the cats woke me up. They very often do, but they weren’t even trying this morning, it was just their random day to run around and jump on things, starting at four o’clock. Cats do that. Luckily I’ve grown used to it and was able to lightly doze the time away until five-thirty when my alarm clock bleeped, signalling the start of the work week. Oh joy.

Today was a full-court press at work, answering the incessant, pleading phone calls of customers, directing coworkers this way and that (they actually do what I say! As if I were in charge!), and constantly sweeping a self-replicating amoeboid mound of paperwork off my desk (I’d like to do that for real sometime with a big old straw broom; wouldn’t it be dramatic?). Just when I thought it might be too much for me to handle any longer and I’d be reduced to gibbering tears I looked up from my desk and nearly everyone was gone. What the hell? Stepping around the corner to the front desk I saw by the clock that it was five after twelve, lunch hour. If it bonged like the one I’ve got at home I wouldn’t have missed that.

It was too cold outside for me to go walking in my spring jacket but I did it anyway. I went all the way down to Johnson Street and back just because I needed to stretch my legs and get some air, and there was plenty of air to be gotten today. The Merry Little Breezes were touseling my hair into knots, probably because I’ve shamelessly grown it shaggily long these past six or eight weeks, I forget exactly. I think I last got it cut in February. Maybe January. I honestly don’t remember. I’ll have to ask my barber.

I came back with a bottle of fruit juice from the co-op, grabbed my leftover salmon from the fridge in the break room and retreated to the quiet of my upstairs cubicle to eat it. One good thing about having two jobs is that I have a cubicle where nobody from my new department comes looking for me. That’s one good thing. Maybe I’ll think of another good thing before I’ve finished drivelling.

The salmon was good, really hit the spot, and I swigged the rest of the fruit juice as I processed applications for the next hour and a half. I’d let myself get behind and it had become a startlingly tall pile, taller far than a tall man (Raise high the roof beam, carpenters!), but some dedicated keyboard-plinking vanquished my backlog and still I had the wherewithal to work out the quarterly incentive pay. I’m a studly burly man that way.

Real story tangent: I wrote a letter to a customer and wanted to give him a toll-free phone number to call in case he had any more questions. “Katie, do we have an eight-hundred number?” I called over the top of my cubicle wall, and we did: she shouted it back at me. Now, If you call a lot of our eight-hundred numbers you get a phone robot, and if we had one of those I wanted to tell the customer which option to select, so I dialled the number Katie gave me but instead of a recording I got Whitney at the front desk. I could hear her on the phone and over the top of my cubicle. “Sorry, wrong number,” I said, and hung up, then finished my letter. When I went around the front desk to flip the letter in the mail I ran into Whitney, so I said, “That was me. I wanted to see if I’d get a recording when I dialled that number.” For a couple seconds she had the stunned look of somebody who didn’t know what I was talking about, then the nickel dropped. “That didn’t sound like you at all! You sounded all, I dunno, manly-burly.” I’m just a teddy bear in real life, but I’m a macho stud on the phone.

Back to my upstairs job and the work I knocked out in record time: I took Penny a copy of the incentive pay report after it was complete, pulled a chair out from her desk and set my head down on a stack of folders. “Can I just nap her for about fifteen minutes?” “You go right ahead,” she said sympathetically, “I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”

I didn’t really nap. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Instead we traded stories for about ten minutes before I switched hats again and headed back to the cubicle where everybody comes looking for me. There was another truckload of paperwork heaped on top of the ordered piles I had left just a few hours before. The good news, though, was that one of the orderly piles, a stack of computer-generated printouts about an inch thick that I figured I’d have to sort through to find the one that was written in an unbreakable 124-bit cipher, was in fact waste paper I could tip into the shred bin. I came that close to being able to dramatically sweep it off my desk.

The clock bonged five, or it should have if it were a true clock and not some battery-gobbling gizmo, in no time at all. Einstein would’ve loved the relatively fleet hours that make up my day at my new desk. I could have half-slept while I was driving home, the way everybody else does, but we had to make a stop at the store so I had to stay awake to be sure I made the turn. I didn’t get a nap until after dinner and the clean-up. Then I could finally set my head down for twenty minutes and WOW! did I power-nap the holy hell out of my tired brain cells. I wish I could do that at about one in the afternoon, though.

One of the shift supervisors I used to work with told me months later that she used to nap on the job by locking herself in a bathroom stall for fifteen minutes. She’d wedge herself in the corner with her arm propping her head up on a toilet paper dispenser and her wrist watch alarm set. I was pretty mad at her for it, but only because she never told me before and I didn’t think of it myself. It was so simple as to be pure genius.

Playful cartoon bard Kate Beaton (or would it be bardette?) revealed her love of the formless twaddle in George Harrison music videos, prompting a chorus of Harrison-oriented adulation from her regular readers. I like to think I’m one of her regular readers but couldn’t bring myself to join in as Harrison’s music was never my cup of tea. His tunes were infectiously hummable in the same way of grocery-store jingles. I can’t run into the local hardware store without chanting under my breath, “Save big money, you’ll save big money, when you shop Menard’s!” It’s brainwashing, I tell you, and Harrison was as adept as any ad man. Every time I caught myself whistling I’ve Got My Mind Set On You, as I did many times a day with it was on the pop charts and radio stations across America’s Dairyland played it every fifteen minutes, it made me want to blow my brains out rather than continue but was entirely unable to because the damned liberal legislature won’t let us carry, curse them all.

But don’t let Beaton’s irrational passion for a rogue like Harrison turn you away from her delightful cartoons. You wouldn’t want to miss the spectacle of Saint Just returning to Paris to console a distraught Robespierre by pointing out that the reason he has no friends is probably that he won’t stop killing everybody he lays eyes on. Depicting history for the modern eye is her speciality, from exploring the question, Madame de Pompadour, what sort of Lady are you? to pointedly emphasizing the significance of arrows at the battle of Hastings.

If my high school history teacher had been armed with cartoons like these I would have had a much greater interest in the goings-on that shaped the world when I was still a lad and might have spent the intervening twenty years learning more about it instead of joining the military and galavanting around the world. Hmmm. Well, our lives never quite turn out the way we figured they would, do they?

Kate’s blog-like journal of cartoons and self-deprecating monologue is here, and a website she set up just a few weeks ago where she seems to be trying to categorize her cartoons and make them easier to read is here. Have a go.

Wow, it’s so good to be home, I can’t even tell you just how good. There’s quitting time, and then there’s the time a while after you get home, you’ve changed your clothes, you’ve had your feet up relaxing a while and downed a big tumbler filled with brandy or vodka or maybe just some good old unadultrated ether and you’re feeling light and airy as a wisp of steam rising from a hot cuppa joe. It’s a very fluid measurement of time. Sometimes you can be there right away, sometimes it’s so nearly impossible to reach that it would take an infinite number of pint glasses filled to the brim with triple-X moonshine to set you free (but by that time you honestly would’ve gotten there quicker with a blow to the back of the neck with a sledgehammer — and on days like those, don’t think I haven’t wished for a sledgehammer).

What’s that time called? The cliche-monster in me wants to say “Miller Time.” That should make advertising executives everywhere tingle with joy. Only a dope would try to label it, and I am that dope, because I was wondering about it this afternoon as I laid back in our recliner with a snort of red wine in one hand, taking long, deep breaths and trying to think about anything other than loan documents (harder to do than you’d think when that’s been the only thing going through your head all day since eight o’clock).

How’d I manage? So glad you asked. It helps to have a guy like Tim around to tease at the edges of rational thought with questions like “Would you rather be eaten alive by a bear or a pack of wombats? I think a bear would be better because he’s big and would probably kill you right away, but wombats are small so they’d probably have to nibble you to death and it could take forever.” That’s not normally the kind of pondering I deal with minute-by-minute in my working day. Thinking like that pushes me into the deep end of the cesspool where it’s sink or swim, and Tim gives me a very good incentive to swim.

“Oh my god!” My Darling B shouted as she gazed out the window overlooking her garden, bringing me running to her side. I don’t know what I expected to see, exactly, but from the tone in her voice I was disappointed there wasn’t at least a Sasquatch or a flying saucer in our back yard, but there was nothing like that. It was just our empty back yard, soaked by falling rain.

“The garlic has literally grown at least two inches since this morning!” she pointed out. And I believe she may have been right. Even without my glasses I could see a line of reedy, green blurs standing tall against the dark brown earth. Last weekend when I was out there pulling up the fence they were poking about a half-inch from the surface, but today they were obviously at least as tall as my fingers, not that we could go outside to check. A steady rain had been falling all day and was still busy drenching everything in sight. I didn’t want to be one of those things.

The rain’s supposed to continue all through the night and into the rest of the week, and there are even a few forecasts that we’re supposed to get snow as well, if we lived in Superior, which we don’t. I know it’s been a long, weird winter but let’s just forget about snow, okay. It’s not going to snow any more, not around here. You can take it from me. In fact, I’ll personally guarantee that you won’t have to shovel snow again until December. If you do, come knock on my door and I’ll shovel it for you. This offer not good to residents of Superior.

The library sent me an overdue notice today. I keep a lot of books past their due date and pay through the nose for it (and with a nose like mine, that’s a lot of pocket change), but it’s been a coon’s age since the library had to send me a notice to remind me I had books out way past their time. My usual modus operadi is to keep them two or three days over, then renew them or take them back, and keep doing that until I’ve nickeled and dimed myself up to ten dollars, the limit they’ll let a guy go to before they send the storm troopers around to my house. Their Uzis have the biggest, most effective silencers ever fitted to any gun and they’re not afraid to use them, so I pay up right away.

I honestly didn’t know which books the e-mail was referring to. My reading habits have fallen apart pathetically in the last few weeks and if I don’t get my ducks in a row, a single sentence will soon be impossible to read without interruption. But that’s a different story. The library’s got a kick-butt web site where I could log in to find the books I had checked out. One was the collection of Art Spiegelman interviews I’ve had on my bedside for weeks but haven’t touched since and the other was one of those “how to care for your cat” manuals that I think I opened up once after I brought it home and never looked at again. They’re both two weeks overdue. Two weeks! I haven’t kept a book two weeks past its due date since Gutenberg printed the Bible. Lots of typos in that first printing. Pretty obvious, too. They kept distracting me and I had to take it back almost right away.

In the past I’ve had plenty of time to keep a close eye on every book I had checked out, and renewed them as soon as they went over, but being a little short on spare time these days I kept forgetting, and when I finally logged on that dodge was no good with these books. They’re new non-fiction, and that means they have a four-week non-renewable checkout. I was stuck with a fine that was going to keep on growing until I took them back.

I was sort of hoping to make it stop growing today but I’m a little spacy and forget stuff, especially in the morning. Even though I’m in motion and therefore technically animate, I’m never entirely awake until after the sun comes up and even then my sentience is spotty at best. What I have to do is jam the books in my backpack the night before, while I still retain full use of most of my brain cells, or at least the ones that can remember an overdue book. And I have to do that after work, when Tim is asking me questions about being eaten by wombats. You can begin to see why this can become a problem.

I was sitting here using my thumbnail to peel crusty, broken layers of callus off the heel of my foot — my right foot in particular. My left foot doesn’t get callused, for reasons that stymie explanation from the gurus of medical science, bless their darling little hearts for trying. You’d think they’d have more critically important physiological phenomena to study, such as the pathology of cancer or how Keith Richards can possibly get uglier every in each photograph I see of him in the paper. Does he have a team of cosmetic specialists who make him up every day? Are they trying to make him look that awful? Does Keith realize what they’re doing to him, or does his drug-induced unending stupor prevent him from focusing on a mirror? I’m not sure we’ll ever be allowed to know.

The calluses on my right foot repeatedly build up into particularly thick, horny ridges along the back of my heel and the side of my toe. Yes, I meant to use the word “horny.” Yosemite Sam has done the same for years to legendary comic effect and I was hoping to ride on his buckskin coattails. Deal with it.

I have two ways of dealing with these calluses: The first, as I’ve already mentioned, is to wedge a thumbnail into one of the many gaping cracks that split my leathery skin from time to time, then carefully widen the gap until I can get the thumbnail far enough underneath the bony plate to peel the callus off like the rind of an orange. It’s an effective but time-consuming method and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re engaged in a totally mindless activity that takes about an hour, like watching American Idol or plinking at your laptop keyboard trying to think of something to write about, because the skin on the heel of your foot, even when it’s converted to dried-out, broken callus, is a lot more dependably attached to you than a rind is to the flesh of an orange, so working it loose with a thumbnail calls for patience and scads of free time.

Also, this is an effective method only when employed by practitioners with many years of experience, and even then the process can go agonizingly wrong, as in “Does spurting blood indicate a severed vein or artery?” I wouldn’t recommend it for beginners. Find an adept, implore him to take you under his instruction, let him show you his considerable skills informed by decades of experience and honed to a laser-sharp focus. It helps to let him call you “grasshopper” for a few years, too. It’s an investment in time and attention that will pay off handsomely and result in far fewer torn, bloody toes. You won’t regret it.

The second most effective method for removing callus as close to armor plating as mine is to employ industrial grade abrasives. Manually applied, this method works fine, but mechanically energized is far more effective and saves you bunches of time. Tragically, it can also result in toes and knuckles being ground into hamburger so think about exactly what you have to accomplish, how badly you want to get there and how much time you have to recuperate following the worst-case scenario. The first time you try it, make it a Friday night, so you’ll have the whole weekend to change bandages. And whatever you do, on your first time out don’t chuck a sanding drum in your Dremel tool and give it a go. Stick with a buffing disk in something that turns quite a bit more slowly, like a rechargable hand drill or a powered screwdriver. Nevermind how I thought of that. Alcohol may very well have been involved, but that’s as much as I’m going to hint at.

Much more commonly I use a lollypop-shaped slab of birch about a quarter-inch thick, laminated on both sides with pieces of emery cloth, called a “File-A-Foot.” I’m not kidding. My Darling B bought it for me years ago from The Body Shop and since then I’ve abraded enough skin off my right foot to fill in the Grand Canyon. Very effective, and much less likely to result in exsanguination or permanent disfigurement than any tool you have to plug into the wall.

I would’ve gone on about this even longer but I started late and turned in early, then ran up against my morning deadline and had to go back to work, dammit. Maybe more tomorrow.

Thursday: trash day (remembered again!), guy food night (breakfast burritos) and, every other week (this being an “other” week), pay day. The planets align, the stars march across the heavens, bells ring, banners unfurl and brass bands tramp down main street to a rousing John Phillip Sousa march. “It’s a great day to be alive!” All that stuff.

Best of all, when we wake up in the morning it will be Friday, the last day of the working week ... if you’re an office drone, and I just happen to be one. We will drive across town, we will report to our cubicles, we will shuffle copious amounts of papers across our desks until we can turn off our computer monitors, get back into our cars and head home with the broadest of smiles on our faces. I suppose only one of us would technically be able to do that last bit since “broadest” is a superlative, but you get the idea.

One of the papers I get to shuffle across my desk is a tedious exercise in oversight: I have to generate a list of all the changes the rest of my coworkers made to the computer records, then compare my list, line by line, to the work sheets they give me at the end of the day describing those changes. The point of the exercise is to make sure what they think they did was what they actually did.

Every once in a great while I find a descrepency, nothing so critical it’s going to result in catastrophe but significant in its own tiny way, so it truly is necessary but, my god, it’s lethally dull work. I can stick with it for about a half-hour before I get cross-eyed and can’t follow the columns of numbers any longer. If this one little task has a silver lining it’s that everything else in the office is pleasant and rewarding by comparison.

I didn’t get any lunch yesterday, dammit. The stars aligned for everything but that. Oh, hell, it wasn’t the stars’ fault at all, it was mine. I grabbed my tupperware of risoto and took it to my cubile, thinking I’d be left alone while I ate but it’s not that kind of work place. Every time I brought a fork full of deliciously cheese-infused rice to my mouth, the phone would ring, or somebody would bring an urgent problem to my attention, or a club-wielding ogre would have to repelled from the battlements.

And when I say every time, I mean every single time. I came to a lull in the work buzz and settled back into my chair, waiting for the next crisis to pop up, but it didn’t come. I looked at the phone expectantly. Nothing. I prairie-dogged a look up over the top of my cubicle. Nobody moved anywhere in the office. This didn’t feel right. Something had to be wrong somewhere. So I sat back down, pulled my fork from where it was stabbed into the mound of rice, poked free a morsel and prepared to pop it into my mouth.

The phone rang. See?

After almost two hours of that I gave up trying to finish eating it and I doubt I’ll ever make the mistake of taking my lunch back to my cubicle again. I’ll probably take it all the way down to the end of State Street and eat it on the library mall from now on.

Another small success: Even though it wasn’t raining this morning, something told me to grab my umbrella from the back of the car yesterday, and a good thing, too, because it was soon raining cats and dogs and other small, domesticated animals, and it didn’t quit until late into the night. According to the voices on the radio the weather brought blizzards to northern Wisconsin, which struck fear into the heart of My Darling B, but all we got was buckets of rain, whipped around by wind fierce enough to lift the skirts of the Jolly Green Giant. Wow, there’s a mental image I won’t be able to get out of my head all day.

Snow. I looked up from the morning paper to see a flurry of snow flying outside the front window. What a revolting development this is.

The doorbell rang at nine o’clock this morning.

To emphasize how unusual this is, the only people who have ever rung our doorbell so far fall into just three groups: teenagers selling stuff door-to-door (subscriptions to magazines I’ve never heard of, candidates for public office, eternal salvation of our immortal souls, and so on), contractors making service calls, and members of our own family, including us. Especially us, now that I think of it. We can be clumsy about locking ourselves out of the house.

None of those groups, to my knowledge, has used our doorbell at nine o’clock in the morning, and on this morning in particular two-thirds of the O-family were still in bed (more on that in a minute), making it that much more unusual. I trotted up the stairs from the basement to open the front door and find a young man uniformed in the dark green livery of a local lawn care company. His baseball cap identified him as Weed Man. In the moment before he greeted me I reflected on how desperate I’d have to be to walk around in public dressed like that.

“Tim?” he asked.

I cocked an eyebrow at him and answered, “No,” wondering how Weed Man knew Tim and if he did, how he could mistake me for my youngest son.

My reply confused him enough to make him look at the house number. Confirming for himself that he was apparently where he meant to be, he paused for half a beat more, then asked hopefully, “Is Tim home?”

“He is,” I told him with a chuckle, “but he’s still in bed. Can I help you?”

That perked him up. “I’m here to do Tim’s free lawn care estimate.”

I had to laugh at him now. Very rude, but I couldn’t help it. “Tim’s free estimate?”

That gave Weed Man pause again. He clearly didn’t realize what was going on here. “Yes?”

“Tim’s my son,” I said, trying to explain my levity a bit. “I don’t know how you got his name.”

The light came on for him and he nodded, understanding. “We’ve got a lot of door-knockers going around this neighborhood,” he explained. “He must’ve said ‘yes’ to a free estimate.” Weed Man glanced around at our lawn. “As long as I’m here I could do one for you.”

I shook my head, still smiling. “No, thanks.” Points for trying, though. Tim said he had indeed said yes to a “door-knocker” severan weeks ago just to get the guy to shut up and go away.

[POST SCRIPT: Tim told me he did in fact tell a “door-knocker” that he wanted a free lawn care estimate because it seemed to be the quickest way to make the guy shut up and go away. As it turned out to be, until Weed Man returned this morning, but that was almost fun.]

It was not possible for me to drivel last night because there were just two ways I could think of for me to stay awake after we returned from a party at the Essen Haus in beautiful downtown Madison. I could have asked Tim to give me a big old slap across the face with a frozen carp every time I dozed off, which he would very probably have agreed to do but which would have also probably made it difficult to concentrate on piecing together even one sentence. Alternatively, I hear there are some dangerous pharmaceuticals that will do the trick, too, but again I think I’d have trouble composing a thought while hallucinations of electric-pink elephants chased me around the room. I was much happier slumping in my chair and falling into a stupor, even while Tim was laughing at my condition.

Which wasn’t my fault, let the record show. I drank just two pints of beer in six hours last night. There’s no way that should have put me under the table. I asked the bartender for a dark beer and he recommended a brew called Optimator, which tasted pretty good at the time. Little did I know it was some exotic form of toxic waste. Six hours later I was having a lot of trouble keeping my eyes open, and when I woke up early the next morning I had a hangover like an elephant standing on my head, something I haven’t had in years — something I’ve taken great pains to avoid, as a matter of fact. Yes, I know that if I were serious about avoiding hangovers I wouldn’t have been drinking at all. Makes perfect sense in theory, but in practice I can’t turn down a foamy mug of well-brewed beer. I’ll never touch that Optimator crap again, though. There are plenty of beers out there I can quaff without feeling as though I’ve been run over by a truck, a quality I value very highly in the beverages I choose.

My Poor Darling B fared just a bit worse than I did, unfortunately. She brought me along to this retirement party for her boss at the Essen Haus and enjoyed herself slightly more, ordering a pint of Optimator after tasting mine and having a few gulps from a big plastic boot that held two liters and got passed around after everyone was sort of lit already. Luckily, it was the only drinking game they played because when she woke up this morning she felt as if she’d been run over by a truck that braked to a squealing halt, backed up over her, then ran over her again before speeding off with its air horns blaring. She could still hear those horns in her head this morning, poor dear.

When My Darling B was finally well enough to travel yesterday I took her to Emian’s for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. She had the cheese panini with a salad on the side; I had a good old American-as-apple-pie ham sandwich. “A whole one, or just a half?” the girl at the counter asked.

“Uh, how big is a whole one?” I asked, wondering if I should be expecting a monster sandwich big enough to feed a regiment of the Chinese Army.

“It’s made from one of those,” she said, pointing to the freshly-made whole-loaf bread on display in racks behind me.

“What, the whole loaf?” I sputtered, and B laughed at me.

“She means it’s made of slices from a loaf like that, dear,” B clarified, still giggling. Okay, I’ve never seen a hoagie quite as large as a whole loaf of bread, but I still had a monster sandwich in mind.

With that cleared up I ordered a whole sandwich. She brought me a monster that would have made Dagwood’s eyes bug out of his head on springs under a BOING! — just like that, in capital letters. Each slice was an inch thick, and they didn’t skimp on the innards: plenty of fresh greens, thick slices of fresh cucumber and just the right amount of mayo. A guy with a beard learns to avoid the places where they make a drippy sandwich.

B made lots of yummy sounds over her cheese panini but her tummy was still feeling just the tiniest bit delicate so she saved the salad and got a box to take it home for supper, slipping half of my sandwich in there, too.

Even though it was sunny outside today and warm, relative to yesterday’s bone-chilling rain showers, I spent most of the day in the pretty darned cold basement dorking around with a very slowly emerging model railroad. Last Friday was pay day and Saturday morning found me at the only model railroad hobby shop in Madison; it’s on the far west side of town, wouldn’t you know it, but luckily easy to get to if traffic on the Beltline isn’t too crazy. I set aside a double sawbuck last pay day and with that and matching funds from this pay day I was able to buy enough track to finish the commissary yard and some cork roadbed to extend the terminal yard through the switches. (If all this is gibberish to you, maybe a visual would be quicker and easier to make sense of.)

So with that and a bottle of glue I was able to make quite a bit more progress. It’s even starting to look like choo-choos might run on it some day, and in fact I did manage to jerry-rig some spare wire with alligator clips so I could connect a power pack to one set of rails and make a steamer run back and forth. It didn’t go far, but I love to watch those steamers go.

Several months ago my mother suggested I get a “hit counter” for my web page so I could find out who visited and how often, but I thought I already knew my audience (three family members and a guy I met on a road trip to California) and couldn’t be bothered to go to the trouble of searching for a web widget only to confirm that my readers were few.

My brother Pete loves to play with web widgets, though. His latest is something called a “twitter” and it seems to be breaking news from his inner monologue that ticks along in a sidebar on his blog. He tipped me to a hit counter called “feejit” that displayed the wheres and whens on a google-like map of the world.

So I gave it a try and it turned out I was almost right about my audience. There are a couple odd hits from places I might know somebody, like Annapolis (and a big How Joe Bye Jen goes out to Al at this point), and a couple even odder hits from places like Nova Scotia where I can’t imagine how I know anybody there. I can only assume they linked to my page by accident while they were searching for something else.

And then there was yesterday, when a glance at the map showed me a couple dozen little pips all over the map, quite a few of them outside the country. I figured the hit counter was broken, but they were all still there this morning, plus a few more. Unfortunately, the hit counter only shows where they came from, not what they were looking at, so I don’t have the slightest idea why all these people should suddenly be interested in reading my drivel. Was it the beer drinking? Was it the hangover? How’s that attract anybody’s attention in South America? I’ll probably never know.

Before he got his grump on as a preternaturally intelligent though belligerent doctor, Hugh Laurie used to make comedies with Stephen Fry — not exclusively, but they were so good at it they did it a lot. I used to love watching them work in the Blackadder series (everyone thinks of that as a Rowen Atkinson show, and he was very good, but Laurie and Fry were as good or better) and for whatever reason felt a sudden jones this weekend to watch them at work together again.

I’ve read P.G. Wodehouse before but I’ve never seen the adaptation that Laurie and Fry collaborated in with British script writer Clive Exton, so I stopped at Bongo Video to see if they had it but, lucky for me, they didn’t. Lucky because the Monona Library did, and those disks are free, not that I mind supporting a local business like Bongo Video but I was able to check out four disks from the library and I can keep them for weeks, watching at my leisure until I’ve inevitably kept them past their due date and the fines make them cost more than a rental at Bongo Video. I admit they’re not quite such a lucky find by the time they get to that last part as they were at first, but I’m short-sighted after all.

Not that I waited to watch them. I popped the first disk in right away and before I knew what I’d done I finished off the first five one-hour episodes, the whole first season. Cracking good stuff.

What do I do when I get home after a long day’s work in the salt mines? Well, nine times out of ten all the smart money would be on “plant my ass on the sofa and read a book until My Darling B announces it’s time for dinner,” but this week that would be a sure way to lose all your bets. Longer daylight hours, warmer weather and a ravenous crop of bunnies have all coalescend into an all-week push to get the garden fence in before everything that’s sprouting gets nibbled down to the roots.

There’s just one crop we’re worried about, actually. The garlic that B planted last fall has popped up beautifully after the winter and grown several inches already, but something (and we’re not necessarily blaming the bunnies, here; the squirrels have been a perfect pack of vandals themselves) has been at them already and B is absolutely frantic to get some galvanized steel between them and her sprouts.

To that end, we changed straight into work clothes after our arrival home from work, after a quick stop at the big-box hardware store to buy a post-hole digger and a pick axe. (Oh, and a shuffle hoe. It was on sale. Can’t pass up a sale.) I took the post hole digger and a pair of leather gloves out back right away and started sinking a hole in the near corner of the garden; B joined me just five or ten minutes later to lay out the boundaries and measure off the rest of the holes for the fence posts.

We had about an hour’s useful daylight to work in. At this time of year, that means “until the sun goes down” when the temp drops off sharply, not that I wasn’t doing plenty to keep myself warm. The post hole digger was well worth the money we spent on it, but it doesn’t go through a layer of river rocks any better than the cheapest spade in the garage, just what I was forced to get down on my knees and use after I cut through the top two inches of sod. The rocks underneath, some as big as a newborn baby, had to be painstakingly dug out before I could get back on my feet to use the post hole digger again.

Make that “painfully.” I had one of them caught on the tip of my shovel and was heaving away, pulling on the handle to lever it out of there when it suddenly gave, leaving the handle of the shovel suddenly free to klung me upside the head. If I’d been starring in a Three Stooges short, that’s the point where I’d jump back, tremble with rage and deliver the line, “Why, I oughta ...” It happened while I was digging the last hole of the night, though. All I could do was rub the side of my head until the throbbing died down a bit, then set to work again.

In an hour I managed to sink seven holes, each two feet deep, before I ran out of steam and daylight and had to pack it in. Tomorrow we’ll stop at the big box again to bring home some posts. I wasn’t thinking of the consequences of leaving seven gaping holes deep enough to break a man’s leg off at the knee when we stopped there tonight or I would’ve bought them then. Here’s hoping that nobody traipses through our yard while we’re away at work today.

(Tim wasn’t the least bit interested in helping us out even though I bought a pick axe to dig the trench that the bottom six inches of the fence will be buried in. I figured he couldn’t wait to get his hands on a hole-digging, long-handled, wrought-iron PICK AXE. Boy, was I wrong about that. Couldn’t have possibly been less enthusiastic about gashing holes in Mother Earth, no matter if the garden implement looked like a weapon of war that could take down Death himself. Lesson learned.)

After seeing the damage they did to the garlic she nursed so carefully, B decreed that the bunnies are now fair game: we may plink away at them with the BB gun as much as we like, cold-blooded enforcement that was off-limits last season even while they were eating her corn stalks down to impotent little nubs, though we offered to help by teaching the little lettuce-lovers a thing or two about Pavlovian conditioning. A BB in the backside when you’re in the garden ought to do the trick.

“But you can only scare them with it,” she caveatted her new edict. “Don’t injure them in any way.” Oh, sure, take all the fun out of it. What if we just wing them in the ears?

I had only enough time to sink six post holes in the garden tonight before the dinner bell rang, but at least they had posts in them, so if you’re stumbling through our yard in the middle of the night tonight you won’t fall into a knee-deep hole and break your leg off at the knee. Instead, you’ll walk into a crotch-high wooden post. Yes kiddo, we stopped at the big box hardware store and bought a mess of ten-foot-long 4 x 4 posts and got them at the awesome sale price of eight dollars, twenty-four cents, marked down from an astronomically high eight dollars, fifty-seven cents! The brain-numbing jingle is true: You’ll save big money at Menard’s ... thirty-three cents at a time.

The obvious problem with buying ten-foot-long posts is that you have to get them home. Obvious to people like you, that is. I try not to think about such trivia until I’m cramming them in through the trunk of the car and My Darling B is saying things like, “I don’t know, dear, are you going to be able to get them all in there?” And that’s when I have to say, “Nothing to it, honey,” because reversing our purchase at that point would require us to go back into the store and waste the rest of the night fussing over a refund at the customer service desk. I had post holes to dig and fence posts to plant! There had to be a way to get all ten fence posts into the back of the car! There’s always a way!

And indeed there was. I got eight in a row across the seat, then backed two of them far enough out to tip them up and make room to piggy-back two more on top. They stuck out of the bungeed-down trunk lid far enough to rig a jib sail, but it was a short trip home, mostly on residential roads with very little traffic. If I sideswiped anybody’s car with a swinging fence post it would have to happen on Monona Drive, but luckily I had to go no more than a hundred yards or so along that. I have to admit that, given our talent for meeting up with bad luck, I figured we’d have a story to tell but we made it all the way home without caving in anybody’s fender. Sorry.

I bought ten-foot fence posts because they were the perfect length to cut in half: I wanted to bury about two feet and leave enough for a three-foot-high fence around the garden. At ten feet long they were even easier to get home, believe it or not. There’s no way I could have possibly loaded twenty five-foot posts into the car, but ten ten-footers, yeah, easy. In this state it’s legal to drive around with almost anything hanging out of your trunk so long as you’ve got a red “danger flag” flapping in the breeze behind you to warn tailgating drivers that a fence post is headed straight for them if I step on the gas a little too energetically.

At home we carried the posts around to the back and I sawed them all in half with my big honking circular saw (powered entirely by raw testosterone) in about five minutes. Then the digging began. With all the diddling around at the store we didn’t have as much time left before dinner tonight, and still I managed to sink six holes around the side and back of the garden. Seven, if you count the one I had to move over six inches on account of the monster freaking river rock I hit after about a foot and half of digging. I uncovered a whole side of it as big as my hairy bum and it showed all the signs of getting bigger, so I took half a step to the left and started over. But if you look at my back yard you only see six more fence posts, so as much as I’d like to say it was seven more I feel like it’s cheating to say so.

Dinner was Burritos as big as your head! from La Bamba’s, right down the street. The “regular” size is big enough for me to cut in half, eat one half for supper and have the other cold for lunch tomorrow. I’ve never tried the “big as your head” size because the leftovers would spoil before I could finish it all, and that’s after I send half of it away to a charity. I think Sean tried the big-as-your-head size when he was here and, if he did, I’m sure he finished it off, but that’s apples and oranges. Nobody here can finish off a large. (Yeah, that’s right! I’m calling you out, Timeh!)

Post holes! Post holes! Post holes! It’s the third night in a row I’ve dug post holes, but this will not be the third night in a row I’ll drivel about them. I can be merciful. I figure I’ve said all that needs to be said on the subject, although I would like to mention that Tim pitched in to help his mother plant all ten fence posts firmly in the ground. Those fence posts aren’t going anywhere. They are well and truly tamped solidily in good old terra firma. They do stand in a wandering line, though. Not by any stretch of the imagination are they in a straight row. Tim said it best when he eyed them and declared, “Gives them character.”

So for about an hour or so after work I dug post holes while Tim and My Darling B filled them in again. An hour was about all I was good for tonight. I was going to blather about the suddenly very snotty nose I’ve been suffering with all day long, apparently the result of an allergic reaction that I wasn’t aware I had. When it’s clear, it’s allergic, and when it’s yellow it’s from a cold, right? I think that’s how I remember it. I’d love to tell you more in luridly squishy detail. However, after the revulsion expressed by various camps regarding my essay on callus and its removal from my right foot, I think I’ll steer clear of describing my secretions and accretions, for a while, anyway.

When we were done working in the yard we ordered out for pizza, B’s treat. I phoned Angelo’s right down the road to order and, just as I was about to say it, the name of their oh-so-yummy meat-lover’s pizza we love so much disappeared utterly from my memory. “Is it the King Ralph?” the guy on the other end suggested helpfully. He didn’t really say “King Ralph,” I made that up because my memory’s so lousy I forgot what he did say, but it was about as weird as that.

I knew the pizza we wanted wasn’t called whatever he pitched at me. “No, that’s not it,” I mumbled, still trying to remember.

Tim and B were tossing names back and forth, and the guy on the phone offered, “I could read the menu and you could stop me if you recognized the one you’re trying to think of,” but my brains were so gummed up at that point I could hardly talk to anybody. Good thing I was the fellah with the phone, eh?

“Porky’s Pride!” Tim blurted without warning from across the room, and I echoed him down the phone line. Yep, the pizza guy said, that was one of theirs. We ordered the large and ate all but two slices, saved for lunch the next day.

Sorry, but I had to cut this entry short. The allergy really did beat my butt so badly that I had to gulp some Benadryl and go to bed early, but if there’s one good thing to decongestant drugs and lots of yard work it’s that I slept like a baby.

We forgot the trash this morning. We managed to remember it — what, three weeks in a row? I guess that’s pretty good, but I’m not going to brag about it.

I think B remembered last night that we had to take the trash out in the morning, but by sunrise none of us remembered. Then, as soon as I got to work, with nothing familiar to jog my memory at all, it came back to me. How’s that for timely? I called and left a message for Tim on our answering machine, but I was too late. He had already left for school, so the garbage can was left uncollected in the garage.

It’s not too bad to let it go a week yet. In the summer when the heat’s really brutal, that’s when missing a week gets really scary.

There was nothing particularly that reminded me that today was trash day. I knew it was Thursday from the minute my brain began firing on all cylinders this morning, but Thursday didn’t mean anything special to me at all until I sat down as my desk and began typing my login at my computer, and even then I can’t recall anything I did that made me think of garbage especially. It popped into my head almost of its own accord, as if it were a thought with a life of its own.

What can you do when your own memory betrays you like that? Not much. I called Tim at home, hoping to catch him before he left for school. Sometimes that works, but today I missed him by minutes and he was gone by the time I made that call. It could’ve been such a good save. Too bad.

I don’t think My Darling B remembered until we pulled into the garage that evening. I thought about shooting her an e-mail right after I phone Tim, but why make the poor woman suffer, right? So I passed that up and let her go through the whole day not knowing. She said something about the trash pickup as we walked through the garage on our way to the back door to face another evening of post hole digging!

We’re done digging post holes, so no worries that I’m going on about them. We even planted all the posts in their holes. The only thing left is to dig a trench all the way around the garden so we can staple the chicken wire to the posts with a couple inches of the bottom of the fence below ground, to keep the bunnies out, and B got a good start at the trench with the pick axe tonight as I finished digging the last of the holes. She’s pretty handy with a pick axe, by the way. Don’t mess with her if there’s any mining equipment laying about.

It’s another pretty short, awfully flat drivel because I’ve got a bad case of balloon head from popping Benadryl. If it wasn’t for over the counter drugs, all the gooshy stuff in my head would leak out my nose and I’d spend all day emptying a box of Kleenex. All I can say about that is, thank goodness for Benadryl or I wouldn’t be able to go out in public until this allergy/infection/whatever goes away.

If there’s one thing I hate about Benadryl, though, it’s the way the back of my throat dries up and itches so much I want to reach back there and scratch it with a Brillo pad. A nagging cough seems like a fair trade-off for a dried-up sinus, though. I’ll take it.

So my runny nose, it turned out, was the onset of a brain-eating head cold, and not an allergy after all. In case you were wondering.

I thought the scratchy throat I had yesterday and the day before was a side effect of popping generic antihistemines to get me through a dribble-free working day, but by Friday afternoon there were three other people in the office who were complaining of the same raspy throat, itchy, dribbling nose and underwater ears I was suffering. Coincidence? I had my doubts.

More significantly, and not unnaturally, my coworkers had their doubts, too. By Monday morning I’m pretty sure I’m going to be the guy who got them all sick for the weekend. It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.

It was pouring down rain last night so we weren’t digging in the yard. I sat up with a book for about an hour after supper but that was about as long as I could keep my eyes open, so I climbed into bed (took my book with me) at about eight-thirty and turned the lights out by nine. And I didn’t get out of bed again until nine o’clock this morning. Without the thudding pain I have between my ears, that could be construed as being just plain lazy. Maybe I am just plain lazy and the headaches, runny nose and scratchy throat are just my deluded way of convincing myself that I’m not! Good heavens, I’m a psychosomatic conundrum!

I’ll give Alan Lightman this much: the man can write poetry, no doubt about it.

On the corner of Kramgasse and Theaterplatz there is a small outdoor cafe with six blue tables and a row of blue petunias in the chef’s window box, and from this cafe one can see and hear the whole of Berne. People drift through the arcades on Kramgasse, talking and stopping to buy linen or wristwatches or cinnamon; a group of eight-year-old boys, let out for morning recess from the grammar school on Kochergasse, follow their teacher in single file through the streets to the banks of the Aare; smoke rises lazily from a mill just above the river; water gurgles from the spouts of the Zahringer Fountain; the giant clock tower on Kramgasse strikes the quarter hour.

Quite clearly, Lightman has been to Berne and loves it with all his heart. It’s obvious in every description he makes of its streets, its shops, its people, that his love gives him an exceptional aptitude for choosing just the right words to paint these vivid pictures.

And yet, when Lightman changes tack to use these pictures to describe the flights of fancy that lead Einstein to compose his relativisitic theories of time, he loses me. I can’t imagine, for instance, how a people who have no sense for imaging the future should be able to sink into reveries of their past. Lightman proposes that, because these people can’t foresee what might happen, they act without regard for the consequences of their actions, yet if they remember the outcome of the acts they’ve already committed, surely they should be able to link cause and effect, action and consequence? I’m baffled.

Maybe it’ll all be wrapped up in the final chapter. I’ve still got at least a dozen chapters to go until then, so I can’t tell if he’s leading up to something or it’s all just for show. In the meantime, the descriptions sure are pretty, and the chapters are short. Einstein’s Dreams is an idea book to read in the bathroom.

So tired. Have I said that already? I feel like I’ve said that already. I know I have, over and over again, all day long.

Today was the day we planned to put up the bunny-proof fence around My Darling B’s garden. We came damned close to finishing it, too, but with only forty or so feet left, I ran out of steam and begged B to stop for the day, promising that we’d be able to finish it tomorrow.

A bunny-proof fence is at least three feet high and the bottom six inches are below ground level, to discourage the little lettuce-munchers from burrowing under. We bought a one-hundred fifty foot roll of forty-eight inch wide chicken wire, planted fence posts about six feet apart and dug a trench four to six inches deep around the whole freaking garden. Tim did quite a bit of the trench work, involving a lot of hatcheting where roots got in the way and pickaxing through clusters of rocks, to say nothing of copious amounts of cussing and at least a dozen pint bottles of water. We couldn’t have gotten as far as we did without him.

But around three sides of the garden was as far as we got. We started at about nine-thirty this morning, right after B delivered on her promise to run down to Emian's bakery and bring back pasteries for everybody. I got a monstrous morning bun, a pastery so large it’s almost indecent for just one person to eat the whole thing. Eating it took so long that I managed to read the A section, the Week In Review, and the Book Review sections of The New York Times.

But that was as long as I dared to dawdle, and soon after changing into my yard work clothes I was bent over a piece of lumber, sawing it to length for a sill for the front gate. The garden has a front and a back gate so our neighbor, Marge, can come in from her side of the yard. They talk gardening quite a lot over the course of the summer. To make the gates bunny-proof, I toenailed a sill wrapped in chicken wire between the posts, leaving plenty of chicken wire hanging into the trench under the sill. I’ll shake the paw of any bunny who can get through that.

Except for a long break for lunch (a thick ham sandwich) and two or three shorter breaks to guzzle gallons of water, we were pretty much constantly trenching around the garden and stapling up chicken wire until about four-thirty when I begged B to stop. It looks like a rather modestly-sized garden until you have to dig a ditch around it. Then it looks big enough to hold a demolition derby.

The back side of the garden is where I left a lot of stumps from the brush that used to grow there. One of them was right in line with the trench Tim dug in the far corner, and it just about did him in. Damned near did me in, too. I figured it would be well and truly rotten by now, pretty easy to pull out, but the furshlugginer thing was so waterlogged it twanged like a rubber band every time I hit it with the hatchet. I finally dragged one of the pancake-sized river rocks over to the trench, shoved it under the roots that held it in place and hacked away like an axe murderer until I could snap it off with a twist of my wrist. And then I collapsed into a pile as limp as a dish of spaghetti. Shortly after that, I started begging.

But we had some cleaning up to do, piles of dirt around the fence that B didn’t want left on the lawn overnight. It was all in clumps and clods and most of it had to be dragged over to the trench by hand and shoved in place and I dreaded it, but after a short break it really wasn’t so bad, especially since it was the last thing we did and I could look forward to grilled steaks and baked potatoes for supper. B even promised to run out for a six-pack, and if you know anything at all about me by now you know I’ll dance a polka on the rooftop in my skivvies for a bottle of beer. That wasn’t a visual you wanted stuck in your brain right now, I know, but the truth isn’t always pretty.

So the bunny-proof fence is not quite complete, unfortunately, but I promised it would take just another night of work to finish it off, an easy promise to make as I know B won’t let another night pass without a fence around her backyard plot to protect the seedlings she’s so lovingly tended in the basement these past weeks. Unless I’m mistaken, I think you can see very recent photos of those seedlings, and even the bunny-proof fence, on her blog.

After Tim finished digging our trench around the garden, I returned the favor by helping him do a little bodywork on his car. It was a good trade. Unfortunately, my idea, to sweat a piece of strap iron to the wheel well where a crucial piece of the body had rusted away, didn’t work as well as I thought it might when the solder wouldn’t be drawn into the gap between the two pieces of metal.

Lucky for us our neighbor, Harley, came over just then to see what we were doing and suggested a brass tab, bent in the shape of an L, might just do the trick, and after a little jiggering and gentle shaping with a hammer and anvil, it did. Then Tim slapped a layer of Bondo over the gap where he had ground down and sanded the rust away, and after it hardened he did a little more sanding to shape it. And darned if it doesn’t look pretty good! The tab was completely concealed under the Bondo, and it held the bumper cover in place as if it was made for the job. Like we knew what we were doing!

A long day’s work made me ready to hit the hay with a great big thud, but when I did it, at nine-thirty, no staying up to read a book and no chit-chat with the wife unit, I found that I was absolutely unable to fall asleep.

At first I thought it might be B’s reading lamp keeping me awake, but she switched it off shortly and the comforting dark didn’t do anything at all to make me drowsy. Then I thought it might be all the noise. Tim was washing his clothes until about eleven o’clock and the wash machine’s in an alcove just off the dining room, makes a lot of noise and was going full blast for more than an hour. I got up and sat on the sofa reading until the wash machine was done, then read another twenty minutes or so before going back to bed, just to make sure.

No joy. Just laid there, wide awake. Once or twice I began to slip into that bizarre dream-like stream of consciousness where you see things lucidly, as though they were happing to you, and they were so bizarre I realized they must be dreams, but as soon as I got excited about falling asleep I was wide awake again, laying there in the dark, counting the bongs of the wall clock as each half-hour went by. I’m pretty sure I can say there can’t be a more sure-fire way to fan the flames of frustration. At one o’clock I got up again to putter around on the interwebs, hoping maybe I could find something really boring there, or if I couldn’t find it I could post it. And here it is.

Nothing in particular reminded me of it, but I got a craving to see Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder and found it at Bongo Video yesterday afternoon, so I brought it home. B likes the movie but didn’t want to watch because she’s “seen it forty-two times.” Forty-two is sort of the magic number around here. More than that and it’s a quantum leap into gajillions.

Tim wouldn’t watch because, in his very erudite opinion, “it sucks.” I asked him to be a little more precise, but he declined.

I don’t get how it sucks at all. Robert Cummings’s performance wasn’t especially good, but everybody else did a fantastic job. Ray Milland made for a deliciously evil bad guy; he could believably say the most reprehensible things with a smile, a voice smooth as honey and a happy twinkle in his eye. The rest of the cast played their parts wonderfully, too; it’s always a pleasure to watch Grace Kelly strut her stuff in technicolor.

The set-up for the crime was expertly paced, and the way Hitchcock wrapped up the ending, with the police inspector tricking Milland into giving himself away, just as it looked as though he was about to get away with everything, was beautifully done. I ought to own a copy of this movie, but for some reason I’ve put it off over and over again.

Empire of the Bay is one freaking long book, going on for eight hundred pages about fur trading in the remotest parts of Canada over a period of four hundred years. Sounds dreadful, right?

And yet I like it. Maybe I’m warped, or maybe it’s a new-found interest in a part of history I never realized was out there before, but the whole of Canadian history appears to start with the founding of the Hudson Bay Company, an astonishingly small band of entrepeneurs who set out in the early seventeenth century to monopolize the fur-bearing wealth of the North American continent, and damned near did it, too, for the larger part of the company’s existence.

The HBC, it turns out, is still doing business today, although they’ve strayed somewhat from the business of trading for furs.

I put in a request for The Portable Atheist about forty-two dozen weeks ago and had all but forgotten I’d asked for it when I got an e-mail notification from the central branch of the library that it was waiting for me.

Hmmmm. Was I still in the curious frame of mind I felt when I asked for it all those eons ago? It’s a thick book, and I’m already into a thick book, and it’s not exactly a book you read from cover to cover but more of a bathroom book to be read when you have ten minutes here, a half-hour there, and I’m already reading a bathroom book. How can there be so many considerations to weigh when deciding whether or not to pick up a book from the library?

I picked it up, of course. I asked for it, I should at least take a look. It’s a bright yellow paperback so thick you could use it as an emergency back-up sofa leg. Tom Clancy only wishes he could write books this thick. Of course, Christopher Hitchens didn’t write it all his darned self, he only assembled and edited these essays from dozens of noted atheists and agnostics. I’m not sure I could ever read all of them, particularly not the ones that put me to sleep. Lamentably, my favorite atheist, Douglas Adams, isn’t featured (although he makes a cameo in an essay by Richard Dawkins, who he was apparently a fan of), a shame because he was one of the wittiest writers I’ve ever read, as well as one hell of a lot easier to read than David Hume.

I’m not sure why I’ve been reading atheistic tracts, other than to find out if there’s any more reason to pay attention to them than there is to the various religious texts I’ve pondered over the years. With the new books from Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris hitting the best-seller list the past few years, could it be that they have something new and interesting to say? So far the answer is, no, not really. I’d wondered if they’d thought of anything I hadn’t already thought of and as it turns out they hadn’t, not that I can tell. And this latest compendium of writings is like a catalogue of all the puzzling contradictions and logical conundrums that made me a questioner some thirty years ago, only they stretch back to the age of Lucretius. My questions appear to be the same as made Hobbes throw up his hands and ask, “WTF?”

I hurry to add that I’m not trying to class my intellect on the same plane with Hobbes’s. I can scarcely read more than a paragraph of Hobbes before my head explodes, or feel as though it wants to, same as when I try to read nearly anything William F. Buckley wrote. Maybe neither one of them was any smarter than me, but they sure could write as if they were.

What I mean is, when it comes down to it, the question is really very basic, isn’t it? If there’s a god, how do you know? And even a book as thick as The Portable Atheist ultimately fails to provide a convincing argument one way or another, although admittedly the writers in that volume are trying a lot harder to tip the argument the one way rather than the other. And I’m not just trying to be nocomittal when I say that; I mean to say, I’ve thought these thoughts already and, rather than feel kinship or enlightment or even a sense of relief at seeing that other people have the same questions, it’s sort of dull and boring to read them over and over and over. Douglas Adams would’ve made the questions at least interesting, but he’s gone and life’s poorer for his loss.

And of course I felt like death warmed over this morning.

“Death warmed over.” Now there’s a metaphor I don’t get. I mean, I sort of get it, the implication that leftovers are supposed to be inferior to the freshly-cooked meal, but what I don’t get is why anybody would look for a second helping of death, if such a thing were physically possible, and if they did, why they wouldn’t just eat it cold. That, and the leftovers we have around the O-Home are pretty darned good, almost always as good as the first time. I certainly wouldn’t use them as a metaphor for something rank and awful.

I felt like something rank and awful this morning as a result of my getting three hours or so of sleep last night, certainly no more because I didn’t go to bed before two o’clock last night.

Since I was awake for a huge part of the time I would much rather have spent asleep, but wasn’t, I grabbed a book and started reading. Luckily for me it was The Salmon of Doubt, a collection of Douglas Adams’s writings compiled by a friend of his shortly after his most untimely death. I wasn’t aware we had a copy, I only chanced across it as I bouncy-balled my fingertip across the spines of the books on the shelves in my basement lair. I love it when I find a favorite book I didn’t know I had.

The last article I read before I turned in to lie awake in bed some more was about a trip he took to the Great Barrier Reef to test-drive an underwater scooter. He goat-roped a magazine into underwriting the trip for him by saying he wanted to visit a place where there were gobs of manta rays, which, he convinced the keeper of the magazine’s travel money, were just like the scooter in that both would tow you around. He promised to hook a ride on a manta and compare them to the sub-scooter.

Not only did they send him there, they sent him there first class, put him up in a five-star hotel for four nights and published the article in which he said, essentially, “I went scuba diving in Australia and got paid to do it.” Except it was funnier than that. Well of course it was. And if I could write like he did I’d probably be lounging on a south Pacific shore right now sipping lemon daiquiris and waiting for the next brilliant idea to hit me like the demolition beams of a Vogon constructor fleet, instead of wondering why I couldn’t sleep.

I read an interview, two newspaper articles and the story about scuba diving with the manta rays in Australia before I snapped off the light and felt my way back to the bedroom. My Darling B had finally managed to doze off; she was snoozing when I tiptoed into the room, and I heard the occasional zawp once or twice before I must’ve finally sailed off to lah-lah land.

Naturally enough, when my alarm clock bleeped me awake this morning I was tired as a new father of quintuplets a month after the birth. How much sleep has the father of quintuplets had a month after the birth? None, unless his parents and in-laws are sleeping over on a regular basis. I’m speaking from the experience of raising just one newborn and extrapolating, but I don’t see how I can be wrong. The only sleep I got with just one newborn in the house was the result of catnaps, leaving me walking zombie-like through my days.

And that’s how I lurched through my day today — zombie-like, jaw hanging slack, bumping into things, bits of me falling off here and there. To judge by the looks people gave me, my eyes were bleeding much like a zombie’s, too. I wasn’t sure if or how I would make it to the end of the day, but lumbering through a cubicle farm in a haze has advantages, it turns out. It was lunch time before I knew what hit me, and I made it to three o’clock without much more trouble, either. Those last two hours held me down by the throat, though. I’ve worked a string of twelve-hour mids that weren’t as hard as trying to stay awake from three until five today.

And when we got home I had to change into work clothes and help My Darling B finish her bunny-proof fence, as promised, because she took a vacation day to start planting in her garden tomorrow and we couldn’t leave all her darling little seedlings vulnerable to the roaving bands of hungry newborn bunnies that’ll soon emerge from their warrens to mow down everything green in their paths. I watched half a dozen mommy rabbits come out for evening silfay after dinner and knew that each one of them was either very pregnant or had already dropped a litter somewhere and it was only a matter of a week or so before the kits were out on their own, looking for seedling tomatoes and peas to gobble up.

But B won’t have to worry about that. The bunny-proof fence is in place, making her garden an impregnable fortress of vegetarian delight. I still have to knock together a couple gates but in the meantime I stapled chicken wire across the gateways so she can get out there and plant for all she’s worth, and I know how she’s itching to. She’ll be sunburned and tired when I get home tomorrow night.

As a reward for my dedication to the cause, B offered to treat me to a meatball sandwich from Fraboni’s, the local deli, quite a tempting offer but more than anything I wanted to just sit on my butt in my own darned house and relax with a simple meal, so we ransacked the fridge for every leftover we could lay our hands on and we laid out a very respectable ploughman’s lunch: a big loaf of freshly-baked bread, a chunk of buffalo sausage, forty-two kinds of cheese (B will rarely allow her cheese supply to dwindle below a dozen varieties), hard-boiled eggs, pickles, and we even found a bottle of beer way in the back behind the pickle jar and split it.

And so I not only somehow survived a sleepless night, I helped My Darling B finsh her bunny-proof fence to get the garden in and had a most rewarding dinner with the love of my life. And I fell asleep the minute my head hit the pillow, which was about 9:01 P.M. How does life get any better than that?

I got my ears lowered today, a noteworthy occurrance only because about two months have passed since my last haircut, and that’s not my usual exaggeration. I’ve typically been letting about a month pass between shearings, slowly going from closely-cropped to ubershaggy and letting George take care of the mess I make of myself toward the end. It’s an easy fix and he gets twenty bucks for it, so he doesn’t complain.

I waited a nearly twice as long for this last cut because it’s not as easy now to find the time to nip on down to the barber’s as it was before I changed jobs. Back then, I could process the morning mail’s batch of applications and return all the phone messages that came in overnight and first thing by ten o’clock. Then I’d go looking for work, or I could poke my head into my supervisor’s office and ask if I could take twenty or thirty minutes to visit George for a clip. It was only once a month, so she never had a problem with me taking a long break.

These days I’m just getting started by ten, even though I come in at seven-thirty and work straight through. And I still don’t have all my ducks in a row. Maybe when I do it’ll be easier to find the spare time to run down to the barber’s in the morning, but from where I’m at now I frankly sort of doubt it. Anyway, I’m not there yet, not even close, so this morning after My Darling B dropped me off I headed straight down the block past the square to the basement of the Concourse hotel where George had me wrapped in an apron and was clipping away by seven-thirty, the time I usually log into my computer work station and start downloading the morning reports.

He got me done with plenty of time to swing past the bakery where I could pick up an oatmeal cookie big as a manhole cover and a bottle of orange juice, and I still managed to step into the office just before eight o’clock.

“You got your hair cut, didn’t you?” Whitney asked when I made the rounds. Perceptive woman, she is. I had what would have best been described as a wavy, unkempt mane before George tidied it up, and since I waited so long to visit him it’s looked like that so long that this is the first time anyone in the department has seen me post-haircut. And Whitney was the only one who said anything. Nobody else noticed George’s expert handiwork.

I have to say I felt a pang of regret when his scissors began to do their business. Working in the yard all week made a daily rat’s nest of my hair and I had to take more care to wash it out than I’d been doing. It was becoming irritating to have the wind blow it into my eyes, too, but I have to admit I’d not only gotten used to having long hair, I’d begun to like it. It used to be I couldn’t stand having hair on the back of my neck, but even that had become so familiar that I miss running my hands through it to push it back over my collar.

A week or two ago my hair was already long enough that Tim suggested I ought to try pulling it back into a ponytail. As much as I’ve grown to like having longer and longer hair, I’m not that kind of codger, and anyway I’ve got the feeling My Darling B would have something to say about that. Something not positive. If I go to wearing longer hair at all, it’ll very likely be in a style that doesn’t involve bands or scrunchies or any manner of drawing it back into a tight little tail that sticks straight out the back of my head.

“Slept like a baby” — another metaphor that doesn’t quite make sense to me. When babies sleep, they seem to sleep peacefully and deeply, but they scarcely ever sleep for very long. If I truly “slept like a baby” every night, I’d quickly be begging a doctor for the most powerful sometics he could prescribe, or self-medicating with a very large glass of grain alcohol every night before bed. Half an hour of sleep is no way to get through the night no matter how peacefully you sleep, or now angelic you look. Plus, waking up with your pants full of crap would get old real fast.

We have big news, which should be written in all caps like this: BIG NEWS! Sean’s application to a teaching fellowship in Denver has been accepted. He’s going to be a teacher! A teacher of bright, young minds! He’ll mold those young minds into, well, something. I know he will. He’ll be just the kind of first-grade teacher I would’ve like to say I had, if I could only remember my first-grade teacher. It’s been a few years.

Sean will go through a six-week training course in June and July before he starts teaching real live children in August, and admits feeling a little apprehensive now that his fondest hopes have come true. Well, it’s not unnatural to get a little jumpy at the idea of A Big Change, is it? It’s quite a challenge, facing a room full of those little booger-eaters and knowing he’ll have to not only keep them in check all day, but try to teach them something on top of it. If anybody’s up to the job, though, Sean is.

He says he’d like to do it at least a couple years before he considers anything else; the Peace Corps still holds a high spot on his “to-do” list.

My Darling B went straight out to plant another plot of her mind-bogglingly large garden, which she continues to insist isn’t all that large after all. Her pea plot is four by four, or four by six, something like that, but surrounded by the rest of the earth we tilled and fenced it appears to be no bigger than a postage stamp, even if I go stand right next to it. Maybe two or three pea plants will have room to spread and grow there, if they get along and play nice.

B claims that the garden isn’t nearly as large as I make it out to be since it’s full of stumps that have yet to be pulled up or chopped out (I’m pretty sure it’ll have to be both, he said with a heavy sigh).

Our plans for the biggest stump, the remains of a walnut tree chopped down several years ago, is to let nature take its course. All of what we can see above ground is rotten already, but the thing had roots that go everywhere. I had to hack one out as thick as my arm when digging the trench for the fence, and B had to carefully plan to put in vegetables such as carrots that grow down instead of up where she could turn over a deep patch of her garden with the fork and not have to worry about stopping to get out the hatchet.

Other, smaller stumps dot the rear border of the garden where a tangle of some kind of scrubby brush was growing when we bought the place. Somebody planted a row of trees along the lot line that were stunted by a freak accident or maleavolent design and grew into a tangle too awful to look at. I spent most of a summer cutting them down a little bit at a time and the stumps that remain are a special nemesis of mine. I tried the hatchet, but the wood’s like a coiled spring and every time I strike the hatchet bounces back. What I’d like to do is dig around them, empty a bag of charcoal in the hole, drain a bottle of lighter fluid over the entire heap and stand back while a bonfire does most of the hard work, but I don’t think B will go for the use of a toxic petroleum product in her garden, and anyway the peas are already planted too close-by. It’s a cool idea to think about, though.

There’s a huge river rock in our yard I might have to try that on, though. It sits on the lot line between our house and Marge’s and somebody painted it white quite a long time ago, which should have been our first hint that it was too big to move. It’s at least as big as a sleeping drunk and we thought we could at least roll it out of the way when we were putting in the fence last weekend, but as I began to pickaxe around it we could see that there was at least half as much again belowground as there was aboveground.

We tried to roll it anyway. We’re dummies that way. I tried to lever it with the pickaxe while B and Tim pulled at it from either side and the thing hardly budged. It must weigh close to five-hundred pounds. I could hit it with a hammer instead, but I’m pretty sure it’s granite. I could go on hitting it with a hammer from now until the day I die, which would come considerably sooner if I went out to the yard every day to hit a boulder with a hammer, but that boulder wouldn’t be too much smaller when I was done.

In the old days, farmers used to remove a boulder from the field by building a bonfire up around it that they’d stoke all day long to get the rock good and hot, then after the fire went out they’d pour cold lake water over the boulder to make it crack into pieces. I think the neighbors would objec to the bonfire part, but I think a couple bags of cheap charcoal would get it just as hot without the dramatically high tower of flames. If I can figure out how to get away with it, you’ll certainly be reading about it here. Watch this space.

The web site of the National Weather Service is predicting a forty percent chance of rain or snow this coming Sunday night. Even if I knew there was the slightest chance that snow might fall on any part of the state five days from now, I would at least have the decency to keep it to myself.

Hello, April! Rain today, lots of it. Not that it matters so much now that I work in a basement. It didn’t matter at all, come to that, because it wasn’t even threatening to rain around the noon hour, the only time I went outside to have a walk down to the other end of State Street, grab a sandwich from Potbelly’s and walk back up Langdon Street to the square.

I ate the sandwich on the march. Langdon is also known as fraternity row; it’s nothing but student housing from library mall all the way uptown to about Wisconsin Avenue. Not only are both sides of the street an unbroken line of fraternity houses, sorority houses and apartment blocks, the foot traffic is all but entirely made up of students talking on cell phones or listening to their iPods. None of them are paying the least bit of attention to anything around them, least of all me, so I didn’t feel my usual self-consciousness about eating as I walk along the street. I could dribble chopped lettuce and mayonnaise all down the front of my shirt without causing a single passer-by to glance my way.

The sidewalks along fraternity row are littered with unread newspapers. One apartment block after another has bagged, semi-soggy back issues of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times heaped at the base of the front steps, not the local fishwrap they could get for a bargain price. Why do they subscribe if they can’t be bothered to read them, let alone pick them up from the pavement at least once a week? Do they come free with the rent, like utilities? Are frat brothers required to prank the Barron’s Business News by signing up for the introductory free week, then trashing every invoice that comes through the mail slot? I’ll probably never know unless I stop somebody some day and ask.

I ate only half the sandwich during my lunch hour, finishing it as I was walking up Carroll Street, just before I was about to cross Johnson. One of the great things about getting lunch at Potbelly’s is they stuff the sandwich with so many yummy extras that eating only half is still awfully darned satisfying. It takes a crew of two to make a Potbelly’s sandwich. The first guy asks what kind of sandwich you want; the chassis of the sandwich, if you will. I’m quite partial to the Italian on white, slices of pastrami and salami laid out on a couple slices of mozarella and toasted. A gal grabbed the sandwich out of the other side of the toaster and asked me what toppings I’d like. “All of them,” I answered, “but go easy on the oil, please.” She loaded me up with lots of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers, olives and mayo, and finished off with a short squirt of oil before wrapping it in a layer of wax paper and slicing it neatly in two, then wrapping it again to go.

I broke off one half and started munching as soon as I turned to go up the block toward Langdon and slowly munched my way through it, not finishing until six or eight blocks later, pausing at Johnson Street for the light. A co-ed on a cell phone walking half a dozen paces in front of me stepped off the curb into traffic with the confidence of somebody who knows she’s not going to get run over by a truck today. A truck screeched to a halt right next to her, and the driver blared the horn. The coed casually flipped her off without looking back.

I considered saving the other half of the sandwich for my midafternoon break, but shortly after returning to my cubicle I realized I was fooling myself. There was no more chance of taking a midafternoon break than there had been of taking a morning break, so I unwrapped the other half and gnawed at it while I finished mandatory compliance training, a tedious exercise in mouse-clicking knowledge-building computer-based training seminar. By the time I finished the rest of the sandwich and licked my fingers clean I was certifiably knowledgable about the Truth In Lending Act.

Then, after getting out of work and jogging across the street through the rain to the O-Mobile where My Darling B waited for me, I learned that it was Thursday. On one level I already knew it was Thursday. For instance, we took out the trash this morning, but mostly because B remembered the night before and lined up the trash cans in a row behind the car so we couldn’t leave without moving them out of the way. Still, it’s a wonder we didn’t simply push them aside, wondering why on earth we’d done that. I also realized it was Thursday because at work, I am the keeper of The Calendar, writing down which employees are gone missing and why. Wednesday’s block was already filled, so I knew this must be Thursday.

But when My Darling B gave me a peck as I got into the car after work and said, “I’m hungry, what’re we eating?” I missed the implications of the question entirely.

“Well, we could stop at the Blue Plate if you like,” I said, only slightly confused. We don’t normally stop to eat on Thursday, we stop on Friday.

“No, I mean, What’s for dinner?” she asked again.

“Ah, maybe I’m missing something.”

She laughed at me. I certainly was. “It’s Thursday. You’re making dinner.” Oh, crap! It was Guy Food Night. That was the level of Thursday I hadn’t become aware of yet. And since I had nothing at all planned or knew of anything to whip up, we decided to go out after all. Besides, B wanted pasta, and the finest pasta restaurant in town is right on the way home. We stopped at The Fork And Spoon, the dining room off the factory floor of RP Pasta just off Willy Street (turn north on Ingersoll, make the next right on Wilson, and park as close to the door as you can without running over any bicycles). I usually order their spaghetti plate, but tonight I tried the chicken panino for the first time and wasn’t disappointed. This time I saved the second half of the sandwich after all, to eat cold the next day for lunch. I forget what B ordered; I think it was rigatoni, and she wasn’t as impressed with it as she was with their other dishes. Washed down with a bottle of Mad Town Nut Brown Ale, it was a very relaxing way to end another working day.

Finally, the rain came down in a storm as scary as the wrath of an old-testament god last night, waking us some time after midnight with thunder following the lightning flashes so closely that the most violent part of the storm must have been right over our heads, and it seemed to park there for quite a long time. When it slacked off a bit and the drumming rain lulled me to sleep, the thunder would come back with a vengeance, rattling the dishes and jolting me awake again. We must’ve gotten a couple feet of rain before it was over. I don’t think My Darling B will be able to work in her garden for at least a couple days. There was water standing in pools on the ground when I looked out there in the morning.

And it’s Friday. Really, after you’ve said that, what else is there to say? How does it get any better than that? It’s Friday, full stop, end of sentence. Life is good.

Not to say there isn’t more to life. There indubitably is. I drove the Willy Street route home to stop at Star Liquors so I could pick up a six-pack of my favorite sudsy beverage and discovered, entirely by accident, that they were hosting a beer-tasting event featuring delicious libations from Central Waters brewing company, one of my favorites, not only because they’re headquartered in Amherst, what I like to call “my neck of the woods,” but most significantly because they brew one hell of a delicious-tasting beer. I went home with a sixer of Imperial Stout known as “Satin Solstice,” but it wasn’t an easy choice to make. They’ve just introduced a delicious India Pale Ale (although My Darling B thought it was a bit too heavy for her tastes) and a very complicated yet enjoyable Cherry stout (I forget the name at the moment, mea culpa).

I grabbed a sixer of the Central Waters Imperial Stout, beer that was strong enough for Russians to drink it, and a single bottle of the cherry stout, and took them home with me; B made do with her usual favorite, Mad Town Nut Brown. We retired to the O-Home, spread a ploughman’s lunch on the table, relaxed with our sumptuous repast and let the cares of the day melt away.

We froze ourselves just about rigid on our weekly trip to the Dane County farmer’s market. It’s only the second one they’ve held outside this year and the weather was unseasonably cold, only forty degrees or so. We were in danger of contracting hypothermia in the time it took us to walk four blocks up from the Monona Terrace parking lot to Michelangelo’s coffee shop to have a little breakfast bun and a hot cuppa joe. After we sat a while to warm up and enjoy our breakfast, though, we once again felt up to walking the loop around the square although, by the time we were halfway around, we felt a lot less like we could make it. Yet somehow we did, probably by keeping our hearts racing and blood pumping by scurrying along like scared rats. I’m betting we finished the circuit in much less than our usually time, but still we got everything we went there for.

Then, this being the first Saturday after pay day, I made a trip to the hobby shop. It’s becoming that dependably typical for me. Truly, I am a train nerd. Today I planned to get more than enough road bed to finish the terminal yard — that means I bought thin strips of cork on top of which I could lay a railroad track. The cork road bed makes the track look better and muffles the noise of the trains; without the cork, an electric train on a piece of plywood sounds like rolling thunder.

“How much is the roadbed?” I asked the owner, trying to budget as closely to thirty bucks as I possibly could.

“A dollar thirty-four,” he answered. “Good day to stay inside laying track,” he added. Maybe he’d been to the farmer’s market earlier.

I also bought a ground throw to experiment with — that’s a lever that will make a track switch move back and forth, and this one’s got an electrical switch built into it that will change the polarity of the electrical current in the pointed part of the switch called the frog. I don’t know why it’s called a frog; nobody does. On a model railroad, the trains come to an abrupt halt if the frog doesn’t change polarity when the switch flips from one side to the other. There are lots of ways to do that, most of them involving very expensive electromagnetic relay switches, but this ground throw I bought will do it at a very affordable price, so I got one to experiment with.

But where I really lucked out was when I strolled past the passenger car models. I always try to make a point of checking them out, even though the store tends to stock the high-end models that cost fifty bucks apiece. I’ve brought one or two of those back to my work bench, but I can’t build much of a roster with those so I’m always on the lookout for an Athearn model. Athearn doesn’t actually exist any more; they were a model company that made pretty good model rail road rolling stock and sold them at a price that a guy like me could afford to buy more than one a month. Some other company bought them out and you don’t see them much on the shelves any more, but once in a blue moon a couple boxes will surface at the good old prices, and if I’ve got an extra tenner in my pocket I’ll snatch it.

And today, I spotted an observation car in the familiar blue Athearn box, and not just any observation car but one from the Pullman standard era, a six-axle “heavyweight.” These old cars have long, low-slung lines and eye-catching clerestory rooftops, and the observation car has the classic brass-railed balcony on the back end. I didn’t have an observation car yet; there was no question but that I had to take it home.

When I got it back to my work bench, opened the box and spread the parts out I paused a moment to think about putting it together. Pausing is not characteristic of me when it comes to model building, even when I was so into it that I painted every piece, sanded and sealed the cracks and invited my friends around to have a look at my finished work. I usually slapped these models together as soon as I got my hands on them, and an easy job it usually is, too, involving no more than screwing the wheel trucks to the bottom, snapping the windows into the openings along the sides and clapping the shell over the floor. They have no interiors at all and most of them require no painting.

As I sat there looking at it, though, I thought, You know, I really need a business car so I can travel my railroad in style, and this could be it. And I didn’t want to ride around in an empty shell of a car; I wanted to convert the observation lounge into a big drawing room with a conference table and huge leather chairs where all the higher-up mucky-mucks on the board could relax with their highballs and discuss big, important railroad business. I wanted a small drafting room just off the drawing room, and I wanted a bedroom in the head end of the car where I could catch a few winks when I traveled o the farthest ends of the road. A galley kitchen in there somewhere would be awfully sweet, too. I could model that, I thought.

And I probably could, and still can, but it’s not as straightforward as I thought it sounded in that pause. In the first place, what I wanted to do was build it so I could take the roof off and look inside. Looking in through the windows is no good; you can’t see anything that way. I might as well paint venetian blinds on the windows and leave it at that.

The thing about taking the roof off is that Athern models are made of plastic so thick and heavy it has its own gravity. I couldn’t just put a sharp blade in the X-acto knife and peel it away with a few deft swipes. Most times when modelers cut these things apart they reach for their Dremel tools first thing. A Dremel is like a little high-speed circular saw you can hold in your hand. I’ve got one, of course. No self-respecting gadget freak would be without one. It’ll cut through almost anything; I’ve used for everything from modeling choo-choos to fixing leaky plumbing, and I’ve got enough experience with it to know that the saw blade spins so fast it’ll melt through plastic more than it’ll cut, so instead of lunging straight at my brand-new observation car with the Dremel buzzing away, I dug an old plastic model out of my junk box and cut that up first.

Every single cut I made, no matter how carefully, ended up looking so terrifyingly ugly that I put the Dremel down in despair. The blade didn’t just melt the plastic, it left a jagged, bubbly scar on either side of the cut. As I was trying to figure out how else I could go about getting the roof off, I idly picked away at the melted plastic and found it came off easily. Underneath that, there was a more or less a clean cut that I could tidy up with a few minuste of sanding. With a little more practice I could cut an agreeably straight line, so I picked up the observation car and began hacking away.

It took a lot of very deliberate cutting to get that roof off. Did I mention the plastic was thick? Battleships don’t have armor that thick. There were places where even the Dremel tool couldn’t cut all the way through. I had to finish the job with a utility knife and more grim determination than Jack the Ripper ever had. When I finally peeled it away I felt as though splitting the atom using nothing more than a couple rocks might’ve been easier.

And I wasn’t even done then, because I had to cut the sides apart so I could make the top edges straight, but that was child’s play compared to popping the top off. I cleaned up the edges with an X-acto knife, cut away a couple of thick plastic flanges from the car floor that were only going to get in my way, then set about the task of gluing all the pieces back together — and here’s the other important thing to know about Athearn model parts: Apparently, they’re not made out of the same polystyrene plastic I’m used to. The glue I had took forever to set up, so I had to sit there holding the parts together for what seemed like a coon’s age. Next time I’m using Crazy Glue, even if I am likely to permanently glue myself to the furniture.

So the sides are back up and the bulkheads are glued in place. The car’s even got a new floor with none of the gaping holes the old one had, and that’s as far as I got today. I’ll have to put off cutting plastic for the interior walls until later this week, which is just as well; I don’t have any more than a fart of an idea what it’s going to look like.

If you’re interested, you can follow this link to a few photos of the model to see it as I cut it to pieces.

My Darling B looked out on today’s bright, sunshiny morning with disgust. “Perfect gardening weather,” she observed, and shook her head. “Doesn’t that just figure?” she added. Yesterday, bone-chilling cold, rain and gusty winds. Today, calm and sunny, but she wouldn’t be doing any gardening today, owing to a previous engagement. And that’s the way it’s been ever since we fenced off half the yard; either she’s busy with something else or it’s raining too much for her to be outside in anything other than a flat-bottomed boat. It must be frustrating to be a gardener.

Call me crazy, but my first thought on waking up this morning was, “Cap’n Crunch.” I was jonseing for The Captain. I blame Tim. He’s a bad nutritional influence, bringing home Pop Tarts and Cap’n Crunch on Saturdays and eating the whole box by Sunday morning. Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t even last until Sunday. Depends on how much he feels like eating super-sweetened garbage.

Eating super-sweetened garbage was exactly what I felt like this morning; I didn’t even have to think about it. I rolled out of bed into the first pair of trousers I could lay my hands on (they were mostly clean), jumped into Tim’s Honda (last car in the driveway is the first out) and Nascar’d down Monona Drive to Copp’s, the megasupersized grocery store on the corner. They remodeled the whole damned store since the last time I was there so it took a while for me to find the boxed cereal; naturally enough, I had to walk all the way to the corner opposite the entrance. How do they put everything you want furthest from the door?

I used the “speed check-out” because I thought it would be faster, hence the name. This is the do-it-yourself check-out aisle where you scan your own darned food, stick your money in the slot and go, theoretically in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. I had just the one box, so I figured I could do it with scarcely a pause on the way out the door — on the run, even. What a dope.

Not only did I have to come to a full stop, I had to stand there so long that Congress could have figured out how to unscrew the economy. First of all, the checkout is a robot that talks very slowly, as if I were stupid, with pauses between everything it says that are so exaggerated I could have made the box of cereal with my own two hands in less time. They ought to make it talk in the language of the used-car guys who read disclaimers on the radio at a hundred miles an hour. Nobody listens to them anyway. (The robot instructions or the radio disclaimers.)

Then I made the mistake of trying to feed the robot a half dollar, a coin that is still legal tender in this country UNLESS you’re trying to use the speed check-out at Copp’s. Then you get it thrown right back at you no matter how many times you drop it into the coin slot. I got it in change at the market yesterday and wanted to get rid of it, but I wasn’t going to be able to fob it off on the robot at Copp’s. “Screw you,” I told the robot, feeding it an extra dollar bill so I could get the heck out of Dodge but knowing full well that if anybody was getting screwed, it was me. Still, cussing at it made me feel a little better.

“Oh!” was all My Darling B could think of saying when she walked into the kitchen and found me wolfing down a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. I offered her some, but she declined.

The minute I woke up this morning I started thinking about what I wanted to get done before noon at work, a signal, I suppose, that I’ve almost completed my transmutation into a tie-wearing, cubicle-dwelling office prairie dog.

I tried to breathe deeply and think of something else more relaxing (like having my teeth drilled? Getting hit by a bus?) but I kept coming back to the project I left unfinished on Friday that I couldn’t stop thinking about. I had to come up with a way to keep people out of my cubicle for at least an hour so I could wrap it up and get on with the rest of the day. Then I hit on the idea of propping the phone on my shoulder and grunting into it every few seconds to make everyone think I was conferencing a transaction. My coworkers will sit at my desk and start talking no matter how intensely I seem to be working on a report or routine QC checks, but they all back up and say “excuse me” if they think I’m on the phone.

I might’ve gone with that, but in the end I didn’t. When I sat down at my desk it was so deceptively quiet in the office that I simply began to peck away at the project for almost an hour before my supervisor stuck his head into my cubicle to remind me of a meeting we had to go to, catching me right in the middle of things. Pretending I was on the phone probably wouldn’t have stopped him from dragging me away, but it could have been fun.

The project had to do with fixing up the way one of our customers deposited money toward her loan. She’d been making extra payments since February, meaning to pay down the principal only it didn’t happen that way. In order to fix it I had to back out all the payments she made, then re-apply them one by one as she wanted, a mind-numbingly tedious exercise that takes a lot of time, especially the way I do it — I take lots of notes and go over the really important stuff with a highlighter. By the time I’m done my desk looks like I’ve been cramming for a final exam worth seventy percent of my semester grade, but I get all the money back to the right place, so I don’t mind making myself look like an anal retentive nerd.

I had just finished backing out all the payments when my boss came by to remind me of the meeting. I didn’t really want to step away from my desk at that point, but as I had all those notes and I figured the chances against my customer looking at her account in the next sixty minutes were astronomically huge, I stepped away without worrying about it too much.

An hour later I came back to my cubicle, sat down at my desk, turned a blind eye to the pile of telephone memos on my keyboard, the raft of e-mail messages clogging my inbox and the blinking red light on my telephone trying to call my attention to the voice mails waiting for me. I was determined to finish my project and be done with it. And fifteen or twenty minutes later I’d put every penny back in the right place, just the way the customer wanted it. Then I spent another fifteen minutes or so documenting it, because it’s not enough that the computer remembers every step I made, it has to be logged and microfilmed for future reference. We really do still microfilm stuff. How quaint is that?

Then I finally turned to my phone to listen to my voicemail, and that’s when I found a panicked message from, guess who? Yes. My customer, the one whose account I had been working on. Flying in the face of the longest odds this side of winning the lotto, she’d happened to look in there mere minutes after I’d backed off a dozen payments to her loan, then walked away to attend the meeting. “I have some questions about my account,” she said, or words to that effect, just barely managing to cover the concern in her voice. I’ll bet you do, I said to myself as I dialled her number.

But it turned out all right. She’d been watching her account like a hawk and saw me put back every penny. She wasn’t sure at the time how that was happening, I supposed because most people think of their money as actual bills and coins and not computer files, but after I explained it to her we had a good laugh. At least, I hope she thought it was good. She was happy with my fix, anyway, and I was happy that it was finally taken care of and wouldn’t keep me awake another morning.

The weather, she is very cold again. My Darling B switched off the thermostat while we were cleaning house yesterday so she could open the windows to let some fresh air in. I didn’t think it was warm enough outside for that and closed a few of the windows that I was closest to, but last night I had to turn the thermostat back on “heat” when the temps dropped down below forty. The furnace was running as I drifted off to sleep last night, and it was still running when I got out of bed this morning. Not continuously, but often enough to keep us from freezing solid in our sleep.

B told me a story on the drive home about how it snowed today, and not just snowed but bizzarded, if that’s a word (and even if it’s not). I had a hard time believing her because, well, because I didn’t want to. It’s been a long, rugged winter, and now the grass is green, the trees are leafing out and the tulips are blossoming in capital square. I’m done with winter, no matter how much it tries to remind me that I live in the frozen north. Right now you could hit me in the head with a snowball and I’ll deny you did it. So I’m not in a believing mood when anybody tells me it snowed today; I’m in total, utter denial.

One of the faxes I got this afternoon at work was a request to do a terribly important banking thing, only the guy who sent it to me asked me to do it in a way I wasn’t used to. Show me how to do a thing and I can to it over and over again until the earth splits in two. I can even find ways to improve. But show me how do to a thing, then do it in a way that’s slightly different from the way you did it the first time, and all you’ll get from me is an empty deer in the headlights gaze and quite a lot of questions. I can be thrown off the beam with very little effort on your part.

And as I flipped through the pages, I got the idea he had not only buggered up the request, he also neglected to provide me with a key piece of information that might have helped me do it much faster. I could restate the request to make it easier to follow, but the missing information would probably take a while to find and I didn’t have a half-hour to look up the docs, so I walked over to visit with another member of the staff and incidentally ask her if she knew a shortcut to finding the information.

She didn’t know any magical shortcuts, but by paging through the fax she did find the information we needed on the last page. Damn. It was pretty obvious, too, but she pretended I wasn’t a total clod. “I can knock this out right now for you, if you want,” she said, as if it were the work of but a moment.

“Uh, okay,” I answered, “but I think I’ve got to start a checklist first.” She furrowed her eyes and did the dog head tilt then, but let me take it to my desk anyway where my brain cramp got even worse.

“There’s no checklist,” I told Alma when I brought it back to her desk, head hung sheepishly. “I’m just tired.”

She brightened up. “You’re tired too? What’s getting to you?”

I shrugged. “It’s four o’clock. It’s time to be tired.” I don’t need a very complicated reason to be tired, you see. Deprive me of my afternoon nap and I’m a mumbling zombie from two o’clock until dinner time, when I can relax and refuel.

I did much better with the rest of the day. I mentioned the fax, but I didn’t mention that it was one of dozens. People all over the state were trying to bury my desk in paperwork, but today I was more than a match for their puny powers of telecommunication. Time and time again I swept my desk clear of their demands for satisfaction, subordination, release and reply.

I was feeling pretty good about myself until I promised Erin that I could back out a payment on one of her loans using the awesome power of the Master Correct. When I whipped it out, though, I quickly discovered it had no power over this particular problem no matter how I tried to tweak things, and I was forced to shuffle into my supervisor’s office to humbly beg for help. I explained to him what Erin wanted, what I tried to do and what went wrong.

“You can’t do that,” he said.

“Oh.”

He chuckled at me. “Nothing personal. It’s not possible to do it that way.” And then he went on to explain about the interest method and some other technical banky stuff that mostly went by me with a whooshing sound, but he did give me the uber-secret code that would let me back out the payment for Erin and save the day.

And actually I was able to save the day quite a few times for some of the people who called. Sometimes I had to unleash the overwhelming powers granted to me by my magical signing pen, and sometimes it was much easier, like the woman who wanted us to send her a letter saying she had paid off her auto loan back in the 1990’s or whenever. I searched our records but couldn’t see that she’d ever had an account with us. “I can send you a copy of the letter we got when we paid it off,” she said helpfully, and I said, “Yes, please do.”

She faxed me the lien release we sent her all those years ago. “That document you faxed to me,” I told her when I called her back, “is all you need. Give it to the guy who bought your car and all will be well and good.” She was so happy I thought she was going to cry, and I didn’t have to do anything.

And so my working day went until it was over, hallelujah, praise be to the ceiling cat. Dinner was cheese and sausage, a loaf of bread and a salad, washed down with a bottle of Imperial Stout that made me feel expansive enough to want to run down to Menard’s to buy a trunkload of lumber and build a garden gate for My Darling B. What I felt and what I actually did, though, were entirely different things.

We sat at the table for about an hour drinking coffee and swapping favorite songs from our high school days. For B and I it was quite nostalgic; B even got out some of the old vinyl and played her favorite Triumph songs. For Tim, the recollections were not so much ruminations as they were a quick recap of what he was currently listening to. To illustrate his tastes, he bombarded us with a rap I believe he called Chickenhead, complete with people actually squawking like a chicken.

While I was sipping my hot cuppa and listening to all this, though, I stuffed my cramped little brain with the dimensions of the gate-building project. Provided I don’t have to spin any vinyl Wednesday night after supper I should be able to make a start on it, at least.

No snow today. I mean it, none. That flimsy crap that vaporized against the windshield the instant it touched down this morning didn’t count. And I’m not saying it was warm because I froze my nipples off walking down to the corner deli in my summer jacket for a breakfast cookie (I love that: “breakfast cookie” — what a great world we live in, eh?) but there was. no. snow. I deny it. I deny it. I deny it three times. There. I’m all better now.

Guy food night was moved up to Wednesday so My Darling B could change into her grubby clothes and run straight out to her garden where she worked a patch of earth to plant a couple rows of carrots. Winter has been dragging on like a bad head cold and we’ve had too many rainy days, preventing her from getting out there as much as she’d like, so when the day turned out to be clear and warm from dawn to dusk, she carped the diem for all it was worth.

As I began to prepare supper I watched her from the window as she worked the carrot patch, looking like nothing so much as a little kid happily digging up the yard with a fork and spoon.

Dinner was a quick and easy standby, breakfast burritos: brown a pound of breakfast sausage, stir in half a dozen scrambled eggs, serve hot over tortillas with some shredded cheddar cheese and, if you like, a dash of hot sauce (I like). Nothing says guy food like a dinner you can make with one frying pan and a spatula in less than half an hour.

I was really hungry so I had two. Tim had filled up on cereal before dinner so he wimped out and only ate one. My Darling B, famished from rushing straight out to work in the yard for an hour and a half after work, was so hungry she stuffed two tortillas with so much sausage and egg and cheese that she could hardly close them up, and wolfed them down as quickly as I did my puny little burritos.

Half past one, I woke up, and I knew almost right away that I was up for a while. Man, I hate insomnia.

It doesn’t matter how late it is, how tired I was when I went to bed or what I do to try to get back to sleep when the insomnia monster eats my head. Counting sheep? Please. I’ve counted millions. Relaxing each joint, each limb, every vertebra in my back doesn’t do the trick. I’ve laid awake in bed for hours, limp as a well-wrung dishrag. And I can do deep-breathing exercises from now until there’ll be no more air to breathe. If there’s a way to force yourself to fall asleep that doesn’t involve pharmaceuticals or a bottle of rum, I’ve tried it.

I take that back. Once thing I haven’t tried yet is a white-noise machine. I’ve heard people swear by those, and my mother used to sleep with a fan whirring all night by her bedside (maybe still does). I was thinking, just before I gave up and got out of bed tonight, that that might be worth a try. The thing about a fan is, although the soft hush of the blades slicing through the air is soothing, the air moving around the room irritates the hell out of me, even when it’s hot. I can fall asleep with the ceiling fan on in the summer, but I usually wake up several times in the middle of the night and end up turning it off.

Tonight I waited exactly one-half hour before I gave up and got out of bed. I think the worst thing about insomnia is not the dread of knowing I’m going to be tired the next day, it’s lying there in the dark, wide awake for hours, NOT SLEEPING. I’d much rather get up and read a book, write drivel like this, or do anything other that lie in bed with my eyes closed, pretending that I’m on the verge of falling asleep. I’d much rather quit pretending, get up and waste the time more productively.

Plus, I had to poop. My stomach was growling all night. I guess I should’ve stopped at just one burrito.

Among my e-mail messages today was an eye-catching subject line promising to show me how to “upsize your sex penis easily.” Um ... my “sex penis?” As opposed to what other kind?

 
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