this is drivel

“You’ve been working here a few years,” I said to Michael this afternoon, by way of barging into his office for the forty-second time in an hour to harass him once again with questions. “When did you first notice that everything happens at once?” He laughed the laugh of a man who finally knows yet another innocent has been drawn into the patchwork insanity of the crazy-quilt job he’s been dealing with for so long.

Today was the day that everybody in the world wanted a sastisfaction at the same time. Partial, complete, re-issued, every flavor they come in, they wanted it all, and could I make it two extra-large scoops on waffle cones with lots of hot fudge and rainbow-colored sprinklies? And if it wasn’t coming out of their fax machine within minutes after I hung up the phone, my voice mail began to flash its cyclopean eye at me, the inbox quickly filling up with frantic messages of closings gone so horrifically wrong it made the prom scene in Carrie look warmly pastoral.

If you’ve never messed around with bank loans, a satisfaction is the document your bank would send to the register of deeds in your county to show everybody and his sister that you paid off your loan. Banks are required to issue them within thirty days of the payoff. Many customers don’t see why they can’t have them instantly, and I can understand that, to a point. Gas pumps spit out a receipt when you’re done filling your tank. Why can’t banks do the same thing? It sounds so simple when you say it like that.

I must’ve gotten a dozen requests for satisfactions today. Every single one of them was marked URGENT! For my part, I not only had to use my magical powers to discover which really were urgent, I also had to gaze deeply into my crystal ball to make sure the loans had in fact been paid off. Not meaning to cast aspersions on the truthfulness of our customers, but I’m going to darned well make sure that a balloon mortgage on a newly-build eight-thousand square foot house has been well and truly paid off before I sign my name to the document attesting thusly, to be enshrined in the country records office for ever and ever, amen.

As it turned out, they all really were urgent. “The customer wants to close the loan tomorrow,” is a phrase I’ve gotten used to responding to, so on top of the usual truckload of paperwork our small but dedicated payoff staff churns out every day, I had to walk over many times with an URGENT request to satisfy a loan. And they do it, quickly and without complaining (too much). Good on them.

We got rain in traditionally huge cats & dogs amounts last night. I woke to the muffled thunder of a distant storm cell, shuffled off to the bathroom for a midnight piddle and by the time I curled up under the covers again the thunder had grown louder and much closer. Then BOOM! We got a real close one, and the rain came pouring down.

Rain’s good for growing things like grass and trees. The leaves on the trees are busting out all over, which is why if you’d asked me a couple years ago I would have told you that gardeners love rain as heavy and regular as the rain we’ve had, but I know better now. Gardners can’t get out and satisfy their manic compulsion to dig and plant and tend and whatever else they do in their carefully-managed plots when the ground’s too wet. They’ll go out if it’s been drizzling (My Darling B will go out when it’s drizzling), but after a really hard rain there’s no point in trying to dig through what’s become essentially a rototilled mud pie.

So if the rain doesn’t let up, and the weather guys are calling for rain through tomorrow, I imagine she’ll spend the next couple days standing by the window sighing mournfully. She’s already started, actually. I tried to cheer her up by pointing out that Sunday is supposed to be sunny and warm. “But the ground will still be too wet,” she pointed out, adding a mournful sigh. Poor dear.

There was no drivel yesterday because I had a hot date last night. There are some things I just will not cut short so I can rush home and blog all night. I’ve got my priorities, and a night out with a pretty girl is a few notches higher on my list than broadcasting my rambling thought on the interwebs. That’s just the way I roll.

Right after I was done with work, I hiked a couple blocks down Wilson Street to The Great Dane to meet My Darling B for dinner and a few beers before we went to the show at the Majestic theater after. We did the same thing the last time we went to a show at the Majestic, and it worked out so well that we didn’t see why we should mess with a successful formula. B was not only already seated when I got there, she had done me the favor of ordering a pint of stout so it was ready and waiting at my seat across the table from her when I arrived. True love is a wonderful thing.

We ordered a plate of beer bread for starters, and our perky blonde waitress asked, “two slices or six?” We were both pretty hungry so we figured, what the heck, go with six. How big can they be if they’re offering six slices at a time? Well. The waitress brought what looked like an entire loaf of bread cut into inch-thick slices and arranged on a full-size dinner plate with matching cups of honey butter, quite a nice treat but the two of us wouldn’t be able to eat that much bread in a week. Tim, however could probably eat it all in a single evening of casual browsing. He stays up late into the night foraging for cereal products, so that we have to hide some bread if we want to have any for toast, or as a side with dinner. We’re used to it by now, after going through the same thing with Sean. It’s the price we paid for raising boys.

As we muched away at our beer bread we played the game of who among our fellow diners would be at the Jonathon Coulton concert. Right away B tagged the two guys with laptops and the guy wearing the Donkey Kong t-shirt, and sure enough they were both at the concert later. That was pretty easy, I thought, but she also got the couple in the booth next to us. The guy wore a button-down polo shirt, a Beaver Cleaver haircut and had an Adam’s apple that stuck out almost as far as his nose. His companion bore a striking resemblence. They were on the floor almost right under our balcony seats.

I wasn’t nearly as good at this game as B was. I figured the guy in the safari shorts and way too big t-shirt would come, but I never saw him. I do remember seeing a guy at the restaurant with a poofy Amish-looking beard who I also saw later at the show, but he looked a lot more like a worm farmer who’d show up at a bluegrass festival than a technogeek at a JoCo concert, so I didn’t tag him, only envied his beard.

Paul & Storm opened for Jonathan Coulton, same as they did last time, and the song they opened with was no surprise. What was pretty surprising was that we didn’t think of stopping at Walgreen’s to buy a couple packets of panties we could throw at the stage at the appropriate moment, but as luck would have it a guy came around handing out panties and ... socks? B and I each got a sock. He said they were cheaper than the panties and he figured what mattered most was that Paul & Storm got pelted with something that looked like underclothing. It made a twisted sort of sense, and they were free as far as we were concerned. As a plus, Storm made a pretty good joke out of the socks.

(I’ve been searching YouTube to find a fan’s-eye-view that would explain what this is all about in a handy video format. I’ve found quite a few recordings of Paul & Storm singing We Are The Opening Band, but in none of them are they being showered with panties at the appropriate time. It’s almost as if Madison’s the only place where the audience got into the spirit of the song. We pelted them with panties, socks, boxers, thongs, you name it. The San Francisco audience just chuckled. How bizarre.)

(UPDATE: No, Madison is not the only place, not by a long shot. There’s a flicker photo set devoted exclusively to snapshots of the panties thrown at Paul & Storm during their opening number. It’s true what they say: There’s an internet page for everything.)

Jonathon Coulton did not disappoint, either, playing a complete raft of all his audience-pleasing favorites. It’s a little hard to describe the music these guys play. Coulton’s sounds sort of folk songy, while Paul & Storm are a little more frenetic than that, but all three write lyrics that are most easily described as “humorous,” although perhaps more accurately described as “incongruous” or even “inappropriate,” which only makes them funnier. And all three try to do whatever they can to encourage audience participation; almost every song is a sing-along, and some stir up more enthusiastic participation than that. Coulton’s ode to zombies, Re: Your Brains, stirs a huge part of the audience to jump up and stagger towards the stage, their stiff arms reaching out menacingly. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t see anybody doing the Code Monkey Dance, though. I would’ve, but I haven’t done it in a while and wouldn’t remember all the steps now. Lack of planning screws up another golden opportunity, just like forgetting the panties.

We didn’t get home until after ten-thirty and, after a whole week in the salt mines, followed by a night of food and revelry, I was seriously beat! After I changed into my jammies and brushed my zoobies I couldn’t keep my eyes open, so off to bed I went. B stayed up a while waiting for the Timster to come home. I never did find out where he was so late.

I spend the day building a gate for My Darling B’s garden. It was supposed to take about an hour. So it goes.

It’s nothing fancy; it never was intended to be. I bought four six-foot lengths of cedar, sawed one in half for the uprights, cut the ends off two for the rails and use the last for a diagonal brace. Screwed them together on the floor of my workshop. Hardest thing about it was measuring the diagonal to get the thing square — I kept nudging it a little too far one way, then another, but then I finally got it right on the nose, drove the screws home and called it done. That part took no more than an hour. But first, the trip to Menard’s ...

It was standing room only at Menard’s today. I don’t know why. Maybe because the weather’s nice enough to work in the yard, or because everbody has put off their spring cleaning until today, but most probably because the Screw With Dave Network went to Full-Goose Bozo Red Alert when they saw my car pull out of the driveway. Scouts were quickly able to determine I was headed out to buy some lumber and the network rallied a couple thousand people to converge on Menard’s and wander aimlessly through the aisles, usually stopping right in front of me to compair prices or confer over a purchase. It was like that scene from The Truman Show where all the cars pull out of the driveways at the same instant to stop Truman from leaving town.

A fairly straightforward purchase of four pieces of lumber, some hinges and a latch, and some extension cords (I always end up buying a little something more than I planned to) turned into a two-hour expedition, owing to the fact that the items I wanted were scattered to the farthest corners of the store, natch. Then there were the checkout lines. I have never seen that many people in line at Menard’s before. Ever. They were backed up into the candy and snack food endcaps of the shopping aisles, even with all but two checkouts open with clerks scanning as frantically as they could. Okay, yes, that was a little playful hyperbole on my part, they were the exact opposite of frantic, but it seemed to scan well when I wrote it.

After I got the supplies back to the O-Home and did the sawing and screwing-together, there was just one more teensy-tiny small hitch: When I took the gate out to the garden and set it on the ground with the hinges against the gate post, it became glaringly obvious there was a significant gap between the bottom hinge and the post. Too late I realized that the ground rose gently but significantly from the gateway, blocking the swing of the gate the way the curb blocks your car door from opening if you get too close to it. I managed to screw it in place, but the gate won’t be able to swing open more than a foot or so until I dig up the lawn in front of it and level it out, but that’ll do for now. I only wanted to make sure another day didn’t go by that My Poor Darling B would have to risk sprained or broken bones from being forced to hop over the fence.

Screens!

Did it bug you as much as it bugged me that the guys who wrote Star Trek couldn’t get it straight whether the Enterprise had shields or screens? Did the various writers even watch the show? Sometimes I had to wonder. In one episode, Sulu would turn to the captain when the little plastic pyramid on his desk when all red and blinky, and he’d say, “Screens up,” but in another episode he’d see the blinky light and say, “shields.” Were they they same thing? If they were, why didn’t Kirk make a puzzled dog face when Sulu switched and ask, “You’re just making crap up to pull my chain, aren’t you?” And if screen and shields were two different things, how could Sulu tell them apart if the same red blinky light came on for both of them? Seems like a pretty elementary design flaw that somebody would have noticed while they were building the ship. “There’s a million blinky lights and buttons on this guy’s desk, but you made the same light go on for the shields and the screens? Are you brain dead?”

These are the long, strange voyages my thoughts made along the twisted synapses of my brain as I repaired the torn screens of Our Humble O’Bode this afternoon. Screens, I thought as I tore them out, Why are they called ‘screens?’ And then the whole ramble about Star Trek went through my head. Naturally I felt compelled to share that with you. Don’t thank me, just send beer.

I ripped a hole in the screen over the kitchen window last winter when I put the end of a ladder through it, and Tim’s window was apparently leaking bugs all summer, but I don’t remember him telling me. He probably did, I just don’t remember it. The torn screen in the front room was leaking bugs, too, and I kept putting off that repair until winter came along and killed all the bugs so I wouldn’t have to worry about it for months, but today I was thinking of putting those screens up (or are they shields?) and I’d have felt pretty dumb if I’d put up holey screens because, you know, what’s the point?

But fixing them called for a trip to Menard’s, the local big-box home-improvement store. Let’s see, stab my eyes out with steak knives or try to go shopping amongst the teeming throngs infesting Menard’s for the second time this weekend? Tough choice.

I wanted just one thing this time, screens. Well, screens, and the plastic beads that hold them in the frames and the pounce wheel that pushes the bead down into the groove, but I figured they’d all very likely be shelved together. You would, too, wouldn’t you? That’s exactly why I was worried they might be in three different places, but guess what? They’re all in the same aisle! It’s almost as if there had to be some sort of intelligent design going on there. I mean, that wouldn’t just happen, would it? Not in Menard’s, anyway.

Here’s another earth-shattering revelation: I was in and out of Menard’s in under twenty minutes this time, even though I stopped on the way to the cash register to grab some shelves for the kitchen. There was just one customer ahead of me in the line I chose, and the cashier really did frantically scan my items, although she had all the personality of a robot arm.

Now that I think of it, a robot arm would’ve been a little more socially engaging, as well as fun to watch. “Hi, there. How’s it going today?” I said brightly to her as I set my purchases on her countertop, thinking I might be able to revive a spark in her dead, empty eyes. Fat chance. The only thing she did that might have been interpreted as an acknowledgement of my presence was ask me if I was going to charge my purchase on a Menard’s card, but she could also have been muttering that at random intervals as the result of a head injury. It would have been impossible to tell the difference from the way she said it.

I have never repaired a screened window. I point that out only because I did a bang-up job, if I do say so myself. Tearing the old screen out was the most fun part. Figuring out how to start putting the new screen on was the most frustrating. I’d hold it up to center it over the opening, hold one corner in place, then as I tried to get the bead in the groove every damn thing would pop out of place and the screen would end up in the shrubbery. Just when I was dead certain I’d need at least three hands or the help of a drooling hunchbacked lab assistant with a slavic name (“It’s pronounced EYE-gore”), I hit upon the idea of slapping some packing tape on the corners of the screen to hold it up until I got the bead well and truly stuffed into the top channel of the frame. Worked like a charm. Once I had that little detail sorted out, both the screens in the back were done faster than cheese turns to poots in my tummy.

The front screen was a different story, but just as short: They’re the old-fashioned steel screens. I didn’t want to tear them apart and redo them, because that would have been a major pain in the bupkiss. Luckily for me there was a little blister packet with four little squares of steel screen right next to the rest of the screen-making stuff at Menard’s. Weirder and Weirder! All I had to do was trim it and bend the little wires around the edges so they’d poke through the screen, then bend them over from the other side so they square would stay stuck. Too cool.

And now we have full-house ventilation, on this, a beautifully clear, sixty-five degree warm spring day. Thank goodness for screens. Or shields, whatever.

My Darling B spent the day in her garden, and when I say “spent the day” I mean she was out there from the time she gulped down her morning coffee until the sun set beyond the treeline and housetops, the air turned chilly and the rabbits came out for evening silfay to stand along the fence line, looking at B’s newly-planted seedlings with weepy eyes because they’d never get to taste her deliciously yummy veggies this season.

Actually, I don’t think B would mind if they had only a taste. It’s when they mow her seedlings down to the ground that she gets a little perturbed. She wouldn’t have asked for a fence if they’d exercised a little self-control and nibbled a bit here and there. But she’s not completely hard-hearted: she says she’s going to plant clover under the bird feeder and lettuce along the outside of the fence line to keep the bunnies happy. I think that would stir up forces more powerful than she can possibly understand, but the garden’s her hobby. I just dig the holes and put up the fences.

Cycling through the Waunona neighborhood this morning on the way to work I couldn’t help but notice when the pleasantly soothing cheeping of little birdies was gradually overpowered by the sullen drone of a diesel engine coming up from behind me. He’ll pass me soon, I figured, try not to let it ruin the good vibe of the ride, but the grunting truck engine kept getting louder and closer, and what was really weird was the driver seemed to be downshifting to move slower and slower so he wouldn’t pass me. When I finally got sick of this guy stalking me and the truck sounded like it was about to drive right up my ass, I broke right, turning into the driveway of a convenient public park to stop and make him go past me.

Man, was that a bad idea. Well no, actually it would have been a great idea if I’d turned off one driveway earlier, but I didn’t. As I turned to face the driver of a monster garbage truck I could quickly and easily see that he was not happy about slowing down for a bike rider. And if the driver was a little cranked off that he had to slow down for a slimy little bug of a bike rider like me, he was hyperpissed that I decided to turn into the very same driveway he wanted to get his truck into. The fact that I came to a full stop and turned to frown at him was like pouring gasoline on a fire.

It was shaping up to become the kind of classic confrontation I try hard to avoid, so I stood up on one pedal and got the hell out of there. The rest of the ride through Waunona was uneventful, even relaxing, but the vibe was gone. I hurried on to work.

On this route, which my inner monologue grandly titles The Southern Route, I exit the Waunona neighborhood where the railroad tracks pass under the Beltline and emerge on a bike path that curves gently around inside the off ramp from the Beltline to John Nolan Drive. With hundreds of commuters screaming past, the ride’s nowhere near as pleasant here as it was in Waunona. The bike path continues along the length of John Nolen all the way into town on a route that’s flat as Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein-built head, just the way I like it. I can roll along at a leisurely pace (is “pace” the right word when describing the speed of a bike?) or crank the pedals a bit harder to go a lot faster, and not have to worry about wearing myself out either way.

And that’s an especially good thing after I spent a slothfully inanimate winter doing very little I could truthfully call “exercise.” Practically nothing, when it comes down to it, unless I stretched it and put in a claim for shoveling snow. I did plenty of that. I even shoveled it off the roof of the O’Bode a couple times. But nothing like riding six miles on a bike. I was really quite surprised I could still make it to work in forty minutes, and even at the end of a stressful day I had the stamina to wheel back home in no more than forty.

There was one part of my body that was way out of shape: My butt was not liking the saddle by the time I was on the last mile or so of the evening ride. I was standing up to go over every little bump by then. My bike’s fitted with a traditionally-skinny saddle although it’s got a groove down the middle which is supposed to be ergonomically designed for comfort, as well as protect my daddy parts from long-term damage. That’s a load of warm dung, I can tell you. If I continue to ride regularly I’ll have to break down and buy one of those soft and springy bike seats that’s as wide as a dinner plate. I saw one in the shop a couple weeks ago when I took my bike in for a tune-up and thought about giving in and buying one then, but a taunting voice on my shoulder barked: “Pedal through the pain, wuss!” I don’t know why I listen to that guy.

I’m not going to lie to myself like I did last year and think that I’m going to take up biking into work all the time like some of these green freaks around here. First of all, I don’t like biking in the rain, and it rains a lot around these parts, particularly in the evening around rush hour. I’ll put up with the occasional cloudburst from a passing storm cell if I’m caught biking on what was otherwise a beautifully clear day, but I’m not a big enough dope to swing into the saddle and start out for work on a rainy morning, knowing full well it’s supposed to rain all day. Riding in the rain sucks. I don’t have the foul-weather clothing for it and even if I did I hate wearing it.

Second of all, I don’t much like biking when it’s stiflingly hot, either, and that leaves out most of July and August. I’ll still do it, because the morning ride is generally quite pleasant, but the ride home on a hot summer evening is like becoming a slowly broiled roaster chicken, basted in my own succulent juices. On a night like that, all my stamina’s gone before I go five hundred feet, and I end up cranking most of the route home in second gear, which takes one hell of a lot longer. Walking’s almost faster. I can put up with a ride like that about twice a week as the most.

Windy days suck, too. Or I guess they blow, really. It’s okay when the wind’s at my back, but it never is. If the wind’s up, seems like I’m always fighting it no matter which direction I point. I don’t know how that’s physically possible, but that’s inevitably the way it works out.

If it sounds as though that leaves about two weeks of suitable biking weather, your guess would be about right, but I’m not doing it to get fit or save the planet, I bike to work because it’s fun, and that’s exactly what I want it to be. When the weather’s cool and there’s little chance of rain, the way it was today, it’s a real treat to start and finish the day with a spin around the lake, even when some dirtbag in a garbage truck comes along and tries to be the fly in my ice cream.

Right in the middle of a marathon form-signing spree I cranked out one perfect version of my name. Has this ever happened to you? If you’ve never bought a house or enlisted in the military, two examples of those rare times in your life when you might possibly be called on to sign your name to dozens and dozens of forms, documents and contracts, you have no idea how carelessly a guy can set his legally-binding mark to papers so important they’ll literally have an impact on the rest of his life. Just any old scribble that starts with a reasonable facsimile of your initials will do. Nobody cares. And speaking of legally, it doesn’t matter. Your lawyer will tell you how to answer the question, “I this your signature at the bottom of this contract?” Yes or no, legible or not, it’s entirely out of your hands at that point. Kind of scary, eh?

So there I was, signing my name for about the thirtieth time, when out came a perfectly readable, and pretty snazzy-looking, version of my signature. Anybody could have known at a glance what it said, and read it aloud, as if four out of five people could manage to read my name aloud. I don’t know what’s so hard about my last name, but even when it was stitched in inch-tall blue all-caps above the pocket of my shirt all those years, most people called me “Sergeant O” to avoid mangling my name, or looking stupid, usually both. I’m not bitter. I just don’t understand what’s so hard about it. O. Kon. Ski. How’s that hard? How’s that become “onkowski” by the time it comes out of most people’s mouths? The mysteries of the grand unification theory are simple compared to figuring that out.

But there it was in black and white, my name, looking better than if I’d tried to sign it neatly and distinctly. I’ve tried, in fact, to learn to write better and sign a readable name, with mixed success. Most of the time, that “ons” in the middle gets my pen going so loopy that by the time I get to the “k” it’s out of control and my name ends up with a pigtail that I just pretend has an “i” at the end by dotting it so I can get it off my hands. Signing a driver’s license has always produced the very worst signature I can deliver, a tangle of wavy lines you normally wouldn’t see anywhere but dancing across the screen of an oscilloscope, probably because I know deep down I’m going to be stuck with it for at least four years, just like the mug-shot photo.

When I sit through a session of signing thirty or forty of these papers, though, a strange thing happens: The signatures become more readable the longer I go on. I don’t know if it’s because practice makes perfect, or because I lapse into a zen-like trance that drains the urgency of getting this over with so I sign more slowly and carefully. Whatever, I turn out some beautiful John Hancocks after I’ve warmed up by signing a dozen or so papers, and the other day that one perfect signature came scrolling out of my pen so beautifully it made me stop, lean back in my seat and smile in amazement.

I wanted to show it to somebody, it was so gorgeous. What I wanted to do was take it home and frame it, but it was at the bottom of a document that I’d have to mail to the county record of deeds, unless I spilled some coffee on it and asked the staff to do it over, but they’ve been working so hard to crank these things out that I couldn’t do that to them. I gazed upon it for a minute or two, soaking in its radiance, then hunched over my desk and continued signing.

She had gotten so tired of brushing the hair back from her eyes that My Darling B got her hair cut after work today. I keep growing mine and have gone from looking like a shoe brush to a super hippie weirdo freak, while she keeps cutting hers shorter. I now have longer hair than she has. When I met her it was down to her waist, but a couple years ago she clipped that to shoulder length and gave the hair away to one of those charities that makes wigs for cancer survivors. Shoulder-length has become too long for her now, though, so she clipped it back to a little-boy mop. If she cuts it any shorter, she’ll have to use a razor.

“Wow, that’s short,” was the only thing I could say when I saw her new cut after she came home. If I’d thought about it just a little bit I probably could’ve come up with something nicer than that, but “Wow, that’s short” was the first thing that came to my addled brain and my motor mouth blurted it out before I could stop it. I’m so articulate that way.

Tim said he thought it was very feminist. “You look like you could kill somebody,” he said. From Tim, that’s the highest form of a compliment. And it was strangely fitting, given that B was going for the Jodie Foster look, particularly the flyaway hairstyle Jodie wore in the movie The Brave One, or at least the one Foster was wearing on the movie poster. She took her laptop in to the hair stylist so she could show the gal what she wanted it to look like.

“It looked pretty good, too, until I went shopping and the wind blew it around a bit,” B said. That’s the problem with getting your hair cut to look like a rich movie actress; if you don’t have a small army of hair stylists to follow you around to plaster each individual hair in place with cans of hair spray, you’re not going to look like the movie poster for very long.

But for summer it’s a very good cut, cool and breezy, and she’ll be able to work in her garden without it hanging down in her eyes all the time, which I know was bugging the hell out of her. I thought it looked kinda sexy, but I knew all along if she had to chose between me and the garden, her little plot of greens would take the front seat. I’m so absent-minded I’ll probably forget what the long hair looked like by this time next week anyway and be madly in love with the new cut, so it all works out.

She was shopping for a garden tiller, by the way. She didn’t go out shopping for shoes or anything like that. I thought I’d make that clear after looking over what I’d written and thinking, She went to the hair stylist, then went shopping ... I’ve sort of made her sound like a blue-haired old lady with nothing to do but go to the beauty parlor every week, then shop for Wedgewood china. No. Banish that thought from your mind. She got her hair cut in the style of a pistol-packing, revenge-seeking angel of vengeance, then she went shopping for a four-stroke gasoline-powered yard implement. Wedgewood and shoes were the farthest things from her mind. I hope I’ve made it clear she’s not blue-haired at all.

Lunch at twelve noon on the dot today. I’m still amazed that happened. Every other day for the past week and a half I’ve been watching the clock, promising myself that I’d get the hell out of the office at twelve sharp and enjoy a walk around the square and a relaxing bite to eat. Then fwisht! the next time I look up it’s twelve-ten, twelve twenty-five, twelve thirty, leaving me to goggle at the clock wondering, Damn! How is that even possible? Then I’ve got to grab my lunch box and rush up the stairs if I want to see sunshine that day.

But today I looked up and it was magically twelve o’clock, exactly. I couldn’t believe it. I’d managed to check the time at the exact moment that my theoretical lunch hour is supposed to begin. I stood there with my jaw hanging open for thirty seconds, completely discombobulated. Then I paced from one side of my cubicle to the other and back, not sure what to do until I accidentally ran into my jacket hanging from the coat hook, snagged it and headed out the door before somebody saw me behaving like a gibbering loon.

Did you know “discombobulated” is in the dictionary? There’s a derivation [prob. alter. of discompose] and a first citation (ca. 1916), just like for a real word. Somebody got paid to write an entry for “discombobulate” in Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Wow. Wonder what that guy’s business card says. Something like: Willie Peters, senior nonsensical lexicographer, Merriam-Webster Corp.

That’d be my dream job right there. I don’t care how many hours I’d have to put in at the office, I’d enjoy every one of them for years and years if I got to spend all day composing entries for made-up words. I’d happily wake to each morning’s alarm and trot off to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of java thinking, Today, I think I’ll spend the morning researching the derivation of kerfluffle and, if I can find a citation or two, I can begin to write the definition after lunch. Golly gosh, I love my job!

I’m going easy on the coffee for a while, by the way. It came to me maybe middle of last week that the reason I’d had a little indigestion and trouble sleeping could have been not so much the stress of the new job but the fact that I’d been drinking three, four, five cups a day, a whole pot really, thinking of it as jet fuel that would keep me on my toes. Not that the job change and the high learning curve didn’t put some mind-altering stress on my psyche, but I got to believe that guzzling coffee probably wasn’t helping me keep a clear head, so I cut back to one freshly-brewed, delicious cup in the morning and that’s worked out pretty good so far. Maybe later next week I can work back up to two. And the week after that, three. Then five. It’s important to pace yourself.

In place of java I’ve been drinking lots and lots of fruit juice, a pint of OJ from the Walgreen’s down the block from the bank first thing in the morning and today another pint of grape juice with my lunch. Grape juice turns straight into stinky dog farts when I drink it. I don’t know what kind of special chemistry is going on there, but the effect is typically immediate. I could play a trombone if the mouthpiece were big enough to cover my butt. Most people don’t want to hear it, though, which is why I normally avoid the stuff, but today as I was picking out a nice tub of tuna salad at the Country Hearth I decided, I want a pint of grape juice. The rest of the world will just have to hold its nose for a little while. Oddly, though, the happy little flora in my upper GI tract didn’t have their usual party and I went tootless the whole rest of the day. It probably turned out better that way.

After I left the Country Hearth and headed back toward the bank, the very first new bench along the sidewalk around cap square was invitingly open and I found I could not make myself return to the cubicle straightaway, so I settled down, popped the top off my plastic tub o’ lunch and leisurely stuffed tuna salad down my neck while power-walkers from the surrounding office buildings strutted past. The way some of them do it, walking that fast looks like it hurts or is extremely uncomfortable, to judge from the expressions on their faces. I’m so glad I’m not one of them.

But finally, inevitably I was done eating and, after a few last sips from my bottle of high-octane fruit juice, I gathered up my unneeded jacket and strolled back to the office for Nose To The Grindstone, Part Two. There’s no clock-watching in the afternoons because so far there’s no point. I rarely have enough time in the day to do everything that comes to my desk, mostly because they keep bringing new stuff to me. This afternoon, though, I cleared so much paperwork off my desk that I saw the top of it for the first time in weeks, mostly because the telephone network went buggy and when the phones aren’t working, the fax isn’t churning out a constant blizzard of requests marked URGENT! That was nice. Maybe if I made a few more friends in the IT department they could make that happen a couple times a year.

“Burger burn for guy night!” I announced, when My Darling B asked what we were having for dinner tonight.

“And what are we going to have with them?” B asked. With them? What’s this? Iron Chef? Honestly, she’s so demanding!

“Burgers always go with potato chips!” I answered. “And pickles! That’s two vegetables! And sliced onions! That’s three! We’re talking healthy eating!”

But really, I had her at “burgers.” B loves a cook-out, and we’re in prime cook-out weather now, not too hot and the mosquitoes aren’t massing for an attack moments after I step out the back door.

We didn’t have any actual hamburger at home, though, or chips either, or onions. We had pickles, but because that was only a tiny fraction of what I said I’d serve for dinner, and the rest of the O-Folk would look at me cross-eyed if I rang the dinner bell and all they found when they got there was a jar of tiny dill pickles, B and I made a stop at the Willy Street co-op on the way home, taking a convenient parking spot right next to Star Liquors.

Hokey Smokes! They just happen to have beer at Star Liquors! Beer goes with hamburgers as perfectly as Fred Astaire danced with Ginger Rogers! As passionately as Humphrey Bogart kissed Lauren Bacall! This was kismet of the highest order, as well as an opportunity too good to pass up! And I didn’t. Along with the groceries, we took home a sixer of Mad Town Nut Brown and never was a dinner menu in such deliciously perfect harmony, at least not on guy food night.

I cooked the burgers on the trusty old Weber that stood lonely and foresaken in the snow all winter, I’m ashamed to admit. I took good care to clean it and hang it from the rafters of the garage the winter before, but last fall the winter weather sprang on us with such ferocity that I didn’t get out there in time to save it from the snows. Okay, I procrastinated. I did. And by the time I felt guilty enough to act, the snow was already up to my buttcheeks and the temps had dropped below freezing. I love my Weber but in weather like that a guy’s got to look out for himself. It’s the same with the garden hose. I can always get another hose, and I’ve already built enough character through cold-weather exercises like shovelling snow and camping in the snow. I’m at the point in my life where I don’t need that many more snow experiences, so the hose and the grill got buried and stayed buried all winter long.

But somehow the Trusty Weber survived. The anterior air inlets, as they are known among Weber afficianados and lexigraphic snots, were heavily corroded and the action was a little stiff at first, but a generous application of elbow grease, applied with my biggest hammer (or BFH in workshop lingo), loosened that right up. Likewise the topside vent. The grillwork itself was a little rusty, but I never set the food directly on it anyway. My grilling technique calls for a sheet of aluminum foil over the grill to keep the food juicy, slathered in spray-on no-stick oil so I can flip the food easily and keep it properly rotated. Plus, I get some awesome fireballs when I hold the spray can close to the hot coals.

After starting the fire with my handy-dandy fire starter (good name, no?), I went inside to pat the hamburgers. Working on the kitchen counter where I could keep an eye on the fire so it didn’t burn down the house and everybody in it, I scientifically measured out each pattie by grabbing a handful of ground beef and testing its weight by bouncing it in the palm of my hand. Foolproof. Give it a try, tell them I said it worked.

I composed each patty of ground beef with a dash of worchestershire sauce, a smattering of pepper and a pinch of salt. I’ve seen B throw just any old amount of spices and other ingredients together and it works pretty well for her, so I thoght I’d try it too, and what do you know? It worked. The burgers not only came out deliciously tangy, they stayed nice and juicy, too.

Each burger was served up with a slice of cheese and, after I popped open the bag of potato chips, I called everybody to a sumptuous repast that was enjoyed by all.

I was un-tucking my shirt from my trousers this afternoon, so happy to be home again after a long week at work that I just had to pause in the middle of the dining room to strip, when my elbow met the bridge of B’s nose with an audible *POP!* A thing like that will throw a wet blanket on your Friday evening let’s-start-the-weekend celebrations.

My Darling B had her hand pressed hard against her face when I turned around to check on the damage. “That really hurt,” was about all she could say, when she finally found her voice. Things weren’t looking good at all.

I watched her closely for the better part of an hour to see if she’d get coon eyes. Thank goodness, she did not. I very definitely wouldn’t have been able to stand myself if I’d hung a mouse on her. A lingering headache is about all she suffered from our collision, and she said there wasn’t much left of that by the time we finished dinner. To make it up to her, I served her a hot mug o’ mud to sip while she sat curled up on the sofa.

It’s my brother’s birthday again ... well, no, it’s factually the anniversary of his birthday. He only had the one, thank goodness. Talk about birth trauma. Just imagine how people would dread birthdays if they had to go through all that screaming and blood over and over. I’m pretty much dead certain mothers everywhere would give up reproduction completely and we’d be extinct ASAP.

But back to my brother and his birthday today: no matter how many times he has one of those (seems like constantly) I never get around to buying him a card, much less putting his name on the envelope and dropping it in the mail. I’m a chronically bad correspondent, even when it comes to Hallmark cards, the epitome of easy correspondence.

Here’s an idea: I could buy him a card for next year’s birthday, address it and keep it in our desk full of official mail and stuff, and I predict I still wouldn’t remember to mail it on time. That’s a pretty safe bet. Tell your bookie to put a twenty on it. No charge for the tip.

Thank goodness that, through the wonders of the internet, I can not only post a birthday wish for my brother on the day of the blessed event, I can even google the perfect Hallmark-card image to illustrate those wishes. Pete’s forty-four today, if I’ve done the math right, so he’s definitely old enough for me to poke fun of his age with a flaming birthday cake photo. Heck, he started on me when I hit thirty, so I figure I’ve got plenty of juice for this.

So Happy Birthday, Pete! Enjoy the cake, because next year you get a bottle of Geritol.

I can’t believe I did this, but after our weekly visit to the farmer’s market I stayed in town to get rid of some paperwork that had been piling up on my desk at work. Really. Have I officially be come The Man or what?

That paperwork had been haunting me for a week or two, though, and I really wanted to get rid of it. I put in a lot of extra time in the mornings before opening getting rid of a handful of it one day, another handful of it the next, but never quite getting it all done. I knew that if I spent a couple hours at it this weekend I could be rid of it once and for all, and I also knew that today would be the best day to do it. We would be in town anyway, I could bring my bike with me so B could go home after the market and I could have a pleasant ride home when I was done. It was a perfect plan, as these things go.

And it worked out just the way it was supposed to, believe it or don’t. It was a beautiful morning, cool but not cold and there were plenty of merchants at the market today so B got to look at lots and lots of garden stuff and I had a couple really good cookies from some of the best bakeries around. The double fudge oatmeal coconut I bought was so good it was like being kissed for the first time.

Then after the market B headed home to work in her garden with her new electric tiller and I went to the office, opened up my file cabinet and went to work on an inch-thick stack of maintenance logs. Everybody in our department keeps a log of all the changes they make to the computer files we keep on our customers’ accounts. One of the things I do is check to make sure that what they thought they did was what actually happened by checking their work against a report of all the changes that were made — One. Line. At. A. Time. It’s mind-numbingly tedious work, but it’s got to be done, and I’m the lucky guy who gets to do it.

Two hours later I took a victory lap around the office after I finished checking the last log sheet. On an ordinary day at work I would never have two straight hours to devote to checking the logs and it made me more than a little crosseyed, but it sure felt good to get it over with. And I’ve got most of my ducks in a row now at work so I should be able to keep up with it from here on.

That done, I climbed on my bike and headed home through the Willy Street neighborhood, up around Schenk’s Corners and down through Monona, a trip of about forty-five minutes, even when I take it easy, and I did. Even though it had warmed up quite a bit, the day was still perfect for a long, leisurely bike ride and, coincidentally, for working in the garden. My Darling B was out there, tilling away, when I got home, and she stayed out there until I fired up the grill to burn some polish sausage for dinner.

“I suppose you’re going to ruin that perfectly good sausage by putting sauerkraut on it?” she asked, as I was getting ready to take them out to the grill, and in fact I hadn’t thought of it until she reminded me. We don’t often have sauerkraut in the fridge but I’ve still got some from the last time and it’s not like the stuff goes bad. You could stock a bomb shelter with it and it would still be good when the nomad raiders came to drag you out years later. She diced some onions for hers and I used some of that, too, with a dollop of mustard just to make it extra-special.

I got to take my two favorite mothers out to eat today.

When I heard the pitty-pat of My Darling B’s feet across the bedroom floor, I emerged from my basement lair to meet her in the kitchen, give her a good-morning smooch and ask her if she’d let me treat her to breakfast at Cleveland’s Diner. She said she would. I thought so.

We were both in for a surprise as we pulled up to the curb outside Cleveland’s this morning, though. The sign in the window said it was closed for renovations and not due to open for more than a week. “Renovations?” I whined. “How are they going to renovate without destroying the atmosphere?” Cleveland’s has (or had) an ambiance unlike any other greasy spoon in town. The walls were papered with concert posters, Brewer’s season calendars, post cards from various vacation destinations, and hung with framed photos of Madison, team pennants and a hockey stick with a deflated balloon drooping from one end. Reproducing that kind of decor seems like a pretty dicey proposition to me. Maybe they have something different in mind, but they’d be hard-pressed to come up with anything as jumbled and yet as endearing. We’ll report back after we visit it following the re-opening.

I was not about to let a minor obstacle like major renovations ruin a Mother’s Day breakfast for B, so I turned the car around and headed up Willy Street where we popped into Lazy Jane’s Cafe. We each tried the two different breakfast specials, a chorizo scramble for me and an omlette with goat cheese for B, and they were wonderful. In fact, we tried every item on special today. “Celebrate Mother’s Day with a mimosa,” the specials board commanded. “May I?” B asked, looking hopeful. “Well, of course,” I answered. Can’t say no to her anyway, but especially not on Mother’s Day.

Barely an hour later, happily stuffed full of breakfast and topped off with a fresh cup of coffee, we returned to Our Humble O’Bode where I cleaned up, put on a fresh shirt and jumped right back into the O-Mobile for the long trip north to the ancestral manse. I can’t remember the last time I spent Mother’s Day with my own mother, so it was high time I did. I called Mom earlier this week and offered to take her out for dinner anywhere she wanted to go. The only place I could suggest was Simpson’s, a supper club in nearby Waupaca that serves quite a few very tasty dinners but I especially like the seafood combo plate. She said that’d be just fine by her.

So I drove up in the morning, easily making it there by one o’clock, just in time to see the start of the Brewer’s game. It seems I’m always calling her on the phone or, in this case, popping into her sitting room while she’s trying to watch a Brewer’s game. She’ll never see every game on television so long as I’m around. That’s not a promise, just an observation. But there’s a lot of time during baseball games when virtually nothing’s happening so we could sit and chat for quite a while, breaking off the conversation when somebody got a hit.

The Brewers were winning when we left at the top of the sixth to head for Simpson’s. I’m haunted by the feeling we shouldn’t have walked out on the Brewers when they were ahead, as if it would jinx their chances. I guess we could’ve stayed to see who won, but we had reservations for four o’clock. Oddly for a supper club in Wisconsin the wait staff at Simpson’s had no idea how the Brewers came out in the end. (Turned out they won 5-3 over St. Louis. No jinx there.)

Mom ordered the scallops for dinner. She loves the scallops. “I know they’re probably not really scallops,” she admitted, “but I love them anyway.” I love them, too. I had a combo platter with scallops, shrimp and haddock, all very tasty and swimming in what had to have been an entire stick of melted butter. And speaking of butter, our baked potatoes came with a little pot of what we assumed to be butter because Mom specifically told the waitress not to bring her any sour cream because she’s lactose intolerant. I am, too, but I don’t eat sour cream because I just plain don’t like it.

So because she told the waitress no sour cream, and because we both assumed it was a little pot of whipped butter, we each slathered plenty of it on our potatoes. I was loving my seafood combo so much that I didn’t take a bite of my potato for quite a while, but when I did I recognized the taste of sour cream right away. “Sour cream,” my brain stem said to my higher functions. “Don’t like.” And I pushed it away. Mom had been eating hers all along and kept on doing so. It didn’t even occur to me that she might have problems with that because I was thinking “don’t like” instead of “lactose intolerant.” But a funny look came over her as she popped in a forkful. She poked at the little pot and said something like, “Oh, crap!” And then the light went on over my head.

“Oh yeah, I think that’s sour cream,” warned her, after which she would have had every right to answer, “No shit, Sherlock,” but she was too busy looking for a Lactaid pill in her handbag.

Aside from that little glitch, dinner was delicious and a pleasant time was had by all. I headed back to Madison from Waupaca, a head start that cut the ride down I-39 to just two hours. Every time I drive that route I’m amazed the shoulders aren’t littered with the mangled car bodies of wrecked automobiles. How so many people can drive like poorly-trained monkeys and survive, particularly at those speeds, is a violation of the law of averages.

INSOMNIA STRIKES AGAIN! I freaking hate this! First I was almost falling asleep but each time I drifted off I’d start dreaming about work and that would wake me up because who wants to dream about work? Then I was all bunched up about waking up over and over again and had to consciously try to relax my bunched-uppedness one muscle at a time. I’d relax my neck, then relax my right shoulder, then relax my left shoulder, check to see that my arms were relaxed, and that’s about the time I’d notice that my neck was bunched up again!

Round about midnight I opened a book and started reading at random, and kept reading until around one-thirty when I put it down again, and not because I was feeling the least bit tired but because I didn’t want to read any more, I wanted to go to sleep. It’s not the best attitude to have if you hope to fall asleep, but screw attitude anyway. So I snapped off the light, made myself as comfortable as I knew how to get, and tried some deep breathing to make myself relax. That only made me dizzy. Not deep-breathing made my brain go about a thousand miles an hour, but at least I wasn’t thinking about work. What I was thinking about, though, was how pissed-off I was that I wasn’t asleep, and by two-thirty my pissed-offedness reached an intensity hot enough to melt iron.

And that’s when I got out of bed, grabbed my robe and stomped down the stairs to my basement lair to bang away at my laptop for a while. This drivel will definitely not represent me at my best.

As you know, I love to cuss. You don’t know that by reading many cuss words in this drivel because I have this vague awareness that cussing is rude and rudeness puts people off and my aim here is not to put people off so I’ve engaged in a judicious amount of self-censorship, as well as word substitution. This freaking sucks. Not because I mind censoring myself for your benefit, I don’t. It’s a courtesy I happily extend to you and intend to continue to do. There are times, though, like when I’m awake in the middle of the night and none to happy about it, that I’d like to cut loose with a string of really juicy, inky blue language, but decorum won’t allow it. Drat and consarn that furshlugginer decorum to heck anyway.

Cussing by proxy has always confused the hell out of me, pardon my fronch. If I say “drat,” you know what it stands for, so I might as well have said “damn,” right? I said it (or in this case wrote it), you got the meaning, the only thing missing was the actual word. What’s the point of that? I never did get it. I understand the necessity of speaking politely in mixed company, but the playful wink-wink status of substitute cussing has always seemed really weird to me. And still I do it all the time. Is it necessary? Does anybody care? I don’t freaking know.

I thought I’d type out some crap before I go to bed tonight so when I get up tomorrow I can see what I sound like when I’ve had zero sleep since seven o’clock yesterday morning.

I got out of bed this morning and went to work, but I don’t know how. I could have wimped out and taken up the offer My Darling B made to punch out of work early and take me home, where I could drop right in the middle of the living room floor and comfortably sleep the next eighteen hours away. I didn’t, though. I said I would if she thought leaving early was worth it, but it wasn’t and we both knew it. We could leave at one or even noon, but we’d get maybe one or, if we were lucky, two hours of nap time and then the noisy O-dude would be home, tromping across the floor and slamming doors everywhere he went. That boy can drop a toilet seat and make it sound like the day Krakatoa blew up.

Huh. I’m kind of impressed with myself. I was absolutely positive that previous paragraph wouldn’t make a lick of sense. I was so totally wiped out from lack of sleep when I wrote it last night that I thought it would make for some funny word salad, but somehow I not only remembered subject, verb and object, it even scans. Well, sort of.

As bleary-eyed as I was when I got home from work, I still forced myself to stay awake, more or less, until eight-thirty last night. I was only shooting for eight but I overshot, which is pretty weird because I didn’t think I was going to make it to eight after I had a beer with dinner that made my eyes start slamming shut by seven. That’s when I went to my basement lair and rapped out the hundred or so words you see in the opening salvo of this drivel.

I came back upstairs a little before eight o’clock wtih all the intentions in the world of putting on my PJs and going see the sandman, but I took a picture book of choo-choo trains to bed with me and got distracted. But even the magical power of choo-choos goes only so far and I was head-jerking my way to lah-lah land in short order, so I snapped off the light and was technically asleep before I set my head on the pillow. I slept like the dead until the alarm bleeped me awake this morning. I could have easily kept sleeping until noon.

The markings on tailgate of the SUV in front of us on the commute home said there was a V-8 engine under the hood. Holy crap, they still put V-8s in cars! How much do you suppose you’d have to spend on gasoline every week to keep a V-8 well-fed? I’ll bet that thing gulps at least a gallon and a half just going into town and back. And at this point, with gas just a whisker away from four dollars a gallon, you could figure the price per hour to operate that monster and it would still make your teeth clench.

My brother bought a scooter to fight back against the high cost of gasoline, a smart move as far as his wallet’s concerned but I have to wonder how close he comes to being smooshed like an ugly bug every day as he’s riding it through the traffic of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. I’ve thought about getting a scooter myself. There are so many people around here who ride scooters that the temptation to join the herd is almost irresistable, but every time I drive to work, morning and night, I’m reminded why I don’t dare go out into traffic on a glorified bicycle: It makes it way too easy for some nutburger, and there are lots of them, to run me over while she’s weaving in and out of traffic, or he’s yakking on his cell phone. In my big Toyota Camry I at least stand a chance of surviving being run over by a Land Rover, but riding a scooter? I’d be pavement pizza, compressed forever into two dimensions. No, thanks.

Which is why, when I go to work any other way than by motorcar, I use a bicycle. There are plenty of trails to ride around this town, so I hardly have to travel by road at all, and then only through an isolated neighborhood and a little-traveled parkway. Everywhere else, I stay on the trail or cheat and use the sidewalk. I don’t care if the pedestrians don’t like it. I’m not risking my neck for their pleasure.

I tried walking once, but it’s just too far and I’m not up to it any more. If I were twenty years younger I’d feel pretty good about saying I could walk to work and back, twelve miles every day, but now I’m not too proud to admit my dogs get hot and tired after just a few miles and by the time I get home my knees ache and all I want to do is sit on my arse for the rest of the day. It’s no way to be, so I’m happy to surrender my bragging rights and commute on wheels.

I was even rather envious of the ample bottom of the woman I saw biking home this evening. There have been plenty of times, usually in the middle of a ten-mile ride, when I’ve thought about how much more comfortable I would feel if only I were a bit more well-endowed in the posterior. Lots of women go on and on about how they’d like to be skinny as me. Bet they’ve never done five miles on a bicycle saddle narrow as an axe head.

There was no coffee at the O-Home this morning. Oh! The Humanity! The Humanity!

I have no idea how we let that happen. Just got stupid, I guess. I seem to recall it’s happened before, but ever since then we’ve kept at least one emergency back-up bag of coffee beans on ice in the freezer and haven’t run out again, until now. Total coffee bean failure. We hang our heads in shame.

To fill the void left by our embarrassing blunder we stopped at Java Cat on the way to work to pick up some piping hot beverages to go. My Darling B asked for a gran-day extra-hyper mocha magnifico with room for cream. It’s not coffee if it doesn’t have cream, as far as she’s concerned, and she dribbles plenty of sugar in there as well. Seems like a milk shake to me. I got myself a black cuppa joe, the small size for us ordinary mortals.

WHOA! There was enough caffeine in there to keep Oprah’s smile shining with fifty thousand watts of electrifying power. I drank about half of it and had to stop when my heartbeat reached one-forty. I usually don’t get there even after I’ve shoveled all the way to the end of the driveway when a couple tons of heavy, wet snow have fallen on it.

Last night I dreamed I had re-enlisted in the military and was starting Marines boot camp! Come on, Dave, you can do this, the encouraging little voice in my head peeped, and the other voice, the much louder one, insisted, No you can’t, you creaky old fossil! These studly young wanna-be killers are going to STOMP you! It was a variation on that dream where you find you’re back behind a desk in school, the teacher is passing out mimeographed sheets that you recognize as a pop quiz in algebra, and you know you couldn’t solve for x for a million dollars. Or the dream where you’re in your underwear. It was like that.

Luckily, even while the drill sergeant was flecking my face with his spit as he bawled me out I had that vague feeling all along that it was a dream so I didn’t panic. I just let him yell at me until he got tired enough of that to move on to the next guy. After that, all I had to do was stand at attention until the alarm clock bleeped me back to the real world, where I had to climb out of my cozy, warm bed and get ready for another nine hours at work. Boot camp was looking pretty good all of a sudden.

The fifteenth of every month is special for two very important reasons: One of us gets paid that day, I forget who. It might be me. So long as the money’s coming in I don’t really care. In any case, it’s a payday and when the money magically appears in our bank account it’s a relief to know that that the system still works and My Darling B and I aren’t spending a whole week at the DMV and the bank for the pleasure of helping people and making the world a better place. We’d do that, sure, but we want the moola, too.

Much more important than that, however, is the fifteen percent off sale they have on wine at Star Liquors on the ides of every month. Well? Is that more important that serving the public or am I wrong? I’m not wrong. I’m so very right. It’s a truth that shines like a newly-minted quarter. I’ll put it away now so you don’t have to avert your eyes any longer.

The parking lot was chock full o’ cars when we pulled in, but one of the owners happened to be out there and waved us into an open slot in the back. “Free wine inside!” he shouted as we went past. “Get your butt in there!” You can see why we love these guys. They try to get one of their suppliers to come in at least once a week to offer samples and talk about their products, and it turned out there was a wine distributor in there today! This day just gets better and better!

She offered us one of those little spit cups like the kind you get with a bottle of cough medicine and dribbled a bit of champagne into it to start. Delicious! Then she gave us a taste of three different kinds of red wines. B loves the red wines, so she was in heaven. The distributor kept up a steady patter about the kind of grapes used to make the wine and where the winery was located. “This one’s from Nostro del Snotico, in the Flectora de la Pectoral region of Spain,” she’d say, and when we met her with blank stares she’d try to elaborate by adding, “It’s just a little northwest of Blanco Bluey and maybe a hundred miles south of Stinko Magnifico.” She never once mentioned a place in Spain I would have recognized. (That would have been Madrid. I’m pretty sure that’s the only place in Spain I know.)

Sadly, the store was out of stock of the wine B loves best, a red wine from Spain, so we had to make do with chosing from the samples we tried. We took home one of each because we’re indecisive as hell.

Our internet connection’s been slower than slow. Slow as a slug crossing a block of ice. Slow as gin when you spell it wrong. Slow as an hour in a dentist’s chair. Those kinds of slow. The kind of slow that makes a guy not want to surf the web. I can leave the room to get a book or a cuppa joe in the time it takes for a clicked link to show up on my screen. It’s almost as slow as having dial-up again, but only almost. Nothing’s a slow as dial-up, not even President Bush answering a question from the press corps.

Our connection’s been so slow that I rearranged my laundry list of cartoons, the one on the lower right-hand corner of the screen that you never visit. I use it every morning to catch up on my favorite comic strips, but visiting them lately has become such a wrenching pain in the neck that I put the titles in the order of the ones I most want to see first, in case plodding download speeds eat up all my time and I can’t read them all before I have to get dressed and go earn an honest living.

This puts them more or less de facto in order from my most favorite to not so most favorite, sort of, but not really. The dailies are up at the top of the list, so just because Kate Beaton’s near the bottom doesn’t mean I don’t like her cartoons more than Bizzaro. I probably do, but she doesn’t post a new cartoon every day and Dan Pirraro does. That gets him bonus points and a seat at the top of the box so I can keep up with him. Beaton posts her cartoons in a blog that she updates whenever she feels like it. Even if I go without visiting her site for days I don’t miss a new toon.

I dreamed somebody shaved my beard off in my sleep. I guess that would be more of a nightmare than a dream, if I had to classify it properly. Whoever did it (I never got anyone to admit to it) did a pretty raggedy-ass job of it, too, I suppose because they had to work quickly and try not to wake me up. It wasn’t bad enough to dream that my beard had been vandalized, though; I also dreamed about most of the day at work, where I ran into every single person I knew. They all asked me why I shaved off my beard, of course. I’ve never been so ticked for so long. I was still pissed off about it when I woke up.

And once again it’s Friday! To celebrate the end of a grinding week of work I thought I’d treat my coworkers to all the cookies they could stuff in their face, fresh from the bakery next door, so right after My Darling B dropped me off downtown I walked straight over to Scott’s, stepped up to the showcase filled with sugar-sprinkled molasses cookies and asked the guy behind the counter how many of those I could get for five bucks. “Whoa! I’d better get a box!” he said, and he really did get one of their big boxes and start filling it with cookies.

At Scott’s they’ve got frou-frou cookies cut in different shapes and frosted with colored cake icing. They usually go for two or three bucks apiece. Then they’ve got manhole-sized cookes, mostly chocolate-chip and oatmeal-raisin, those sorts of monster cookies, for a buck eighty-five. The molasses cookies, however, are normal-sized, no bigger than a beer coaster (funny how that immediately popped into mind as the most recognizable shape and size for a cookie). There’s nothing at all remarkable about them, other than they’re sweet and tasty and I could eat about a half-dozen of them before I realized I was making myself sick.

They came in two sizes, actually, the coaster-sized ones and some much smaller, about the size of a half-dollar, if you remember what those look like. He finished off the box with a few smaller cookies to make it come out to four dollars and ninety-nine cents’ worth as I grubbed around inside my wallet for a fin to pay for the goodies.

After I settled into my desk, switching on the desk lamps and hanging up my jacket, I set the box out on the table where we all leave our communal offerings and, feeling magnanimous as hell, popped the lid to show everyone that I brought them ... eight cookies. Supporating pustules! If four dollar a gallon gasoline doesn’t convince you that the American economy has tanked, then I give you Exhibit B: eight molasses cookies worth more than a gallon of gasoline. Luckily for me there was no one else in the office at that early hour, so I quickly closed the box and hid it under my desk behind the file cabinet where nobody would see it. I made a present of them to My Darling B when she came to pick me up later in the evening.

So we’re trying to figure out what brings lots of viewers to our blog, and it’s obviously a keyword search used by millions of dedicated pot smokers, alcoholics and porn addicts. For instance, My Darling B updated her blog this evening after I prodded her to post some photos of her garden, and she used the caption “hardening off” for a photo of some seedlings she took outside to acclimate them to the outdoors. “That’s what they call it,” she said, “it’s nothing dirty.” Within half an hour she had never-before seeen hits from all over the world. Wonder why? Let’s see: Hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off hardening off.

And a few weeks back I scored literally dozens of hits by posting a bit of drivel that included the phrase “weed man,” which was stitched into the hat of the guy who wanted to chem our front lawn, as well as an extensively negative review of Optimator, a beer served at a local tavern. I don’t know which term tripped the flood of blog viewers, but let’s give them both a try again, because I’m sure it was one or the other: weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk weed man optimator beer drinking drunk.

And, just to make sure: Porn. There. All eyes on the feedjit box, now. This ought to be fun.

Both My Darling B and I woke up early enough this morning to enjoy a leisurely cuppa joe on our sofa reading the morning funnies and still get to the farmer’s market before the sidewalks were crowded buttcheeks to bellybutton with shoppers who don’t want to stop for anything.

B is the shopper on these trips. I am merely her basket bearer, a task that requires me to keep on eye on B and one eye on the traffic, for when she stops, I must immediately find a way to move toward an out-of-the-way parking spot. If I’m paying close attention and all goes well I can simply drift with the human tide toward an available bench or into the lee at the end of a vendor’s table. If I’ve been people-watching, a compelling distraction given the nature of the crowds at the market, I suddenly snap out of it to find B has stopped two or three tables back, calling for me to stop on a dime. To do that, I must find a way to part the oncoming throng. Easier to put an egg back in its shell.

When the crowd becomes even thicker and much more irresistable, just hanging on to B is an exercise in futility. I tried the polite way, but Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me goes from being polite to annoyingly repetitive in short order. When polite failed to work, I tried the belligerent way, using a shoulder or a hip check to firmly indicate a turn, but I found the best way to keep from being trampled under the feet of the teeming millions is by hooking a finger in the back of B’s t-shirt, turning on the Bambi eyes, and whimpering like a lost little boy. It’s not all that dignified, but what the hell, it works.

I also go along to the farmer’s market for the great company. It’s fun to watch B oooh and ahhh over the veggies and listen to her tell me all about the spices and herbs, even though I don’t understand the difference between them (and so far she’s been unable to explain it — pepper’s a spice, but cilantro’s an herb? How does that work?). And besides, she buys me cookies. The cookies are freaking awesome.

We did a little garage sale-ing on the way home. (I’m not sure how that verb declines. “Saleing” doesn’t look right, but “saling” would be pronounced SOL ing, wouldn’t it? The homophone “sailing” would make it pronoucable but is too easily confused with boating. So I’m going with the hyphenation for now.)

Today was the second day of the Monona Citywide Garage Sale and there were signs out everywhere. Our Humble O’Bode needs more clutter like Madison needs more left-wing liberal hippies, but it’s hard to drive past a yard piled high with the jetsam of somebody’s life and not get reeled in by curiosity. One guy had his collection of stone arrowheads on display for sale, choice of any for ten bucks a pop. Another family had a stack of old electronics that included an eight-track tape player. Might’ve been fun to have just for the novelty, but there’s that thing about clutter I mentioned already.

B bought a nice basket she planned to use for gathering veggies from her garden. I bought a notebook not because I need another one but because the cover is a poster drawn up to entice summer travelers to use the Great Western Railway. I’m not surrounded by choo-choo clutter yet, it’s just a fond wish at this point.

With the remainder of the morning I mowed the yard, including those irritatingly durable bushes planted along the back rail of the deck. I used the hedge clippers on them last summer when they tried to grow up over the edge of the deck but I never found the tactic that would let me win that losing battle. I think I would have had to go out there every day and trim them in order to keep up with their rampaging growth rate and I didn’t feel like doing that, so last fall we just ran them over with the lawn mower again and again. They spring right back up, though, faster than dandelions, so that’s how I trim them now. VROOM! and they’re not a problem any more, then two weeks later they’re all grown up again. It’s a lot easier than spending an afternoon fussing over them with the hedge trimmers. I might try the same technique on the rest of the shrubbery around the yard. Probably won’t work on the flowers, though.

My Darling B stayed home all day yesterday, puttering in her garden, while I slaved away at the old salt mines! Can you believe that? And she’s going to do it again on Monday! And again on Tuesday! It’s like she doesn’t have anything better to do!

To be fair, it’s a pretty big garden, roughly the size of North and South Dakota combined, and she’s limited herself to just one power tool for some reason, so she’s got her work cut out for her. She tilled two patches yesterday and finally got the potatoes in the ground. They’ve been sprouting so aggressively that I’m pretty sure they’d evolved intelligence and were beginning to work out how to open the thick brown bags they were trapped in. But B diced them up into pieces and buried them, so we’re safe from a potato takeover this season, thank dog.

Non sequitur: I’ve been seeing a lot of “dog is my copilot” bumper stickers around town. Is that a local joke, or something bigger? ... okay, after a quick google search I discovered it’s the official motto of BARk magazine. I did not know that. Cool motto. Dumb magazine, though. Can there really be that much news about dogs to fill a magazine for twelve months, year after year?

Is there one for cats called MEOw? No, there is not. How about HISs, PURr or SPIt? There was a Hiss Magazine, looks like a dead blog. There’s one called Purr but it’s not about cats. I’m not sure what it’s about; looks maybe like indy music, performance art or teenaged rebellion. I’m not sure I want to google “spit” and “cat” at the same time. You’re on your own there.

Non sequitur: There were an awful lot of apostrophes in that last sentence. Here’s Bob, The Angry Flower, who became one of my favorite toons when he offered an all-encompassing lesson in the use of the least-understood punctuation mark. And here’s the secret to using an apostrophe in the word “it’s.” Learn and enjoy.

Well, I haven’t done much today. I need a day like that every so often, you know? I woke up early, around five-thirty, but I rolled over and went right back to sleep when I realized there weren’t any cats at the foot of my bed, whining and crying about not being fed. And they never did. I slept in until about seven, then laid in bed for another fifteen or twenty minutes listening to My Darling B’s comforting purr and considering whether or not I wanted to get up. And I very nearly didn’t, but the lure of the Sunday morning newspaper waiting at the end of the driveway was too much to ignore, so I grabbed a pair of trousers and a shirt and padded out into the living room with them.

After putting my pants on and fetching the paper, in that order (don’t want to scare the early-morning dog-walkers), I brewed a fresh pot o’ java and sat down at the table with two slices of buttered toast, sprinkled with sugar. Coffee, toast and the morning paper. Do Sundays get any better than this?

Ever heard of Lucian Freud? Me, neither. He paints garishly-colored portraits (mostly nudes, by the way) and one of them just set the record for the highest price ever paid for a living painter’s work, a little over thirty-three million dollars. The painting, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (quite a few of his subjects seem to be sleeping), is easily the ugliest painting I have ever seen in my life, not only because of the eye-stinging way he combined the colors, but for the paint-by-numbers way he did it. I’ve got the funny feeling that if you took it out of Christy’s hands and tried to unload it at a garage sale you wouldn’t get five bucks for it.

Several hours and two cups of coffee later I fixed the screen on the back door that the cats had pushed out. It was one of those plastic screens; all I had to do was pull out the rubber bead, stretch the screen into position and run the bead back into place. I’ll probably have to do that a couple dozen more times this summer if we continue to let the cats sit on top of the bottom half of the dutch door where they get all wound up by the birds and chipmunks push up against the screen, trying to get as close as they can.

My uncle gave us a couple boxes of books last Friday so I pawed through them for a while, a delaying tactic, I have to admit. I was trying to put off the cleaning I give the bathroom from time to time. I’m a very aperiodic house cleaner. It gets done when it gets done. This time around, though, I think I let it go a bit too long — I was so not looking forward to it. I don’t look forward to it even when it’s not too far gone, but I knew I’d have to spend an hour at least on the floor today because the grout had a nasty case of mildew that looked as though it could withstand an aggressive assault with a flamethrower, and I had only a stiff brush and a fresh bottle of 409 spray cleaner. Lucky for me that did the trick.

Two hours and a very hot shower later I was back in the recliner, flipping through books. Jim passed along quite a few picture books and histories of Wisconsin, so I’ll probably be plunging into those soon. Quite a few of the rest, like a beginner’s guide to sailing, will end up going straight to the donation bin at the library, unless you call dibs on them. The rest of the afternoon passed by pretty lazily; I dozed in the recliner when I wasn’t flipping pages. It was that kind of day.

I grilled steaks on the Weber last night for dinner. Delicious steaks, rave reviews, everybody loved them. I don’t know much, but I have a pretty good idea how to grill steaks. I’ve been doing it for a while.

So how come I forgot the most important rule of grilling, and that is: Never barbeque in your bare feet. And I mean it, that’s the most important rule. You can try to argue there are others more important — always start with a good cut of meat; don’t make the fire too hot; never get into a land war in Asia — but I would counter-argue that if you’re hopping around on one foot trying to pick a hot ember from between your toes, there isn’t one iota of your being that’s paying attention to grilling any more, so any other considerations are moot at that point.

I was in a hurry last night. It’s the only excuse I’ve got. I had just spread out the coals, I didn’t have a lot of charcoal to start with and I wanted to slap the steaks on the grill with all due speed so I could use every minute of heat they had to give. Luckily I was never in any danger of dropping dinner because I had already laid both sirloin slabs down and was stepping away from the barbeque when my foot, specifically my little toe, found that one killer ember lying in wait on the lawn. Doubly luckily, the ember stayed on the ground while I took flight, reaching at altitude normally achieved by human power alone only during NBA tournaments.

I announced my find loudly enough that the entire neighborhood should’ve heard about it, but if they did, nobody but My Darling B answered up. “Are you all right?” she called, worriedly, from the kitchen window as I was still kasproinging on one foot, the other folded over my knee so I could look for a bright red welt. There was none. Contact had been mercifully brief. Even after dinner there was still no mark to show where I’d been dumb enough to burn myself, but as I pogoed over to the deck rail for support it still felt as if there was a hot needle in there. Wowzers, that hurts.

“I’m okay,” I answered B, mostly to keep her from dialing nine-one-one, then hobbled inside to find my flip-flops.

My Darling B went out first thing this morning, in her bathrobe, even before she’d had her morning cuppa joe, to stick a thermometer in the dirt. There was a touch of frost on the rooftops this morning and she wanted to see if her seedings would be safe in her garden, and it turns out they will. It was about fifty degrees in the patch of earth she tested. I only wish I’d taken a snapshot of her out there in her bunny slippers and pink robe.

She stayed home again all day today and got in great big patches of tomatoes, whole football fields of them. If you’re anywhere near Madison this summer and you like tomatoes, stop on by. I can guarantee you won’t be allowed to leave unless there’s a line of fat, juicy tomatoes on the ledge across your rear window.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have cared one bit whether or not we had fresh tomatotes growing in the back yard. In fact, I remember solemnly promising my Dad that I would never eat raw tomatoes. “That’s what I used to say,” he warned me. “You just wait.” I still don’t exactly go out of my way for them, but last week My Darling B bought an heirloom tomato from the co-op, sliced it up into thick, juicy chunks and made lots of yummy noises as she gobbled it down during dinner. She shared a couple pieces with me. Not many, but some. Actually, she would have shared it fifty-fifty if I’d only asked, but I didn’t. She loved eating that tomato so much that I wanted her to have all the tomato she could hold. That, and I’ve never been all that crazy about eating raw tomatoes.

But I love fresh sliced tomatoes on sandwiches and burgers. With onions. And of course a slice of cheese. A hamburger’s not worth eating if it isn’t dripping with cheese.

Dinner tonight was a bit more complicated than cheeseburgers. My Darling B served up a concoction of chicken and saffron that was delicious but she was in the kitchen from five-thirty until seven or so preparing it, and she wasn’t very happy with the results. She loves to cook but she’s very exacting when it comes to what it is she wants to prepare, even though if you watch her she doesn’t measure a thing, she just throws a little of this and a handful of that together and keeps tasting it until it suits her.

The saffron chicken soup wasn’t suiting her, though. She kept straining it and puree-ing it, and just when it was looking like we’d be ordering out for pizza because the stuff wasn’t going to be ready until dinner tomorrow she called us to dinner. I don’t know just what she did with it, but it was wonderful. And she served it with fresh-baked bread. Is there any food as delicious as bread right out of the oven? We sliced it up and ate all of it but one butt-end.

I’ve been advised that, if I’m having trouble sleeping, I should go see my doctor and ask for something called Halcion. Doesn’t that seem a little backwards to you? I mean to say, normally you go into the doctor, describe your symptoms and wait to see what he prescribes, or at least that’s what I do. You don’t march in and say, “Doctor, I’ve got a compound fracture of the fibia and tibia, please start an IV with Wringer’s lactate and a morphine drip, stat.” (Not bad, eh? That’s from watching two straight years of Emergency!) I guess that’s not the best example, because in all likelihood he’ll not only grant you your wish, he’ll probably insist on it, but you see what I’m getting at, right? I don’t remember ever asking the doctor for prescription drugs.

Besides, if I’m going to ask for sleeping pills I’d ask for Lunesta, the drug with the pretty green moth that flies from house to house sprinkling sleepy-time dust on people who smile as they lay their heads on their pillows. They all wake up looking so refreshed! And they’re still smiling as they look out the window and watch the pretty green moth fly away. I’ll bet that satisfied look goes away after a couple nights and they start wondering, “I’ve see that moth flying away every morning since my last attack of insomnia. Is it an alien mind thief? Some kind of succubus? What’s going on here?”

It’s Eliza Doolittle Day!

It also happens to be My Darling B’s birthday. Just forty-five short years ago today she popped into the world, destined for greatness. Instead, she ended up in a tiny 1950’s-era Levittown-like cottage with me. Kind of blows the whole idea of a greater destiny right out of the water, doesn’t it?

But celebrating another birthday isn’t entirely without its compensations. She had the whole day off, the last of her five-day weekend, to putter around in her garden planting all manner of good veggies for our dinner table. By her own account, it was a very successful day. When I finally came home after work we all tumbled into Tim’s car and sped off to Angelo’s for a birthday dinner that couldn’t be beat.

And I do mean we were speeding. Angelo’s isn’t more than three blocks away and still Tim managed to reach speeds normally attained only by vehicles with wings and jet engines. How he keeps that car of his on the ground is beyond me. It should have achieved ballistic flight when he came up the hill on Frostwoods to Monona Drive, and again on the way home when he turned into the parking lot at the old folk’s home to do a short cut. That was the part of the trip where B was hanging on to the hand strap over the door. It’s not just for decoration; it really works.

I had the house special tonight, an all-you-can-eat plate of spaghetti. I could eat just one. Actually, just half of one. I took the other half home to save for lunch tomorrow. Tim had the twelve-inch cheeze pizza, and My Darling B ordered a plate of butterfly pasta and salmon covered in alfredo sauce. She was feeling extravegant because Angelo’s sent her a coupon good for one free entree on her birthday, although she was a little miffed that the coupon wasn’t used to cover the cost of her entree. Instead of applying it to the birthday person’s meal they put it toward the cheapest meal on the ticket (I think that might have been mine). Seems kinda chintzy to me, not to mention stupid. I mean, if they’re going to offer her a free meal, then turn around and say, “Sorry, it’s not for your meal, it’s for that guy’s.” Does that make sense? If she’d come in alone, I guess they would have picked somebody else in the room. “Hey you! The guy with the salad and glass of water! Your meal’s on the birthday girl over here! Wish her happy birthday!” Dumb.

As we were relaxing after our meal and trading some family chit-chat across the table, I shared this joke with Tim: “How many guys does it take to shingle a roof?”

He looked a little puzzled at first, then asked, “I don’t know, how many?”

“Just one, if you slice him real thin.” bah-dum-BUMP!

His frown became even deeper and he asked, “How many guys does it take to what?”

I shook my head and tried again. “How many guys does it take to shingle a roof?”

He shook his head right back at me. “How many guys does it take to shit in the Louvre?”

Oh, wow. I don’t even know how to begin making fun of that.

Back home we gathered round the dining table for dessert, a chocolate birthday cake with butter cream icing from Emian’s. I know I shouldn’t be eating junk food like that at my age, but it was sooooo scrummy. When I ordered it, the guy asked what kind of icing I wanted. I didn’t know there were options. He read off three and I don’t remember what the first two were, but when I heard “butter cream icing” I drooled all over the telephone receiver. “Oh, butter cream icing, yes, please,” I answered, grabbing my handkerchief from my pocket to wipe up the mess.

And it was every bit as delicious as I thought it would be. B had the slice with the biggest, rosiest flower on it, as she was entitled to. The flowers were another option I wouldn’t have thought of until the guy offered it. It had two or three really big, beautiful roses surrounded by lots of little ones, and a ring of teardrop flourishes around the edges, very sweet and delicious.

My day was unlike any weekday I’ve experienced in the past two or three months. I was in training all day. I took just two phone calls, both before nine o’clock this morning. I didn’t answer any e-mail until after four o’clock and I had an hour for lunch, a mid-morning break and a mid-afternoon break to boot. I hardly knew what to do with myself during the breaks, so I just stood at the window and watched the clouds go by. I didn’t realize until today how much I missed having windows to look out from.

Theresa, the woman teaching the class I was in, assigned three labs for us to do but we begged her for more. She obliged us but felt bad about heaping more work on us that she had on other classes. We just laughed at her. More factually, we brayed like donkeys. “Bring it on!” we dared her, and I added, “This is nothing compared to the easiest day in the loan services department.” So she kept making up stuff for us to try and we kept knocking it out. It turned out to be a very informative class. I enjoyed it a lot, both for the time off from the usual grind and for the invaluable instruction on a software tool that would make me nearly as all-powerful as Odin, Jove and Zarathustra rolled into one big cosmic fireball.

As much as I liked spending the day in a nice, cushy class room playing games with shiny new sofware, I kept hearing Martin Sheen’s voice narrating the opening of Apocalypse Now!: “Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush he gets stonger.” I couldn’t help counting the hours as they ticked by, every one of them an hour I was falling behind the paperwork that was piling up on my desk, in the mail box, on the fax machine and all over the freaking department. Maybe I need to chill out a bit.

Training again, the second and *sigh* the last. It was a nice break from the daily grind, but now it’s back to answering phones and shooting troubles. Is that a seperable verb? It ought to be.

After we learned a few more tricks to play with our shiny news toy, the instructor let us out for the morning break and told us we could take our time and visit the farmer’s market. I suddenly felt an overpowering desire for a brownie, scrounged all the quarters I could find in the pocket of my backpack and hoofed it down to MLK street, salivating.

There were three different booths selling brownies: Stella’s bakery had a tray covered in brownies that were each the length and breadth of Nebraska, but they also appeared to be topped by a generous dollop of cream cheese, too (Iowa-sized, to stay with the metaphor), so I moved on. Another booth had some that were impressively large but wafer-thin. The last booth had just what I was looking for: a brownie thick as a dictionary and almost as big. It almost took two hands to hold it. I paid and wandered away happily biting chunks out of it as if it were an apple.

Frost warning tonight, so My Darling B carried an armload of old sheets out to her garden and covered all her delicate baby plants to protect them. Our yard ended up looking like a campground for hoboes. A flickering campfire and a boxcar just visible through the trees would have made the picture complete.

I was out very late tonight, so this will be short. Very short. Promise.

The High Noon Saloon on Washington St was having a Steel Bridge Pre-Party with several musical acts from around town. The Steel Bridge Party is an annual musical event to raise money to preserve the historic truss bridge that crosses the river at Surgeon Bay, and several of the bands that participate, and who happen to be based in or around Madison, decided to throw a Madison-area pre-party. I heard about it at work through a guy who’s in one of the bands and it sounded like it might be fun, so off we went.

Tim was good enough to drive us out and back. He even drove slowly and carefully on the way out, a little less slowly on the way back. Maybe he figured he could push the envelope because we’d been out late, had a few drinks, and so wouldn’t notice. Or maybe he was just in a hurry to get back to the movie he rented and we interrupted when we called to get him to pick us up. Either way, we didn’t raise a word of objection, being so grateful for the free taxi ride.

“How long as it been since you’ve been out past nine o’clock, much less in a bar?” I asked My Darling B, after we found a chair and settled in. And it turned out that it hadn’t been so long. We went to the Jonathon Coulton / Paul & Storm concert just three weeks earlier and were out until eleven-thirty, way past our bedtime. Neither one of us could remember the last time we went out to a bar, though. I think it might have been the last time Sean was in town and we took him to Madison’s on King St for some dueling pianos. The piano players had a tip jar and passed out tickets we could write our requests on. The more we put in the tip jar with our tickets, the more likely they were to play our tunes, but they had a fifty-dollar minimum for “Piano Man” and they absolutely refused to play “Free Bird.” Unfortunately for Sean, they announced these conditions after he’d already turned in his ticket with “Piano Man” and “Free Bird” on it. But otherwise he had a good time.

The party at the High Noon featured about a half-dozen or so different bands and would have lasted well pass the time we both turned to pumpkins, so we didn’t get to see all of them, only the first three or four. We grabbed a couple beers and made straight for the tables in the balcony seating where we hoped to be able to talk a bit, but no dice. If I had one complaint about the music scene it’s that the sound men are cranking up the volume too much. Or maybe it’s not their fault, maybe they’re just doing what the bands tell them. I hate to sound like a carping old man ... okay, no, that’s not true at all, I love to sound like a carping old man, so here goes: How on earth am I supposed to enjoy whatever a band’s playing if the volume makes me clench my jaw and wince through it? Anybody you ask will tell you I’m not a delicate little flower by any stretch, but at least half the musical sets the bands played tonight were way too loud for me, and for My Darling B, although I have to admit it may in fact be that the fault is entirely with us. Other people seemed to like it a lot. We had to walk out of the They Might Be Giants concert because the volume was so mind-crushingly overwhelming it was like an attack on our nervous systems, but there were hundred of people who not only seemed to be lapping it up like cats at a bowl of milk, they were rushing the stage and screaming for more. So maybe I’m a delicate little flower afer all.

Okay, curmudgeonly rant about the loud music aside, we had a good time.

The thing to see at the farmer’s market yesterday was a truck with a canoe strapped across the roof. The bow of the canoe had a hole in it big enough to sink the Titanic. Why’s he keeping that, much less bothering to haul it around? Or was it up there when it got holed, and he’s just been too busy to take it down up to now?

Tim’s definition of humanity includes eating meat. You’re not human, says he, if you don’t eat meat, because humans are omnivores and so, by definition, you give up your humanity if you give up meat. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. I rarely can. We keep him around mostly for the entertainment value these days.

This morning’s first major task: Correct the misapplied payment. A simple matter. I had the knowledge. I had the skills. I had the software. A few deft keystrokes and I would render the account as faultless as anyone could possibly make it.

I started by planning my attack. This error situation called for The Master Correct. Swiftly I reconnoitered the essentials of the problem, mapped them on a printout, and began to parse the syntax of the computer code that would assign the payments to their correct localities. Principal, interest and escrow all fell into line as I weaved my magical spell.

Then, the hitch. There always has to be a hitch. I started by paying in the first transaction from my cash drawer. If only I’d had a cash drawer. I’ve never had a cash drawer because I’m not a teller. I work from a journal. It’s horseapples and oranges, not even close to the same thing, so I had to correct the correction, then re-reapply it. Not a good way to start, so I stood up, took a deep breath, turn and walked face-first into the cubicle divider. And did it again, just to make sure I was awake. It seemed to knock some sense into me.

Until the other shoe dropped. After applying all the transactions as my cunning plan required, I looked at my teller totals and found my journals were still unbalanced. Wait a minute, I backed out how much? That can’t be right. But a recheck of my teller totals confirmed that I doubled the amount that should have gone to my journal. Dope.

No worries, though. The Master Correct pushed the due dates back twice as far, so after I reapplied the transactions as they should have been I simply ran the final transaction as if I meant to do it that way all along. After the dust settled my journals balanced, the payments were all correctly applied and all was right with the world.

That was the first twenty minutes of my morning. The rest was much the same. By four o’clock I was so ready to go home, as was everybody else. They were giggling like maniacs over in the payoff section, but the loan service assistants were still fielding phone calls and I was within a hair’s breadth of giving up on ever seeing the top of my desk before the weekend. Yet somehow, I can’t describe exactly how, I did. It happened before four-forty, even. One minute there was still paperwork as thick as icing on a wedding cake from one end of my desk to the other, and then, as easily as a bride cuts that cake and shoves a handful of it up the groom’s nose, it parted and I could see real simulated wood laminate! I had reason to hope for a long weekend after all!

I met My Darling B in the car outside the bank at ten minutes past five. She was absolutely wiped out, too, and she’d taken the first two days of the week as personal time, remember. “I’m so glad it’s Friday,” was all she had the strength to say.

We had to take Willy Street home so B could stop at the co-op to pick up some bananas and OJ, quite fortuitous, really, because I wanted to stop at Star Liquor for a six-pack of porter for the weekend. Porter’s a dark beer with a rich taste and a bite in the smokey aftertaste. Even more fortuitously, there was a rep from Summit Brewery there offering free tasters of four of their summer beers. On top of that, all Summit beers were on sale, a dollar-fifty off the usual price, and if I bought two six-packs I got a free pint glass and a keychain/bottle opener combo! I had a taster of their porter, their pale ale and their India pale ale, drinkable beers all, and decided that, for this three-day weekend, I’d take a sixer of their pale ale for the day drinking and a sixer of their porter for a quaff to be drunk with dinner.

Halfway up John Nolan drive early this A.M. on the way to the farmer’s market I realized I’d forgotten to take a travelling mug of coffee along with me. It took a little of the wind out of my sails, but only a little. The one thing I wanted at the farmer’s market was an inch-thick brownie, and of course nothing goes with a brownie so well as a hot cuppa joe. But I was joeless. Bummer.

Never mind, it’s a minor setback, right? I could very probably enjoy a brownie without a cup of coffee, couldn’t I? Well, sure ... if I could’ve found a brownie. A complete circuit of the square revealed there were none to be had. Stella’s Bakery were selling some, but they were topped with cream cheese, a significant ingredient to a guy whose innards are as reactive to dairy products as yours are to a red-hot fireplace poker. I was not only joeless, I was also brownie-free.

Lucky for me I was in the company of My Most Darling B, who saved me with a hot cuppa from Sucre, the new coffee joint on the Mifflin Street side of the square, and just a little further along on Carroll Street she bought me a double-chocolate and coconut cookie, which is very nearly a brownie in cookie form. See, this is why I married her. She always knows how to make things right.

I stand corrected: Sucre isn’t just a coffee shop, it’s a “patisserie & dessert lounge.” We saw some mouth-watering goodies on offer in the showcase beside the cash register but, as we came intending to buy only a coffee and still hoped to find brownies along the as-yet unwalked Carroll Street, we declined to sample them. I’ll have to come back later.

After our coffee, and just before we found the double-chocolate and coconut cookies, we stopped to see which new buttons The Button Man had added to his display. The Button Man usually stands at the west corner of cap square in a white jacket and red pants with cards and cards covered with the buttons he makes as a hobby, apparently, because he doesn’t put a price on them. “You can leave a donation if you like,” he says to anybody who asks, pointing to a coffee can hanging from his display. The buttons feature George Bush, John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and it doesn’t take a political analyst to figure out who he’s promoting and who he thinks is a war-mongering pea-brain.

I usually stop and take a good look for the news ones he comes up with each week, but I never grabbed one until I saw a button today with Bush in a flight suit superimposed with the initials AWOL. That one took a special place in the clutter collection on the west wall of my lair. Then, on impulse, I grabbed an Obama pin, too, and left The Button Man a donation before heading up the street to join B.

The potato man wasn’t at the farmer’s market this weekend and we needed a fresh sack of spuds for the grilled steak dinner we had planned for Memorial Day, so we stopped at the Willy Street Co-op on the way home. Also, B had to P. She waited a minute or so outside the locked door until a woman, who B described as “someone from the neighborhood who doesn’t live in a house,” emerged, then hurried in to find that the homeless woman had either given herself a vigorous sponge bath, incidentally sprinkling the toilet seat, or perhaps she had some trouble aiming. Or maybe there was a third possibility that didn’t occur to B as she hovered, nervously hoping her legs wouldn’t give out too soon.

I don’t care whether or not homeless or customers or whoever use public facilities, but I’d happily strangle anybody I caught coming out who didn’t clean up after themselves. What kind of entitlement is it that makes people think they can leave a mess like that behind? Unluckily, somebody was waiting outside the door when B was done. Oh great, she thought as she came face to face with the woman just outside the door, now she thinks I did it. Isn’t that just the way it goes?

“Are we in a hurry?” I asked B as we put our groceries in the back seat of the car. “I’m not,” B answered, so I suggested we stop at Saint Vinnie’s to look at the glassware. We found a pair of stemmed pilsner glasses at St. V’s on the Beltline two years ago and bought them along with a huge box of plates, bowls and flatware that we threw together when we moved here and found that we wouldn’t be able to accept our household shipments until we found a semipermanent place to rent. The search took months, so we scrounged the shelves at St. V’s for the box of temp dinner ware. Most of it got pitched after we moved into Our Humble O’Bode, but the beer glasses grew on us and not only did we decide to keep them, we’ve been looking for others like them ever since.

We didn’t find any, but B did load a box up with Mason jars in anticipation of canning the bushels of veggies she’s cultivating in her new, improved garden out back. A couple of glass coffee mugs caught her eye, too, and as they were only a dime apiece, she threw them in with the jars.

I wandered into the book nook behind the kitchen ware and wound up crouching along the bottom rack of the LP section, scanning the names on the spines of the classical record sets. On impulse I pulled out a five-record set of Mozart quartets. All I know about Mozart I learned from the movie Amadeus, the one with Tim Hulce and Ben Kingsley. I’ve heard some Mozart on the radio, of course, and Tim loves Mozart, believe it or not, but if memory serves I’ve bought just one recording of Mozart before. I liked it, and I liked the stuff that Tim listened to, but if you asked me to point you toward some good Mozart recordings, I couldn’t tell you no matter how long I thought about it or what you threatened me with. I ended up taking the boxed set home from St. V’s because I recognized the name Mozart, and because it was a five record set for just two-fifty.

There’s my taste in classical music summed up quick and easy: Do I know the name? Is it cheap as hell? Then I’ll take it. But you know what? It’s a strategy that’s so far worked for me pretty well. I had the records playing on the phono in my lair as I banged out this drivel in the afternoon and it was lovely, sweet stuff. I can’t wax emotional over it the way Tim can, but then Tim’s a guy who has a special way with words, much the same as The Spynx did in Mystery Men when he uttered deeply penetrating yet amorphous phrases such as, “When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, then you can head off your enemies with a balanced attack.” They said it was like he went right to the edge of being confusing. Tim sometimes goes over that edge, but he does it with style.

To play my new tunes I moved a few stereo components to my lair that hadn’t been there before. Several years ago I kitted my desk for sound by bringing home a portable Aiwa CD player and it’s faithfully provided me with years of loyal service, but a few weeks ago it began to make odd clucking noises as it spun up a CD to read it, and always started playing the first song by skipping the first thirty seconds or so. Then last night it played random parts of the disk I was listening to way too fast. These are all signs it’s time to put the thing on a fence post and use it for target practice.

But without my little boom box, what was I going to do for music? There are times I retire to my lair for absolute peace and quiet, but most of the time I want some background music playing to help relax my brains after a busy day. And, as it turns out, B and I have several stereo components stockpiled in the basement, most of them still in pretty good shape, and some of them remarkably good components from the days when we wanted to blow the windows out of our dorm rooms playing AC/DC. (B was the metalhead. The weirdest stuff I listened to was Pink Floyd, unless you count that stuff by the guy who stuck the word “foetus” in every album he recorded. The less said about that, the better.)

Since all I wanted to do was listen to Mozart with the volume no higher than “two,” the electronics I had at my disposal were definitely overkill but I dragged them into my lair and patched them together anyway. Must have tunes! And despite the age of several components (if they had been animals they probably would have fossilized by now) it all somehow worked, and worked well, so the boom box will very likely be full of BB holes by the end of the long weekend.

I grabbed a boxed set of Aaron Copeland recordings, too. He’s the guy who wrote Fanfare For The Common Man and the background music for the “Beef, It’s What’s For Dinner” advertisements (also known as the fourth dance episode to Rodeo, “Hoe Down,” in case you want to look for it at a music store near you). I found that last one by accident when I bought a CD with some Aaron Copeland on it and was listening to it at my desk one day when the opening strains made me jump out of my seat, round up the rest of the O-Folk and drag them goggling at me to listen to it. “It’s the beef song! It’s the beef song!” I told them, by way of explaining why I was behaving like a raving lunatic.

And by way of explaining to you why they would care, we’ve all loved the “Beef, It’s What’s For Dinner” advertisement since the day we first heard it on the car radio somewhere in Colorado, partly because it’s got that great background music, although as I hinted, we didn’t know at the time it was Copeland. Mostly we liked it because of the way Robert Mitchum bombastically intoned the key phrase at the end of the spot. When he said, “Beef, It’s What’s For Dinner!” you damned well marched right off to fire up your Weber grill and served beef for dinner, and if you didn’t have any in the freezer you got into the pickup truck, drove into town and got some if you knew what was good for you, and Mitch made sure you did.

So when the O-Folk heard the familiar background music from the advertisement they all had to repeat the tagline, one after another, and then if I recall correctly, and I’m willing to bet I am, they tried to dance a reasonable facsimile of a hoe-down right there in the bedroom. We’re not like this all the time, but it’s fair to say we’re a little on the strange side of life.

But I wasn’t in my lair all day long cobbling together electronic components and listening to codger music. Before I even went down there I lent a hand to B in her garden. She wanted a row of eight-food-tall stakes driven into the ground along her melon patch, and she thought I would be just the manly man to do the heavy work. Wow, have I got her fooled. No, actually she knows better, but I’m the only manly man she’s got. Well, there’s Tim, too, but lately he’s been largely unavailable for this kind of work. So just before lunch I hacked a sharp point on the end of the four stakes with a hatchet (Guy job! Did I call it or what?), climbed up a ladder and pounded each one about a foot and a half into the ground with a bee guff ow can hammer.

I didn’t disappear into my lair until after I’d had lunch, but I did come up occasionally to take a sunshine and fresh air break. I also hung up a bird feeder, a potted plant, fixed the garden gate and solved for x. But I’ve prattled on long enough. Factually, I’ve prattled on way more than long enough twice over, and it’s getting late, so I’ll tell you about the bee down my shirt tomorrow.

Our plan today was to strap the bike rack to the back of the car, hang our bicycles from it and drive up to Wilton, where the local branch of the Lion’s Club was putting on a pancake breakfast. After filling our bellies with carbs and coffee, we hoped to cycle a mile or two of the Elroy-Sparta bicycle trail, which runs righ through Wilton, a town just south of Tomah.

It seemed like such a good idea when I thought of it, but after we’d been on the highway about forty-five minutes and I realized it would take at least another forty-five to get to Wilton I was starting to feel as though maybe I should have figured out the distance between Monona and Wilton before suggesting we drive a million zillion miles before eating breakfast.

Also, clouds were closing in and threatening rain, not at all what I expected. It was sunny and warm when we got ready to go and I thought it was likely to remain that way. In fact, it never did rain, but just a few miles south of Wisconsin Dells it sure was looking as though we’d get pretty darned wet if we tried to go cycling today.

I didn’t want the morning to be a complete wash, pardon the pun, so I offered My Darling B an alternate plan: We could stop in Wisconsin Dells for some breakfast at the legendary Paul Bunyan’s Logging Camp Restaurant. I landed a job waiting tables there a little over twenty years ago to help pay for my last year at UW-Eau Claire and have regaled B with many tales from my food service experience. She very enthusiastically agreed to the new plan and the opportunity to take in The Paul Bunyan Experience.

The first problem we had was finding Wisconsin Dells. It’s right there on the map, I know, but there were four exits from the Interstate and I had no idea which one we should take, so we arbitrarily picked the third one and guess what? It not only put us on the main road through the town, it also took us straight to Paul Bunyan’s! Do we know how to take a wild-assed guess or what?

The first thing I noticed about the place that hadn’t change was that the place was busy! When I waited tables there it was go, Go, GO! all the time, and twenty years later they’re still doing it. We joined the tail of the waiting throng of hungry tourists just inside the entrance, but it thankfully it was a line that never stopped shuffling toward the dining hall. The restaurant was still sucking them in and spitting them out like a well-tended machine.

There’s still a gift shop just inside the main entrance so you can get a good look at the souvenirs that will magically compel you to part with many, many hard-earned dollars when you pass this way as you head to your car after breakfast. I looked for a keychain but couldn’t find any. B wanted a coffee mug with Paul Bunyan on it, but that was another miss. They could’ve sucked another fifteen or twenty bucks out of our pockets after we got up from our breakfast but instead all we bought was a souvenir postcard, one dollar. Too bad for them.

A pretty young hostess greeted us as we waited in line, handed over a ticket and advised us of the charges for the meal. Unfortunately I didn’t qualify for the employee discount any longer. The price was a little steep, I thought, but this was for The Paul Bunyan Experience, remember, so on we went. A floor hostess guided us to a trestle table in one of the side rooms off the main dining room and we settled in.

“You know that steel-jawed leghold trap I’ve got hanging from the wall in my basement lair?” I asked B after we sat down. She nodded. “I yanked it off the wall behind you the last day I was working here.” The decor at Paul Bunyan’s tends toward a clutter of saw blades, kerosene lanterns, wooden sleigh runners and so forth. It’s supposed to remind you of pioneer days in a logging camp. When I worked there, the back wall of the dining room had about a half-dozen leghold traps nailed to it, and I wanted one of them as a souvenir of the place. Other people pocketed salt shakers and coffee mugs, that kind of stuff. Boring. I wanted something that screamed “Paul Bunyan Logging Camp!” and nothing screamed so loud as those traps, so I got somebody to watch out for me while I pried one loose and stashed it behind a bush just outside the fire exit. I think the statue of limitations ought to let me get away with admitting that now. I hope so, anyway.

That dining room had a lot of memories for me: It took me forever to clean up in there one night when the guy half of the couple at the corner table decided to break up with his girl right before closing time. I tried as discreetly as I knew how to wipe down every table but theirs and mop the floor while she sobbed hysterically into her hankie. I’m not a completely insensitive bastard, but I’d just finished a long, hard shift. What I wanted to do more than anything was finish up, go home, peel off my sweat-soaked, rancid clothing and stand under a blasting shower for as long as I could afford to feed quarters into the coin slot, but every time I caught his eye his expression pleaded “just one more minute.” I didn’t get out of there until almost an hour past closing.

The weirdest things always seemed to happen to me in that dining room. One day I approached a table of customers to introduce myself and was brought up short by a woman who was wearing so much makeup so hamfistedly applied that she appeared to have a clown face. This was back in the era of bright blue eye shadow and soot-thick mascara, but seriously, this woman had a made-up face that only Bozo the Clown could love. It was so incredibly overdone I had an irrational feeling she was daring me not to laugh at her. Since her ghastly makeup made it difficult for me to concentrate on reciting the menu items I turned away for a moment, hoping that if I got started it’d all roll out automatically, when who on the other side of the table should I see but a teenaged girl who must have been the woman’s daughter because the girl wore makeup that made her look just like her mother! I almost did lose it then.

That dining room was also where a guy stopped me as I was passing his table, motioned at his uneaten food and asked for a “donkey bag.” He enunciated the word “donkey” so clearly that I blinked at him and asked, “A what?”

“I’d like a donkey bag,” he repeated. He said it very slowly this time, as if he’d just realized I was clinically stupid, or a foreigner.

“A donkey bag,” I answered. “Right. I’ll just go get you one.” And I disappeared into the kitchen to ask the rest of the wait staff if there was such a thing as a “donkey bag” and if there was, how was it different from a doggie bag. Nobody knew, so I brought the guy a doggie bag and he seemed to think that was what he asked for in the first place, even though it was printed with a drawing of a dog sitting up to beg for scraps.

After My Darling B and I settled in the waitress brought us a couple glasses of OJ, a pot of coffee and a dish of buttermilk doughnuts rolled in sugar to nosh on while we were waiting for our breakfast. I loved those doughnuts. They were baked fresh on the premises and there used to be a standing rule that broken doughnuts were not to be served to the customers. If there were any broken ones on the tray when we brought it up from the bakery, we were free to eat them ourselves. Not surprisingly, every tray had two or three broken doughnuts on it.

Shortly after we finished our doughnuts, the main course arrived: A bowl of scrambled eggs, a bowl of pan-fried potatoes, a dish of sausage links and ham slices, a stack of six pancakes and a pair of biscuits smothered in gravy. And we could have as much of it as we wanted. If we finished off what she brought us, which was unlikely, all we had to do was ask for more. She’d keep bringing out more until we busted open or became physically unable to speak. Lumberjacks must’ve been some fat porkers if they ate like this every morning back in the day.

Our appetites sated, we climbed aboard the O-Mobile once again and set out to pass a curious eye over the town of Wisconsin Dells and, to sum up the place in a word: Bleh. Shorthand phrases like “tourist trap” really don’t do the place justice. The only method I didn’t see being used to separate tourists from their money was bludgeoning them across the kidneys using hoses filled with sand, then going through their pockets while they writhed in pain on the pavement.

“This place looks like Gatlinburg,” B commented as we cruised the main drag, recalling the most outrageous tourist trap she’d ever falled into. “That’s funny, I was about to say the same thing except with Branson in place of Gatlinburg,” I answered. I’d guess that one is pretty much interchangeable with any other.

Then we cruised up and down Highway 12 looking for a clue that might suggest where I could find the campground I used to live in that summer. The family truck-top camper was set on blocks on a wooden site somewhere between Water World and the Ducks, but there was no sign of it now. I’m pretty sure the whole thing was wiped out by a hotel complex at the top of the hill.

Since Highway 12 was the road headed south out of town through Baraboo we started home that way.

When I open up the Home & Garden section of The New York Times or thumb through an issue of Dwell, both publications I love to peruse (as well as browse through) when I get the chance, I rarely see home improvement ideas that I could use in our house, or in any house belonging to a person of my means, come to that. The kitchen of Our Humble O’Bode will very probably never boast a granite countertop because our kitchen is the size of a postage stamp, for starters, and because I’m likely to herniate myself hauling it into the house. Likewise, we’ll never shoehorn a Subzero refrigerator in there, or a Jacuzzi in the bathroom, and I doubt I’ll ever find the time or energy, much less the extra cash, to add indirect lighting and a sunken floor to our living room. Although they’re not impossible and they’re nice to think about, they’re not going to happen on my salary.

We did briefly entertain the though of adding a porch to the front of the house, just a small one, screened in, a place we could sit in our rockers after dinner in the summer and watch the neighborhood go by as the sun set. I even went so far as to call a carpenter to come by, discuss several options and have him draw up some proposals. The cheapest one, a simple stoop made out of that plastic lumber I hate more than whiny insects like mosquitoes and Neil Diamond, would have set us back six or seven thousand dollars, and when he mentioned the price of a screened-in porch I had to chuckle out loud. Couldn’t help myself.

There are some home-improvement jobs I can handle myself, but demolishing the brick stoop we have and replacing it with one built from scratch is outside the orbit of my abilities, and that’s why the front of the house looks more or less exactly as it did when we moved in.

One of the things I think I could do, however, is build a wall-to-wall bookcase in the living room. There’s an eight by ten foot wall on the north end of the room that I know we could fill with just our favorite books. I’ve seen book cases like that in the background of photos of well-known authors, actors and some other profession that begins with the letter “A,” and I want one. Besides, we need one desperately. We have several hundred books and all but a hundred or so are stacked two deep on book shelves in the basement. I want to get them out of there before they compost.

You might be asking yourself, “Dave, why couldn’t you just buy modular book cases and puzzle-piece them together?” I could, smarty pants, but there’s that money thing again. This may be a snotty attitude, but I no longer want to buy particle board furniture for my house. Unfortunately, we can’t afford the good stuff. I’m not talking about mahogany, but it seems once you move from Ikea furniture that you put together with hex wrenches, up to any kind of furniture that somebody else put together, you’re expected to pay a premium price even when it’s made out of plywood. I can put together a book case out of plywood and make it look pretty good. I think.

When I pitched this idea to My Darling B she tentatively agreed to it, provided I could show her some drawings and give her an estimate of how much it would cost. Mostly she wanted to see some ideas. My problem is, I don’t draw. An idea pops into my head, I saw some lumber into pieces, the pieces fit together or they don’t, and voila! Furniture. Or not. Now that I think of it, I can begin to see why she doesn’t like this approach.

To test my skills, I drew a sketch of a book case that would fit into a corner of my basement lair, came up with an estimate of the cost, and got the thumbs-up for a trial run. Putting that together should theoretically turn up most of the glitches I’d want to avoid so a book shelf for the living room would look nice enough I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have guests over, in case we ever had guests over again.

I’d hoped to spend most of this afternoon sawing sheets of three-quarter inch ply into pieces. A quick run over to Menard’s dashed my hopes, though, when I found they were out of two by eight sheets of three-quarter inch ply. I could’ve bought two by four sheets instead, but that stuff cost two dollars more than half the cost of a two by eight sheet, not so much by itself but I needed at least eight sheets of two by four to do the job — that was sixteen dollars more than I’d planned on spending, so I said screw it and left. Chislers.

The only other place to buy lumber on this side of town that I know of is Home Depot at the East Towne Mall, and the traffic’s so bad up there on a slow day that I would rather go anywhere else if I can help it. Since I can’t help it, it seemed like a reasonable alternative, but there’s no way I’m going within five miles of the place on Memorial Day weekend. No lumber today, then, I guess.

Well, crap, I forgot to tell you about the bee down my shirt. At least, I think it it was down my shirt. It’s the only way I can think of that he ended up in the basement, attacking the back of my head.

I was down in the workshop getting a hand drill ready to sink a couple screw eyes into the roof of a bird feeder when I heard the angry buzz of a bumble bee and felt its wings beating on my neck. In my normally cool, calm manner I tore and swatted at my neck as I hopped around the work shop, trying to get away from it, but the bumbler either couldn’t get away because he was still caught under my shirt or was tangled up in my hair, or he was so pissed off about something that he didn’t want to get away until he stung me. I hate getting stung, so I did the swatting hoppy dance until he flew away.

After he was gone, and after my brain returned from panicked thoughts of undistilled animal fear, I could still hear him buzzing around and spotted him against the window over the work bench, trying to get out. I’d never opened that window but figured this would be a good time to try, so I reached up to turn the latch and when I did, the bumbler veered off into a corner and got tangled in a spider web.

I’ve never seen a bug as large as a bumble bee get tangled up in the web of a common house spider before. I figured that, since he was about the size of Godzilla when compared to the teensy little wolf spider watching from the crack under the window, the bumbler would easily tear himself free of the web and go on bapping against the window glass, but spider web is apparently made of something as tough as hardened steel. The more the bumbler tried to get away, the more ensnared he became until he collapsed on the window sill, spent.

The spider didn’t make his move right away, which I thought was pretty stupid. If you were going to attack an elephant with your bare hands, it would make sense to move in as soon as it collapsed from exhaustion, instead of letting it catch its breath and rest its muscles, right? Then again, it’s not like spiders are known for having an abundance of brains. Or any, for that matter.

Well, maybe the spider wasn’t so stupid after all. It let the bumbler thrash around and wear itself out a bit more before he followed it into the other corner and delivered a lightning-fast knockout jolt of nerve toxin with his venomed fangs of death, then backed off and left him to die. Circle of Life drama playing out right here in the basement of Our Humble O’Bode.

Yesterday was what we could call our first hot day of the summer. It hardly got much above eighty but it was stuffy as hell. Every time I came upstairs from the basement (where I was hiding from the heat most of the day) my bare feet stuck to the floor like it was freshly painted.

After the sun sank low enough that the house cast a shadow over the back yard, My Darling B and I sat on the deck with a couple beers and a bag of potato chips (we’re on the bag a day diet) and enjoyed the still quiet of the enening. “If only it could stay like this all the time,” B sighed. “This is just about perfect.” It really was. We watched the birds come and go, looked for bunnies but saw only one (probably something to do with the hawk wheeling overhead) and soaked in the pleasure of a cool summer evening. There weren’t even any bugs to pester us.

Tonight there’s a frost warning so we spent the dinner hour in the garden folding newspaper pirate hats, which fit just about perfectly over seedling tomato plants after you crush the pointed ends against the ground and scoop some dirt into the flaps to hold the little tomato tent down firmly against the earth. They even stand up pretty well against a breeze.

Afterwards I had a bite to eat, then settled in to a cozy corner of the sofa to watch a video of the PBS series Carrier that a friend from work recorded for me. I was no more than twenty minutes into it when a youthful door-knocker for the Democratic National Committee interrupted my viewing pleasure to ask me for a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars! The DNC wants me to cough up a hundred dollars for the pleasure of listening to those two prats fight like school kids for a couple more months. Sure. Sounds like fun.

What I wanted to ask the fresh-faced youth at the door was, “Does your spiel work at the other houses you visited tonight? ‘Cause if you’ve got a couple hundred dollars on you, I’m going to roll you right now.” But I was nice and made up some bullshit about this being the end of the month and I was strapped for money, which he grabbed hold of like a drowning man seizing an oar, babbling about how Republican economic policies have left us all hanging out to dry, so any amount I could give would be welcome. I could’ve fished out whatever change was jingling in my hip pocket but I played nice, excused myself and went back to my program.

The little paper hats we propped up over the tomatoes last night might’ve looked too goofy for words, but they saved the seedlings. The first thing I noticed as I stood at the kitchen window filling the kettle with water to make the morning pot o’ java was that the roof of the neighbor’s house was touched with frost. So for once the weathermen were right. How’d that happen?

Good thing My Darling B checks the forecast every night. I sometimes poke fun at her for doing it because it’s so late in May to be as good as June! How can there be frost on the ground on May twenty-eighth? But this garden’s become a labor of love that’s got to be carefully protected no matter how crazy the weather or her obsession with it seems, and the best part is she’s going to bring some tasty veggies to the table this summer and fall. There’ll even be further preserved yummies all winter long. The pesto all by itself that she makes with basil raised right here on the ground of Chez O makes it worth all the work she puts into keeping up the garden, to say nothing of drafting the rest of us into it.

When you keep book out from the library after the due date, they charge you ten cents per day per book. Hardly seems worth the effort, doesn’t it? You’d think that the cost of paying a librarian to tally up those piddling fees would cancel out whatever income they might have generated, and it would hardly be a deterrent to the average American, none of whom over the age of eight would bother to pick a dime up off the street.

But then there are the O-Folk, who check books out of the library by the carload, and I literally mean that. My Darling B will rarely emerge from the library with fewer than a dozen books, enough to leave the back seat of our car awash in the latest published gardening literature (veggies, bugs, dirt, etc.) as soon as I make the first turn out of the parking lot. We may not be loaded up to the windowsills, but when they take up as much room as a passenger, I think it counts as a carload.

The upshot of all this babble is that we stopped by the Monona Library on the way home after work in order to pay our overdue fines, the sum of which came within a whisker of breaking the fifty-dollar barrier. B was by far the most accomplished scofflaw, racking up fines of twenty-four dollars and change, while I could manage a distant but respectable second with just over twenty dollars.

I’ve still got one overdue book checked out, though. If only I’d brought it back tonight I could’ve taken her.

Cat puke. There really isn’t anything on earth more disgusting than cat puke, and if you think there is you haven’t been called on to scrub a heap of it off the floor at the bottom of the basement steps. I’ve been up to my elbows in baby poop, and I’m here to tell you cat puke is worse.

And I’m not exaggerating one bit. Go ahead and try to argue that there were far ghastlier things in Soviet gulags that were so much more disgusting they’re not even in the same league, and I’ll argue right back that’s just the point. I’ll never be interred in a Soviet gulag, knock wood, but sure as every cute little pussy cat will grow into a big old tabby that’ll hork up a hairball on your sofa, I’m sure as shitake mushrooms going to have the privelege in the next month or two, and every month or two thereafter, of wiping up a blot of barf from the flooring somewhere in this house, and that makes it far more disgusting than anything you can try to make me imagine.

Tales From The Cubicle: Whitney stopped by my desk to ask me to put in a work order for the light over her desk, which didn’t work. Speaking as a bureaucratic animal who spent over twenty years working for the federal government, I know that nothing gets done without a work order, so I didn’t even think about the problem. I heard something was broke, I heard a request for a work order, and I sprang into action — tapping at my computer keyboard. It was a response as automatic as drooling when Doctor Pavlov rings the bell.

A short time later I ran into Whitney again at the fax machine and let her know, “I put that work order in for you.”

“I know,” she said, “and he fixed it. The light works a lot better if you plug it in.”

Damn! How’d I not think of that?

I woke up too darned early this morning, a cat in my face. What she wanted, I’m not sure. I got up an hour before, in the dark, to feed her but she came back at about six-thirty, whining but very definitely not wanting me to touch her. I think what she wanted was the warm spot I leave behind when I get out of bed. She curls up there on weekday mornings as soon as I toddle off to the shower, and switches places with My Darling B as soon as she gets up, too. I was not about to roll out of the sack just to make the cat happy so I tried giving her the consolation prize of a scratch behind the ears, but she wasn’t having any of that, turned and sat on the end of the bed, very pointedly not facing me. Wench.

But I did not, repeat, did not get up. No weensy little tiger wannabe is going to tell me when to get up. I lolled in bed. The cat came back every time I dozed off to sniff at my face and tickle me with her whiskers, or try to suck my soul out through my nose, depending on what you believe about cats. When I tried to pet her again, she nipped at me. That’s when I scruffed her with one hand and pinched her snout between my finger and thumb with the other hand, showing her why I’m at the top of the food chain. Even with her walnut-sized brain she understands that, she just forgets once in a while.

My Darling B and I finally got up round about seven and first thing we did, after a hot cuppa and a bite of toast for me, a banana for B, was head to the farmer’s market, but not the one on cap square this week. B wanted to check out the west side farmer’s market, which seems to have split into one larger market in the continent-sized parking lot at the DOT’s Hill Farms site, and a second, smaller market in an ancillary parking lot about the size of a dish rag, behind the Hilldale Mall.

I was frankly a little surprised that B would want to go anywhere near the Hill Farms site on her day off, but it didn’t seem to bother her in the least bit, not any more than being in the shadow of the bank bothers me as we take a turn around capital square every Saturday morning. It’s a much smaller market than the one on cap square but doesn’t suffer much for the essentials, and in fact has plenty of the extras — cookies & cake, coffee — that make going to the market on the square so much fun. And the biggest plus to going there is also its biggest detraction: there weren’t anywhere near as many people so we didn’t have to fight crowds, but it also meant people-watching was not as much fun.

In the afternoon we went to the Capital Brewery in Middleton for the Burgers & Brew festival, a fund-raiser for REAP, a group that promotes locally-grown organic food for the kind of people who not only read ever word Michael Pollan writes but worships him as one of the prophets of the green movement. Or maybe “worships” is too strong a word. “Lives his thoughts and breathes his words” would be more to the point.

Don’t mind me, I’m just being a dope. I like Michael Pollan. I like his books. I like the promotions that REAP puts on, especially ones like today’s for which they had the savvy to combine microminiaturized burgers served up by cooks from local restaurants and beer from Wisconsin microbreweries. How could that be bad? I just couldn’t, and it wasn’t. Even the most frou-frou burger, a herb-flavored veal patty topped by a teeny-tiny fried quail’s egg (!) that we very nearly passed up because we weren’t sure we wanted to be seen carrying it to a picnic table, was delicious.

And, as is becoming the norm, they handed us souvenir four-ounce glasses at the gate to drink our beer tasters from. I’ve got so many of these things by now that we’re running out of shelf space for them in the china hutch.

Charlie Wilson’s War wasn’t a bad movie at all, nicely entertaining, well acted, well-written, had a lot of familiar faces. For some reason, every film we’ve seen in the last week has featured Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a starring role. He was very good here as a fast-talking CIA agent. Tom Hanks had the starring role as a womanizing, hard-drinking congressman and played it with his usual disarming charm. He’s reached a point in his career where he brings the same stylish ease to the screen that Cary Grant had in North By Northwest, James Stewart had in Anatomy Of A Murder or Gregory Peck had in To Kill A Mockingbird.

The movie opens with a title card, the dreaded “This movie was based on a true story” that has become so cheeseball it gives me stinky toots as soon as I lay eyes on it, although in the end (accidental pun) maybe that’s what the producers were after. The movie seemed to be played for laughs as much as serious drama. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing fame left his fingerprints all over the trademark quips Hanks and Hoffman spouted throughout the movie.

The gist of Charlie Wilson’s War is that Wilson lead the fight to win the Cold War using the enormous influence he had over his fellow congressional members, a seat on a key committee, the help of a collossally brainy CIA agent (Hoffman), and a go to hell attitude, as epitomized by his brazenly boobie-baring harem of tight-skirted congressional aides and the highball glass he drank from more or less all the time. It’s a fun idea, a little like watching George Clooney pull off the casino heist of Ocean’s Eleven, but I think the truth of the “true story” got a little thin somewhere in the dramatization. Still, it was a movie worth a bucket of popcorn. Besides, those of us who helped win the Cold War got a little charge out of seeing it played out again.

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

Every gosh-darned word © 2008 Dave Okonski