this is drivel

The bank statements went out today. That doesn’t mean much, if anything, to you, and to me all it means is paper cuts. Not always lots of them, but usually really nasty ones. I have to flip through a couple hundred unfolded statements looking for about a dozen in particular, always in such a big hurry that at least two or three paper cuts are as inevitable as taxes, taxes and more taxes. I got one this morning that went deep enough I could see red meat. Yuck.

And the snow came in today. Not a lot of snow, not even enough to make it necessary to shovel the driveway, although after we drive across it enough times to compress it to a diamond-hard surface slicker than teflon, I’ll be kicking myself for thinking I didn’t need to shovel. But that’s at least a week in the future. Plenty of time to start kicking myself.

Actually, the snow started coming in yesterday, in the morning as we were headed north toward DeForest and the auction. It looked like it was going to be such a nice day, too, but just a mile or so from the airport we were caught in a near whiteout that slowed traffic down to about thirty-five miles per. That didn’t last long, but it surprised the hell out of me.

A steady snow kept falling through the night and was still coming down this morning, and there was enough of it that My Darling B suggested that we should probably leave early, and we all nodded and said, “Yes, of course we should leave early, naturally enough, who wouldn’t?” And we were out the door and on the road by seven.

Tim rode to work with us, a hard pill to swallow because he’s in love with driving his car real fast and we’re so freaking old that it takes us twice as long to get into town and get back home, but the alternative was to pay ten dollars a day to park downtown, so he joined our little carpool and somehow stoically endured the ride with us.

Last month, he lucked out when he heard that somebody would be taking maternity leave and allowed him to hold her spot while she was gone, but that was for only one month and it’s already gone. Tempus fugit, y’know. He had his good times and now he must wait for another spot in the parking ramp to open up before he can climb behind the wheel of his little Honda coupe and vrummm into town again.

I was in a very important meeting with some people very highly-placed in the bank’s food chain when the vice president of consumer lending turned to me and said, “ I like your hair a lot better the way it is now than the way it looks in your badge photo.”

Other people have shattered their badges by trying to scrape ice from their windshields, but I bought a heavy-duty scraper/brush as big and sturdy as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s leg the day I moved back to Wisconsin. Other people have just walked off and left their badges on the seat in a booth at The Great Dane on Friday night after a few too many beers, but for a man of my constitution, one beer is too many for me, so I make sure I put mine in my pocket before I start drinking. You just have to take a moment to see the worst thing that could possibly happen, and anticipate it.

So I still have the badge with the picture they took of me the first day I started working at the bank in August, 2005, about three months after I retired from the Air Force. In the photo, my hair’s about an inch and a half long and my face is as smooth and beard-free as a baby’s bottom. If you were one of those white-shirted TSA goons and I tried to use my badge as a photo ID, there’s no way you would ever let me get on a train, plane, or even into your automobile.

With my crazy, almost-ponytailable hair and bushying beard I’m starting to look like a pirate, especially when I tie my hair back with a bandana, the way I did last night so I could clean the bathroom floor without all the hair in my eyes. The hair on my head, not the hair on the floor, although that was a problem, too.

The weirdest thing I saw all day was after we got home. My Darling B served steak for dinner and Tim didn’t come straight to the table and wolf down at least half of it. He said he was going to save it and have some later, but I still believed I’d seen something utterly unprecedented in the history of the O-Folk. I would sooner have expected to see a pair of octopus, one in a zoot suit and the other in a poodle skirt, dancing the jitterbug. (Googled the internet already, couldn’t find a video of it — although I did find out there’s a restaurant in Newcastle, England, called The Dancing Octopus.)

We gobbled our way through a dinner of leftovers, sort of. B ate the last piece of cold pizza in the frige, so I sliced open the package of summer sausage we got from the market last weekend and cut off a few thick hunks to eat with the leftover crusty bread we had with our fillet yesterday, and that was our supper. It had to be simple & quick, because there was a wine tasting at a new shop up the road, and by the time we left we were already almost two hours late!

Not that getting there late was a problem. There was still plenty of wine left in the bottles lined up on the bar for sampling, and John, the guy pouring, wasn’t stingy at all. You don’t even need much of a sample when you’ve got half a dozen wines waiting for you to try them, or at least a lightweight like me doesn’t John started us off with a Pinot Grigio, told us a little about the grapes, where they were grown and how they were prepared, and left us to stand there sniffing at our glasses, trying to look as if we knew what we were doing.

B has taken quite a liking to wine snobbery, reading all kinds of books and web sites, and learning to say the names of the grapes with an outrageous Fronch accent. Isn’t is great how “French accent” is almost always preceeded by “outrageous?” It’s almost a law of nature that they go together. Anyway, she’s the one who’s serious about wine tasting, and I’m the one who gives the glass a brief sniff, gulps it, and makes a yummy sound. At most, my comments are limited to something like, “Uh-huh, tastes good.”

Sometimes she’ll try to prod me into saying something intelligible. “C’mon, don’t you smell the vanilla?” she’ll ask me, and then I’ll sniff again guiltily, maybe even twice, but if it smells like anything to me, it smells like wine. That’s it. That’s the limit of my critical powers. That, and “Tastes good.”

Although there was a bottle of Shiraz, from an Australian winery called Ozzie-ba-ru, that was delicious. It didn’t smell like just wine, or taste like it, either. I don’t know what all was going on in there, but when I took a sip, the wine set up a three-ring circus on my tongue and put on a show that made me rock back on my heels and gaze off into the distance in wonder. I’ve never been really grabbed by a wine like that. I still couldn’t say anything intelligent about it, but wow.

We bought two bottles.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

I had a huge, chocolate-chip cookie for breakfast. How about you?

Not only did I breakfast on a cookie big enough to bolt to the hub of your car and use as a spare tire in an emergency, I walked two blocks in sub-freezing temperatures to get it, and walked back. It’d have to be a really tasty cookie to make a guy do that, wouldn’t you think? And what the hell: it is.

There’s a place right next to the south entrance of the Tenney Building on cap square that I can never remember the name of right away. It’s got a very generic name like Country Kitchen, Country Hearth, Kitchen Hearth ... that’s it, Kitchen Hearth, a little storefront deli that sells all kinds of good baking first thing in the morning and take-away lunch at noon. The cookies are fantastic. My favorite is the oatmeal chocolate chip with walnuts. It’s got enough fat in it to give you a heart attack and enough sugar to make sure you stroke out before the ambulance crew can shock you back into a normal rhythm.

I have, in the past, been weak eough to give in to the temptation to go fetch one of these monster cookies every morning for a week, and even eat them before lunch. I don’t know what kind of indestructable, genetically enhanced body armor I thought my stomach was made of, but man, was I ever sick as a dog when I did that. My carefully calculated, absolute limit is about one of these a week. One every four weeks would be a lot better for my delicate constitution, and even then I have to spread a cookie out over at least two days. Half the one I got this morning is wrapped up and waiting in the bottom of my tote bag for me to wolf it down with tomorrow morning’s coffee.

Dammit, I’m making myself hungry.

It was cold enough today to make my nose hairs stick together, even at noon, but after finishing the bowl of delicious potato and bacon soup I brought with me for lunch, I still had a half-hour left before I had to be back at my desk, and I just couldn’t spend it in the break room, so I pulled on my sweater, wrapped my overcoat up tight and even put on my earmuffs to take a brisk walk around the downtown neighborhood, just so I could get a little sunshine and fresh air. Really, there’s nothing like fresh air to get your blood moving again, especially when it’s so cold that a gust of it makes your cheeks feel just like they’ve been scrubbed with sandpaper. Talk about a wake-up.

Thursday means guy night, which you know if you’ve been paying any attention at all to my daily drivel. You have, haven’t you? Of course you have.

This Thursday I actually felt an inspiration to prepare and eat a real dinner. I wanted fish, specifically, a thick, broiled salmon fillet. It’s a perfect food for guy night, because all you have to do is rub a little olive oil on it, slide it under the broiler for a couple minutes, turn it over and let it broil a couple more minutes, then serve. Only Cup O Noodles is easier.

I broiled some garlic bread, too, and washed off some spinach while the bread was toasting, because My Darling B insists that I serve a vegetable with dinner or I’m cheating. With a glass of the shiraz we brought home from yesterday’s wine tasting, it turned out to be quite a sumptuous repast, if I may say so myself.

Holy Frick, today was cold! Coldest day yet! The thermometer on O-mobile’s dashboard slowly decremented, degree by degree, as we commuted into town this morning until it displayed a single, solitary digit that shivered in that weird green light dashboard LEDs have, but it didn’t matter much to us. We were all frozen solid by then.

As luck would have it, I made a lunch date to each Laotian food at a restaurant about five blocks from the bank, so I made darned sure I wore the down-filled coat I inherited from my Dad many moons ago. It’s looking frayed in more than a few key places, but it still keeps me toasty warm in the coldest Wisconsin weather, and when you’ve got that, looks don’t matter. If, for some bizarre reason, I had occasion to wear this coat at any other time of year, onlookers would wrinkle their noses and wonder which park bench I slept on at night, but in the dead of winter people compliment me. “That looks warm,” they say, as well they should. I’ll hang on to this coat until removing it from its hanger results in a blizzard of feathers.

I’ve never eaten Laotian food before that I know of. A couple of friends knew of a mom & pop store on Gorham Street about a block north of State Street where they said we could get the best Laotian food in the city. It might have been the best; I wouldn’t have any idea. All I can say about the quality is, I liked it. I ordered a dish called Pad Thai that I thought was very tasty, noodles and pork in a sweet-spicy sauce that I heaped on rice and eagerly gobbled down. The portions were enormous, and although I hungrily wolfed down quite a lot of it at the restaurant, I was still able to bring home enough that I’m sure I’ll be able to feed My Darling B and myself for lunch tomorrow.

And while we’re talking food, dinner tonight was huevos rancheros, which B lovingly prepared and served to me piping hot, but not so hot that my eggs weren’t perfectly runny. I never liked fried eggs until B began to serve them to me, because she knows exactly how runny to make them.

Y’know what there is to like about telemarketers? You’re going to say, “nothing,” I’d bet, but think about it for a moment and see if you can’t think of what I’m thinking of.

Did you think of something? No? Want me to just tell you? What I like about them is, I can lie to them. They call me at dinner time to talk to me about new windows for my house? I tell them I just had the windows done. They want to help me get my credit card debt under control? I paid off all my credit cards with a consolidation loan just last week. They want me to cover my roof in solar panels? I’ve been off the grid for the past two years. They’re selling rocket ship rides to the moon? Already been there.

The best part of this deal is, they have to believe me. They don’t know. I just might have the lastest in garage door-opening technology, or maybe I already signed up with another service to make my lawn green and weed-free. If they dared to challenge me, not that they ever have, I would tell them that I hired a local contractor to do the job, and they’d have to believe that lie, too.

I got my inspiration from Tim. He picked up dozens of calls this summer and spun the most amazingly bald-faced lies ever, and had a lot of fun doing it. My favorite was when he told the guy who asked to speak to his dad that I wasn’t here, and after they asked if he knew when I’d be back, he told them, “Not really. When he starts drinking like he has been, sometimes we don’t see him for days.”

I’m not sure I could pull that off without choking back a chuckle that would give me away, but I can make up just about any other lie, the more atrocious, the better, with so much confidence I sound as though I’m delivering the word of god. I’m probably going to hell for it, but I got tired of hearing the phone ring morning, noon and night. Now that I answer it and tell all the telemarketers I’ve already got whatever they’re selling, at least I have the fun of messing with their heads, and maybe, just maybe they’ll stop calling me. Doubt it, though.

Our home’s tiny kitchen came with a tiny, stainless steel sink. It’s a standard size with two bowls, and I’m sure it looked very modern and very large back when it was installed, but I’ve been cursing it ever since we moved in because the bowls are just not big enough for some of the fry pans and platters I have to wash by hand. And I don’t like a stainless steel sink much. It’s very shiny, but also very noisy, and the buff finish never looks really clean.

About two weeks ago, the faucet started making a knocking noise that’s been getting worse with each passing day. I think it was probably caused by a build-up of minerals in the pipes, but I didn’t care enough to check it out because, one way or the other, I’d have to replace it anyway. Since I was already embarking on another adventure in plumbing, I thought I might as well do something about that sink, too.

I’ve wanted a really huge sink ever since I saw the one my Autie Sue and Uncle Jim have in their kitchen. It’s as big as our two-bowl sink, but it has one huge bowl and is a lot deeper. I do all the dish washing at our house, so a sink like that made me drool. When I looked at the local store, though, the only sink with one huge bowl was acrylic. It was a sandy color and had a dull finish, not at all what I was thinking of. I wanted an enameled sink, a gleaming white one. They had something like that at the store, but it had two bowls, one big and one small. I looked at the plastic sink and at the enameled sink, and the shiny one got my vote. I decided I could live with the two bowls.

So today, right after lunch, I went to the store to buy the sink and all the other stuff I thought I’d need to swap everything out. It should go without saying that I’ve never replaced a kitchen sink before. I had an idea how it might be done, but as for having something useful, like experience or a working knowledge of plumbing, well, that’s a completely different story. A very short one, just a few pages long, and the text has very wide margins. It’s double-spaced, too. I can’t overemphasize enough how little I know about plumbing, other than to say it’s almost criminal that I try to do it on my own.

An enameled sink is made largely out of cast iron and it’s huge, packaged in a box you could park a Cadillac Escalade inside. Naturally, the only white sink they had in stock was at the bottom of a stack of three enameled sinks, but through a process of tipping each box carefully off the stack, scooting it along the floor, and levering them back onto the shelf a little further down, I was able to avoid giving myself a hernia.

Then, a big problem: I noticed, after I’d loaded a box filled with three-hundred pounds of cast iron and enamel, that box had MADE IN CHINA printed in very small type in a corner of the side panel. Well, crap. My Darling B would never have let me in the door with that thing, unless I hid the box and lied to her, and I’d feel like a heel if I did that, so I tipped and scooted it back to the shelf, then stood in the aisle a little longer to review my options.

Besides the enameled sinks, they had stainless steel, which were just like the sink I was trying to get rid of, and acrylic, which looked like cheap plastic toys with a eye-boggling price tag. They were made in the USA, though, and were guaranteed not to chip or break. They’d also be very quiet, I realized after drumming my knuckles across one of them. You don’t know how nice that’d be until you’ve tried to wash a twelve-inch cast iron skillet in a stainless steel sink that’s just an inch shy of being wide enough for the job.

They also had an acrylic sink that was a single bowl, just what I’d been looking for in the first place. A standard two-holer kitchen sink is twenty-two by thirty-three inches wide, and our stainless steel two-holer was about six inches deep. They had an acrylic sink that was nine inches deep and the sides of the bowl dropped straight down into the 22 x 33 hole, making the thing look like the gaping maw of hell. Awesome. I could get two skillets into that thing and still have room to take a bath. So I decided to give the acrylic a try.

As an added bonus, the plastic sink was nowhere near as heavy as the cast-iron enameled sink. I could pick up the box and carry it to my waiting cart, no problem. I didn’t think of this until I sat down to write this drivel, but I probably would’ve ruptured a disk trying to lift that cast iron one from the floor to the countertop. The gods must’ve frowned upon my choice of the enameled sink from the very beginning, and stamped that box with the Made in China label because it wasn’t yet my time to be laid up in a hospital bed for weeks on end in traction. Thanks, gods.

The first thing I had to do to begin this plumbing odyssey was shut off the water main, because the cold water feeder pipe under the sink didn’t have a shut-off valve, just a compression fitting on the stub end of a copper pipe. I put a shut-off valve on the hot water feeder, but only because I thought it would be a good idea when I installed the dish washer. It would have been a very good idea if I’d thought of putting valves on both of them, but there’s a special page in the dictionary to describe the kind of lazy I am, and one whole definition having to do with plumbing, with illustrations.

So I shut off the water main and made an attempt to install a valve on the cold water feed. It was the kind of valve that has a compression fitting on it. I’m a lot more comfortable with sweating a connection to a copper pipe. Why they call it “sweating” I’m not sure. It’s really soldering, with a blow torch. I love the blow torch part. I don’t get to use my blow torch often enough, so I almost look forward to these adventures in plumbing.

But, because I temporarily forgot how to read, or was suffering from some other version of mental insanity, I couldn’t find the kind of valve I could sweat onto the pipe, so I figured I could give the compression fitting a try. The nut at the base of the valve is meant to clamp down on a brass collar that should seal the joint between the valve and the pipe, but try as I might, I couldn’t get it to work. I used some of the bluest cuss words I knew, which usually does the trick, but the valve would not seat at all. I could turn the damned thing with my hand no matter how hard I cranked down on the nut, so off to the hardware store I went again.

Discouragement was not setting in yet, contrary to what you might think. It’s not at all unusual for me to have to make two or three trips to the store to complete a project like this one, and as a matter of fact my ability to read suddenly returned and I found the valve I wanted in the first place, or thought I did, which lifted my spirits. By the time I was wedged into the cramped space under the sink, though, the good feeling went away as I noticed the other end of the new valve was wrong for the connection I wanted to make. I put on my coat, hat and boots for a third time to head back to the hardware store.

All this was taking several hours longer than I had planned, which wouldn’t have been a big deal if B hadn’t been waiting all this time to take a shower after cleaning the kitchen and dining room. I couldn’t turn the water main back on until I got this valve installed. The first time I thought it was solidly in place, a tattletale trickle of water gave away a bad soldering joint, and I had to torch it, try to clean it up and re-solder it. The second time I thought I had it in place, I mixed up the pieces of the valve, and water came gushing out of the fitting and all over the kitchen. That was an exciting moment for B, who was watching the pipe for me to see if it sprang a leak. After sopping up the mess, I took the valve apart, then put it back together with the right pieces. This time there was no gushing and no leaks, and B finally got to take her shower. Good thing for me she’s so patient.

That taken care of, I could finally slide under the counter on my back, undo the sewer connections and unscrew the retaining clips that hold the sink in place. Mysteriously, though, I couldn’t lift the sink out of the countertop even though everything appeared to be disconnected. I double-checked every retaining clip and hose fitting to make sure they were all undone and had a look at the sink from above to see if maybe it was glued in place, but couldn’t find any hint to explain why it might not want to come out, so I slid under it again, set the heels of my hands against the back of the bowl, closed my eyes and pushed as hard as I could.

I heard a resounding crack as something gave and the sink popped out of its hole. After climbing topside and removing the sink, I discovered that what had been holding it in place was a thick bead of goop that had collected under the lip over the course of years and years, food and syrup and who knows what else that was as strong as super glue after it had hardened. B went at it with a razor blade and some 409 to get it all off while I got the new sink ready.

The new sink fit perfectly, and I didn’t have any trouble fitting the faucet, but when I went to install the garbage disposal I found that the drain was directly over the sewer pipe. There wasn’t enough room under the sink for the disposal’s motor. That meant I had to put on my hat, boots and coat for one last trip to the store to fetch a standard drain and some pipe to piece together a drain so B could use the sink to make dinner, which was already behind schedule.

Five and a half hours later, we had a working sink, which is really not bad at all when you take into account I started with only the vaguest idea of what I was doing, and I’m still in the dark, really, as to how it all worked out.

Yesterday’s dinner was pizza, lovingly crafted, as are almost all the dinners we enjoy at Chez O, by the hands of My Darling B. She fussed over every little thing, the crust, the sauce, the sausage topping, the diced onions. Even though it was pizza, it was a magnificent meal. Out of sheer gratitude, I would have done anything she asked for a taste of the marinara sauce alone.

I adored her pizza so completely that I ate that fateful one piece too many. As unbelievable as it might seem when you’re indulging in it, there really is such an animal as too much of a good thing. My stuffed belly thumped its own heartbeat all through the night, and I lay there, listening to every beat. Pizza. Pizza. Pizza. Pizza. Until five o’clock in the morning then the alarm clock blessedly began to bleat. No night is longer than a Sunday night before you have to go to work, lying in bed for hours on end, not sleeping.

After getting out of bed I washed up, then made coffee, the usual morning, except I didn’t toast my usual two slices of bread and gobble them down, slathered with butter and showered with sugar. Couldn’t bring myself to do it. Wouldn’t have been able to if I’d wanted, come to that; there was no loaf in the fridge, but I was blissfully unaware of that. All I had for breakfast was a brimming mug full of piping hot java. “You didn’t eat breakfast?” Tim asked me later, incredulously, and I finally knew what that tone of voice sounded like. I’ve never heard incredulous before this until he spoke those words to me.

It made me enjoy my lunch all the more, which was, perversely, cold pizza left over from the night before.

The end of the world is at hand. Seriously, they’re forcasting Armageddon here in south-central Wisconsin. If you’re anywhere else, you can feel safe in the knowledge that the four horsemen will not be paying a visit to you this evening, but here in the greater Madison area we’re all receiving the last rites. The news programs agree that each and every one of us can all expect to be frozen solid before sunrise.

How is it that Badgerlanders all turned into a big, whiny pack of wussies in the few short years I was away? I mean, seriously, if you chose to live in Wisconsin, what did you expect? This is the frozen north. We gets lots of snow here, and as the nights get shorter, the days get colder. I sort of figured most of the adults who lived here had worked that out by now.

Or maybe not. Maybe they were always like this, running up and down the streets, waving their arms in the air, wailing about how awfully, terribly cold it was and how the snow was going to bury them all, and I simply never took notice until now. I’ve been living in denial all these years, the way everybody else has been fooling themselves into believing that maybe this winter it won’t snow, or get really, painfully cold. Sheesh.

We’re expecting about a foot of snow overnight, or it could be as little as four inches, or it could be like the last time the weather nerds forecast freezing rain would fall all night and hermetically seal us inside our houses before heavy snow would bury us so deep we’d never see sunshine again. Whatever it’s actually going to be, the forecast for tomorrow has made everybody else a little bit crazy, and made me roll my eyes a lot.

Okay, it’s going to snow. We sometimes get snow here, maybe you’ve heard. It’s also frequently cold. It will be snowy and cold until March. By then, a forty-degree day will inspire you to stride into the great outdoors in t-shirts and shorts. Summer will seem positively tropical. There are plusses to living here after all. Try not to let it spoil the current panic, though. By all means, tear out your hair and shriek as if you’ve never seen snow before.

Okay. I feel better now. Thanks for letting me vent.

More adventures in plumbing last night: The basement sink’s drain stopped draining. Is it still a drain when it doesn’t?

I loaded the clothes washer with some rags, then checked to make sure the drain was open and, oh, hey, it wasn’t, dammit. Without a functioning basement sink, we can’t use the clothes washer. It pumps all its dirty water into the basement through a Rube Goldberg connection of iron pipes that runs from the laundry upstairs to the sink downstairs. There’s only so much water it can barf into a sink with a non-draining drain before we suffer a plumbing apocalypse.

So I rolled up my sleeves and bent to the task of trying to figure out how to unblock it. First, I plunged it. And plunged it. And kept on plunging it in the increasingly vain hope that I could clear the block without taking the drain pipes apart. Sometimes it works, but last night the plunger and I found no joy in persistence.

After humping up and down on the plunger for about twenty minutes, I finally bowed to the inevitable, hunched down on the floor and shuffled all the junk out from under the sink so that I could unscrew the fittings that held the drain pipes together. Here’s my tip for you if you’re thinking of embarking on an adventure in plumbing: Don’t look in the drain pipes. Just throw them away. I’m stupid enough and cheap enough to go poking around in the P-trap to see if it’s blocked, and I’m always disgusted by what I find there. Don’t do that to yourself. A P-trap made of PVC plastic will cost you four bucks at the hardware store. Go out and buy a new one, throw out the one that’s gunked-up.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have that option. It was ten o’clock. The sky was filled with blowing snow. The roads were covered in ice. Besides that, Menard’s wasn’t open. I could have left it until the next day, I guess, but my attitude was, get it over with.

The plus to this particular adventure in plumbing was that I didn’t have to try to catch any of the water that came gushing out of the drain pipes I was disassembling. There’s a drain in the floor right next to the basement sink to catch all the water. A plumbing job in this one part of the house almost cleans itself up. The negative is, I have to stand in a puddle the whole I’m working.

After I had all the pipes taken apart, I dug around inside the drain pipe with brushes, hoses, a stiff piece of wire, but no matter how deeply I poked around in there I couldn’t find the block. Since I couldn’t hook it and pull it out, my final option was to force it down. I schlepped out to the garage, brought in one of the garden hoses and hooked it up to The Blaster.

I found this nifty little gadget last summer when I was having so much trouble with the shower drain. It’s a black rubber bulb that screws on to the end of a hose and, when I turn the water on, fills up to block the pipe and keep water from backwashing onto the floor, while at the same time shooting a blast of high-pressure water down the drain. I let it blast away for about three minutes, then pulled it out, put the pipes back together and filled the sink to see how successful I was.

I’m happy to say it was about one-hundred percent cleared of any blockage. All that was left was to clean up the mess on the floor, then wash my hands up to the elbows in lye.

Wednesday night means wine and cigars are being sampled at The Tasting Room on Monona Drive, just three blocks from our house. It would be a rather pleasant walk, if it weren’t December and there were sidewalks in Monona. There are a few here and there, but not in our neck of the woods, so walking three blocks to Monona Drive, even at the relatively quiet hours after six, means picking our way carefully among the slush and ice boulders in the gutter while hoping against all hope that the drivers of the trucks we can hear speeding toward us from behind will be able to see us and, more important, pay some attention to us and a little less to their cell phones as they pass. A guy needs a snort of wine after facing that in the dark.

I forget how My Darling B discovered this very local wine tasting, but however she did, I’m fine with it. All we have to do is show up, throw our coats over a chair, and wait expectantly at the corner of the bar for the wine-tasting expert to sidle over and ask, “Can I get you a couple glasses?” We don’t even have to ask. It’s like they want us to drink their fancy-pants wine!

I’m not actually sure they’re wine experts. They talk like they are. They know, for instance, what the grapes are called in each one of the wines. It took me a while — oh, a few years, to be perfectly honest — to realize the names on the bottles like Chardonnay and Malbec referred to the grapes. I thought they were just snotty French names slapped on the bottles to make wine snots sound like they knew more than me. And it works. I knew wine was made from grapes, of course, I just didn’t know there were different kinds.

But I’m making some progress trying to find out. Five years ago, all I knew about how to pick the wine I liked was that the stuff from Australia with the kangaroo on the label tasted pretty good. Now I know that Syrrah is delicious, but I’m not as crazy about Pinot as a lot of people seem to be. Not that I’ll turn it down if you offer me a glass. I try to remain broad-minded.

B’s much more of a wine snot than I am. She reads books about wine, googles the names of the wines we buy to read all about the vinyards, and can say things like, “Mmm, an excellent oakiness with a vanilla finish,” when we go to these tastings. Then she looks expectantly at me to get my input, and all I can manage by way of analysis is something along the lines of, “Smells like wine,” before I gulp the remainder and push my glass toward the next bottle.

This, it turns out, is really a very sophisticated description when compared to the one B read from a vinyard’s web site this evening, which desribed one of their wines as “exceptionally winey.” Huh! Really! And was it remarkably grapey, too? How about “very wet?” Maybe I can get into this wine thing after all.

Salmon for guy night, a repeat of last Thursday but I think I got away with it. That’s the dynamite thing about salmon; you can throw a slab of it under the broiler and serve it time after time and it just doesn’t get old. Well, probably you could. Me, not as likely. My Darling B visits a parade of food web sites all night ever night and ends up with a head so stuffed full of recipes that she never serves the same dish twice, so I’m thinking I probably couldn’t get away with popping a salmon fillet in the oven again again next week Thursday. I’ll have to think of some other sea creature to broil and serve with rice.

We kept saying we should eat more fish, then we never did. Then last week I had a hankering for salmon on the very night we have come to celebrate as “Guy Night,” and it came to me in a flash of inspiration that salmon was stupidly easy to cook, so we stopped at the Willy Street Co-op on the way home to pick up a fillet from their alway well-stocked seafood selection, snagged a big old loaf of crusty bread as we headed to the check-out and called it supper. It was so tasty and filling that I did it again this week, with similar results, but if I want to do fish again next week it’ll have to be with something on the order of trout almondine.

If bad things come in threes, as some people seem to believe, then the gods are due to give me a break from the plumbing emergencies here in Our Humble O-Bode for a while. First, it was the kitchen sink, what seemed like a pretty straightforward project to replace an outdated stainless steel sink that quickly turned into a magnificently complicated screwup that took me hours to figure out. I’m still patting myself on the back for doing that.

Then there was the clogged drain in the basement sink, which has to work or we can’t wash clothes, and we had to do that so I had to fix it.

Last night, the drain in the bathtub finally choked, and that means nobody gets to take a shower in the morning without standing ankle-deep in sewage. I don’t know about you, but something like that first thing in the morning is guaranteed to give me a case of the ass ugly enough to last until lunch time.

There were several ways to attack the problem, the first and easiest being to dump a bunch of chemicals down the drain. They promise the moon and they make an impressive show of foaming and stinking up the bathroom, but in the end they rarely work as well as they’re supposed to. On the one or two occasions when they did seem to work as advertised, I ended up hauling out the tools a week later.

The next step is to get out the plunger. I just did this a night before the basement sink stopped up, and I was still tired from it, so I skipped this step. What would be the point?

No, last night I went straight for the awesome hydraulic power of The Blaster. It required that I haul a garden hose upstairs and reel it out across the living room floor, which could have ended in tears if I’d been careless enough to drop the end and spill gallons of water across the hardwood floor, but that part of the operation, which I consider to be the most cringeworthy, was pretty much mistake-free. The next part, where I had to unscrew the drain cover and get my fingers covered in sewer muck, was hardly cringeworthy at all with the memory of the previous plumbing adventures still fresh in my mind.

The rest of it was easy: turn the water on and let it run long enough to flush whatever was in there to infinity and beyond. And there was quite a lot of “whatever was in there.” I got to see some of it when the drain burped a bit during the process, and never was the idea of “backwash” so vividly illustrated. If you’d seen what I saw, you’d never use the term to describe the dregs in the bottom of a pop can again.

But the hour spent last night hauling the hose out and reeling it back up again was worth having a long, hot shower this morning. I even got up earlier than usual so I could take my time and enjoy it.

Thanks for all your birthday wishes. It’s funny how it still means so much to hear them after all these years.

B offered to take me out for a birthday dinner, to any place my little heart desired. One of our favorite restaurants is The Fork and Spoon Cafe, a small restaurant attached to the RP Pasta factory near downtown Madison, in the Willy Street neighborhood. B discovered they were serving a special last night, lamb ragout made with sheep raised on Jordenal Farm, a farmer we buy from almost every time we visit the Dane County Farmer’s Market. One of our favorite restaurants serving meat from one of our favorite farmers — it wasn’t quite like all the planets lining up, but it was one of those opportunities we couldn’t pass by.

As things turned out, though, I ordered pasta marinara, not the ragout. The night before, I’d prepared a big old fillet of salmon, and Tim had declined to join us for dinner, so I gobbled down his portion because I just love salmon, but I paid for my gluttony when my overfull tummy kept me up most of the night. I didn’t eat breakfast the next morning, either, but by lunchtime the next day I was feeling well enough to go in with the rest of the folks in the office who were ordering sub sandwiches from one of my favorite sub shops, Potbelly’s.

I still felt fine after my sub, but I wasn’t quite ready for dinner rich in meat. I usually order something different from whatever B’s having anyway, then sample from her plate and return the favor. So after looking over the menu I decided the marinara sounded good. It turned out to actually be pretty good, too. Not as good as B’s lovingly hand-crafted marinara, but still pretty good, and I took plenty home to enjoy later.

After dinner, I stretched out on the sofa to watch a movie. I originally popped Love, Actually into the machine, one of our Christmas movies, but B said she wasn’t ready to watch that yet, so I hit STOP and opened a book instead. That started one of those goofy non-arguments you hear only between old married couples:

“No, it’s your birthday,” B said, “go ahead and watch it.”

“But I don’t want to,” I said.

“But I want you to,” she said.

“Well, I’m not ready now.”

“Please watch the movie.”

And so on. I don’t know what eventually inspired me, but I went rooting through our collection of VHS tapes (remember them? We still have a box filled with them and, more importantly, a tape player that works) and found a copy of Apollo 13, not what I consider a traditional birthday movie although I was freakishly nerdy about the Apollo program when I was about ten years old. What ten-year-old wasn’t, back in 1970? The height of my nerdiness was when my parents bought me a model of the Saturn Five rocket that stood four feet tall. The command module came off the top so I could dock with the lunal module and carry it to the other side of my room, where I could land it on the bedspread. When my nerdy friend came over with his walkie-talkies, we could spend a whole afternoon carrying out a moon-landing mission from beginning to end.

Sorry, I believe I’ve gone over all this before, and I know I’ve babbled about the movie already, too, so I shan’t go on any longer, except to add that My Darling B made a big bowl of salty popcorn drizzled with real butter that we munched on through the first half of the movie, the dear.

It’s Saturday, time for our weekly trip to the farmer’s market and all the other customary things that kick off the weekend: locking the cats out of the bedroom when they loudly announce they’re hungry, sitting up on the sofa for a liesurely half-hour or so with My Darling B to welcome the day with a hot cuppa joe, and finally attending to our morning toilet before we headed into town.

After I washed up I asked B if she would help show me how to tie back my hair, as she suggested day before yesterday, and she not only helped, she tied it back for me, which surprised the hell out of me because not so long ago she threatened to leave me if I ever wore my hair in a teensy-tiny ponytail. Maybe this is different because I intend to keep growing it until it’s not teensy-tiny, or until I get sick of it and buzz my head again.

After The Snowstorm That Froze Madison last week, this weekend we went through The Big Thaw. Just about every bit of the snow that piled up over the past two weeks has melted away to nothing in a heat wave of forty-degree days this weekend. Not that I’ll miss it, but there’s something about watching all the snow I so conscientiously shoveled off the driveway melt to nothing that makes me feel, I don’t know, emasculated maybe.

Tonight, temps are supposed to drop below zero, and the forecast calls for a high of nine tomorrow. Well, that’s Wisconsin.

It’s been a quiet day here at Our Humble O’Bode. The manifold O-Folk have been keeping to themselves, mostly.

Tim’s been in his room all day shooting the heads off mutated flesh-eating zombies. He played his new video game, Fallout, from morning to night Saturday and Sunday. I don’t know how, but he did. Oh, hell, I do know how. When I was eighteen I earned a 1.96 GPA by spending almost all of my first college semester at the student union playing pinball games when I wasn’t in class. They had three or four of the classic Bally tables, so old that one or two of them still cost just a dime, and I got so caught up in their magic that I spent more time playing them than studying for my next test. They’re a long way from computer games, but a game’s a game, sort of.

Tim shot heads off a few zombies while letting me watch to see what the fuss was about and, ah, I’m not sure what to say. It’s without a doubt a video game with the grossest-looking shootings I’ve ever seen. Not even Tim’s previous favorite video game, Gears of War, in which soldiers hacked the heads off alien monsters with chain saws, was quite as over the top as the grotesque scenes that unfold with each shooting in Fallout. Tim says the game’s been banned in two countries, and I’m surprised it’s run into serious opposition in only two.

In Fallout, a complex targeting systems lets Tim freeze the scene whenever a rampaging mutant appears so he can select exactly which part of the mutant he wants to shoot, and when the action begins again it’s in slow motion so he can see not only where the bullet hit, but he also gets to watch blood spatter and chunks of meat go flying. Pinball might have been just as addictive, but the imagery was a lot easier to stomach.

My Darling B disappeared for a couple hours this afternoon to go shopping for Christmas presents. It’s a secret just where she went, but she must not have had quite the success she thought she would because after she got back she spent a lot of time surfing the internet and grumbling that what she was looking for should be in every corner store in the city.

Well, everyone else has been talking about it: Yesterday we had high temps in the mid-forties. This morning the dashboard thermometer in the car said it was three, and the high temp never climbed out of single digits. It was one of those mornings I felt it was cold enough to back the car out of the garage and leave it running in the driveway for ten minutes, the way we used to do every time we went driving in the winter back when gasoline was less than a buck a gallon.

Tim has so far refused to wear a coat this winter, no matter how cold it’s gotten or how much his mother badgered him, just a fleece jacket, kind of thin, and most of the time worn with the sleeves rolled up, even while he was hunched over hooting about how freakin cold it was. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even have a coat of his own, not that it matters particularly. We’ve got quite a few coats in the closet he could wear until he breaks down and buys his own, but I honestly don’t believe he’s even thinking of it. He gives the impression he’d rather wear a dress in public. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that.

I was outside exactly five times today, for less than a minute each time: First, to back the car out of the garage, then to get back into the car and drive to work. After we pulled up to the curb on Carroll Street it took less than ten seconds for My Darling B to pop out of her side of the car, scoot around the back of the car, peck me on the cheek and retreat to the warmth of the driver’s seat. I trotted to the rear entrance of the bank as quickly as possible and ducked inside. That was the third time.

I came within a heartbeat of running across the square at noon to get a fresh cuppa joe from Michelangelo’s, but as I was putting my coat on I felt that tell-tale lightness in the pocket that hinted my wallet was not where it was supposed to be. It wasn’t in my bag, either, so I hung up my coat and made do with refilling my travel mug at the water fountain.

So my fourth exposure to the arctic blast of our fine frozen Monday didn’t hit me until quitting time, when Tim and I found ourselves waiting at the curb. B’s usually waiting there for us instead of the other way around, unless of course it’s below freezing. That seems to be some kind of physical law. I tried to talk Tim into hanging out inside but he wouldn’t have any of it, and instead pushed his sleeves up, tore his jacket open and thumped his chest, howling at the sky. According to him, it’s not a matter of staying warm or getting cold, it’s a matter of principle. He couldn’t live with himself if he hid from the cold. That’s just how it is with him.

As I stood there, stunned by the brutal impact of Tim’s philosophy, B came around the corner to rescue us from the cold. At home, I parked the car in the garage and closed the door behind me, so I never had to go out again.

Yakisoba for dinner tonight. That’s Japanese for “stir-fried noodles, veggies and meat” and it tastes terriffic. Our favorite restaurant back in Misawa, Japan, called Cheese Roll Noodle, served a plate of yakisoba big enough to feed Cox’s army, and it was the most fabulously tasty yakisoba ever anywhere. If somebody said they would send me back to Japan but only for an hour, I’d go to Cheese Roll Noodle, eat a bathtub-sized bowl of shrimp ramen and a side of gyoza, and take a couple orders of yakisoba back with me.

I’ve never had bad yakisoba, even the packaged stuff with the bags of powdered MSG. I’m not talking about that dry brick-like crap the grocery store sells for a dime a pack. These are soft noodles you boil or stir-fry, but I the powder sauce is very probably the same. That’s why My Darling B found a recipe for yakisoba sauce on the interwebs, mixed up a big jar of the stuff and stirred it into a batch of veggies and noodles and beef strips. YUM!

It takes a while to make yakisoba, though, so I took a glass of wine to the living room to relax on the sofa and let the worries of the work day drain away, until B asked me to print something for her, and since B is She Who Must Be Obeyed, I dutifully dug our prehistoric printer out of a closet, blew two or three times into its workings to make sure there was plenty of dust in my eyes, plugged it into the wall and listened to it make emergency noises for the next twenty minutes, just what I wanted to do after hours and hours of work day frustrations.

We’ve had this printer so long I can’t remember a time when it worked. It’s a piece of junk, but it’s an expensive piece of junk so we can’t bring ourselves to throw it away, although just throwing it out is too good for it. What we ought to do is circle it with baseball bats and beat it to death in slow motion like those guys did in Office Space.

I really did try to make the printer work, and after a time I even got it to eat up some paper and spit it out again. It sounded like it was trying to print on the paper, but it all came out as white as it went in, utterly un-printed upon. I ran the same sheet of paper through the printer three or four times with the same result, nothing but blank paper. She’ll have to print that document at the library.

It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, though. The glass of wine I took to the living room with me was some mead we brought home from the wine and cheese show at the convention center last summer. Delicious stuff, mead. If you’ve never had it, one modest-sized glass is all you need to relax every muscle in your body, even if you happen to be tinkering with a computer printer, one of the most high-stress jobs known to humankind.

Wine tasting! This was the big one! The last wine tasting of the year at The Tasting Room on Monona Drive! And they were not only sampling wine, they were serving a tasty lunch meat platter from Fraboni’s! It was free booze and noshies, all in the middle of the week!

We didn’t want to miss a moment of this event, so My Darling B asked to leave an hour early from work, and I took off when she showed up downtown, a little after four. That gave us plenty of time to get home, even over roads so slippery they might as well have been covered in cooking oil. I fishtailed once or twice, but otherwise made it home perfectly safe.

And that gave us plenty of time to take in as much of the evening’s festivities as possible. The walk up the road to The Tasting Room isn’t any longer than ten minutes, which sounds like a great little stroll if you happen to live in Arizona or Florida, but this week for residents of Wisconsin a walk like that seems to last about ten thousand years, all of them during an ice age.

We got there before the cigar smokers showed up, all part of the plan of leaving early. I suppose if you’re already a cigar smoker, then smoking cigars and drinking wine seems like a sensible pairing of hobbies, but if you’re not a smoker it doesn’t make much sense at all, even if you’re an absolute beginner when it comes to sampling wines. The first thing everybody does at a wine tasting is sniff the wine, which is difficult, if not impossible, to do if you’re surrounded by a dozen people puffing on stogies. I’m not saying I could tell a Syrah from a Medoc by sniffing them, I’m just saying I couldn’t tell it was wine under those circumstances.

But tonight, as I said, it just so happened that the place was smoke-free the whole time we were there, so we could sniff wine all we wanted and even drink a little, too. And we met a really nice guy who happened to have been stationed in Kaiserslautern, where he learned to drink good wine, and that’s conincidentally where I spent six weeks on a temporary assignment, and where B and the boys came to visit me and we went on a tour of the wine region, so we had lots of shared experiences to talk about.

The trip back, once we’d warmed ourselves with a few sips of really good wine and munched on cheese and crackers, wouldn’t have been so bad if the temperature hadn’t somehow dropped to fifty degrees below zero, or thereabouts. To warm ourselves after we got home, we shoveled all the fluffy snow off the driveway, then retired to the kitchen where we pulled the cork on a bottle of wine B won by answering a trivia question about wine, as if there were anything trivial about wine. The owner was so happy we came to all his wine tastings that he challenged B to pick a card from his Trivial Pursuit-like wine game, then asked her a multiple-choice question that she happened to know the answer to because she’d watched the movie Sideways just two weeks ago. Some things are just meant to be.

Even though this is Guy Night, and even though I said just last week I was going to make Guy Night more interesting by fixing more real dinners with real meat and real vegetables that I spent more than fifteen minutes preparing in the kitchen with more than one utensil, tonight I wussed out completely. My answer to My Darling B’s question, “What are we having for dinner tonight?” was, “PIZZA!” And not pizza that I planned to make myself. This was going to be pizza by telephone, no question.

I admit it, I copped out. I shouldn’t have. What I should have done was stopped at the Willy Street Co-op to buy some really good food for my family, and enjoyed preparing it for them, because they’re worth my time and effort, every day, no matter what. I guess I owe them a huge apology. They seemed to like the pizza just fine, though. B ate four pieces, and Tim even joined us for dinner. That was pretty cool.

It’s not that I didn’t want to do something special for my family, it’s that I didn’t want to do anything for anybody. Eight hours of solving other people’s problems will do that to you sometimes, particularly when you work in a bank, the tax escrow checks have just been mailed, and the fed has lowered interest rates to zero, economically stimulating everybody and his dog to go busting down our door wanting to refinance their loans, a good thing since it keeps me in clover, but man, I wish we could make them stop for just one day so I could clear my desk.

I mailed out the monthly mortgage statements today, too. Paper cuts galore!

The day wasn’t without its high points, though. Santa Claus paid us a visit, even, strolling in at about three o’clock with a big bag overflowing with candy canes, a welcome treat although in our department he might have made some of us a lot happier if he’d handed out bottles of Tylenol and Advil, the candy of choice in our profession, which reminds me, I’ve got to order more as soon as I get to work in the morning. We’re nearly out.

Not everyone in our department was happy to see him, however. One of the assistants tried to hide in my cube to get away from Santa, forgetting, I suppose, that Santa is magical and will find you no matter where you are. “Santa’s really creeping me out, Dave,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t dare barge into my cube to deliver his present of a single candy cane, but he did anyway. I had to promise her I wouldn’t let Santa scare her before she would accept his gift.

After Santa left, one of the other assistants asked me who that was. I played dumb. “It was Santa Claus.”

She rolled her eyes a bit and laughed. “I know, but who was the guy playing Santa Claus?”

I waited a heartbeat before I answered, with as serious an expression as I could manage, “You mean you think that wasn’t Santa Claus?”

At which point she decided, rather wisely I suppose, not to challenge my delusions, probably on the suspicion I might snap and she wasn’t close enough to a hidey hole to take that chance.

You might’ve heard we had some snow here today. I say “some” because it’s nice and relative. That way, if you’re reading this from deep beneath a snowbank in Milwaukee, you won’t feel as though I’m bragging about all the snow we got, while if you’re reading this from the upper flaming rings of hell, it somehow still doesn’t sound like much. It’s a magical reference.

It snowed all through the night until there was six or eight inches on the ground by the time we got up in the morning. I know because I woke up around midnight and couldn’t get back to sleep until two-thirty or so in the morning, so instead of laying in bed doing nothing I sat in my recliner looking out the window at the falling snow ... or, doing nothing, I have to admit, now that I’ve thought about it. Somehow it didn’t seem so pointless at the time that I was doing the actual staring out the window.

Even though we would plainly see quite a lot of snow was falling, the stuff on the ground somehow didn’t look like much until we put on heavy coats and went out to shovel it off the driveway. Standing in snow up to our butt cheeks, we began to have doubts as to whether or not we were going to get to work today.

And right we were to have doubts. Wading into it changed our initial impression of a light dusting to a heavy blanket, and backing the car into the street demonstrated the snow was deep, heavy and thick enough to stop a car. Well, our car, anyway. It turns out the O-Mobile is just about gutless when it comes to bulling its way through snow. We keep it in the garage and Tim parks his little Honda in the driveway, safe from rampaging snow plows, and speaking of plows, they still hadn’t made an appearance by the time we finished shoveling the drive and were getting ready to leave, so I talked Tim into backing his car out so we could shuffle the two cars around, positioning our Toyota for a quick getaway.

If only. When I backed into the street I became almost instantly stuck just a few feet from our driveway. The car backed up a bit, then bogged down to a dead stop, unable to climb the short rise even in reverse, so I waited for Tim to pull into the driveway, then took off down the street to gain momentum, flipped a yooie and tried to come back up. Again and again I slowed to a stop after backing up to try over and over to get back to our driveway. Finally I just wound up the engine, spinning the tires fast enough to keep the car moving, if very slowly, until I was close enough to fishtail in. Barely.

I popped out of the door to the stink of burning rubber. I might be able to get the car to go the rest of the way up the street if I burned off the rest of the tread left on those tires, but I didn’t want to try it. With little argument, I talked the rest of the O-fam into waitin until after the snow plows cleared off the road.

On any other day they would’ve come by at six, but this morning they didn’t show up until after seven o’clock, and then they made a pass down the wrong side of the road and went on to plow Labelle Street, good news if only we could’ve gone that way to work. We had to wait almost an hour for the plows to come back and clear off the rest of the street, and then of course I had to shovel out the end of the driveway. Snow plows are plus, and snow plows are minus.

The rest of the roads were pretty easy to drive on although we did quite a bit more than the usual slipping and sliding. I didn’t even try to get up the hill to drop us off at the square; I pulled over on Wilson Street instead where we could jump out and B could take over with the nose of the car pointed downhill toward Broom Street.

Beer cheese soup for dinner tonight, and you know what that means: my awesome powers of lactose intolerance will be keeping the bed warm all night!

... in which yours truly stays very busy from sunup to sundown yet, paradoxically, never quite feels as though he’s gotten anything done. Has this ever happened to you?

Although of course I did do a lot. The feeling that I wasn’t must have been due to one of those, whaddayacallums, optical illusions. “Trompe d’oeil” is the technical term, I believe, or at least the snotty know-it-all phrase. But illusion or not, today was one of those days that whizzed by so fast I ended up with no more than a blurred snapshot and a few vague memories. I thought trying to reconstruct it might be fun. Shall we?

We didn’t literally get up at sunup. This is the weekend, after all, and we have always liked to sleep in, although in the past “sleep in” meant that we didn’t get out of bed until we had to describe the time in double digits, but these days we feel like big fat slugs if we’re still in bed as late as eight. B rolled out this morning at seven, and I followed her as soon as I heard the irresistable call of the coffee grinder. There followed thirty or forty minutes of rapt contemplation over steaming cups o’ joe, followed by another hour at least of waiting for Tim to get out of the bathroom. Once he gets in there, he’s in there for a while.

Our first destination, as on every other Saturday morning, was intended to be the farmer’s market, until I asked My Darling B if we could stop for breakfast at Lazy Jane’s. There wasn’t a scrap of bread to be found in the kitchen this morning for toast and I had a serious jonzing for one of their Belgian waffles covered in pecans and banana slices. B can’t stand to see me slobber the way I did when I said the word “breakfast,” so she agreed.

Parking was a bit of a problem. Cars were parked all up and down Willy Street, although for what, I’m not sure. About the only shop open at that hour was the kitchen store next to Lazy Jane’s. I suppose they might have been having a Christmas sale, but the huge number of cars blocking traffic seemed a bit excessive for a cut-rate price on orange juicers. I pulled into the parking lot alongside Lazy Jane’s just in case there might be a spot big enough to pull into, but found no joy at all, although there could have been one if the dweeb in the Jeep Cherokee hadn’t angled across two slots. There’s a special ring in hell for guys like him.

And then, as I turned in my seat to back out of the lot, I spied a woman clearing snow off her rear window. I froze. Was she getting ready to leave? She climbed into her car and her brake lights came on, then her white tail lights. She was! Huzah! Naturally some bozo came into the lot just then and thought he was entitled to her spot, but from my angle I could back in faster that she could drive away and he could get around her. Possession being nine-tenths of the law, it wasn’t much of a contest.

The only down side to eating at Lazy Jane’s is that there’s normally quite a long wait to get into the building, to say nothing of getting close enough to the register to order, but today the stars must’ve been aligned in the heavens just so, because there was no line at all. We walked in, stepped right up to the register, and asked them to give us food, the first time that’s ever happened. I suspected I might wake up at any minute and find myself face down on my keypad at work, but if it was a dream I remained asleep and enjoyed it.

I had the waffle, as I said, manhole-sized and steaming, which sounds sort of x-rated, now that I’ve said it, but nevermind. I slathered it in syrup and gobbled it up, washing it down with lots of their excellent black coffee, a meal that serensified my sufficiency for the rest of the day. My Darling B ordered the special, scrambled eggs and chorizo sausage with a side of chipped potatoes. Even though I loved my waffle more than carnal relations (well, maybe not that much), I coveted her eggs and chorizo from afar, and not very subtly. B let me taste, and it was very good. It probably would have been even better if she hadn’t asked them to make it without mushrooms as advertised.

When she asked the guy, “Can I have it without the mushrooms?” he shook his head tiredly and explained, “We can’t make changes. It comes freeze-dried in a shrink-wrap package.” And then he cracked a smile and said sure.

The farmer’s market was about the same as always. The music this week was provided by a quartet of violinists, or whatever you call them when they’re not fiddling. They were so good they had to have been professionals, not the usual folk singers with guitars and tambourines we usually see at the market. Not that folk singers aren’t professionals or necessarily bad, just that these four sounded as though they’d spent their whole lives playing together and wanted nothing more out of life than to make the most beautiful music ever heard by human ears. There’s something about the sound of strings that captivates me. I found myself compelled to stand and listen while they played several familiar Christmas favorites.

And then we crossed over to the west side of town to buy a slicer. That’s the technical term for a knife used to slice meat. It’s long and wide as a broadsword; all it needs is a wrought-iron handle and a scabbard to make it a weapon any knight of the realm would be proud to use for hacking his opponents into bite-sized kibble. B has been saving up to buy one for her kitchen, and today was the day she finally had enough. She picked out one with a rosewood handle and the shop owner got it out of the case for her to look at, then set another one beside it and suggested she get that one instead. It was the kind preferred by professionals, he said, would last forever and cost half as much. It was even American-made. With all that going for it, B didn’t even mind that it had a plastic handle. And with the money she saved, she bought a fat separator made of Pyrex, and also American-made. “Fat separator” sounds like something Doctor Mengele used in Auschwitz, doesn’t it? But it’s really an ordinary-looking pitcher used to make gravy.

As if we hadn’t done enough shopping already, we stopped at Whole Foods to pick up the food stuffs we thought we’d need to keep the pantry filled while Sean’s here next week, a challenging task for anybody, but My Darling B’s got the experience to measure up to the task. The new wrinkle is that Sean’s a sometime vegetarian now, so he’s constantly browsing for fruit and cereal instead of meat. B stocked up on apples and such to appease him, but I can’t wait until the morning he demolishes a whole box of Tim’s Cap’n Crunch. Hilarity ensues!

That was our morning and part of our afternoon. I dropped B off at the house with the groceries and her new kitchen toys, then set off on my own to do a little shopping for stocking stuffers by myself, the nature of which will have to remain a closely-guarded secret for now. And while I was out anyway I made a stop at Saint Vinnie’s to browse the book store. Good thing I did, too, because they had a copy of Gordon Prange’s Miracle at Midway, a book I’ve been trying for years to find at a used-book price — just two dollars for this one! Finding it at Vinnie’s after such a long search gave me the same kind of thrill as finding a twenty dollar bill in the pocket of a coat I hadn’t worn for years.

I didn’t get home until almost three in the afternoon, past time for my nap. I hate it when that happens.

This is it, folks, the shortest day of the year. They can only get longer from now until June.

And as if nature wanted to drive the point home that it doesn’t get any wintrier than this, we woke up to face the coldest day so far of the season: the termometer’s needle shivered at ten below zero. Why do they even have numbers below zero? Once you’ve said “below zero,” the numbers don’t make much difference, do they?

I went to the window first thing this morning to see if I could tell whether the newspaper was buried in the driveway or in one of the snowbanks on either side of the driveway, and when I was pretty sure it was in the driveway, glanced at the thermometer to see if I’d have to put on my jacket or a heavier down-filled coat, but when I saw what the temperature was I gave up on the idea of going outside altogether. What for? I can read the newspaper on-line anyway.

It wasn’t until around one in the afternoon, when the temp had climbed to ten degrees — just plain old ten, instead of ten below — that I put on my heavy coat, mittens and boots, grabbed a shovel and made my way to the end of the driveway, trying to clear away the snow as I went. A very frisky wind was trying very hard to blow every shovel full of snow I threw right back in my face, no matter which direction I threw it. I could put up with about ten minutes of that before I called it quits, snagged the newspaper from the spot where it was almost completely buried in the snow, and headed back inside to see if it would be possible to feel warm again. And luckily, it was.

Sean was supposed to fly in to Madison today, arriving at about six-thirty this evening, but the guy must live under a spell or curse or some other kind of magical juju hex because whenever he flies out to visit us, he never takes off from Denver on time and he always arrives in Madison so much later than his itinerary says that on at least one occassion he hasn’t shown up until the next day.

This time, somehow, his mother finally convinced him to take a direct flight into Madison. Before this he always flew into O’Hare, arguing that he saved money that way, but the fifty bucks or whatever it was he saved was more than offset by the cost of a hotel stay, meals and, again on one very memorable occassion, a car he “rented” from a stranger who befriended him after Sean missed a connecting flight and was stranded in Chicago.

He called a little after four to let us know he wasn’t bording yet, as he was supposed to, and again about an hour after that to confirm that his flight had been delayed and wouldn’t be taking off for at least another hour. The United Airlines web site said his flight didn’t take off until seven-eighteen, almost an hour after he was supposed to have landed in Madison. Faster and easier to take a train, nearly.

It’s so good to have the boys together again. As I typed these words, they were huddled around the glow of Tim’s computer, taking turns knocking the heads off zombies with a sledge hammer. Nothing brings the family closer together at Christmas time in quite the way a light-hearted game of Fallout 3 does.

Actually, it wasn’t zombies, it was innocent bystanders. Tim and Sean were trying to see how much mayhem they could get away with before they got a reaction from the security team of the hotel they were marauding through. The answer was, just about all the mayhem they felt like. They could pile dismembered corpses on the desk of the guard in the lobby, or pile severed heads at his feet, and he wouldn’t so much as blink. “Doesn’t seem very realistic,” Tim observed dryly.

There is one thing about a game like Fallout 3 that almost anybody could like: The soundtrack is awesome! The signature recording of the game is I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire by the Ink Spots, chosen, I’m guessing, because of the game’s post-nuclear apocalypse setting. America has been nuked into nuclear oblivion, apparently right around the time Kruschev beat out his threats with his shoe, so all the music comes from about that era. The Spots come back again

Cole Porter’s Anything Goes fits with the theme of the game nicely, too; as mentioned above, you’re allowed to do most anything. “About the only line they won’t let you cross is, you can’t mess with the children,” Tim pointed out.

And the theme continues with Roy Brown belting out Butcher Pete and Mighty, Mighty Man. Roy Brown is the man in the picture next to the dictionary definition of belting out a song.

Somewhat incongruously, the soundtrack also includes a few numbers like Dina Shore singing Tex Beneke’s I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy. What that’s doing in a first-person shooter with more blood spattered on the walls than an emergency room at Cook County General, I have no idea.

Sean’s flight finally arrived last night at nine-twenty, roughly three hours after its scheduled arrival. I drove out to the airport with My Darling B to meet him, and we waited for him in the lobby at the bottom of the escalator. Dozens of other people came down the escalator, caught sight of somebody who was waiting for them, and rushed into their arms with big smiles on their faces. There was this one pudgy guy with big hair and a face lit up with a smile so wide he looked like a kewpie doll, or some other super-cute cuddle toy for his mom, who was waiting just a few feet from us. It was like the opening scenes from the movie Love, Actually over and over again.

And over and over again they said, “This has been the longest day of my life!” Most people love the speed of flying from one place to another, but that’s about the only thing they like about it.

Back at home, we had a late dinner, chatted a bit, and then had to go to bed because it was way past bed time for B and I, and we had to go to work in the morning.

My Christmas gift from my supervisor was, he let me off at noon today. Thanks, Michael. (Like he reads this.)

After I left work, I trudged through the blowing snow to meet My Darling B and Number One Son at Michelangelo’s for lunch. B bought me a sandwich and a steaming hot cuppa joe to tide me through the afternoon as we did a little shopping on State Street. Just a very little. I didn’t even have anything I had to get, but there was one thing I was thinking of, a movie somebody was talking about that was so well-known, I figured I should’ve been able to find just about anywhere, even in gas stations and convenience stores. We split up just outside the coffee shop to do our shopping, and agreed to meet again at A Room Of One’s Own, the book store on Johnson Street.

I don’t know where anybody else went, but I walked about two blocks down State Street to The Exclusive Company, to see if they had the DVD in stock. One whole entire wall of the upstairs floor is nothing but brand spanking new DVDs. I strolled up and down the aisles looking for The Very Well-Known Movie, expecting to see its colorful cover pop out at me any moment. No joy there. I made another, slower circuit of the rows and rows of disks, taking my time to flip any likely candidate to one side to get a better look at the cover. Still no luck. There was one whole section of titles where it should have been, but no matter how long I stood there and frowned at it, it never materialized.

Not that it would have mattered if I’d found it, what with all the cash registers being kaput. While I carried out my frustratingly result-free search, the guy behind the counter was frantically making one phone call after another to everybody he could think of who might know something, anything, about computers. He was having about as much luck as I was. If I’d managed to find the movie I was looking for, I doubt they would have known what to do with my money. The computer’s down! I can’t even make change!

Walking back to the book store, I happened upon a shop a block further on that sold used DVDs. Huzzah! It was like being given a second chance! And what were the odds that two shops selling DVDs wouldn’t have The Very Well-Known Movie? Pretty good, as it turns out. Again, I ended up strolling past long, long shelves filled to the rafters with used DVDs, and coming up utterly empty-handed. They had disks of every television show ever made from the 1960’s on, but I had to eventually give up and head for our book store rendezvous with nothing to show for my little excursion.

After we got home, I had a nap, just because I could. Especially because I could. I don’t usually get a chance to nap until the weekend, and even then I don’t always get one. Bliss!

In the evening we sat down to watch Trains, Planes & Automobiles, one of B’s seasonal favorites. As holiday movies go it’s more of a Thanksgiving movie, but I think B wanted to watch it with the family.

As it turned out, Tim hadn’t seen the movie, or rather, he didn’t remember it. He probably saw it back when he was too young for it to stick in his memory, only knew that it had Steve Martin, and he’s of the generation that has no memory at all of what a great big deal John Candy was supposed to be. In a way, I sort of envy him for that. I lived through Candy’s rising stardom and I never quite got what all the fuss was about. Although he was usually good for a few yuks here and there, he wasn’t as knee-slapping funny to me as everybody else seemed to think he was, and even though he was in a whole slew of movie roles, when he wasn’t clowning around and tried to act, he wasn’t all that convincing.

As funny as Trains, Planes & Automobiles was, Tim wasn’t happy with the ending. I never thought it worked, either. The movie got the laughs in all the right places, but every time they tried for drama I thought it got pretty hammy, and the ending was just plain maudlin. Still, I’ve got to say I like the laughs. The bit where Steve Martin wakes up to John Candy giving him a tender smooch on the ear is worth a knee-slapping guffaw.

It’s the day before Christmas, so what did we do? We went looking for a Christmas tree.

I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in.

I realize we’re oddballs in a country that starts to decorate for Christmas in mid-November. When I was but a wee lad, I’m pretty sure it was against the law to put up Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving. Then a couple years back somebody realized that cornucopias and turkeys made for some really lame decorations, I guess, and began to string garland and lights immediately after taking down the skeletons and bats they put up for Halloween.

I never went in much for decorations, but I’m firm in my belief that anybody who puts up Christmas decorations before the first of December should be roasted alive in the village square.

But back to the tree: It’s been our custom to go fetch a tree back to Our Humble O’Bode in mid-December, on the weekend that follows my birthday, and that’s worked well for us over the years. This year, however, My Darling B wanted to wait until Sean was home so we could all go to a nearby tree farm as a family, select a satisfactorily lush Seasonal Pagan Pine Bough, stuff it in the trunk and take it home. But as Sean wasn’t scheduled to fly into Madison until Sunday night, and we wouldn’t all be off work until today, we altered our plan a bit after B called a nearby tree farm to confirm that they would be open on Christmas eve.

Fast-forward to this morning: Snow was falling, heavily and apparently without end, turning the roads into a slushy, slippery mess. The tree farm we planned to visit was in Oregon, ordinarily no more than a half-hour drive from our house, but we would have to take the Beltline to get there, then quite a ways down county roads, and I wasn’t crazy about the idea considering the road conditions. B agreed it probably wasn’t the best idea, so we decided instead to check some of the tree sales lots we saw around town.

Our first stop was at Menard’s, where they’d had a huge corral filled with trees for most of this month, but there were none there today. Blaine’s Farm & Fleet didn’t have any, either, and our last chance was at a place called, I’m not kidding, Elve’s Palace, a new-age head shop and palm-reading store front on Atwood Avenue. The corral was still set up, but there were no trees in it, and the store was closed.

That was our last option; we didn’t know of any more places that sold trees, so this will be our first treeless Christmas. I cobbled together a sort-of tree, stringing a teepee of colored lights from a hook in the ceiling so Santa would have a place to set our presents. You can tell what it’s supposed to be, but it still looks more than a little odd.

Even though we don’t have a tree this year, we still exchanged the presents we piled up under the teepee of colored lights I strung from the hook in the ceiling that looks a little like a Pagan Symbol of Seasonal Cheer. It wasn’t the huge pile of swag that turns the living room floor into rolling wads of torn wrapping paper. We’ve been trying to get away from that, but we still got a couple gifts for each of the boys, and B still loves hanging stockings and stuffing them with tasty treats and a few small toys.

Right after we opened our presents this morning there was a knock at the front door and, opening it, we found a roly-poly man with a white beard waiting on our front porch. Hi, Santa! I almost blurted, but luckily for both of us this wasn’t one of those times when my mouth was completely out of my control. I’ll bet he hears that a dozen times a day. Probably more like a hundred right about this time of year.

The front of his jacket had the emblem of the City of Monona emblazoned on it, and before I could say much more than hello, he told us the water main broke down the street and the city crew would be shutting off the water to most of the neighborhood in about fifteen minutes.

“Now there’s one hell of a Christmas message,” Tim commented, after the guy left. “We’re turning your water off, and somebody will be by later on to take away all your presents. Merry Christmas!”

Having our water shut off at eight in the morning put a bit of a hitch in our holiday celebrations. We were still able to sit down and enjoy our Christmas morning breakfast of french toast and mimosa as planned, but of course we couldn’t clean up afterwards, so the dirty dishes sat on the table all morning and most of the afternoon because B needed the counter space in the kitchen to prepare the Christmas turkey, which is a little trickier than usual when you don’t have running water to keep your hands and your kitchen utensils clean. B’s a very fastidious cook.

And she couldn’t prepare the mashed potatoes or stuffing without water, either, but a little after noon she put the turkey in the oven anyway, putting our dinner’s fate in the hands of the hard-working men of the city water utility. By B’s calculations, a nineteen-pound turkey should take at least four hours to cook. Adding thirty to forty minutes for it to cool, she figured she might plausibly serve dinner at about five, so she crossed her fingers and hoped that would give the utility guys enough time to dig their great big hole in the frozen ground, fix the break and turn the water back on.

The other major wrinkle was that only one of us had time enough to take a shower this morning before the lines went dry. The rest of us had to sit around in our own funk most of the day. I didn’t think it would be so bad, and it wasn’t at first, but by three-thirty when the water came back on I was so ready for a long, hot shower. I had to clean up after dinner, though, and there were a lot of dishes waiting, so I the last one in. I showered for about twenty minutes, and tried as hard as I could to use all the hot water.

The turkey tricked My Darling B. It was supposed to take at least four hours to cook, but it was done in less than three. The water wasn’t on then, and we didn’t have the faintest idea when it would be on, so rather than let the turkey get cold and dry B went ahead and served it anyway. She’d already baked the pumpkin pie, and we had a loaf of crusty bread left over from the other night when B served pesto pasta, so that was Christmas dinner: turkey with gravy and bread.

We ate off paper plates, to keep the dirty dishes to a minimum. Then, not ten minutes after we sat down to tuck into our delicious meal, the water came back on. Doesn’t that just figure?

After dinner, the clean-up and the long, long shower, we circled around the television set to watch a movie. My vote went for Love, Actually but the majority didn’t go for it. Too mooshy, I guess. Although B offered It’s A Wonderful Life as an alternative, the boys both wanted to watch Elf, so Elf it was — exactly the same movie we watched last year on this day when Tim received it as a gift in his stocking, as it happened. I like the set-up for Elf; human baby raised by Santa’s elves travels to New York City to find his dad, a Scrooge of a man who is transformed by his new-found son. Unfortunately, somewhere in the creative process some boob thought it would be a good idea to add a love interest, Zooey Deschanel, that went nowhere, and tack on a putzy ending, but for a cozy night with the family gathered ’round a big bowl of popcorn, it served almost as well as Love, Actually.

And after the movie, they went to Tim’s room to play video games, and I went off to bed after finishing up this drivel so I could get up early and go to work tomorrow morning. My supervisor had dibs on the day off after Christmas.

Today was one of those, whaddayacallits, paradoxes: It’s back to work after two and a half days off, so it sucks like a Monday, but it’s really a Friday!

But that wasn’t what was really weird about it. Yesterday it was zero degrees outside, freaking cold and hip-deep in snow. This morning it was raining and twenty degrees. That was fun. Tim and I had to go to work but B didn’t, so we took Tim’s car, which had been sitting in the driveway all night and was covered in a armor-like shell of ice. I pried the driver’s side door open and started the car, turned the defrosters on full blast, and let it idle for about ten minutes before we left. When we went back out, the ice was mostly melting off the windows. Tim broke out his long-handled scraper and made short work of what was left.

By noon the temps were in the thirties, it was raining again and the streets were covered in icy slush, and tonight it was up in the forties and the forecast called for thudershowers. What the hell? Yesterday morning anybody who was walking around outside was freezing his butt off — tonight we all drove home in a blanket of warm, heavy fog. This is the weirdest winter yet.

B warmed up the turkey and put together a full dinner tonight with all the trimmings, now that she had a kitchen with running water. She boiled a great big pot of potatoes and mashed them, and mixed up a mess of stuffing in a pan as big and wide as Lambeau Stadium, which was almost enough to challenge our two boys. I kind of ate too much, but that’s traditional, isn’t it?

After dinner, the boys ran out to Bongo Video to rent a movie. We all gathered around to watch the seasonal Christmas classic, Shaun Of The Dead, a light-hearted tale about zombies overrunning suburban London, then wasted another two hours of our lives discussing what we’d do if we ever found ourselves in a similar situation, exploring as completely as we could the best strategies for seeking shelter from zombies and the most effective ways to kill zombies — or, to be more technically accurate since they’re already dead, to re-inanimate them. We’ve all read the books by Max Brooks and know zombie killing backwards and forwards, so it was quite a lively conversation, as you may well imagine.

And then, sated nutritionally as well as audio-visually, we said our good-nights and shambled zombie-like to bed.

We were supposed to go over the river and through the woods today, but we had to call grandmother — my Mom — to tell her we wouldn’t be able to make it. My Darling B’s scratchy throat had metamorphosized into a full-blown chest cold, complete with frequent hacking coughs and truckloads of phlegm. Wow, is there a phrase like “coughing up plegm” that makes pretty much everybody’s face wrinkle up automatically? Not really. Try it at the next dinner party you’re invited to and look around the table at the expressions of your fellow party-goers!

Almost as bad as a hacking, plegmy chest cold, dense fog smothered most of the state this morning, or at least the part of the state most significant to us, the part between our front door and Mom’s house. It was thick enough all morning and afternoon to keep up from seeing more than a block down the street. I can only imagine the kinds of pile-ups it was causing along the interstate north to Stevens Point. Mom said she didn’t want to be biting her nails thinking about us driving through that. I wasn’t too keen on driving through it, myself, or of biting my nails all the way, one hand on the wheel at a time to do it.

So we stayed here at Our Humble O’Bode, safe from The Fog Monster and quarantined away from anybody we might infect. B went back to bed for a while, pulled the covers over her head and tried to sleep, with Boo curled up against her neck to keep her warm. Sean settled down at the kitchen table with a plate of turkey and stuffing, and read The New York Times from front page to back, as he is wont to do, then moved on to the book case in the hallway and kept on reading. Tim put on a pair of headphones to play video games, probably the one about killing zombies and mutants in Washington D.C., and surfing the interwebs, probably to discover new and messy ways to kill zombies and mutants.

Trying to keep busy and maybe even make myself useful, I went downstairs to the work shop to clean off the bench. Big piles of various and sundry pieces of household hardware build up on the work bench until the only thing it’s useful for is holding up big piles of loose hardware. I try to keep it cleaned off, but that never seems to work out, so I usually end up spending spare time on a weekend like this one picking and chosing what to box and put away, and what to toss in the garbage.

That went pretty well for a while, but the trouble is, I’m a man who’s very easily distracted, and pretty soon I had a saw in one hand and a chunk of lumber in the other, cutting pieces for a shelf I promised to put up in the kitchen for My Darling B. I got as far as cutting the end pieces while B was in the kitchen chopping up veggies for soup, then unplugged the power tools and hung up my saw and hammer after she laid her delicate head on the sofa to catch thirty or forty winks in the afternoon.

I finished putting the shelf together after dinner, but it’s not hung in the kitchen yet because B wants me to stain it so it matches the cupboards. I can build a shelf just fine, and I can paint them and even do occasionally, but I don’t know a thing about staining wood. I don’t have any stain in the work shop and I’ll just be going down to the hardware store tomorrow and grabbing the first can of stain that looks sort of like it might be close to the color of the kitchen cupboards. Once I’ve got the can open and a paint brush in one hand, it’s all up to the gods to make everything come out the way she wants it. Could happen. I’ll let you know, naturally.

The semi-regular game of Monopoly that takes place whenever the four of us are together concluded this evening with My Darling B declared the winner, but only “in the most technical sense,” as Tim put it, who conceeded after landing on one of B’s hotels, the technicality being that she ended up with all the money and he didn’t, as is the point of the game. We conducted the semi-regular game of Risk the other night, too, and for the record Sean ended up dominating the world. That’s his second win ever in his whole life, if memory serves.

I got bumped out of both games very early on. I was the first player to get bumped off the Risk board, and I went bankrupt just a few turns after Sean did in tonight’s game of Monopoly, but I was the banker so I stuck around to auction off properties and dole out the cash. Tim never “technically” went bankrupt, it should be said, but conceeded to his dear old Mom at her suggestion, partly because the game had been going on for hours, as Monopoly games will do, and partly because B wanted to get dinner started, although she said she was willing to go on if he was. He just wasn’t as willing, and so dinner was started.

Which was turkey pot pie. Our turkey might have been a pound or two short of its advertised weight, but it was still one heck of a huge turkey, and ever since Christmas B’s been making one meal after another from its carcass. Lunch every day has been cold turkey, and last night’s meal was turkey and wild rice soup. Not that I’m complaining in the least. I mention it only because B’s a cook who prefers to serve something different every night, so she’s been apologizing for serving “the same thing” again and again out of embarrassment. I, on the other hand, am a simple man who loves turkey. I don’t know that I love it so much I’d eat it every night for a month, but I don’t mind eating it for days and days, particularly when she’s thinking up different ways to serve it. It’s all good eating to me.

Whoa, I ate too much crap today. The holidays are traditionally a time of overindulgence, and I haven’t shirked doing my part to perpetuate the custom. And I don’t know how I could have even if, for some reason, I had resolved beforehand to stuff less candy and baked goods down my neck this year. I feel safe in saying it never occurred to me, and so stuff I did.

Round about, oh, yesterday, however, I had reached the point where my stomach was threatening me with warnings like, “I kept the receipt on those last three cookies you just ate, one right after the other in rapid succession. If you want me to return them, go ahead and send another one down here.” So breakfast this morning was a cup of coffee and a slice of toast, and lunch was a California roll at the local sushi bar. I was doing just fine until this afternoon, when I remembered that My Auntie Sue called early this morning to let me know she brought back a tin of Mom’s Christmas Sugar Cookies from her visit to the frozen north last weekend, and was keeping them at her desk for me whenever I felt like coming by to pick them up. And suddenly, I felt like it.

Mom’s sugar cookies are made from a recipe that comes from her grandma. She’s made them every year that I can remember, and I look forward to them every time. There’s nothing like lovin’ than fresh cookies from Mom’s oven. I think I heard that on a Keebler cookie advertisement.

So right after lunch, I stopped at Sue’s cube to fetch the tin of cookies away from her. I shared a few with a friend of mine at work, then spirited them back to Our Humble O’Bode where the boys went through them faster than a Madison pickup truck driver through a red light. As much as I shamed myself for it at the time, I was glad later I gobbled down more than a few at my desk.

But wait, there’s more! Somebody’s mom made a mess of peanut brickle, as well as fudge and some chocolate-covered mixed nuts, and that somebody brought it to work. Mom must have been on a coffee jag for the whole weekend she was baking because she made so much of it that there was still quite a bit left over today. I stayed away from it all morning, but after I had the taste of those sugar cookies on my palate, I got a craving for chocolate-covered almonds, and there just happened to be a few left. Ate only the teeny-tiny pieces, so I could kid myself that eating a million small pieces wasn’t as bad as eating a couple huge pieces.

Finally, there was the box of chocolate. Every year, Barb hides a glass pickle deep among the branches of the Christmas tree, and he who finds it gets a prize. Since there was no Christmas tree this year, she had to make up another game, and I don’t even remember what it was but I recall that the prize was a box of chocolates. Sean won. His mother, knowing that Sean would eat the entire box in a sitting unless she threw up as many obstacles in his path as she could think of, hid it away until tonight, giving it back to him just before we drove him to the airport for his flight back to Denver. As soon as he got his hands on the box, he was picking out his favorite chocolates and letting his Mom pick out the caramels. I might as well admit I managed to get in there, without losing any fingers, to snag a couple of the nut cups and a chocolate truffle.

And dinner tonight was take-out from La Bamba’s, the restaurant chain that promises “Burritos As Big As Your Head!” Oy, I’m full.

Mmmmm ... green tea. It doesn’t have the jolt of coffee and it’s a little short on body compared to, say, Earl Grey, but on a cold winter’s night, like the one that chilled our corner of the world as I wrote these words, a piping hot cuppa green tea takes the chill off, and has a lingering aftertaste that wakes a body up without the jitters that caffeine leaves behind.

I’m lucky enough to get not only a warm glow from green tea, but warm memories that go with it as well. In Japan, every restaurant, large or small, and they were mostly small, had a big thermos of green tea waiting in a corner next to a stack of cups, usually tiny plastic cups adorned with a cartoon animal and a slightly skewed English phrase that had no reason to be on a teacup. It was the alternative to water, although there was no question which one I’d go for after coming in from trudging through the snow on a blustery winter day, and there were more than a few runs down ski trails that I finished with only the thought in mind of popping out of the bindings and stumping up steep stairs in a heavy pair of ski boots just to down two or three cups of scalding hot green tea.

We don’t have much tea in the house now. I used to be a tea drinker not very long ago. Before I picked up the coffee habit, there was no other hot drink for me, and I had boxes of Earl Gray, hippie weirdo herb tea, frou-frou teas flavored with orange peels and marigold, plain old Lipton in the patented flo-thru tea bag and, after a second tour of duty in the United Kingdom, boxes the size of steamer trunks filled with a brand called PG Tips, regarded by many confirmed tea drinkers as the very best in the world.

But I haven’t kept much tea around lately and tonight I was jonzing for a hit. All I could scrounge up was a box of “Gingerbread Spice” from the folks at Celestial Seasonings — here’s how seriously nerdy I was about tea, once: I’ve visited the shop in Boulder, Colorado, where Celestial Seasonings blended their concoctions. My favorite from their lineup was Lemon Zinger, but we haven’t had any in the house for years. I don’t even know where the Gingerbread Spice came from; it was probably left over from two or three moves back. Probably pretty stale by now, but I resigned myself to giving it a try.

After putting the kettle on I began to poke through the cupboards where My Darling B keeps her cooking sundries, hoping against hope that there might be a lost bag of Earl Grey squished into a corner somewhere, when I heard, from over my shoulder, B’s voice, still a bit raspy from her chest cold, asking me, “What are you looking for?” She’s always on the alert when people go rooting through her things in the kitchen.

“Tea,” I sighed heavily.

Her eyebrows went up about a quarter inch, then she picked up one of the dozens of tins scattered around on shelves, across countertops and in cupboards that hold her wonderous potions, mysterious blends of herbs and spices, and magnificent kitchen gadgets, and, popping open the top, offered me bagged green tea! Bliss! It’s from moments just like this that I know I married the right girl.

It’s an extra-special day today, partly because it’s the last day of the year, but mostly because we got out of work early. My employer not only lets me off for New Year’s Day, but also lets me go at three the day before, to get an early start on the carousing, I suppose. Not that I carouse much, but it’s only fair to give me and everybody else the chance.

Tim heard about the early out and was pretty jazzed about it. However, he utterly failed to realize we were off New Year’s Day until early this morning as we were putting on our coats to go. We were trying to figure out how much money we would have to plug the parking meter with, our usual formula all screwed up by the two-hour tail chopped off the end of the day, when all at once an exclamation point suddenly appeared over his head and he blurted out, “Hey, do we have off tomorrow, too?”

“Of course,” I answered with a little bit of duh in my voice.

“Sweet!”

There wasn’t a lot of carousing this New Year’s eve at Our Humble O’Bode. My Darling B was still a little under the weather, her case of the coughing crud hanging onto her lungs with one evil taloned claw. She spent most of the day puttering around the house between naps, but in the evening she whipped up a big pot of the most delicious seafood chowder I’ve eaten in ages. And just because she always likes to try something new, she baked little softball-sized loafs of crusty bread, cut the tops out of them and gutted them like jack o’lanterns, then ladled chowder into each loaf like it was a bowl. I don’t know where she picked that up, but I’m glad she did. I ate my bread bowl after I gobbled up all the chowder I could hold. Scrummy!

After dinner, we cozied up on the sofa together to watch Love, Actually, sort of a holiday tradition here, usually the Christmas holiday but we couldn’t get the boys to go for watching it this year, so we left it until tonight. That kept us up until ten o’clock. Pretty close to the new year, but only almost, and not a whole lot of the customary revelry you usually find at new year’s parties. If anybody asked, I’d have to admit our New Year’s Eve was entirely devoid of carousing. We didn’t even get drunk. We had a couple glasses of wine with dinner and I drank a bottle of beer with the movie and that was it.

Well, happy new year’s anyway.

 
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Every single word © 2008 Dave Okonski