this is drivel

It’s a terribly dreary New Year’s day in Monona, Wisconsin, here on the outskirts of the greater Madison area. I don’t attach any significance to it as an omen of the year to come, just making an observation. You’ve got your overcast skies, complete with dull, diffuse daylight struggling to penetrate it, and for the most part failing. You’ve got your bone-penetrating damp cold from temperatures hovering right around the freezing mark, not quite warm enough to melt snow, but not quite cold enough to firm up the slush collecting along the edges of the roads. And finally, you’ve got your wind. It’s not a terribly vicious wind, it doesn’t slap you around or blow incessantly, but it’s just persistant enough that you never forget it’s there, and it gusts enough to make you think twice about putting your hood down.

It’s the kind of day that forces recollections of Germany to the surface of my memory. Walking around outdoors there was one of my favorite pastimes in the summer. There are few places on earth more inviting than the streets and parks of Berlin on a warm day. Winter, though, could be very decidedly uninviting. Whether I was waiting for a train at an U-bahn platform or standing a midnight watch in the snow at the top of The Hill at Marienfelde, I can’t remember ever being warm while I was outdoors. It didn’t keep me from going outdoors, just kept me from feeling warm.

And as uninviting as today’s weather was, it didn’t stop me from having a long walk this afternoon, either. I shoveled the driveway first, to warm myself all over, made sure I had my warmest pair of mittens with me, and zipped my down jacket all the way up as far as it would go before I set out in the general direction of Lake Monona. I wanted to see if the lake was frozen over with ice thick enough to walk on, and if the usual crop of crazy fools had gone out to dig holes through the ice, sit on it and wait for fish to grab at their lines. The answers to my questions turned out to be yes, and yes.

The ice was a lot thicker than I thought it would be. We’ve had two week-long stretches of subzero weather that should’ve frozen all of the lake solid by now, but I’ve seen patches of open water here and there. A few weeks of relatively warm weather might account for that, or maybe it’s moving water that won’t freeze over all winter. I’m not familiar enough with the lake to know.

The quickest way to get to the lake from our house is to head west on Frostwoods Lane until you get to Winnequah Road. There are public parks all along the lake shore, and one of them is at the end of Frostwoods. The park is on a bulge in the lake called Squaw Bay. That was probably in keeping with the rest of the Indian-sounding names around the neighborhood, but every time I see it I wonder why nobody’s brought a legal suit yet to make the city change it.

I figured if any part of the ice was going to be dangerous, it would probably be near the shore line where the storm sewers drain and the water moves a little faster around the bends along the shore, but along the shore at the park it was so thick I couldn’t see through it, and there was no sign of rotten ice at all. The only danger I came across were drifts of wind-whipped snow. I began by walking across them, thinking I’d have better traction in snow than on glare ice, but the snow turned out to be so fine that it made the ice more slippery, not less. After doing a quick dance across one or two patches of snow that almost ended in a broken ass, I avoided it and walked only across bare ice.

About halfway across Squaw Bay I got the answer to my second question: There were two people sitting on upended plastic pails at the mouth of a channel, dipping bobbers in a pair of holes, and another, more robust pair were standing over freshly-drilled holes on the open lake near the tip of the penninsula on the north end of the bay. The second pair either had the constitution of eskimos or they hadn’t been at it long, because the wind was whipping pretty fiercely out there. If I hadn’t been marching briskly across the ice, I wouldn’t have been able to stand the cold driven through me by that wind for more than five minutes.

Both pairs of ice fishers watched me intently as I crossed the ice toward them, as if they were wondering, Who would be crazy enough to go for a walk across the lake in this kind of weather?

I stepped ashore in the southern channel through the penninsula, where Nishishin Trail teed north and south and gave access to the water. From there, I walked north on Tecumseh Avenue and turned on Winnequah to head home, trotting along the edge of the road at an adjutant’s cadence all the way. All in all, it was a walk that lasted perhaps an hour, too long to be out on that kind of cold, windy day, but I just had to get out of the house to stretch my legs and get some air.

As I sat at my desk, buried up to my shoulders in heaps of backlogged paperwork, Alonzo brought me just the thing I had always dreamed would make me happy: a dolly piled high with five boxes of consumer loan statements! I was so glad to see him and his delightful gifts that I chucked a tape dispenser, a stapler (a heavy, 1950’s-era stapler that really packs a wallop, not one of those modern lightweight plastic pieces of crap) and a notary’s seal at his head before he had a chance to duck, let alone get away. Next time, I’m thinking he’ll probably send one of his underlings to deliver the statements to my office.

It’s not that I was trying to duck my responsibilities. I have to deal with the consumer loan statements just once each month, so it’s not even much of an imposition, as these things go. It’s the timing that bugs me. Without fail, the damned things seem to end up in my office at the worst possible hour of the busiest possible day. I had next week’s schedule to make out, a million requests for subordination to respond to, voice mail messages blinking at me from my phone, a turkey to stuff, tires to re-align, and woodpeckers! Millions of ’em!

But regardless of what I would have rather been working on, the statements had to go out as soon as possible, so I pushed everything else aside and bent to the task. I was making remarkably good headway until my computer warned me that I was due to attend a meeting I pretty much forgot about as I flipped through page after page of statements, ten thousand of them. It’s not nearly as tedious as it sounds. The ones I was looking for were usually in the middle of the stack somewhere, all in a gaggle, so when I found the first of them, the rest were right behind, except for a few stragglers at the very end of the stack. I was supposed to pull them out, take them to a copy machine and print a red warning message on them, words to the effect of, Hey, you! You don’t have to pay any attention to this statement! It looks like a bill, but it’s only telling you what you might have to pay if we weren’t such a bunchy of swell guys. Relax! Put this in a desk drawer and forget about it! Really! Honestly, that’s what it said, more or less. The banking business is a little weird sometimes.

I had to put it aside when my computer bleeped, though, to go sit in on this meeting that was all about how we could expect to get buried in the avalanche of refinanced loans that have been tumbling down toward us, faster and faster, ever since the fed lowered the lending rate to essentially zero. I’m not sure what the difference is between zero and “essentially zero” other than we’re about to suffocate beneath the paperwork of “essentially zero.” If it were actually zero, we probably wouldn’t even have these few moments to call a meeting and stare at each other with glazed eyes, wondering what fell on us.

I don’t know how my supervisor ended up talking to my boss about the consumer loan statements, but somewhere in there I heard him going over how we were going to print the red warning labels on the statements one last time, then give it a miss next month and see how that flew with the customers. They chatted a bit about how tedious it was to separate the statements, and the hour or more it took to print the red warning message, and it went on just long enough that I almost missed the part where my boss said he thought we could just chuck it this month. Almost, but not quite. I nearly fell on my knees when I thanked him for saving me that chore.

So, once the meeting was over, I sprinted back to my desk, boxed up the statements, loaded the boxes on a dolly and began to wheel them toward the door when I suddenly realized that, this being the end of the year, I had to take a box of leaflets along to be stuffed into the envelopes with the statements for lines of credit. And that’s when it hit me: Statements for LOCs and statements for loans were not quite the same thing. I would have to finger my way through the entire stack of ten thousand statements to find the ones that were not LOCs and put them to one side, to be mailed unstuffed.

Oh, damn.

The only thing that kept me from slitting my throat with a letter opener right then was that I supervise an elite cadre of disciplined minions who will help me with tasks like this, sometimes. They mostly answer telephone calls from the general public, copy documents and write letters, but I can, from time to time, talk them into flipping through thousands of statements when I’m looking for a proverbial needle in a haystack, because they like me, or maybe because I can crush them like bugs. I’m not sure which is the more powerful motivator. Whatever the case, I managed to pawn off a box of statements on each of them, then went back to my desk to hunch over my own pile, lick my thumb, and begin searching.

Three hours and a gobbled lunch later, I had a really huge pile of LOC statements and a much smaller pile — pathetically smaller, really — of regular old loan statements. It sounds like a long time, but really I was amazed at how quickly we got through it. With all the phone calls we had to work through, I figured it would take days. Not only that, I managed to flip through thousands of sheets of fresh, crisp paper without cutting myself once, a flat impossibility, statistically speaking.

Puking cats are the number-one morning interruption that trumps my weekend privilege to sleep in on the weekend. A few other things will wake me and make me think about getting up, like the snow plow going up our street, but I can usually roll over, wrap my head up in the quilts and go back to sleep. I can’t ignore puking cats, though. I’ve tried, but the idea that somewhere nearby there’s a pile of kitty vomit lying in wait for me to step in it with my bare feet ... well, maybe you can see how that would linger in my thoughts persistently enough to keep me from dozing off again.

I’m never going to get up early to feed the little pukers again. They can go ahead and cry all they want, I’m not budging from my warm coccoon for them ever. There aren’t enough fingers on all the hands in the world to count the number of Saturday mornings I’ve padded across the cold wooden floor of the living room in my bare feet to tip a little kibble into their dishes in the forlorn hope they’ll settle their growling tummies and go back to bed. And how do they return the favor? By standing in the hallway just outside my bedroom door and barfing up the breakfast they begged for. Screw ’em.

Cats are such noisy pukers, too. First they sound like they could be just coughing up a hairball. It makes your ears prick up a bit, hoping that’s what it’s going to be. Hairballs are easy to clean up. But then that watery pump-action sound, like a toilet burping up stack gas, kicks in, followed by the final, wet yak discharging a slimy bolus of kibble that sounds remarkably like a midwest farm kid spitting a chaw of tobacco into a pop can. Who could sleep after hearing that?

My Darling B went on sleeping, by the way, the important distinction between us being that she never woke up, or, if she did, she faked an unbroken streak of snoring pretty well. I knew I was not going to make it back to la-la land, though, so I rolled out of bed, carefully felt my way across the bedroom floor in the dark to the closet, grabbed my bathrobe and made it all the way to the hallway without stepping in anything nasty. Felt pretty proud of myself, too.

The problem with cat puke — at least, the kind that our cats barf up — is that it’s almost exactly the same color as the hardwood floors in our house. To spot it, you have to bend low and try to catch its lumpy profile against some reflected light, not at all easy to do, especially in the early morning when you have to turn some lights on in the first place. I couldn’t find any in the hallway, even though I was positive that’s where I heard the little furball hacking up his breakfast. There wasn’t any in the living room, either, and I checked the dining room without any luck, even though I knew he wasn’t that far away when I heard him making the telltale sounds.

It wasn’t until I gave up and headed for the bathroom that I found his nasty little pile, in the classic fashion, when it came oozing up between my toes. I would have cheerfully strangled both cats in the minute or so immediately after that, but they were nowhere around. Hiding behind a closet door, no doubt, laughing their hairy asses off as I stumped into the bathroom on my heels to stick the fouled toes of my right foot under the tap and let steamy hot water run full-blast over them.

Hell of a way to start the day.

Going back to bed after cleaning up the cat barf wasn’t an option, so I put the kettle on and went out to get the morning paper, then sat at the table for about an hour, reading the news and sucking down some joe. I still had time to shower and write about stepping in cat puke before My Darling B roused herself from her slumber, and soon after that we made our customary trip into town to visit the farmer’s market.

The market’s moved to its winter quarters in the senior center, and when they do that, they make use of the kitchen to set up a scrummy breakfast that we usually take advantage of because it’s always something really unusual. This week, it was egg strata. Never heard of it before. I tried to find a photo of it on the internet to illustrate, but they all looked like quiche, and what they served at the market this morning was nothing like a quiche; it was more like scrambled eggs whipped into a fluffy, cake-like thing, very smooth, with no fillings like bacon or potato. They served it with a sausage link on the side and a scoop of diced potatoes — white and sweet, with carrots. Very tasty.

I thanked B for buying me breakfast, giving her a wet smooch on the cheek, then walked up the street and across the square to put in a few hours at the bank this morning. It’s been crazy-busy there all week and getting crazier, and I wanted the quiet time this morning to do a few things I would never have been able to get done while the phones were ringing off the hook and everybody was stopping by my desk to ask me questions and favors and occasionally drawing a pint of blood. I did get quite a lot done, but it wasn’t really all that quiet: The phone kept ringing! Who thinks there’s anybody at the bank on Saturday morning? Well, I guess there was somebody there, but I wasn’t about to pick up the phone, and it felt pretty good to ignore it, I’ve got to tell you.

The world outside our door — and I mean right outside our door — was a dangerous place this morning. A light rain fell at sometime during the night, not normally all that dangerous, but this morning the temperature was still just below freezing, so the world was a glazed donut, or appeared to be. If only it had been as sticky as one, too.

I put on a pair of loafers to go fetch the newspaper, had to walk no more than ten yards to get it, and before I got to the bottom of the porch stairs I lost count of the number of times I nearly busted my ass. This wasn’t a job for loafers! What I needed were baseball cleats!

After lunch, when the temperature had climbed to thirty-three, I went out to see if I could scrape the ice off the edges of the driveway, where we’ll have to walk in the morning to get in and out of the car. Sharp as the scraper was, it could shave off only a little bit at a time. If I’d kept it up until dinner time, I might’ve cleared off a patch just about big enough to stand in.

Luckily for me, B bought a five-pound bag of snow melt some time ago, and although she’d already used some of it, the bag was still nearly full. I scattered plenty of snow melt around on the driveway, the sidwalk and up the stairs to the front door, then buttoned my hood up and took a little walk around the block to give the stuff time to do its chemical magic.

About fifteen minutes later, I was back, and the snow melt had done its job well. Waiting to see what happened was a good idea, although walking around the block was maybe not so good. It was colder and a lot windier than I’d thought, so I was good and ready to get inside, but first I threw down another good scattering of snow melt at the top of the drive, just to make sure. Then I went in to brew a cup of tea.

One of the projects I’ve always meant to get around to someday was collecting the e-mail messages I’ve traded with friends and family. I used to collect letters but now that e-mail’s the way to go, I kept the ones I meant to print out and collect.

And this morning I started to collect them in a text file, and quickly recalled why I’ve been putting this task off for ages. The free web e-mail service I’ve been using for so long that my e-mail name doesn’t have numbers after it is so clunky it takes ages to cycle through a single iteration of sorting the messages from one person onto a page, viewing the message I want to keep, copying the message to a text file, and finally deleteing the message. I spent an hour copying and editing just ten messages, then stopped because, much as I like leafing through messages, or whatever the verb would be for e-mail, at that point I felt as though I’d rather get my teeth drilled than look any more.

Topic of Discussion: Has Morgan Freeman been in any stinkers? Tim says he hasn’t. I contend he has. As a general rule of thumb, everybody actor has been in a stinker or two, so it stands to reason even Morgan Freeman has, astounding though that may seem.

I started off naming Bruce Almighty, because we were talking about stinker movies that Jim Carrey has made (all of them except for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Mask). Tim liked Bruce Almighty. I thought it had a few good moments but overall was pretty dumb. A good movie, to me, is one I would watch again, and I couldn’t be bothered to invest another two hours of my life on Bruce Almighty, so it gets a thumbs-down from me.

How about that disaster movie about the asteroid? Not the one with Bruce Willis. That was a stinker, but that was a different movie. Morgan Freeman played the president in a movie about an asteroid wiping out life on earth. It came out the same summer as the Bruce Willis movie. I could look it up, but right now it’s more fun to babble like this. Freeman didn’t have much of a part, not his fault, but he was in it, and it stunk. A stinker, by the way, is a movie I would not only avoid watching again, but a movie I regret having watched in the first place, a movie that makes me wish I had those two hours of my life back to do something more productive with — scrub toilets, play with the cat, anything else.

March of the Penguins was not a bad movie, but it wasn’t much of a good one, and it wasn’t really a movie, it was a documentary that’s already been done, and done better, on one of those hour-long National Geographic Specials I used to watch on television in the afternoons. Freeman narrated. That was during that crazy stretch when film makers and television producers the world over were clambering to put Freeman’s voice-over on their production. His voice is pretty special, I’ll admit, but they kind of went nuts with it for a while.

Freeman narrated War of the Worlds, too, and that was a major stinker. Wasn’t Freeman’s fault, he did a great job reading the opening lines from the H.G. Wells classic. It sends tingles down my spine when I read it to myself, but when Morgan Freeman reads it, WOW! Too bad the movie sucked sewer water.

But getting back to movies Freeman actually appeared in, I admit I’m hard-pressed to name more without consulting the google, and if I go there it feels like cheating, so I’m done. Two stinkers and a bad voice-over are enough for me to feel that I trumped the guy who claims to be all-knowing.

B bought a kitchen gadget made in China! Okay, Taiwan, but still remarkable for a woman who will drive from one hardware store to another all across town until she finds the gadget she’s looking for with something other than MADE IN CHINA stamped on it.

It’s not that she hates China or the Chinese. I’m sure most of them are swell guys, maybe even the Communists. They’re just doing their job, right? And they probably make some things really well. They’re known for some really great tea, for instance, although to be honest I wouldn’t eat or drink any processed food from China for ... well, for all the tea in China.

It’s the cheap, plastic stuff we try to avoid, and that would be, well, everything but tea, now that I think about it.

One of my goofier hobbies — they’re all pretty goofy, but I still like to pretend that some aren’t really all that goofy and maybe somebody, somewhere might take one of them seriously — is buying rotary phones off e-bay, cleaning them up and connecting them to the phone lines to see if they work. Actually, it’s the other way around: I connect them first and, if they don’t work, I don’t worry so much about cleaning them up. Not at all, really. The dead phones migrate to a graveyard in the bottom of an old writing desk that’s becoming a parts locker. I clean up the parts as I need them.

Finding myself with a few hours to spare this afternoon, I began playing with a couple recent acquisitions, both made in the late 60’s. One was slightly older and had an all-metal rotary dial that returned smoothly with a delightfully satisfying series of clicks. The other, newer phone had a plastic dial that returned slowly and almost silently. I preferred the older, metal dial but found, when I connected both phones, that although the older phone’s ringer worked, I couldn’t get a dial tone when I picked up the receiver. At first I thought maybe the earpiece was faulty, but I couldn’t dial out, either, so I began to suspect the guts of the phone didn’t work.

The new phone worked just fine. It was dirty as sin, but cleaned up nicely. I also found, as I was taking it apart to clean it up, that the dials were interchangable, so I disconnected and swapped them, giving the working phone the dial that went clickity-clickity-click as it returned. With a new cord, it’ll look really nice.

To check that the phones worked, I used the old trick of dialing my own telephone number. That way you get a dial tone, an automated message after you dial, and the phone rings a few seconds after you hang up, so you know everything works the way it should. I didn’t realize that Tim was picking up the phone in the living room each time I rang it, because I hung up as soon as I heard it ring. He came stumping down the stairs after the third or fourth time and poked his head into the work shop. “Is that you?”

“Ringing the phone, you mean? Yes, that was me. Sorry.”

A few seconds after he went back upstairs, the phone rang. I hadn’t disconnected it yet, so I picked it up, thinking it was Tim messing around with me. “WHAT?” I grumped into the mouthpiece.

And I heard a cheery woman’s voice that sounded nothing like Tim’s ask, “Is Dave there?”

Oops.

It turned out to be Heather, calling to beg for a donation to the Desperate Children’s Emergency Relief Fund, or something like that. I told her I made a yearly donation to my local chapter of the United Way, but she was not deterred. My donation to the Desperate Children’s Emergency Relief Fund would benefit many deserving children, some of which had less than a year to live. Well, shit, Heather, I’m really sorry I was so rude when I answered the phone, but that was really uncalled for, I wanted to say, but instead repeated my spiel about giving to the United Way and thanked her for calling. She didn’t sound quite so cheery as she wished me a happy weekend.

There’s kitty litter, and then there’s tons of kitty litter. Or maybe it just feels like tons because I don’t usually deal with kitty litter in fifty-pound bags. Whatever, I brought a new bag of kitty litter in from the trunk of the car tonight. That went smoothly enough, but when I fixed up the litter box, I came to within half a grunt of spending the rest of my life in a truss. All I tried to do was tip some litter into the pan, a bit on the chancy side of doable when the fifty-pound bag is still full. “Lift with your knees,” they’re always telling us, and that works until you find yourself just a weensy bit off-balance and nearly bust a guy trying not to fall face-first onto the concrete.

Ah, who am I kidding? I nearly bit the big one because I’ve become a great big cream puff. I’ve been letting myself go ever since I left the Air Force, where the penalty for not exercising was jail time. Compared to that, having trouble lifting a bag of kitty litter doesn’t seem like such a big deal, until the time comes to refill the pan. Then I try to make up for it with a few lines of drivel before I pack it in and hit the hay.

Whuff. Time for a breather. All this typing wears me out.

We had the radio on in the car as we drove home last night, as we usually do. When B pulls up to park on Carroll Street outside the bank, she’s nearly always listening to a talk show hosted by Ben Merens, on most days a fun guy to listen to but yesterday dwelling on war between the Israel and Hamas, kind of a downer.

But as much of a bummer as Ben’s show was yesterday evening, he was all sunshine and light compared to the news bulletin that comes on at five-thirty, a roundup of stories indicating in one way or another that civilization as we know it is coming to an end. And why would that be? Because all the money’s gone! Run for the hills!

Toyota is shutting down their production lines for the next ten days, something they’ve never done, ever, and it’s scaring the bejeezus out of economists, who go from one microphone to the next, round-robin style, to use this as yet another absolutely bedrock indicator that the world economy will explode into a million zillion pieces, possibly right after the station break.

China has been losing ground in the effort to keep widening their trade deficit. Why’s that bad? Um. I honestly don’t know. But the guy on the radio said it was because they make all the stuff for sale in the world, and now that the world economy’s is deflating faster than a sat-on whoopie cushion, and is making roughly the same noise, too, nobody’s buying anything, which leaves the Chinese sitting on trillions of dollars worth of cheaply-made plastic crap. Not literally crap, but it was apropo to the whoopie cushion simile.

The post office reports that the number of letters send through the mail is down. Huh. Imagine that, in a world of e-mail, text messaging and twitter, people aren’t scraping pointy sticks smeared with ink across paper to ask each other, “How are you? I am fine. Hope you are the same.” Nobody misses licking foul-tasting glues off envelopes or stamps much, either.

Actually, the doomsday squads admitted that the problem isn’t All The Money’s Gone, it’s that the money was overvalued. We all went along with the grand delusion that houses, cars, and Rachel Ray had somehow become worth a hundred times more than your parents would ever pay for them, the same parents who came out of The Great Depression with stories about using a bathtub in shifts, or gathered round the Christmas dinner table to eat their fill of grilled cheese sandwich and fight over the parsley sprig. Well, guess what? Twelve-hundred square foot houses aren’t worth a quarter million dollars, you can’t sell a five-year-old General Motors car for more than a thousand bucks, and Rachel Ray is the most overrated celebrity cook since Jamie Oliver.

What I love best about the Everything Was Overvalued argument is that it proves money’s essentially a stupid idea. People built all those houses and cars and fantastic electric toys on the assumption that they’d rake in an eye-popping heap o’ benjamins that turned out to be worth squat. They didn’t know it would be worth squat, but tell that to Schrodinger’s cat. Once you’ve pulled the trigger, it’s your cat, dead or alive.

As yesterday’s episode of drivel, about money and the wholesale panic its sudden disappearance has caused, ran to a close, I trotted out this thought:

“What I love best about the Everything Was Overvalued argument is that it proves money’s essentially a stupid idea. People built all those houses and cars and fantastic electric toys on the assumption that they’d rake in an eye-popping heap o’ benjamins that turned out to be worth squat. They didn’t know it would be worth squat, but tell that to Schrodinger’s cat. Once you’ve pulled the trigger, it’s your cat, dead or alive.”

To which my brother replied, with a Texas twang:

..and why would you get Schrodinger’s cat involved? What’d he ever do to you? Is there a relationship between quantum physics and money? Is the nature of subatomic particles a stupid idea?

The answers are:

Well, because it sounded cool, or at least it did to me in the last waking moments I had yesterday evening. I admit I was drifting in and out of la-la land as I finished up my last blog entry, but honestly, I didn’t think anybody would be able to tell the difference between my usual disconnected ramblings and the half-awake babble I was spouting last night.

What’d he ever do to me? The indeterminate little jerk annoyed the hell out of me and everyone else. Even Schrodinger. More to the point, especially Schrodinger.

The relationship between quantum physics and money is not so hard to explain. It was the idea that was floating around in my tired little mind at about the time I began to type out those bizarre words at the end of yesterday’s drivel, but I ran out of steam before I could explore it with any of my usual vacuity. Just like Schrodinger’s cat, a house is worth a half-million dollars if the market bubble around it expands, or it’s worth a hundred thousand dollars if the bubble pops, but we never know if the bubble’s expanding or popping until after we buy the house. Or the car. Or shares in a mutual fund. Isn’t that annoying? You bet it is.

As for the nature of subatomic particles: you got me. I’ll wait until after the Large Hadron Collider pounds out a couple of them — or none of them; it’s a crap shoot, after all — before I give it any more thought.

Pardon me while I crap myself. My inbox tells me that my McAfee Protection Has Expired! I was so shaken by this news that I hit the “delete” button with more than the usual enthusiasm. Yikes! No McAfee? How will I ever survive? If this is the last post you read from me, at least you’ll know the reason for my downfall. I dared to decline a renewal of my McAfee subscription.

As it happened, it was actually My Darling B who called McAfee and asked them what the hell they meant by continuing to charge us for two subscriptions to the noted anti-virus software gurus. She received a bill in the amount of approximately double what she thought she should be paying, or maybe it was that she received a bill just weeks after she previously received a bill for the same thing, I forget which. In either case, she phone some poor tech support schlub who answers the phones for McAfee and asked them what the hell they meant by debiting her checking account twice, and indignantly asked for her money back, which they quickly gave her.

Ever since then, friendly reminders to renew my subscription have clogged my Lycos mail inbox until today, when I received the Warning that my Protection had Expired! and now I’m going to get somebody pregnant with that thing if I don’t learn to control myself. Some people know how to take all the fun out of playing with myself on the interwebs.

Speaking of keeping it in my pants, I almost forgot to tell you about the very important meeting I was in the other day, complete with departmental vice-presidents who asked me several times to make vital contributions to their high-level give and take, and just about the time I was feeling pretty smug about how far up the food chain I’d climbed, I glanced demurely at the edge of the table for effect during one of the discussions I was taking part in and happened to notice that my fly was yawning open. Really, really yawning open, the kind of wide open you could see from space, if you happend to be the perverted sort of superhero who could not only launch himself into orbit but would spend his time up there peering into the boardrooms of corporations in an effort to spot yourself an open zipper or two, you disgusting animal.

And of course after you’ve discovered your zipper is open, there’s nothing else you can think about. No matter how smug and cocksure you were feeling about yourself just minutes before, no matter what moment of brilliance you might have been basking in previous to that, the only thoughts you can muster up enough determination to form in your mind after you’ve seen that your fly is open is, Damn, how many of them have noticed my zipper’s undone? All of them, right? It’s open wider than Joan Rivers’ mouth! I wish I hadn’t worn my pink flowered boxers today, dammit. And so on.

I squirmed through about five or ten minutes of thoughts just like that until somebody at the table passed out colored spread sheets to illustrate some point she was making. They were printed on legal paper, each eight by fourteen inch sheet appearing wide enough to be a bedspread, so of course I quikly opened up the packet and spread the sheets out across my lap, then studied them throughout the remainder of the meeting as if I were committing the results of each and ever table to my very soul. If anybody had asked me any questions about it, though, I would’ve bene sunk, because of course the only thought going through my mind was thankyou thankyou thankyou thankyou thankyou!

If there’s anything worse than noticing that your fly’s open during a committee meeting, it’s trying to make a dignified exit from a committee meeting with your fly open. Forget about it, it can’t be done. I tried casually holding my notebook at waist level but I’m pretty sure that, rather than camoflague my wardrobe malfunction, it called glaring attention to the fact that the barn door was swinging in the wind. If I’d had any pluck at all, I would’ve simply done a comic double-take at my lap, jumped out of my seat and spun around, shouting “Eks Why Zee!” as I yanked the tab of my zipper up with an exaggerated flourish worthy of the cheesiest vaudevillian. Maybe next time.

I started a drivel for yesterday, but all it said was, “Wow, insomnia. Hate that stuff, don’t you?” because I wrote it at four o’clock in the morning, an hour after I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. And then I didn’t write anything else because my brain was sloshing around inside my skull like soup. Like brain soup. I wonder what brain soup would taste like? Probably pretty delicious, since it’s mostly fat. Let it simmer for a couple hours with some potatoes and carrots and onions and salt lightly and you’d still never get me to try it unless you paid me a stack of hundred-dollar bills too tall for me to see over the top of. For that, I’d polish off the whole pot and wipe the bowl clean with a chunk of crusty bread.

After getting out of bed at three o’clock in the morning and staggering around all day like a zombie, the natural thing to do after work was walk a couple blocks down the street to the Great Dane to drink beer and play shuffleboard with some of my coworkers. Yeah, that wasn’t very smart, was it?

I’d planned to nurse one beer while waiting for My Darling B to come pick me up. The DMV offered her some overtime so she was putting in an extra hour and a half, and then was going to meet me at the Dane for supper. I ordered a porter when I got there and it tasted so good that I finished it off a little sooner than I’d anticipated, so I ordered another to drink while it was my turn playing shuffleboard. I suck at shuffleboard, by the way, and I don’t think my suckage had anything to do with the beer. I’m a natural-born sucker. I made one or two good shots, but for the most part the gal I played against pretty much cleaned my clock. Lucky for me, B showed up as I finished my first game, so I had a good excuse to shake hands with the competition and go straight to the dining room.

Where I had one more beer, my biggest mistake of the night. The Great Dane serves beer by the pint, and I’m no longer plumbed to hold that much. The pipes are as short as my thirst is long. Whatever that means. It sounded good when it popped into my head. You figure it out. What I should have done was asked for a big glass of ice water and told the waitress I’d slip her a ten-dollar tip if she kept it from ever getting more than half-empty, then tried as dilligently as I could to empty the thing, but no. I’d had a long, hard week and I was stupid enough to think I deserved three pints of beer. Well, I was dumb enough to deserve it, that’s for sure, and the headspins that kept me up past my bed time. Not too late, but I could have hit the hay at nine o’clock if I’d been more prudent with the beer. Maybe I’ll exercise a little more self-control after learning this lesson. Maybe.

I got plenty of sleep last night. Finally. And it’s about time. I slept so deeply that, when My Darling B apologized for disturbing me with a coughing fit and jumping out of bed, I had to admit I didn’t remember her doing any of that. I don’t remember waking up until seven-thirty this morning, and laid in bed for about a half-hour after that, enjoying my sloth. Not as much sleep as a typical house cat, but good enough for me.

I figured I would spend most of today doing pretty much nothing, but there was just one thing I really did want to finish and that was a shelf for the kitchen that I promised to My Darling B several weeks ago. I bought the lumber right away, spent a weekend cutting the pieces and fitting them together, and was waiting for a warm evening or weekend to stain it. The work shop is cold enough with all the windows buttoned up and the furnace running, but I’d have to ventilate it before I popped open cans of stain or I’d stink up the whole house.

As you may have heard, though, we haven’t had any warm weekends here in Wisconsin for a while, so this morning I drove out to the local big-box hardware store, Menard’s, to see if I could find an exhaust fan I could install in a basement window. They had plenty of exhaust fans if I wanted to hang a hood over a stove top, or to install in the bathroom ceiling, but window fans were nowhere to be found. “It’s a seasonal item,” one of the happy, smiling clerks explained to me, before all but running away from me, I hope in embarrassment. So no help from Menard’s.

What I ended up doing, and I should have thought of this first thing this morning, before even getting out of bed, was salvaging an old box fan from a distant corner of the basement, where it was all but invisible behind boxes of old clothes, empty plastic tubs and the skeletons that used to be in our closet. It was too big to fit in any of the basement windows, but I took care of that by knocking together a small shelf on the wall under the window, then perching the fan on the shelf. Voila! Home-made exhaust fan. I got your ‘seasonal item’ right here, Menard’s!

With the fan on I could slop stain all over the shelves, the floor and myself until the cows came home. It stank up the work shop plenty, but the rest of the house remained refreshingly stink-free, so the home-made exhaust fan worked pretty well, if I may say so. Staining the shelves went well, too. I would normally rather just slap on a simple coat of paint and call it done, but My Darling B asked me to stain the shelves to match the cupboards, and although I can’t do everything she asks of me, I try to keep her happy, so I gave it a try. And it turned out to be surprisingly easy. My past attempts at staining wood haven’t turned out all that well, but these shelves ended up looking all right. Well, B declared them ‘awesome’, anyway, which is good enough for me.

I went digging through the two big cardboard boxes we have stashed in the basement, filled with VHS tapes of movies we bought from thrift stores over the years, looking for a copy of Moonstruck that I was sure was in there somewhere, but wasn’t. Maybe we had a copy we taped off the base movie channel, or maybe we didn’t, I don’t know. I was pretty sure we did.

The need to watch Moonstruck on that particular night was one of those sudden urges that hit me every so often: a craving for pistachios, a desire to pull on my boots and go for a walk across the frozen lake in subzero temperatures, an impulse to take apart the old dehumidifier that’s been haunting the far corner of the basement to see if I can figure out what keeps the fan from coming on. Moonstruck isn’t one of my all-time favorite movies, although it has a lot going for it, but suddenly I just wanted to see it again, and I was awfully bummed when I couldn’t find a copy among the dozens of tapes of other, badder movies and television shows we’ve elected to keep over the years. I have the sneaking feeling this year’s spring cleaning will see the end of a lot of those tapes.

And then on Friday night a DVD copy appeared on the coffee table, thanks to a visit to the library by My Darling B. What a sweetheart she is, eh?

Even though this isn’t one of my all-time favorites, I still like it a lot, for a start, because it’s set in New York, so it has a lot of great scenes of New York neighborhoods. If I ever get a chance to visit New York, I’d like to spend a day or two walking up and down the streets of those hoity-toity neighborhoods with the prettied-up brownstone buildings, just to be there. They’re gorgeous houses and it’s a shame we just don’t make them like that any more.

I like the Italian theme a lot, too. I don’t know diddly about what it means to be an Italian-American so I have no idea how authentic the movie actors made it, but I love it that they’ve all got names like Cappomaggi, Castorini and Cammararei, and they all talk with outrageous Italian accents, or try to. Although Nicholas Cage should’ve probably not tried.

If you ask me, Cage was all wrong for his part. I don’t know what the casting department was thinking when they went for him. He had one or two good scenes but, overall, this wasn’t one of his better performances, and if his audition was anything like the final product, I’ve got to wonder who else tried out for the part and did they do as sloppy a job as Cage did?

The rest of the cast, though, worked for me, especially Vincent Gardinia as Cosmo, the philandering old man, and Olympia Dukakis as his wife Rose. I’ve like Danny Aiello in just about everything I can remember seeing him in, too. I thought Cher did a pretty good job in the lead part, although I’ve never thought she was as great as everybody seems to think she is.

My favorite scene in the movie doesn’t have anything to do with any of them, though. It’s when Louis Guss, who’s got a pretty tiny part as Rose’s brother Ray, but goes all the way with it, tells the story of Cosmo’s Moon, the full moon that came out when Cosmo stood in the street outside Rose’s house, looking up at her window. The night after he tells the story at dinner, the moon comes out again because Cher and Nicholas Cage are making whoopee after they go to the opera, and obviously she’s supposed to get all the wolf whistles as she strolls through the moonlight in Cage’s apartment wearing nothing but a crocheted afghan draped over her shoulders.

But the sweetest scene is when the glaring light of the full moon wakes Ray up in his apartment. He pokes his wife, Rita, awake, then goes to the window to part the curtains and show her Cosmo’s Moon. “You know, standing there, in that light, you look about twenty-five years old,” she tells him, and a stunned look comes over his face, then a boyish look, and then a mischevious look, all in the space of about three or four heartbeats, as he shuffles back to the bed calling, “Rita ... Rita ...” Rita bats him away and tells him no, but not like she means it.

Probably my favorite part of Monday is the end. Scratch that, without a doubt my favorite part of Monday is the end, and now that I think about it, the end of Monday is most likely my favorite part of the whole week, maybe even passing up Friday. Pulling on a set of flannel jammies and curling up under the quilts could hardly feel more satisfying than it does after I’ve finished off a Monday, particularly a hectic one.

And this one qualified as hectic. The only time I was away from my desk for more than ten minutes was when I took lunch. I made sure to take a book with me, and sank down into the pages as soon as I popped my rice & sausage dish into the microwave. Kept on turning pages until I was sure an hour has passed, but when I looked up I’d been in the break room just twenty minutes! What the hell, I kept reading.

All that busy work cut me off so completely from the rest of the world that I didn’t realize it’d been snowing until I stepped out into the street this evening to wait at the curb for My Darling B to take me home. I had enough time to kick around in it a bit and snap a couple photos before she turned our car up the street to get me. Then it was home, chili, beer and quilts. Bliss!

B’s been putting in overtime this week. The DMV, strangled to death (literally!) by a budget-cutting assembly year after year, fell behind on vehicle certifications because they can’t afford to hire enough people, so they offered time and a half to get the people they already have, like B, to stay behind and process paperwork. I guess that could make sense, on Bizzaroworld.

Instead of leaving at four-forty, the normally scheduled quitting time carefully calculated by her union, she hangs around until six and clocks on overtime to the tune of forty or fifty bucks. Or maybe it was twenty, I forget. If it was eighty, I’m not sure it would make staying at work for eleven hours worth the extra money. B’s been having second thoughts as well.

So long as I’m hanging around downtown for an hour and a half after closing time anyway, I keep myself busy by finishing off as much as I can of the paperwork that spoots out of the fax machine all day long. This is only Tuesday, but so much has come in since the weekend went poof that I’ve been working pretty much non-stop from the moment I get to the office at about seven-thirty in the mornings until B comes to pick me up at six-thirty in the evenings. I took a forty-minute lunch today, and that was living large. Tomorrow I might go for forty-five, just to see what it feels like.

Three more days of this, or almost. Can the O-Man survive? “You’re working overtime only until the end of the week, right?” I asked B over dinner tonight.

“Yep,” she answered briefly, snorfling down a scrummy bowl of chili she whipped up in a crock pot yesterday. Crock pots are handy when you’re working late and don’t have a lot of time to prepare dinner, or clean up after.

“And you’re not working late on Friday?”

“I’m not working quite as late,” she corrected me. “I can only stay until five fifty-five.”

Oh. Well, that’ll give us an early start on the weekend.

Those early starts and late evenings make me a little punchy, and past a certain hour of the day I should not be allowed to operate most of the office machinery. The other day, I dropped some documents into the fax machine’s hopper, punched in the phone number (reading it off the cover sheet) and, as I usually do, waited to hear the blee-blee-blee of the transmission before walking away. Instead, I heard somebody’s voice after the phone on the distant end was picked up.

Dumbass gave me his phone number instead of his fax, was my first thought, until I recognized my own voice coming from the fax machine’s innards. I’d absently dialed my own telephone number before hitting the ‘GO’ key. Criminey.

I’m really too tired to drivel, but I’ll give it a shot, see what happens ...

I got me a parking pass yesterday, thinking that Tim, who loves to drive to work, would love my great idea to drive in together. Wow, was I ever wrong. He wants to drive in all by himself so he can put the car stereo on as loud as it will go, and he wants to leave the house at ten minutes until eight and pull into the parking lot no earlier than seven fifty-nine and thirty seconds.

I want to be at work at seven-thirty. I get so much done in the half-hour before anybody shows up that it’s worked out to my advantage to ride into town with My Darling B, who has to be at work by some weirdo union mandated clock-in time like seven fifty-two. Whatever it is, she usually ends up dropping me off at seven-twenty or seven-thirty, hence my quiet time. When I told Tim I still wanted to get to my office by seven-thirty, he wanted none of that.

So I was going to turn in my parking pass today but I forgot. Once the phones started ringing, I had just enough time to blink before I looked up at the clock and it was lunch time, and I’m not going to waste one minute of my precious two-minute lunch hour tramping upstairs to turn in my parking pass. After lunch, I just plain forgot. I wonder if they’ll make me pay for the whole month if I had it for just one day and didn’t even park in the space?

... okay, that’s all I got. Off to bed.

Well, let’s see if I can stay awake long enough tonight to beat a few words out of this laptop. I certainly couldn’t have done it last night. We didn’t even get home until seven o’clock, and by that time all had energy left for was to eat supper and brush my teeth before I tunneled into a warm spot beneath the quilts and stayed there until the alarm clock began to bleat this morning.

I’m feeling a lot better tonight, not because I did any less work, but because My Darling B came to pick me up much earlier this evening and, this being Friday, we treated ourselves to dinner at Bahn Thai on Willy Street. We wanted to try something new and something that we had heard good things about, but beyond that, we weren’t too fussy.

B tried something with noodles and shrimp. I asked for a seafood stir-fry: shrimp, scallops and something called “fish ball,” whatever that is, with mushrooms and water chesnuts. They brought it to the table with a big bowl of rice and two plates so we could share. The two dishes didn’t really go together, but neither one of us was feeling so particular that we really cared that much. Besides, the food was delicious. If we had to voice a complaint, like if you paid us for it, or if I had a blog and babbled about these things all the time, it would be that the shrimp were a teensy bit overdone, but that won’t keep us from going back, or from enjoying the leftovers we took home with us.

I am so damned glad it’s Friday night that I could just pee myself. I think I will. No, I’ll do that later, maybe after I go to bed. I wonder if I’ve ever done that. Have to remember to ask Mom next time I see her. Anway, Friday ... it’s here and I was saying I’m pretty damned glad of it. “Got any plans for the weekend?” a friend at work asked me, and I blurted out, “SLEEP! A lot!” Because I’m about eighty hours behind and I can’t stop yawning. If I wake up at any point between the time when my head hits the pillow tonight and the alarm clock starts gleeping Monday morning, I’m going to curl up into a tight little ball, stick my thumb in my mouth and stay that way until I fall asleep again. But I’m not too worried that will happen.

Not entirely true. As it happens, HR is bugging me to write performance appraisals for a few of my minions, and every time I’ve tried to work on them this week the phone rang, or somebody asked me a question, or I had to change into my Superman tights and save the world ... I mean, I never seem to get more that three minutes a day to work on the damned things, so I’m going to the office tomorrow morning to spend a few quiet hours thinking up a dozen different ways to express what a great bunch of guys I work with.

I’ve never liked writing performance appraisals, but the two I have to turn in this week are for a couple people who work particularly hard, and I’d like to make sure they’re recognized for it. There isn’t much else I could do to reward them; it’s not like I can pay them what they’re worth, or give them a medal. I could bake them cookies, I suppose, but then I’d have to get out of bed on Sunday, too. See? The weekend’s getting away from me already. I might as well bow to the inevitable.

I’ve owned a pair of cross-country skis for more than fifteen years, but I’ve never been on them until this afternoon, and the reason for that is: I am so cheap, I make a Scotsman look like a drunken pro football player out for a night on the town in Vegas.

I bought my pair of cross-country skis at a garage sale for a nickel. In actual fact, I probably spent a bit more than a nickel but the price was so low it makes no difference to the story if I say a nickel. I was so chuffed with myself for getting a pair of good cross-country skis at such a bargain-basement price that I’ve spent the last fifteen years looking for a pair of ski boots that didn’t cost more than the skis, as if that was ever going to happen.

Well, the day finally came that I decided I wasn’t going to wait any longer. The past three or four days it’s been so cold outside that we didn’t dare go out for any longer than it took to walk from the door to the car, or vice versa, but today the temps were in the twenties and I wanted to get out and stretch my legs before another cold air mass from Canada or Mars or whereever they come from shut us in the house again. And for some reason, trying out those skis got stuck in my head. I’ve lived in the country and in the city, but I’ve rarely lived in a place I could step out the door and go skiing. Here in Monona, though, there’s a great big lake so close I could walk to it in fifteen minutes, and after a week of sub-zero temperatures, that sucker is frozen solid. It’s become a wide-open stretch of fresh snow, begging me to ski on it.

But first, those boots. I had no idea where to get a pair, but I remembered a place in Colorado called Play It Again Sports, where they sold new and used sports equipment at discount prices, and figured there must be a place like that around here, so I asked the google to show me. The google knows all. Sure enough, it turns out there’s one on the west side of town, so I jumped in the car and whizzed out there.

I looked at the used boots first. Remember, I’m a cheapskate. The only used boots they had were in kid’s sizes, and they were those low-cut shoes they call boots but really aren’t. They also had some new boots on clearance, and they even had a pair in my size, real boots that came up above the ankle and were lined with Thinsulate. I bought a pair even though they cost five-thousand percent more than what I paid for the skis. You’ve got to live a little every once in a while.

On the way home, I swung by the local Ace hardware store to pick up a carton of furnace filters I ordered a week and a half ago. The store phoned me on Friday to let me know they were in, and we needed a new furnace filter so bad. The one that’s in there was choked with dust when we bought the house three years ago. I’ve been vacuuming it out every winter and promising myself that I’d get a replacement, and the guilt finally caught up with me.

When I got there, though, the guy at the customer service counter said he didn’t have an order for me. He searched the stock room even though he was sure he never even spoke to me on the phone, and he came back empty-handed and apologetic. “Are you sure you phoned us, and not the Ace Hardware in Cottage Grove?” He said people often called the wrong number because both stores were on Cottage Grove Road, but only one of them was actually in Cottage Grove, and it wasn’t the one I was standing in. I was pretty sure I called the right one, but asked if I could use his phone to call the other store to find out, and what do you know? It was the other store that had my case of furnace filters. But I bought one off this guy anyway because he had one and I couldn’t see going home without it, even if I didn’t have time to drive all the way out to Cottage Grove today.

Back home, I went through the front closet looking for skiing clothes. I used to have a jacket that was pretty good for skiing, but it wasn’t in there. In The Big Box Full Of Gloves, though, I found a good pair of warm ski gloves and a pair of gaiters that I’ve owned since we lived in Colorado. I don’t think I’ve ever used those before today, either. My Darling B suggested I look in the basement for the ski jacket, and darned if she wasn’t right about that. In no time at all, I was properly attired for a test run across the lake.

I didn’t get out onto the lake, actually. I drove down to Frostwoods Park and skiied across Squaw Bay, skirted the edge of Lake Monona, then turned back toward shore. Twenty minutes of cross-country skiing was more than enough for a guy who spends the majority of his time in a swivel chair. Besides, it was getting dark, and the wind off the lake was pretty stiff.

I wasn’t the only one nutty enough to go cross-country skiing across the lake. There was another set of tracks leading away from the park across the bay and I followed them until I was out on the edge of the lake. The tracks headed north but I turned south across the mouth of the bay onto fresh snow, and the skiing suddenly became a lot harder. Following somebody else’s tracks was easy-peasy. Breaking a trail across wind-driven snow was a lot more like exercise, and I quickly broke a sweat.

The trouble was the crusty snow. A lot of the snow was fluffy and thick, which was tough to ski through but at least my skis stayed under me where they should have been. Just about the time I’d hit my stride and start to feel like I knew what I was doing, though, I’d hit a patch of crusty snow and the skis would go every which way but forward. Fighting to keep the skis together and pointing straight ahead, I’d get across the crusty patch into real snow again, hit my stride, and go cruising along until I hit the next crusty patch.

I was breathing hard and well-warmed by the time I got back to the shore twenty or thirty minutes later. When I raised a ski pole to pop my boots out of the bindings, though, I noticed that one of them was a lot shorter than the other. Buried somewhere out in the snow on Squaw Bay is the basket and point of my left pole.

The driveway has been crusted over with a well-packed layer of snow since Monday, because the deep-freeze of the past week, and the late hours I’ve been working every night, have left me disinclined to go into the frigid darkness after dinner to chip away at it. The temp yesterday was in the twenties, though, and today it was about the same and sunshiney, and I wanted to take the skis out onto the bay again so I put on my jacket, hat and gloves to clear some more of the driveway and get a feel for about how cold it was out there.

And the answer was: Not too bad. About a one point one on The Irritability Index, an open-ended scale on which each tenth of a point is ten times worse than the one before it, like the Richter Scale. The very lowest measure of irritability, an ought point one, would be an itch you can scratch. By the time you get to ought point two, you’re talking about an irritability equal to hearing a mosquito in your bedroom while you’re sitting up reading, while a mosquito buzzing around after lights out would easily be ten times worse, an ought point three. It’s not too hard to understand.

Measuring cold on The Irritability Index is more of an art than a science, although it’s generally agreed that any temperature that’s cold enough to kill you if you’re not smart enough to dress warmly and keep moving would easily top one point null. The temps we had this morning were without question at least that cold, and they were backed up with a brisk wind, just to make them a touch more irritating, moving them up a notch on the index. I could stay warm so long as I was chipping away at the snow and moving it off the driveway with a shovel, and to mitigate the stinging wind against my cheeks I decided to add a layer around my neck and face with a scarf.

Skiing across the bay was especially pleasant in the sunshine, but I still couldn’t bring myself to go out very far onto the lake, where the wind had a lot more bite to it, so when I got that far I swung east toward the Monona shore, followed that in a way with the wind at my back, then when I was about halfway back across the bay I turned again and made a big figure eight across my original track. I think I was out for thirty or forty minutes altogether, about as much as I had the energy for today.

I took My Darling B to Java Cat last night. They had a sign out front all day that said, “Goodbye Bush 8 - 9 pm”, and when I asked B if she wanted to find out what that meant, she said why not? She’s usually game for a night out to go any place that serves coffee and sweets.

As it turned out, the sign referred to the entertainment for the night, a sort of beatnik poet with a guitar singing protest songs against the outgoing executive and rambling through a well-worn litany of complaints ranging from the reasonable to the bizarre. We listened for about as long as it took for B to finish off a cup of gelato and me to gobble down my brownie, and headed home at around seven.

On the way to the show, we stopped by Bongo Video to see if we could pick up a copy of Batman: The Dark Knight. B thought we had a pretty good chance of snagging a copy, but I was thought she was feeling awfully optimistic about getting a first-run movie at six o’clock on a Saturday night. Darned if she didn’t pull one straight off the rack, though.

Tim likes this movie so much he’s seen it ninety-two times, give or take. We thought it wasn’t a bad action flick, although it starts to drag at the two-hour mark when the action slows down and they start talking too much. I thought the sub-plot that brought in a rival for Bruce Wayne’s love interest, as well as another villian, slowed it down a lot. Heath Ledger’s take on The Joker was plenty creepy, although I think it’s kind of sad if the role he’ll be most vividly remembered for is a creepy Batman villian. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a creepy Batman villian, only that he’s done much better.

The motorcycle was way cool. I didn’t think so when I thought it was purely computer-generated, but the rental video had a “special features” trailer that showed how they made the motorcycle and filmed the action sequences with it on the streets of Chicago. Honestly, I thought the scenes of the motorcycle blowing stuff up as it was speeding along the streets went on too long, but I love gadgets so much that when I found out it was a real motorcycle it sort of blew my mind. It’s a tiny mind, so it’s pretty easily blown.

Hi. It’s Martin Luther King Day. Just in case you hadn’t heard. I’m not sure how that would even be possible, but I suppose it could happen.

It almost happened to me. Almost, but not quite. I listened to the news this morning but it was all local stuff and they hadn’t cranked up the MLK Day celebrations yet. It was mostly cries of joy and relief that the high temperature was going to be in the mid twenties for the third day in a row, instead of subzero and falling.

I rode in to work with Tim; I think he played music on his car stereo on the way into town, but I don’t have any memory what it might have been. It wasn’t the stuff he sometimes plays in his room that makes the fillings in my teeth ache. I would’ve remembered that. Maybe he didn’t play anything at all, I don’t know. I had only one cup of coffee with my morning slice of toast and consequently took a long time to wake up this morning.

There is no radio reception at all in the underground department where I work. Deep in the underbelly of the downtown high rise on cap square, we are utterly cut off from the outside world, without even a window to shed a sliver of light on our desks as the sun slowly arcs across the sky. When not even sunlight can find a way in, radio doesn’t stand a chance. I came up briefly to the break room for about a half-hour to each my lunch, but I’d tunneled my way through so much paperwork by that time, I just wanted to sit in a corner in silence, gazing out the window at the frozen surface of Lake Monona as I ate my spaghetti squash. When I finished eating, I read a single article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, then went back to my desk. Still no contact with the outside world.

On the ride home I know what Tim played on the car stereo, because it was one of my favorite Police albums, Reggatta de Blanc, and we had a long conversation about it. It’s forty-five minutes of music set to a hip ska beat, and accompanied by lyrics about heartbreak, loneliness and rejection, just the kind of thing to catch the attention of angst-ridden teenagers in the eighties. Small wonder the Police were such a huge hit.

And that’s how I went nearly the whole day before I heard the first iteration of King’s “I have a dream” speech, broadcast over NPR as we sat down to our dinner. “They’ve been replaying this all freaking day!” My Darling B said over brazed beef ribs and mashed potatoes, as Tom Ashbrook revisted King’s most famous speech for the nth time. “I think he’s a great guy, too, but didn’t he do anything else to remember him by?” Could be. Tom wasn’t telling, though.

We got a cart today. It’s a plastic cart, but it’s ours and we can haul lots of papers around in it, which makes us very, very happy. And I’ll tell you why. Might as well sit down for this.

We in the Loan Services department are The Keepers of The Vault, where all the forty-two zillion papers that you signed when you took out a mortgage, if you were loopy enough to do that sort of thing, are kept in rows and rows and rows of shelves that slide back and forth on steel tracks, powered by whirring electric motors. It’s really pretty cool, if you’ve never seen anything like it before. You should stop by to have a look some time.

The Vault is a long way from anywhere else, but lots of people who are anywhere else but in the Loan Services department ask us to bring them the files from The Vault. If they’re a very long way off, we wrap them up in manilla folders, tightly secured with lots of latex rubber bands, and call the good folks at Office Services to come take them away. What they do with them after that is none of my business, but I understand the file folders frequently arrive at their destinations, and I’m good with that.

For delivering files to much closer offices, like to my cubicle, for instance, we’ve been relying on swivel chairs. These oxcarts of the office environment can hold an eye-popping number of file folders, but as innovative as it may be, it looks dumb as hell. And one day a few weeks ago, as Alma was pushing a swivel chair piled high with file folders back to her desk, I overheard her and Der talking about how freaking awesome it would be if we had a push cart to wheel these things back and forth.

That’s when I popped out of my cube and asked them, “Yeah, it would. Why don’t we have a cart, then?” And I went across the hall to Office Services, the department that not only hauls away mail and other deliverable items, but also orders supplies for all the other departments, and I asked my good buddy Bryan if we could have a cart. “Sure. Why not?” was his approximate answer. He showed me a photo in a catalogue of the kind of cart we could have and it was exactly what I had in mind, so I said I would think he was the greatest guy in the whole wide world if he could make that think appear in our department someday soon. And you know what? Today, he did.

The down side was that it came in a flat box and we had to put it together, not a problem if it was held together with bolts, but it wasn’t. All the pieces had to be screwed together, and they were all made out of high-density plastic that was very hard to drive screws into, and all we had was a long-handled screwdriver I borrowed from Office Services. Ordinarily if I had a task like this, I would fetch an electric drill from the work bench, chuck a phillips-head driver bit into the drill and drive all twenty screws home in about a minute and a half, but because each and every screw had to be tediously driven by hand, I screwed in just enough of them to hold the wheels in place, and took at least five minutes to do it. Then pushed the cart back to our department and asked my minions to drive in the rest of them. And they did. It still amazes me that they’ll do what I ask them to do. Well, most of them will.

After that, there was just one mystery to solve: We could have caster wheels on the front, or on the back, by taking the top off and turning it one-eighty to orient the handlebars on the opposite end. I was all for having the caster wheels on the back, because I thought that would make it easier to steer the cart around corners, but the others pointed out that shopping carts have wheels in the front, and there’s about a bazillion of them, so they must be onto something there. I’m nothing if not democratic about these things, so I let them put it together with the caster wheels out front. And then we had a cart.

“It’s your solemn duty to make sure the cart is locked up each night inside the vault,” I told the vault clerk, “so it doesn’t disappear, and reappear in another department.” He seemed amazed at the suggestion that anybody would wander off with our cart, never to return it. Hasn’t been working there very long.

When I came up out of the subterranian chambers that make up the department where I labor at my day job, there was still enough daylight to allow a guy to read a newspaper. I can’t remember the last time I emerged into the open air after work and saw a sky that wasn’t all inky black darkness, although it couldn’t have been more than a few months ago.

The puzzle was not how long ago we last saw daylight after work, it was how suddenly we were seeing daylight after work. “When did this happen?” I asked My Darling B. I couldn’t remember seeing daylight the day before, and certainly not the week before. B was as stupified as I was. Try as we might, a search of our memories turned up no recall of daylight other than what we saw outside our respective snack room windows during lunch hour. It remains a mystery.

The days have been getting longer instead of shorter for almost a month, of course, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to us that we’d be driving home in daylight sooner rather than later, but after last week’s especially gruelling schedule, emerging from work after six thirty most nights, and this week’s breakneck pace (how can it be Wednesday already?), I haven’t been paying much attention to the sky at all except on the weekends when I can turn my face up in to the sun and stare into the heavens for a good, long time instead of snatching a twenty- or thirty-minute gaze over Lake Monona from the break room.

Tim claimed that he remembered seeing daylight after work just the day before, but that didn’t jibe with our memories, and we both denounced him as a liar and a braggart. It happened magically, we say, all at once, and that is the way it shall be remembered.

Our Humble O’Bode is so old-fashioned that we still have a telephone, the kind that’s quaintly referred to these days as a “land-line”. I have a cell phone but it’s turned on only when I need it. B has a cell phone, too, but the battery’s always dead. Our home telephone is really the only way you can hope to reach us, other than by standing on our front porch and knocking on the door.

And even this old-fashioned telephonic contrivance is anything but convenient, because we don’t answer the phone when it rings. Call us on the phone, and you’ll have to say “Hello? Hello?” into the answering machine until we’re satisfied you’re not a telemarketer calling to tweak our heart strings to get us to part with ten dollars, minimum, for your very worthy cause.

Not that I mean to mock worthy causes. Many of the organizations that call really do seem to be worthy. I’ve even given money to some of them in the past, but these days I funnel all my donations through the local chapter of the United Way because I can set up an automatic deduction from my paycheck, give them a set amount every month and designate the charity of my choice, most of them right here in town. That way, I don’t have to doink around with trying to work out which telemarketers to say yes to, and how many.

Doesn’t stop them from calling, though, or from trying to separate me from my money by playing dirty pool when they do. I made the mistake of picking up on a call one afternoon not too long ago and found myself talking to a telemarketer who immediately went into her spiel for the Children’s Cancer Fund, or something like that. I put the brakes on her right away, then tried to explain about the United Way and the deductions but hardly got ten seconds into it before she interrupted me.

“That’s all right,” she said brightly, “any amount you can give will be very much appreciated by our little boys and girls —” and here she switch to a more measured, somber tone, “ — many of which have less than a year to live.”

Ooooo, that is so dirty. I was going to play nice with her until she did that.

I pointed out to her, in so many words, that she shot herself in the foot with that little maneuver, then said good-bye and set the receiver in its cradle, resisting the temptation to say Hear that? I said good-bye! before hanging up.

I suppose that works on some people. I can’t help but wonder why, though. I mean, if you’re a telemarketer who’s just cold-called the kind of mean, stingy bastard who can somehow resist your first pitch to give any amount of money, no matter how small, to kids with cancer, what would make you think you could suddenly defrost that ice-cold heart by throwing a bucket of icewater on it? Geeze.

B won’t even pick up the phone when it rings anymore, even on Sunday afternoon when the only person who calls is her first-born son. It rings and rings and rings and she won’t even start to walk from the kitchen to the living room to pick it up until she hears the familiar tones of Sean’s voice filtered through the answering machine, saying, “Hi, guys, it’s me ... is anybody there? ... anybody?” Oddly, it always reminds me of the ham radio operator calling in the closing half-hour of the Orson Welles version of War Of The Worlds: ”2X2L calling CQ, is there anybody on the air? Isn’t there anybody?”

Paul & Storm are coming back to Madison! I found out on Friday and we bought tickets on-line last night!

Oh, and Jonathan Coulton is tagging along with them as usual. I almost hate to say this, because Coulton’s generally considered to be the headline act, but I look forward to seeing Paul & Storm’s show just a little bit more than Coulton’s. I still like Coulton’s show, too, but after sitting through a live performance of Paul & Storm’s The Captain’s Wife’s Lament, even Coulton’s very popular Code Monkey sort of leaves me wanting more, although First Of May is usually quite a crowd-pleaser.

They’ve been at the Majestic the last two times we saw them, but they’re coming to the Barrymore this time around. Our last trip to the Barrymore was to see They Might Be Giants, if memory serves, and it was the worst concert experience of my life because the amps were turned up loud enough to make me bleed from all the openings in my head, and we had to leave after just two or three songs to seek medical attention. If the sound guy doesn’t get it right this time I think I’ll have to just go bleed all over him and maybe he’ll get the hint.

I found out about their visit from a guy at work who knows Paul & Storm somehow. He tipped me off on Friday morning and I went straight to the Barrymore web site after we got home to find out when they’d be coming to town, and to buy tickets. We’ll have to go shopping for panties and pirate hats next weekend so we’re properly outfitted for the show.

I hate going in to work on Saturdays. I’ve done it for three weeks now, driving My Darling B into town so we can have our customary breakfast at the Dane County farmer’s market before I walk the three blocks up Mifflin and across the square to the bank to work until one in the afternoon, when Tim has been good enough to come pick me up. Putting in a few hours on the weekend has let me take care of some of the supervisory things I should be doing during the week, but never have the time to do because I spend all day long digging out from under the paperwork that comes flapping into my cubicle from the special chute they’ve installed overhead. Dump trucks can now back up to the building and simply dump it, instead of sending it one sheet at a time by fax. Much more efficient.

Today, I changed it up a bit. We went to breakfast, as usual, and it was wonderful, a triangle of french toast, hash browns made with yams, a poached egg topped with spinach cream sauce, and an apple tart, courtesy of the chef at L’Etoile. I’ve seen him shopping at the farmer’s market before, usually pulling a toy wagon loaded with goodies. Every item on our plate this morning came from the farmer’s market, too.

I stayed to shop the market with B this time, then afterward drove her to the Willy Street Co-Op to pick up a few more things. Meanwhile, I hoofed it down to Vinnie’s to check out the used books. I hadn’t done that in three weeks, much too long, and I found two books right away that I didn’t even have to think about buying: South, the memoir by Ernest Shackleton of his odyssey to Antarctica, and Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts. I have no idea whether or not Roberts is a writer good enough to put together a compelling history book, but I’ve liked her reporting when I’ve heard her on the radio, so I felt willing to give her a shot. And I could always use another book about the revolutionaries.

Bonus! As I walked back through the records section, my eyes fell on a five-record set of LPs, The Motown Story: The First Twenty-Five Years! My hand snapped it up without my having to think about it and tucked it under my arm with the books.

Then I took B home, made a pot of coffee and sat with the morning paper until about eleven-thirty before heading back downtown to catch up on some work. If I have to go back, that’s the way to do it, no hurry. Lowers the stress level a bit.

I had to work on performance appraisals, not my favorite chore even though they were for a couple of people who richly deserve a thorough write-up, so I felt I had to put in the extra time to get them done right. First thing after I took my coat off, though, I went straight to the room where we keep our office supplies.

Ever since I got there, that room has been a heap of boxes, papers and assorted, cast-off desk supplies. Some of the most commonly-used items were sort of put away in a cabinet, not very neatly, and the cabinet was small and couldn’t hold much, so everything else that was what could be considered “office supplies” was more or less just piled on a table or, when the table was full, heaped on the floor against the walls.

First thing I did when I launched my campaign to clean the place up was ask Properties to get rid of the table. All anybody used it for was piling junk on, and it took up way too much room. Then I started wheeling and dealing to get three big cabinets from another department to replace the small cabinet, and finally got them last week. So today I spent the first half-hour or so after I got there putting everything away in the three big cabinets. It all fit easily and even looked organized enough to make some kind of sense. I meant to send an e-mail warning everybody that I would stomp up and down on anybody who junks them up, but I forgot.

The one last thing that would make it all neat and tidy was to put in a work order asking Properties to haul away a couple of broken-down filing cabinets that have been haunting the supply room and collecting junk. That done, I set to work on the performance appraisals.

The hardest thing about performance appraisals is writing something that doesn’t sound like the same thing over and over and over. “Bob does a really good job writing memos. He also does a good job taking phone calls. And Bob’s really good at filing papers, too. Bob’s organizational skills are really good, and I like the way Bob talks to customers. All in all, Bob’s a really good worker.” I mean every word of it, but it sounds like schlock.

Also, it’s too short. I think they probably want a little more than that. There are one or two people in our department who work in a way that doesn’t really move me to write much more, but a lot of them do, and I feel I owe it to them to do better. Hence, my coming in on Saturday again.

Another thing that makes writing a performance appraisal a real pain in the ass is the form they expect us to use. It’s some kind of proprietary software with little text windows that hold only so much text. There are twelve separate sections where we’re expected to enter a description of a specific job skill, then a narrative evaluation of how well the employee does that skill, and although there’s lots of room for the narrative, there’s hardly enough room in the description window to write more than a dozen words.

Most people just copy the job description from the HR web page, then paste it into the appraisal, but that ends up cutting so many words off the end of the description that it doesn’t make any sense. I spend an awful lot of time trying to condense the job description so it’ll fit that teensy-tiny window and, for the longer job descriptions, I cut it up into several windows and treat them almost like separate jobs. I don’t know if that’s what they want, but it’s the only way to make it work so I can give the employees an honest write-up.

I doinked around with that for almost two hours, then printed off what I wrote and took it home with me, in case I got some time to work on it some more. Not too sure that could reasonably be expected to happen, though.

My Darling B asked me to get her some cheese paper while I was downtown, so I walked half a block down from the bank to Fromagination, a shop that deals in all things cheese-related. Cheese paper is paper you wrap cheese in so it stays moist and doesn’t stink up everything else in the fridge. I don’t know how it does that, it just does.

I bought cheese paper at Fromagination before, but I didn’t remember how I found it, so when the young lady behind the counter asked me if I needed any help I said yes, and when I told her I was looking for cheese paper, she pointed to a display on the countertop. That was easy! I snapped up a package and headed for the cash register, flipping it over to see how much money I’d have to dig out of my wallet. The price stopped me dead in my tracks. Ten bucks? How many sheets could possibly be in there? It didn’t say on the back, so I flipped it over and found there were only ten sheets in the package.

I’m positive I didn’t pay that much last time, so I thanked the young lady and put it back in the display. She said something to the manager, who was between me and the door. The manager caught my eye and offered, “We also sell individual sheets.”

“How much does each sheet cost?” I asked.

“Twenty-five cents,” she told me.

You don’t have to know long division, percentages or even much about fractions to realize there’s something wrong with discounts like that. I can do better math using only my fingers. Well, then, if the prices are so outrageously whacked, there’s got to be a limit, right? “May I have ten sheets?” I asked, figuring she’d say no.

“Of course,” she answered, and started to dig them out of a drawer behind her.

She rolled them up and tied them with a pretty pink bow, I handed her two-fifty, and I’ve been puzzled ever since.

Our ritual after coming home on Friday night has become one of decompressing from the working week: We pop open a couple beers, or My Darling B pours a couple glasses of wine, we gobble down an entire bag of potato chips while we quaff, and quaff, and quaff some more, then B usually whips together a meal that’s out of this world, whether she’s planned it by taking the ingredients from the freezer the night before, or she hasn’t, and has to improvise from whatever’s handy in the fridge.

When we’re very lucky, as we were last night, Tim will join us after dinner, usually when he wanders in to feed on half a box of Wheaties he eats by pouring great heaps of the crunchy flakes into a ramen bowl, big enough to mix biscuits in. He’ll stand in the kitchen with a hip cocked against the range top and shoot insults at us between bites. Sometimes he’ll stay for just five or ten minutes, but when we’re very lucky he’ll stay for an hour or more before he heads back to his room to doink around on his computer doing what only the titans of the intertubes can know.

All this by way of explaining why there was no drivel yesterday. I was sitting at the dining room table most of the night, gabbing with the O-Folk. At some point, I followed Tim into his room and he used the awesome power of the interwebs to order a computer case and an eighty gigabyte hard drive. When it arrives, he claims he’ll be able to cobble together a working desktop computer from the collection of parts he’s amassed over the years from the various upgrades he’s made to his own desktop, and I’ll have one of my own to type this drivel on. And then I guess I’ll keep my laptop next to my recliner.

An eighty-gigabyte hard drive still blows my mind. The hard drive in the very first desktop computer I bought was two-hundred fifty-six megabytes, which was jaw-droppingly awesome back in the nineties, and now you wouldn’t dare even connect it to the interwebs for fear of crashing it by loading a single web page. Tim tells me it’s nothing to buy a hard drive that can hold more than a terrabyte, a thousand, thousand, thousand, THOUSAND bytes, which is, to put it in human terms, more words than a gasbag like Rush Limbaugh could ever utter in a hundred lifetimes. I can remember a time not so long ago when storage like that was considered so powerful you had to be a government agency to purchase it. Now you can order it on-line for less than a hundred bucks.

And speaking of storage space, my brother Pete has been hatching a plan to host o-broze.net on a server he’s going to set up in his house. That kind of blows my mind, too, but I’m pretty sure he can do it. If you come back to see and you get the message, “page not loading,” you’re probably visiting during the transition. A revisit later would probably do the trick.

Today the O-Folk made the most unreasonable use of two automobiles ever. I called Mom last week to invite myself and the rest of my family up for a visit, and we set a date for today. It’s a long trip, about a hundred forty miles, and I can do it in about two and a half hours if I take the interstate most of the way, but the length of the trip cuts into the frequency of our visits, so we generally leave about nine o’clock in the morning and stay until about four-thirty or five.

About those cars: We own two, the family car and a smaller, white Honda known as Tim’s car. He hasn’t paid for his any more than we’ve paid for ours, so I suppose I shouldn’t be splitting hairs about who paid for what, although when it comes down to counting, the bank paid for our family car and we’re paying them back, but we paid for Tim’s and he’s paying us back. Capitalism’s a funny thing.

We usually all pile into the family car for a trip to Mom’s but for today’s trip, Tim insisted on driving his own. He said he didn’t want to leave as early as we did, which seems a little goofy to me. He was dressed and ready to go when we were, but whatever. He also said he wanted to crank up the tunes. Okay, I can get behind that. We listened to Ella Fitzgerald and the B-52’s, not always his cup of tea. Finally, he wanted to drive like a maniac. He claimed he went through a speed trap at ninety-five miles per, looked the state trooper square in the eye as he went past, and the cops didn’t make a move to stop him. I’m not sure I believe him about the speed trap, but I’ve taken a ride from him before and I’m inclined to believe him about how fast he drives. I wish he wouldn’t mention it in front of his mother, though.

If you tuned in yesterday for a dose of drivel, you may have noticed that the wrong day was displayed, a temporary glitch in the transfer of these hallowed web pages from a commercial web host to our new web host. O-Broze Dot Net now resides on a purpose-built server sitting cozily in the home of my brother, Pete, near Fort Worth, Texas, who promises to love it and care for it forever and ever. We’re going to call it Betty. He doesn’t know that yet. He’s not even sure why. But we will.

The big galoot got it into his head that he could build his own server after seeing one of his army buddies do it. After tinkering with a salvaged computer and a copy of Debian Linux (free) for about a week, he did it. If that’s not a classic example of good old American can-do spirit, I don’t know what is.

He copied the web site’s files on Wednesday, but didn’t have all the kinks worked out to bring it on-line until yesterday, which is why you may have seen Wednesday’s drivel when it finally came up last night, or this morning, depending on where you were and how quickly the interwebs delivered the redirected web page to your neighborhood.

All three rings of the circus seem to be busily humming with activity now, though.

Happy Monday! And they don’t come much more Monday-like than this one. The day was as personally intense as a double-barrelled dose of rock salt, right in the hinder, at close range. Appropriately enough, I was sitting on mine all day and it still feels as if I should be picking buckshot out of it.

I wasn’t the only one who felt like a stretch of bad road. All of your friendly neighborhood O-Folk were subdued on the ride home, staring straight ahead like crash-test dummies, and when we finally made it to the cozy sanctum of Our Humble O’Bode nobody wanted to do much more than sit and stare at the walls.

Although we did have a fine dinner. B baked some potatoes until they had just the right kind of crunchy skin, then we smothered them in butter and cheese. She even had some bacon bits, prepared earlier, and with a sprinkling of chives they were absolutely the best ever.

She commanded me to bring a bottle of syrah up from the wine cellar. Most people would mistake our wine cellar for a cardboard box in a corner of the basement, but they don’t know. If they only took a look inside, they might think again. There’s nothing really pricey, unless you’re like us and think that thirty-five dollars is pricey; we’ve got one or two of those.

And plenty of syrah, which I’m starting to feel is my favorite. We tried some from Australia at a tasting a couple weeks back, and ever since then I’ve pushed my way to the front of any line that’s waiting for a snootfull of it. Every other wine tastes like “just wine” to me, but I can tell a syrah from the rest of them.

After we finished off our spuds, we paused a bit to relish the last of our wine, sweetening it with a bit of the chocolate brownies I brought back from the Kitchen Hearth. I had to walk two blocks in below-zero temps to the Tenney Building to get them, but they were so rich it was worth the trip, and by noon I had such a strong urge to get away from my desk, even if only for fifteen minutes, that I might have stripped to my skivvies and taken a polar bear plunge in the lake. Might have.

After washing up, chomping down some breakfast and putting on my best working duds, I still had about ten minutes to myself before we had to hit the road to our respective day jobs, so I stretched my legs out across the sofa, rested my head, closed my eyes and attempted a daring experiment: I tried not to think of work for at least five mintues. Seems simple. Fix on a thought, any thought, other than what’s going to occupy my mind for the next eight or nine hours. Blue skies. Kittens. Relaxing with a glass of wine. Anything at all.

Couldn’t do it. No matter what I fixed my mind on, it always came full-circle back to something work-related. Blue skies were something I never saw, working in a basement. Try again. It sure would be nice to take a kitten to sit on my lap at my desk. BZZZZZZZ! Try again. Man, I sure am looking forward to a glass of wine after get home from work today. And so on.

At least I have a job. Listening to the radio on the way home, all call-in shows, was a litany of ruined lives as one caller after another told his tale of woe, every one of their stories the result of the crappy economy. And there I was, exhausted by more work than I could handle. I work in a bank, which in these times seems to make me as close to Public Enemy Number One as a guy can get without actually killing anyone. The idea I get is that banks are bad because they’re either collapsing and taking the economy down with them, or they’re soaking up billions from the government’s economic stimulis package without having the common decency to lend money to the common folk.

I’m here to tell you, that’s not the bank I work for. We’re lending like crazy, and I can prove it. Every day I leave the office with more paperwork on my desk than when I came in. If I could hire a guy just to log in and divvy up the reams of paper coming out of the fax machine every day I’d do it, and get him coffee every morning with a donut on the side, just for the pleasure of not having to mess with that much of the paperwork. Most of it would just end up on my desk, though.

It’s a good sign, I suppose, that I’ve got so much to do. I hear lots of people don’t. The down side, though, is that I’ve apparently gotten so used to thinking my way from one task to the next in rapid succession that I can’t stop doing it after I get home, not even after I’ve had a good night’s sleep, and I slept pretty darned well last night. Such are the perils of being employed. I don’t expect much in the way of sympathy, I’m just saying.

An article in the news warns us all that, unless we take the necessary steps to properly back-up our digital media — and I’m talking to you now, buddy! — historians of the future will find a black hole of information from which they will be unable to view any of the events that took place in this century.

Web sites have been taken down, digital photos disappear into the bit bucket ... it’s a tragedy of epic proportions, they argue. Well, obviously they’ve never seen my web site, and although I can take a pretty picture on occassion, I think I can assure historians yet to be born that the loss of my collection of digital photos would be nothing to weep over.

I’ve often wondered myself what kind of legacy I’ll leave behind, until I go to an estate auction, see all the crap other people left behind and realize that the digital age isn’t that much different. Back when people were given the Brownie box camera, they snapped photos by the zillions. Where are all those photos now? Not preserved by historical societies, I can tell you. Artsy-fartsy crafters are buying them up at estate sales and making them into decorative coasters. There’s your historical black hole.

The only difference between then and now is, the digital photos will simply be scrapped along with the worthless laptops nobody will buy at auction, unless it’s to pry the keys off them to make into necklaces.

When I woke up this morning, I thought it was the usual time, about five o’clock. I often wake up just before the alarm clock goes off, which is not as bad as it sounds. In fact, I have to admit I like it, a bit. It gives me some time to get used to the idea that a good night’s sleep is about to be abruptly brought to a nerve-jangling halt. A good night’s sleep, to me, ends with waking up before the alarm, burrowing deeply under the covers and bracing myself for the coming onslaught of reality.

Shortly after I awakened this morning, though, I heard the clock in the living room strike twelve bells. I tend to count them, against my will, whenever I’m awake enough to hear them, and although I don’t always get the count right, this morning I counted twelve, the most I could possibly count, and way more than five.

Strange, I thought. I’d put the light out at about quarter past ten, and I felt as though I’d slept a lot longer than an hour and forty-five minutes, but what the hell. I rolled over and drifted deep into sleep, blissed out at the idea that I had another five hours until I had to face the world again.

A couple minutes later, the alarm clock began to squawk. Isn’t that a hell of a thing? Obviously the clock is broke, or I was hallucinating. I am dead certain I heard that clock strike twelve. Either I felt as though I slept five hours in what was acutally two, then slept another five hours in what felt like just a couple minutes, or I’m losing my marbles. It’s not hard to chose which is more likely.

Corn chowder for dinner tonight. I couldn’t begin to tell you what’s in it, beyond corn and bits of bacon. Not even the woman who made it could tell you that. My Darling B’s food experiments typically begin with a recipe culled from the interwebs or an issue of Bon Appetit magazine, but after she gets started and her imagination begins to roam, the finished product rarely resembles what she saw that attracted her to the idea in the first place.

B has built up quite an impressive selection of soups on ice, waiting to be re-heated, which is what led her to declare Wednesday night Eat Stuff Out Of The Freezer Night. It’s an effort to economize using what we already have on hand, although I couldn’t help but notice she stopped on the way home to pick up a bag of potato chips (she always serves a vegetable with dinner) and a six-pack (nothing goes better with chowder).

The beer she chose to go with our dinner tonight was from the Furthermore Brewery, which we like a lot because a) it’s in the nearby Wisconsin town of Black River Falls, which sounds very cool, and b) because they make beer that tastes sooooo good. Also, we met one of the brewers when he brought a bunch of his stock to a tasting at Star Liquors on Willie Street, and remember him as a lot of fun to talk to. I’m not sure B was thinking about all of that when she picked it up. Probably she just grabbed what was handy and she knew we would both drink. And she knows I’m not that choosy, so she picks up what she likes. Easy.

Tomorrow night is Guy Food Night, and I believe we’ll be dining on grilled ham & cheese sandwiches, not because I’m feeling particularly lazy and don’t want to broil fish. I am feeling particularly lazy, but I’m not in the mood for fish. I feel the need to make something crunchy and hot, and nothing would fit the bill more perfectly that a well-grilled ham & cheese sandwich. Pan-frying a sandwich with a gooey layer of molten-hot cheese inside guarantees satisfaction.

And here we are again, driveling. I’m writing drivel, you’re reading drivel, ya drivlyu, ty drivlesh’, on drivlyot, my drivelyom ... c’mon, conjugate the verb with me! If you’re not familiar with Russian, substitute your favorite language, or your most despised, whatever the case may be. It all depended on the situation you were in at the time, didn’t it? Did you have to learn it, or were you taking it for an easy A? If you could sleep through class and drink instead of study after school, your memories of learning another language not your own probably aren’t too bad now. Lucky skunk. I had to learn Russian. Sort of. I asked for it, and I could have bailed, even thought seriously about punching out, going home and learning something easier, like brain surgery, but I decided I didn’t want to quit halfway through, and kept at it until I could conjugate even silly made-up verbs like дривль. It’d have to be spelled with a myaki znak at the end, wouldn’t it?

And here’s where I learned it, sort of, courtesy of the google. I hope they don’t crush me like a bug for stealing a screen shot of this corner of hell. The campus of the Defense Language Institute used to be on this spot, the farthest corner of Lackland Air Force Base, but none of it’s there now. I can recognize the spot only because of the line of jet fighters at the bottom of the photo. They’re parked inside a fence line with a watch tower that the Security Police use to train young SP wanna-be’s. The barracks that I lived in were along the road to the right, across the field from the jets, and I spent many a night trying to catch a few winks between bursts of automatic weapons fire. Ah, those were the days.

The campus, such as it was, was really just a motley collection of Korean-war era barracks that the Russian language school was temporarily moved to while its permanent home in Monterey, California, was being remodeled. Just my luck, I joined the Air Force in time to go to my tech school while it was at sun-bleached Lackland, instead of seaside Monterey. If you don’t believe timing is everything, you haven’t been stuck in Texas for a year and a half.

All those buildings are gone now. I don’t recognize a thing in this picture besides the jets on the phoney flight line, and the building at the upper right-hand corner that resembls a computer chip. That’s the home of the 3708th Basic Military Training Squadron, although they call it something else now. At two o’clock in the morning on February 5th, 1984, I stepped off a bus and into my twenty-one year career in the Air Force at the front door of the orderly room of that squadron. Many’s the day that I lay frying like an easy-over egg on the asphalt of that huge drill pad to the south.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. I was at the 3708th for about a week before I transferred to the 3706th, the base’s drum & bugle corps. My father gave me the best piece of advice ever before I left for basic training: “If you ever hear anybody ask, Who can play a musical instrument? — raise your hand and keep it up until they see you.” It was a Monday morning, we were all getting our heads shaved, and as I waited for my turn I noticed a Master Sergeant take our drill instructor aside for a few words. Then he shouted, “Listen up!” and said the words my dear old Dad alerted me to: “Has anybody here played a musical instrument?” And I thought: Holy Crap! It’s happening! My hand was already in the air, all by itself, and by the end of the day I was in the drum & bugle corps, where we didn’t have to do KP, didn’t have to mow lawns, didn’t have to do any extra duty, just practice marching a lot and learning how to play The Air Force Song and The Star-Spangled Banner on a big, silver horn with two valves. I think I marched in two parades, and we played at a lot of retreat ceremonies.

When basic training was over, a bus took me to the other side of the base and I spent a year at DLI, a hellish school trapped inside a hellish base. In the summer, the heat of the day regularly pushed the thermometer all the way up to one-hundred degrees. If the air conditioning failed in the school house, it became a five-thousand watt microwave oven and they called off class rather that cook us alive. And the teachers were under diabolical order to torment us mercilessly with new and more complex Russian language lesson every day. The course seemed designed to stress us to our breaking points, if we had one that would be broken by a language lesson, and before it was half over at least half the class had “washed out,” reclassified to other jobs. One guy was in long enough to learn how to say “I want to transfer to Explosive Ordnance Disposal!” Another guy stuck with it until almost the halfway point, then started talking about washing himself out and asking to be an SP. And that’s exactly what he did. The next time we saw him, he was guarding the planes at the fake flight line behind our barracks.

From the web page of Appleton Downtown Incorporated, I present to you the coolest name ever:

Thanks, don’t mind if I do!

Say it aloud, doll, say it aloud, as if it were a question.

I thought I was having a rough week until I stopped at Star Liquor on the way home to pick up a six-pack and had to wait in line behind a dozen other people waiting to check out with more liquor cradled in their arms than I could drink in a month. Adam, one of the liquor store’s owners, or managers, or maybe he just hangs out there a lot, said he thought everybody was just getting ready for the Super Bowl, and I suppose that could be the case. I know why I was there, and it didn’t have anything to do with football.

I had planned to go into work tomorrow morning, but after thinking it over I figured that it would help me catch up only a little bit, and my desk would still be buried under a newly-drifted pile of paperwork on Monday morning anyway, so I decided to work like a maniac all day long, clear as much off my desk as humanly possible without stopping, and take a whole weekend off for a change. Hour after hour, I kept on dogging away at the work until I had almost all of it gone shortly before noon. I took a half-hour to eat some Chinese we ordered out for, then came back to find the mail had come in and all the stuff I staffed out began coming back to me for signature. Nine hours after I walked into the office, I left feeling like a football that spent a whole day in the middle of a never-ending rugby scrum. I am so freaking glad it’s Friday.

Traffic on the way home was really crazy. The parking lane along Willy Street is supposed to be a traffic lane from four-thirty to five-thirty, but nobody wants to drive there because of the great thick slabs of ice frozen immovably to the pavement along the curb. It’s like trying to drive too fast over speed bumps. Every so often some dude in a big truck varoooms on by to prove his manhood, but other than that, the lane stays mostly empty. So I got in it and ran up as fast as I could go.

As we neared Star Liquor, we could see there were a couple cop cars with their lights going flashy-flasy in the parking lane up ahead, but we couldn’t tell if they were before or after the liquor store until we were right on top of them. I didn’t care. I stayed in the parking lane right up to the very last second, and it paid off; they weren’t blocking the way, they were up by the co-op. Coming back out of the liquor store parking lot, they were still there and effectively ran intereference for us as motorists drove slowly and changed lanes to get around them. In and out in heavy traffic, that’s luck.

And then there was the detour that’s been bottlenecking traffic between Cottage Grove Road and Buckeye — it wasn’t there any longer. My Darling B thought I was just trying to scare her by staying in the right lane a little too long, but I could see the signs indicating the diversion had been taken down and I shot right past the intersection and into the cone zone with practiced ease. We were home in good time and the Friday relax-a-thon began well before six o’clock this fine evening.

Morning breakfast at the farmer’s market, followed by shopping for fresh produce, and then not going back to the office to work. Been there, done that. I’m going to spend this weekend at home with My Darling B, read some books, take a nap in the afternoon, maybe even doink around with my choo-choos a bit. Decompress. Forget about work. Feels good.

We usually take Willy Street home from downtown Madison so we can stop at the co-op for the few items we can’t get at the market, and I figured as long as we were already parked, and Saint Vincent de Paul’s was just across the street, it would be a shame if we didn’t stop by to have a quick peek in the book shop. I can’t remember now a single time I’ve left without at least one book I’d be interested in curling up on the sofa with Heck, someday I may even get to do that.

Today I found Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. I keep reading that Woolf is one of those authors everybody should read, and so far I’ve collected A Room Of One’s Own and To The Lighthouse, but they’re both still in my TBR pile. Maybe Orlando will be the Woolf I finally read.

Then I found two biographies by Ron Chernow, a historian I know I’ve read but can’t figure out what it was. I somehow managed to carry Titan: the Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and The Warburgs all the way back to the check-out without having to stop and catch my breath, even though they each ran to more than eight-hundred pages. The subject of Rockefeller has always teased at the edges of my interest, mostly because I know nothing about him other than he was once the richest man on earth. I’ve never heard of the Warburgs; I picked it up only because Chernow wrote it.

And finally, my eyes fell on a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage and realized I didn’t have enough books at home filled with pompous grammar rules that I never pay any attention to, so I grabbed it.

I almost got out the door without spending another dollar, but My Darling B had found a pair of daiquiri glasses and was prowling the aisles for more, so I wandered a little further and found a VHS tape of Star Wars. I have never owned a copy of Star Wars and was suddenly siezed with the desire to watch it again. Maybe the nausea of watching the last movie in the franchise has finally worn off.

After we got home, I spent most of the afternoon doing absolutely nothing constructive at all. I suppose that’s nothing to brag about, but I have to say it felt pretty good to sit at my laptop for hours, doing nothing more crushingly important than updating the web page where I keep a diary of the books I’ve read. I could have been washing my dirty clothes, or cleaning the bathroom, or stacking the lumber in the work shop so it wouldn’t be underfoot and I could go in there and get a screwdriver when I needed it without danger of spraining an akle. I didn’t do any of that, though. I should be ashamed of myself, but I’m not. Maybe the guilt will catch up with me later. Maybe.

I had a hot date with a girl to go to the Souper Bowl this afternoon. Not the Super Bowl. I couldn’t care less about some dumb football game. I’m talking about the Souper Bowl, a fundraiser to benefit Habitat for Humanity. They get a bunch of high school kids to donate a couple thousand ceramic bowls, and pretty nice bowls, too. If you bought them from a hoity-toity craft shop, they’d soak you for fifty bucks, easily, to buy a bowl like the one you get at the Souper Bowl, but all you have to give them is fifteen bucks, and they’ll throw in a bowl of soup, a cup of lemonade, and a cup of coffee with all the cookies you can stuff down your gullet.

There’s entertainment with the meal, too. This year, the UW-Madison marching band showed up. Man, those guys have a lot of energy! Not only do they have to be able to play brass horns loud and well while marching, they do what so many modern marching bands do these days, ducking and rocking to the fast-forward beat of the tunes they play. The kids playing Sousaphones must be on amphetamines to be able to carry on the way they do. And then about half of them aren’t playing at all, but running through the crowd as cheerleaders-at-large, waving their arms and singing. The crowd joined in on all the numbers, singing and waving their arms in semaphore that only Camp Randall Regulars would know. I was starting to feel distinctly out of place by the time they were finished.

This is our third straight year at the Souper Bowl, and it keeps getting bigger and bigger. They moved it from the cafeteria into the gym of West High School to accomodate the crowds this time around. We got there twenty minutes before the door opened, and a good thing, too, because the line was already about fifty feet long. By the time they started letting us in, the line had doubled over itself.

And this year, they had two lines of tables covered by ceramic bowls to choose from. But even with all that, it didn’t overwhelm me. For the first time, I saw a bowl right at the front end of the first table that I snatched up and held onto, no second thoughts. It was love at first sight. I strolled along the tables, looking at the other bowls just to play along, and to watch B trying to decide which bowl she wanted to keep, but I didn’t see anything I liked more than the bowl I found. I learned later on that my pick was the work of Peggy Ahlgren, a local artist and maker of stoneware at Wilson Creek Pottery. I’m honored!

I had enough time in the evening to do something constructive, but I sat on the sofa and watched Star Wars instead. What a dorky movie. What awful dialogue. I still love it.

Coincidentally, Carrie Fisher was on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me this afternoon, and the host, Peter Segel, is such a great big Star Wars dork he had to ask her about the movie. “Is there a story about Star Wars you’ve never told anybody?” he asked. “Alec Guiness gave Mark Hamill twenty pounds to go away,” Fisher answered. “And did Hamill go away?” Segel followed up. “Yes, after Alec signed it.”

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© 2009 Dave Okonski.

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