this is drivel

As it turned out, the guilt of doing nothing constructive all day yesterday did finally catch up with me, and I spent quite a bit of time today trying to show The Cosmic Constant that I was worth more than a mere gravimetric spike in the web of matter holding the universe together.

For a start, I finally made a trip all the way out to Cottage Grove to pick up the furnace filters I ordered more than two weeks ago. It might have been as much as a month ago, I really don’t remember now. I thought I was placing an order with the Ace Hardware store right here in Monona on Cottage Grove Road, but it turns out there’s now an Ace Hardware I didn’t even know about that’s in Cottage Grove, and I called that one by mistake. After apologizing to them, I promised that I’d get out there as soon as I could, or, in my case, as soon as I could remember to. With my Swiss-cheese memory, that gave me a mind-bogglingly wide margin of error.

But before I drove out there, I asked My Darling B to check the web site to see when they were open, and when she confirmed that their hours were nine to five on Sunday, I got dressed and headed out there at eight-thirty to get the trip over with as soon as possible. The lights were all out when I got there, though, and, shading my eyes as I tried to peer through the windows into the darkness, I saw no signs of life inside. The sign on the door said they opened at ten on Sunday. The mystery was solved when I got home and B sheepishly admitted to me that she’d looked up the web site of the Ace Hardware right here in Monona on Cottage Grove Road. The Cosmic Constant played a cosmic joke on the both of us.

I may try to get out there again next weekend, but I’m in no hurry now, and not feeling at all guilty about it. They can keep the furnace filters. Why are there even two Ace Hardware stores on Cottage Grove Road, anyway? That’s just perverse.

Second constructive action: Get rid of the growing pile of odds and ends we’ve set aside for Goodwill. Every time I come across a shirt I know I’ll never wear again, it goes into a bag at the bottom of my closet. There’s also a box in the basement that’s been slowly accumulating items such as badminton rackets, a pair of headphones, a never-opened pumpkin-carving kit, and so on. Yesterday, B spent a couple hours tidying up the corner of the basement where we store the packed-up portion of our lives, and the heap of donations grew even bigger, so this morning I grabbed pen and paper to make a list of everything we planned to donate, then loaded it into the car and drove it across town to the local Goodwill.

Our storage area is now tidy enough that I can walk through it without tripping and breaking my nose, but man, we still have an awe-inspiring assortment of, ah, junk. We’ve moved house across the Atlantic twice and the Pacific once. That’s some serious moving. I don’t know how other people did it, but to move all the junk we had, we adopted a system of putting most of our possessions in plastic Tupperware tubs so it wouldn’t end up scattered all over the house and yard like so much debris dumped in the general vicinity of our new home with all the randomness of a tornado’s passing. It worked pretty well, too, but containerizing your life can lead to pack-rat syndrome, the feeling that it’s all somehow going to be useful someday so you’d better hang on to it, just in case. Also, it’s already in the containers. Popping them open and sorting out what you want to keep from what can go to Goodwill always seems like a project that would take so long, you want to put it off forever, which we have.

Now that we’re here more or less permanently, though, we’ve made an infrequent habit of breaking into the boxes and tubs. Our guideline for getting rid of things: If we haven’t touched it since we moved here three years ago, we probably don’t need it, so out it goes. So far, so good.

That wasn’t really the problem we had until B went in there yesterday, though. The mess in the storage room was mostly the result of one of us O-Folk needing to put something away that didn’t have an “away,” and dumping it in a heap on the basement floor. Instead of putting it away, she simply got rid of most of it, putting it in the boxes I hauled away today.

I don’t remember doing anything else that I might consider constructive, other than giving the bathroom a cleaning. I read another chapter of Shackleton’s South, had a nap, updated web pages, petted the cat, petted the other cat, stuff like that.

Happy Monday! I want to shoot myself!

Not really shoot myself, ha-ha, just kidding. Who would want to do that to themselves just because it’s a Monday? ME! I WOULD! I’D KILL ME RIGHT NOW IF I HAD ANYTHING WITHIN REACH MORE DANGEROUS THAN A PAPERBACK BOOK TO DO WITH WITH. I suppose I could bludgeon myself with that until I run out of steam, although that’d happen after just one bludgeon. It might even happen during the preparation to bludgeon. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s starting to happen while I’m just thinking about bludgeoning. I’ll have to have a nap before I go any further.

I’m absolutely spent. I’d go to bed, but the stress of getting to my feet, climbing the stairs and brushing my teeth is obviously much more traumatic that lifting a paperback, so there’s not even the faintest hope of setting my head on a pillow tonight. I’m most likely to fall asleep right here in front of my desk in my clothes and drool down the front of my shirt all night. If I’m very lucky, My Darling B will read this in the morning and bring me a cup of coffee.

While I’m doing all this wah-wah, poor-little-me crying, I’m reading a book by Ernest Shackleton about his expedition of two-dozen men, stranded on an ice floe after the ship they were on was caught in the ice and crushed until it was nothing but splinters. They survived by dragging lifeboats, each weighing a ton, over ice buckled upwards by the pressure of crashing together, until they got to the edge of a floe where they could safely launch them into the freezing ocean. Most of the time they had nothing to eat but penguins and seal blubber. So, yeah, I have too much paperwork. I’m tired. Wah.

If this winter doesn’t end up officially becoming the coldest on record in a lifetime, I’ll eat my down-filled parka, without syrup or gravy. Not sure what you’d eat a parka with, but given the choice and a gun to my head, I’d prefer gravy. Or maybe curry. A nice yogurt sauce would be tasty, too. But I won’t be eating it, because I’m dead certain they’ll call this the coldest winter since the glaciers packed up their steamer trunks and left Wisconsin.

Glaciers are clothes horses of the worst sort and require teams of porters to haul their steamer trunks to and fro. You wouldn’t think it to look at them, but the do. Pick any one glacier and you will has no less than a dozen steamer trunks packed up with boiled shirts and tuxedos, ready to put on the ritz at the drop of a silk hat. The ones that have been around for a while have assembled wardrobes that would make whole theater companies break down and cry with envy, especially since glaciers are more possessive than apostrophes and never share their stuff.

Speaking of glaciers, I believe I mentioned yesterday that I’m reading a memoir of Ernest Shackleton’s trip to the Antarctic. Well, it was a “trip” the way a year in the gulag is a “vacation.” Shackleton’s ship, cruelly misnamed Endurance, was crushed in Antarctic pack ice, stranding the expedition in the middle of the frozen ocean. Never was the phrase “sucks to be you” more apt.

Rather famously, nobody in Shackleton’s party was killed, even though the men of the expedition slept on ice floes for months, spent weeks at sea in tiny life boats, were soaked through by sea-spray in sub-zero temperatures, and otherwise passed the time slowly freezing solid. How they endured is beyond my comprehension. I’m certain, without the slightest doubt, that I would have been a popsicle by nightfall on day one. And that’s why I work in an office, shuffling papers at a desk, and not as an intrepid Antarctic explorer. There are men made of sterner stuff than I am, men like Shackleton, and they’re the ones who go trekking off across frozen wastelands. Men like me read about them, cozily wrapped up in quilts.

Dinner tonight was fried tofu served on a bed of green rice with cherry tomatoes. My mother, who tried in vain to get me to eat stuff like squash, will be amazed to learn I liked it a lot. My Darling B was pretty surprised, herself.

The rice was green on purpose. I forget what all she said she put in there, but B made some kind of sauce out of cilantro and coconut milk to mix it up in that was so lip-smacking good, it made me sit up and beg for more. We stuffed ourselves and still had plenty of leftovers for lunch, because, of course, Tim would rather suck sewer water than eat a home-cooked meal, and especially one that was absolutely devoid of meat. Tofu? Don’t even.

Tim built me a computer! He had a big freaking box filled with motherboards and graphics cards and other discarded parts he accumulated as his computer went from one Darwinian upgrade to the next. Not too long ago, he offered to build a computer for me with the parts that didn’t completely suck, any one of which was so technologically advanced eighteen months ago you would have been arrested if you’d tried to leave the country with it in your suitcase. All I had to do was buy a case, a hard drive and a CD drive, so one night I sat down with him at his computer, let him pick out the best stuff for the least amount of money, then plugged in my credit card number and Zow! Computer parts appeared at our door about a week later.

As it turned out, we needed one more thing: A power supply. The leftover he had on hand had a power cord that was not quite long enough to reach the receptacle on the motherboard. Another week passed ...

The new power supply was waiting on our doorstep tonight like a lost puppy that had found its way home. Tim took it straight to my basement lair to install it, then crossed his fingers and hit the switch. Power! And the computer booted up on the first try! For an operating system, I loaded it with Ubuntu, an o/s Tim got free off the internet. Looks pretty geeky, but works great.

I desperately need more help at work. That old “an extra set of arms” answer some guys give you when you ask them what they need just wouldn’t do the trick for me, unless the extra set of arms came attached to a torso with a working head on top and a pair of legs to help them get around. And while I’m dreaming, I’d like the head pre-loaded with all the office trivia it would need to do all the things I do, because I don’t have the time to show them. That’s all I need. Just that.

It’s not that the rest of the staff isn’t doing their jobs. Most of them are working as hard as human beings can. It’s that there’s no way we few, we happy few, we band of brothers ... sorry, battlefield flashback. Happens. There’s no way our modest staff can hope to keep up with the reams of paperwork that the fax machine pukes out every day, and the fax machine is only part of the problem. Combine that with the bleeping inboxes and the [bleeping] couriers making deliveries, and we’re swamped.

Now add telephones. We’re a customer service department: Call our toll-free number! Walk-ins welcome! And yesterday, for example, the phones went crazy. Absolutely rang off the hook. And every call, it seemed, was from a customer with more than one question, sometimes hundreds. If you’ve worked in customer service, or you’ve had kids, you know the “Why? Why? Why?” type of caller. We love our customers — wouldn’t be much of a business without them — but we’ve all noticed that talking to one on the phone for forty-five minutes does not make the piles of paperwork on our desks go away, or even shrink significantly. Makes them get bigger, in fact. Sometimes they even spawn.

Eggs & sausage for guy night. I’m not the most inventive cook who ever slung a spoonful of hash on your plate. Luckily for me, My Darling B doesn’t care so much. All she’s looking for is something she didn’t have to think about and isn’t laced with the usual toxic substances found in the sort of packaged food a guy would normally buy.

Tonight, she wanted to retire to her sewing room directly after she changed into her lounging clothes (don’t tell her I told you this, but they were a pink pair of pyjama pants and a long-sleeved tee, all wrapped up in her favorite bathrobe, “favorite” being a euphemism for clothing that should have been donated to Goodwill last summer), then sit at her Bernina sewing machine and darn a few pair of her favorite socks while I hung out in the kitchen, watching the sausages fry. That’s my kind of cooking: Put it on the burner, watch it burn, take it off & serve it.

I’m especially good at scrambled eggs. A guy almost has to be, give the small number of basic foods we can claim to cook by throwing them in a pan and heating them up. I feel I’m especially lucky, though, because I can cook them so they’re firm but not dried out. That’s the kind of skill a gal will marry a guy for, rather than risk losing it.

What I most wanted to do tonight was recline on the sofa with a book for at least an hour, but I still had to clean up after dinner, then retire to the basement lair to drivel. That takes a whole lot longer than you’d think. There are so many distractions on the interwebs.

I just finished the chapters of Shackleton’s memoir South about his trip from Elephant Island to New South Georgia to get help. He knew that Elephant Island was so far outside the shipping lanes that no one would ever look for them there, so he picked four men, loaded up a life boat with a week’s provisions, and set sail. Did I mention it was more than eight-hundred miles from Elephant Island to New South Georgia?

They ate insanely small rations, something like a cup of milk and a sugar cube for each meal, and they ran out of water a couple days before they landed. When they finally came within sight of shore, the first thing Shackleton noticed was the wildlife. It was like one of those Looney Toons; everything he saw looked like dinner to him. Actually, no, everything he saw was dinner to him. After months on the ice, followed by a week at sea, these guys were as hungry as the Pac Man.

The first thing they saw was an albatross rookery, with lots of fat, young albatrosses in the nests. They killed a half-dozen and made a stew. A lot of very unfortunate seals came up on shore; Shackleton and his men killed them and ate them all. Shackleton went exploring on the second or third day, to look for a way to hike across the island to get help, and found a bull elephant seal sunning itself on the rocks. Killed it, left it for a snack on the way back. I don’t know how there’s anything left alive down there, even now.

Leo Kottke came to play for us tonight at the Barrymore. “Us” generally, the hoi polloi of south-central Wisconsin, not “us” as in referring to one’s self in the third person. We, B and I, are not quite so important as to command a performance from Leo Kottke, although I’d like to think he’s the kind of guy that might drop over for a beer and a brat before the show if the situation presented itself.

The last time we saw Kottke, he was on a double-bill with Leon Redbone and, to be honest, we went to the show to see Leon and ended up staying because we were already there, it was a nice night out and, what the hell, he might turn out to be pretty good. And he was. And still is.

This time around he was the entire show, no opening band, no double bill, just Leo strolling out onto the stage as the light dimmed, carrying a six-string by the neck in one hand and a twelve-string the same way in the other. His hands were looking a little gnarled, but he can still get them to dance across the strings.

We were in the fourth row this time. I would’ve moved up even closer, but the first three rows were folding chairs brought out to fill what was at other, louder concerts a mosh pit. When B brought to my attention how hard those chairs would feel before the first hour was up, I retreated to the closest row of plush theater seats, and didn’t regret it. The fourth row was close enough, and much more comfortable.

Before we took in the show, we had dinner at Dobhan, a trendy fusion restaurant up the block that served what was made out to be modern food with an Asian theme. I had a hamburger made from yak. I have to admit, I liked it a lot. The meat was tender, it was mixed up with diced onions and herbs, and topped with chimichurra sauce, if I remember correctly. If I don’t, My Darling B will set me straight.

At about one-thirty or two o’clock yesterday afternoon, after dogging my way through a couple stacks of paperwork and daring to feel just a little bit satisfied with myself about it, I stopped to take a detailed assessment of the office and realized that it was pretty quiet ... a little too quiet.

For the past three or four days, the phones have been literally ringing off the hook, wrapping their cords around the necks of the staff and choking them until they’re blue. Okay, not literally. It felt that way, though. I’m pretty sure the staff will agree with me on that one.

And every day this week we’ve received a hundred of requests or more for payoff statements, the simple-looking sheet of paper you get from us, your bank, when you ask to pay off your loan, itemizing the principal, interest and fees. The principal is the money you asked for; the interest is the money we asked you to pay us for giving you the money; and we tack a few fees on there just because we’re evil. Ask anyone.

But yesterday, there was an eerie quiet to the place. The phones were still ringing, but only occasionally. A few requests came in for payoff statements. Here and there, a cricket chirped. I stood in the doorless doorway of my cube looking out over the office and thinking, This is just like that moment in the movie when the lone guard looks out into the darkness with a growing expression of anxiety on his face. Then, just as the background music changes to a major chord, a hundred screaming enemy soldiers / the alien / a leopard jumps out of the shadows straight into the camera, and I pee my pants.

Clyde at the Ace Hardware store in Cottage Grove, the town, not the road, wouldn’t stop calling me. Every week, there was a new message from him, each a little more plaintive than the last. Clyde is so relentlessly devoted to customer service that he will not part with the box of furnace filters I ordered from him more than a month ago, when I thought I was talking with the customer service desk at the Ace Hardware store on Cottage Grove Road in Monona. When it turned out that my filters were in the village of Cottage Grove, a twenty-five minute drive from my house, I was not at all prompt in driving out there to fetch them.

On Friday, there was another message from Clyde. Ace Hardware must have a pretty thorough indoctrination program. If I’d been in Clyde’s shoes, and I’d been calling a slacker like me, I would have sold every one of those furnace filters to the first taker after my original phone call failed to roust me off my butt to come out and pick up the filters that I’d so graciously ordered and held in the stockroom for me.

But Clyde wasn’t the kind of man I was, and a man with as much integrity as he had shouldn’t be rewarded with the cold-hearted indifference I’d shown to him, so I hopped in my car and drove out there once again. The first time I went, the store was closed. That peeved me enough to forget about going back, but after Clyde’s call I felt I ought to give it one more try. They were open this time, and Clyde was as devoted to customer care in person as his messages made him out to be. He brought the box of filters up from the stock room, opened the box to make sure they were the filters I wanted, carried the box to the check-out and offered to haul them out to my car for me. I felt as though I ought to tip him.

Hold on to your hats: We skipped the farmer’s market this morning! I know!

As I discussed the morning schedule with My Darling B, she said she was still feeling a little full from last night’s dinner at Dobhan and so wasn’t all that crazy about going out to breakfast, too. “And I don’t really need anything from the market,” she added. “I suppose we could just skip going altogether.”

The earth trembled. The sky darkened. A rain of fire fell from the heavens. Or at least that’s what I feared would happen after she allowed such blasphemy to escape her lips. A glance out the window confirmed that none of those things was happening, however, so I answered, “Okay.” And still the world kept on spinning. Weird.

If we weren’t going to go to the market, then what would we do instead? Well, apparently we can break with just one tradition at a time. Although B didn’t need anything from the farmer’s market, she did need to fetch a few things from the co-op, so we drove up to Willy Street and she did her shopping while I walked a block down to St. Vincent de Paul’s to cruise the shelves of their book store.

At first, I found nothing that interested me immediately, but as it turned out, that was only because I was in the wrong section. I usually head straight for biographies and history, but after my eyes played across those shelves and failed to find anything I had to take home, I let myself wander into less familiar aisles. I stopped in front of the shelves market “Science” when I caught sight of the book title Apollo, by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox. I have no idea who those two are, but flipping through the photos in the book, I knew I had to have it.

And right next to Apollo I found First On The Moon, A Voyage with Armstrong, Colllins and Aldrin, a book I’d caught reference to in other books but never seen before. It clearly belonged in my growing collection of books about the moon landing, a fascinating topic because, as you may have heard, there’s a certain loopy group of conspiracy nuts that actually believes men once walked on the moon! I thought everybody knew that was just a bunch of actors on a Hollywood sound stage. But I guess there’s always a few gullible people out there who’ll swallow any damned thing the government tell them, no matter how obviously unbelievable it may be.

B joined me at St. Vinnie’s and prowled the aisles of the kitchen section while I picked out books. She brought home another platter and a covered butter dish. After twenty years of marriage, she’s finally going to let me keep butter on the countertop in a butter dish. Maybe. I’ll bet you she puts it back in the fridge at least half the time.

After we checked out at St. Vinnie’s, we crossed the street to have a cup of coffee and a scone at Lazy Jane’s, because we still weren’t quite hungry enough to eat a full breakfast. B laid her head on my shoulder and sobbed when she saw eggs benedict at the top of the menu of specials for the day. She loves eggs benedict, and they almost never serve them, but we stayed with scones and coffee rather than stuff ourselves with a breakfast we really weren’t hungry enough to eat.

I hardly noticed at all when B’s alarm bleeped this morning, weird as I might have thought it was to set an alarm for a Saturday morning when we were planning nothing more urgent than a trip to the market. When she looked at the clock and announced, with a note of panic in her voice, “It’s Friday!” however, I felt a very definite, Twilight Zone-weirdness settle over me. Friday? How can it be Friday? We just did a Friday! It can’t be Friday again!

“No, it’s not,” I responded.

She took another, closer look at the clock. “It’s Friday!” she repeated. How she could tell what day it was by looking at the analog face of her eight-dollar clock, I couldn’t say. Maybe I should have been more worried about her health; she could have been stroking out. Instead I repeated, in the most calming voice I could muster at six o’clock in the morning, “No, it’s not, it’s Saturday.”

The message must’ve sunk in, because she breathed a sigh of relief and went back to sleep, narrowly avoiding trapping us both in a Bill Murray movie.

Last night’s movie was Man On Wire, the story of Phillipe Petit’s obsession with walking on a wire between the World Trade Center towers. I’d heard all kinds of good reviews of the movie and wanted to see it, and then yesterday our favorite radio show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! had Petit on as a guest, and that clinched it. I was going out anyway, so I stopped at Bongo Video and took a copy home.

Petit was portrayed in dramatic reenactments by one of those street performers who rides into the town square on a unicycle, strings a rope between two lamp posts and jumps up to start juggling flaming torches, to the delight of the crowds gathering around him. No idea if Petit was like that himself, but it was fun to watch.

The unfolding story of his plan to string a wire between the two towers was fairly gripping, though. He did it while the towers were still under construction; the upper twenty floors were mostly unfinished, and the roof was a bare concrete slab with lots of naked iron beams to attach a wire to. He and a posse of co-conspirators snuck into the buildings the night before, rode to the top and waited until the dead of night to start working. The wire was supposed to be ready by dawn, but their self-imposed deadline slipped and Petit couldn’t start his walk until several hours later. He became an instant celebrity, but the ending of the film was a lot different than I imagined it would be.

I’m getting really tired of seeing this advertisement on every freaking web page I visit. I’d heard quite a few disparaging remarks about Rachel Ray before this, but I didn’t have an opinion about her myself until I saw her name attached to these ads. My Rachel Ray Opinion-O-Meter has consequently pegged on the low end.

From what I can gather in these photos, the first rule of a flat stomach is “Suck in that gut!” Much more accurately, at least in the case of this advertising campaign, I think it’s likely that the first rule is “Get a guy with a flabby beer belly to pose for your ‘Before’ photo.”

We started talking about these ads over dinner the other night, and Tim went nuts! Just ballistic! I backed up into the kitchen so I was within easy reach of the big knives in case he hulked out and started smashing things, but instead he focused his anger on shouting about the ad. He spends most of his time surfing the internet, so he must’ve seen every variation of this ad by now. The one he really hates is this one:

What’s wrong with the ‘before’ girl, he wants to know? She’s cute, but she’s not presented that way, while the skinny ‘after’ girl in the skimpy tank top obviously is.

Speaking as a member of the Skinny race, by the way, I’m here to tell you it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. This is a point I rarely bring up, because I’m met with lots of rolled eyes and comments like, Sure, easy for you to say, you can eat all you want! Apparently, taking personal shots at Skinnies is okay.

But really, it kind of sucks. Just for a start, I live in Wisconsin. For nine months of every year, I can’t get warm no matter how many layers of clothes I wear. This being an especially hard winter, I haven’t been able to walk outside if I’m not swaddled in a down-filled parka that makes me look like a six-foot tall beige hand grenade.

And I can’t buy clothes that fit. Everything I try on hangs off me. Unless I go to the trouble of having clothes tailored, I usually look like a broken storefront awning, flapping in the breeze. Of course, I could go the route of women’s fashion and wear clothes that look as though they were made for children, but I don’t like stretchy fabrics. And I’m almost fifty.

Finally, so what if I can eat all I want? I’m reviled by almost everyone for every bite I put in my mouth, so it’s not like I can enjoy it. Luckily for me, I have a sweetheart who not only likes to eat good food, she has fun preparing it, and even enjoys growing some of her own. Our number one rule for our stomachs is: Find good food, then eat it. Not too much. And serve a nice wine with it, too.

Choo-choo magazine came today. This puts me in a terrible bind. I’m just one chapter short of finishing Matt Taibbi’s The Great Derangement, a book you can gobble up the way kids eat cotton candy, especially if you have a snarky, cynical view of the federal government. I was thinking I could polish it off tonight before lights out, but when I came in from parking the car in the garage and saw the front cover of Rail Model Craftsman peeking out from the litter of junk mail on the dining room table, I began to doubt.

My doubt deepened when I thumbed through it quickly before dinner: There were two articles on scratchbuilding, the art of piecing together tiny little models from bits of balsa wood, plastic and cardboard. One was a quick and dirty how-to on modeling old-time passenger cars. It was only four pages, but any time I can read an article on passenger cars, my heart quickens and I get all veklempt. Oh, thank you! Thank you! I weep gratefully to the gods of steam and steel.

The other was an incredibly detailed, lengthy article on modeling a trackside scene near and dear to my heart: a pickle factory. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I’m a huge fan of the pickle industry, which, if you read the kind of magazines I do, consisted entirely of huge wooden brining tubs poking up through the wooden stages of trackside pickle stations. I built myself a pickle-hauling railroad car years ago, but I’ve been waiting to build a pickle platform until I could find a suitable plan and article to guide my hand. This just might be the one.

I stopped reading Ernest Shackleton’s South after he hired a ship to retrieve the rest of his stranded expidition and bring them back to civilization. Not on his first try; he hired three or four different ships and was turned away time after time when ice floes blocked his path and the ship he was on either ran low on coal or was in danger of being crushed. On the final try he arrived at Elephant Island to find a gale had blown the seas clear of ice, sailed straight into the bay to pick everyone up and was headed north within an hour.

There was another hundred pages to the book devoted to Shackleton’s efforts to rescue the crew of the Aurora, the ship that was supposed to lay supplies and pick up the expedition after it crossed Antarctica, only it wouldn’t have been there. Shackleton doesn’t come out and say why, only hints that something awful happened. I may get around to reading it later, but for now I’m too distracted by noisy Rolling Stone writers and choo-choos.

Dinner last night was pulled pork in barbeque sauce on home-baked buns. Scrumptious, but they had the unfortunate side-effect of causing every one of us to violate EPA air quality standards for the rest of the night. Not sure why.

At first, I thought it was just me. My gut seems to take a certain antisocial glee in digesting seemingly innocuous foods in volitile ways, thus ensuring I can never have friends or linger over coffee in quiet restaurants, but shortly after dinner I settled down on the sofa with My Darling B to read a few chapters and, ever the thoughtful one, she apologized in advance. A little later on, after Tim had eaten his share, he did not apologize even though he punched a mammoth hole in the ozone.

Tim brought a pair of candy canes down to my basement lair, where I sat at my keyboard, driveling away. “I thought we had an understanding about this,” he said, waggling the candy at me. I’d left them hanging from the arm of the floor lamp in the living room after plucking them, one at a time, from the advent calendar that B hangs ever year at the beginning of December. It has twenty-four little appliqued pockets that look like Christmas stockings, into which she tucks one candy cane each. We take turns plucking a cane out each night until Christmas eve.

Tim can eat every one of his; he’s a kid. I’m way past the age when I could eat armloads of candy every day, and I certainly can’t eat a candy cane night after night. Bleh. So I march up to the advent calendar and take a cane back to my chair, as tradition demands, but I end up hanging most of them from the arm of the floor lamp.

For reasons that will probably come to light only after years of therapy, this drives Tim up a tree. He isn’t merely annoyed, he threatens me with grievous bodily assault if he catches sight of so much as a single candy cane dangling from the floor lamp for more than two nights in a row. “What’d I tell you about this?” he rants. “Why can’t you just eat them?” I don’t know, why can’t you hang up the bath mat when you’re done washing up? It’s probably related.

The sun shone bright and golden over the city as we drove to work this morning. It’s not all that new to drive to work in daylight; been going on for more than a month now, but today, as I came around the bend at the top of Williamson Street approaching Blair, we were met with the image of A Shining City On A Hill: The capital building’s dome glowing, and hundreds of picture windows in towering high rises aflame in the light of the rising sun. Once again, I found myself thinking how cool it would be to live closer to town, but to do that we’d have to be able to find a condo that cost less than a thousand dollars a square foot. And sell our house. And move again. Even if the economy would let us do the first two, that last one’s a deal breaker.

And of course, the economy’s not going to let us do the second one, either. The first one would only be easy to middling hard, but selling our house would be a challenge if all Pizarro’s gold was heaped in the basement. Not that I’d sell it if it was.

“What we should have done,” My Darling B said as we finished our wine after dinner, “was bought a house we couldn’t afford so the bank would foreclose and we could apply for some economic stimulus.” We’d had the radio on all through dinner, listening to Tom Ashbrook hyperventilate over President Obama’s dire warnings at last night’s press conference. The hour before that, we’d heard Ben Merens inviting listeners to call in and share their experiences of simplified life, now that we all had to make do with less.

“If only we’d known,” I agreed, nodding. Not that we were completely blinkered, as we went house-hunting that year. I sort of figured we were buying at the wrong time, that property values were hugely inflated, but I never would’ve counted on the feds tossing bales of money at us if only we’d thrown caution to the wind, bought Camelot on ten acres of land and mortgaged it with an adjustable-rate, five-year balloon loan. They’d given away bags of money before, but mostly to airlines, and savings & loan banks. Who knew they were going to bail out laughably over-invested working-class joes?

Are they really doing that, by the way? I have yet to hear from anyone, even on a radio talk show, who has received a bailout buck, much less a boon, to save him from foreclosure, even though every politician who gets some talk-show time uses it to reiterate his steadfast support for the working class. *smacks head* Of course! That’s the first clue that they’re doing anything but giving it to the working class. My bad, sorry.

Phone call from Sean in The Mile High City last night. He’d just spent a twelve-hour day at work and wasn’t too happy about it. Obligatory catch-up: Sean teaches preschool kids in Denver Public Schools. All of them. Or that’s what it felt like for him today, apparently.

Trying to imagine what a downer a twelve-hour work day would be for a twenty-four year old, I cast my mind back into the distant past: Let’s see, when I was his age, I was doing, hmmm, what? O ye gods! I was in basic training! This would be the anniversary of my second week in basic, the week they shaved off all my hair, the week I was “pickled” , the week I remembered to hoist my arm high in the air in answer to the question, “Does anybody here know how to play a musical instrument?”

Those were days of getting up at five in the morning, dressing in thirty seconds, eating in two minutes, marching even when we went to the bathroom, and turning in at eight. So yeah, I have a pretty good memory of long days that sucked in a major way.

I didn’t tell him that, although maybe I should have. I got the feeling he mostly wanted to vent, though, not to commiserate with me, so I let him go a bit, then called his mother to the phone, because mothers know the best things to say to their boys when they’ve had a lousy day.

Three people called to beg for money tonight. I nuked them all.

We receive so many calls from people trying to shake us down for cash that, for years now, we’ve been letting the phone ring until the answering machine picks up. So many of the people I know do that, I wonder if anybody answers their phones any more?

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when the speaker on the machine kicks in it’s either dead air, a dial tone, or a recorded message, so we haven’t felt much like changing our tactics. Lately, though, the beggars have been changing theirs, hanging on until the machine picks up, then trying to fish us with, “Hello? Dave? Are you there?” Clever girl.

So what I’ve been doing for about a week now is answering the phone on the first ring, letting them make their pitch until they get to the part about asking for money, then interrupting and telling them as quickly as I can, so they can’t regain traction, I make all my donations through the United Way, but thanks for calling. So far, that’s worked like a stake through their ghoulish little blood-sucking hearts, all except for the woman who told me that kids with cancer were going to die if I didn’t cough up some extra cash. The phone’s still a little frost-covered from the reply I gave her.

I haven’t noticed that their enthusiasm for calling me has waned any, yet. The Cancer Kids called back again tonight, not the same woman as before, so she obviously didn’t have time to make a note on her computer before my answer froze her solid. Or maybe she did; I gave him my one-liner and he said, simply, Thanks, and hung up without trying to pin the deaths of cancer-stricken children on my cold, tiny heart.

A cop called trying to sell me raffle tickets; they’ve always been pretty easy to say no to. Raffle tickets? Somebody must be buying them, because they’ve been calling year after year.

The last caller was the happiest, showering me with blessings and wishes for a godly life. Wow, did he get the wrong guy. Two seconds later, he was asking me for a hundred bucks, but no less than fifty — which would I prefer to give? I shot him my stock answer, and he was off in a flurry of chicken feathers.

I have no idea if word will eventually get around, and even if it does, I’m not sure if it’ll make them any less likely to bother me. Asking nicely doesn’t work; I’ve tried that. Talking dirty to them doesn’t do the job; Tim’s played that one for all it’s worth. Letting it ring hasn’t discouraged them. If nothing else, this is my revenge: I’m donating money, but not to you, said as nicely as possible, until they try to whip a little guilt on me.

How did it get to be Wednesday already? No, I’m serious. I don’t remember how. I doinked around the house for about an hour this morning with the belief firmly rooted in my head that it was Tuesday, and didn’t realize my mistake until I started typing this entry.

By the way, why’s it still called “typing” when nobody under the age of twenty-five knows what a typewriter looks like, much less how to use one? When my kids were in school, and the local public school system was devoted to the terribly progressive ideal of putting a computer on every desk, they used to take classes in “keyboarding”. I figured that was the end of “typing” as I knew it.

And people have been “keying in the data” for at least twenty-five years now, but even so I still hear people say “typing” long after the typewriter’s been completely eliminated from the scene. I don’t even see them show up much at garage sales any longer. I guess that words are set in type, so by a mere technicality you could argue it’s still a useful word, but using it as a verb still sounds weird. Like dialing a phone, even though only weirdo throwbacks like me have phones with dials on them anymore.

There are still a few typewriters in the office where I work, incidentally. The staff use them to address envelopes. I’m pretty sure that’s all they use them for, though. Why, I don’t know. We have a printer that will take envelopes and I use it all the time, but nobody else will. I gave my typewriter to the first person whose typewriter broke down, and now I have more desk space and my envelopes are typo-free.

I wonder if I could blow another three paragraphs rambling about “typo?” Hmmmm.

My lost sense of time is probably the result of the self-reproducing heap of paperwork that lives on my desk at the office. It’s just a feeling; I know in the thinking part of my brain that I’ve dispatched truckloads of paperwork from desk and out into the Great Void, but the animal part of my brain can only see that the damned pile is there now, and reacts with panic so hideous that I seem to be missing whole days of my week.

Or, maybe I’m just losing my mind.

Just about the time I think I’m getting the hang of things at the office, maybe even feeling good about it, along comes The Cosmic Costant to smack me back into place.

We’ve got a software tool that mines the Data Warehouse to generate reports that can show us whether or not we’re doing our jobs correctly. You can probably see how that would be useful. And isn’t “Data Warehouse” a cool name for information storage? If you grew up in the Space Age, as I did, it probably conjurs up a mental image of a room filled with tall, glass-fronted cabinets and twirling reel-to-reel tapes, what we used to call “memory banks,” another term that sounded so cool back in 1969 but sounds dorky as all hell now.

Anyway, I attended a two-day seminar to learn just the beginnings of how to use this software tool, and I got pretty good, I thought, at cobbling together reports that could be useful, if I only had the spare time to study them for more than two minutes between phone calls. One project I was working on was a report that might one day have eliminated hours of tedious work for our staff, but I barely got started on it before the world blew up and I was suddenly busy as bees used to be before Colony Collapse Disorder made them go bye-bye.

The refinancing craze that made me so busy also quadrupled the amount of time our staff had to spend on the tedious work I was trying to eliminate. Since I couldn’t spend any time tinkering with the Data Warehouse report, I asked my boss to hire more temps to do the work that was piling up, and he did. It still weirds me out that people will follow my advice that way.

Then last week, when the time this very tedious task was taking up got so humungously long that we literally couldn’t afford to let it keep growing, my supervisor tinkered with the problem of generating a Data Warehouse report, and what do you know, he came up with a report that sent the tedious task yelping into the darkness with its tail between its legs. And there was much rejoicing.

So I asked Michael to show me how to generate the report, thinking it was as easy as some of the reports I was used to cobbling together. He sat down with me at my desk this afternoon to walk me through it. “Start by opening up the report generator to find out what the number of the last report was,” he began, and pointed helpfully so I could see which number he was talking about. The screen was awash in columns of numbers.

“Then open the payoff request software,” he continued, “and copy all the payoffs generated after the number of the last report.

“Okay, now paste that into an Excel spread sheet.

“Sort by account number. If the leading zeroes get dropped, like they did here, you have to add them.

“Now save it as a text file.

“Import the text file into the report generator. If the account numbers get scrambled, you’ll have to use the compute function to reconstitute them ...”

I was pretty much lost already, and he’d only just gotten started. Twenty minutes later I managed to generate a complete report, but it was like hitting the lottery. If I could somehow do it twice, I’d still feel it was plain dumb luck. And obviously I’ve got a lot more to learn about mining the Data Warehouse.

We got an earful of sound bites from the grandstanding big mouths in Congress who grilled the CEOs of the nation’s eight biggest banks. Congress is always calling people to testify, and ends up grilling them every time. I’ve got to wonder why anybody goes anymore. It can’t be for the good company. Maybe they serve doughnuts and coffee before they start the grilling, just to soften people up a bit, try to get them to relax, let their guard down. That’s what I’d do if I were a blowhard with the authority to command the richest men in the nation to attend my bloviate-o-fest whenever it pleased me to bark at them for a while.

Their chief complaint seemed to be that they weren’t lending money after the feds heaved it through their front doors with pitchforks. They seem to have expected the banks to lend every dollar of it immediately, and very strongly implied that if bank managers weren’t out in front of each branch office, dragging passers-by in off the street with shepherd’s crooks, then stuffing their pockets with hundred-dollar bills before turning them loose, the CEOs weren’t doing their jobs to the satisfaction of The American People.

This line of argument appeared to confound the CEOs. It certainly confounds me. Has a day gone by since this mess blew up that one pundit or another railed against bankers, the rat bastards who brought this all down on us? Making all those loans to people with no income, no assets and no down payment; Why even bother to sign the papers? Might as well just give the money away! And so on, yadda yadda yadda.

So banks tightened their standards, tried to make smarter loans, and get the other side of their metaphorical face slapped. What do you think you’re doing? Better start lending that money! Make it snappy! Messages don’t come more mixed than that.

Incidentally, I haven’t the tiniest clue where all these non-lending banks are. The particular bank I work in, and the forty-two dozen banks who call me up on any given day to pepper me with requests for information about refinancing, are lending tons of money. The picture I get is like that game show with the big glass booth filled with money. A fan’s blowing around so it looks a lot like a snow globe, and contestants try to grab as much as they can in sixty seconds. Maybe it’s not exactly like that, but it’s as far as possibles from the picture of a barren, frozen credit market that’s painted in the news every day. I honestly feel like I work on another planet sometimes.

I just passed the one-hundred page mark while reading Apollo, The Race To The Moon, and I’m happy to keep going. I’m even happier to find out it’s about the people I always considered the heroes of The Space Age, the guys who set up the Agency, cast an eye on the landscape to lay out the spaceports, and designed and built the gadgets that put men in space.

Apollo, The Race To The Moon is the stories of Rob Gilruth, Chris Kraft, Max Faget and dozens of other guys you probably never heard of until Tom Hanks starred in Apollo 13, then helped produce From The Earth To The Moon and put a jaunty, Dennis Quaid-like grin back on The Space Age. Remember Quaid as Gordon Coooper in the film version of The Right Stuff? Just like that.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut, of course, but if I’d realized then what I know now, I’d have paid a lot more attention to my math course work and shot for a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Sixteen guys went to the moon, but forty thousand people made it possible for them to get there. If I’d had any idea that learning calculus might have made me forty thousand and one ... oh, I still probably would’ve screwed around in the back of the room, because I didn’t have any idea. I wanted to be an astronaut. Every eight-year-old boy did after July 16, 1969. But what a dream.

For dinner on Guy Night, I got away with boiling some spaghetti and slathering it with bottled sauce. I haven’t tried doing that in years.

The sauce was okay, nowhere near as good as the home-made sauce My Darling B whips together, but I didn’t have the time or the talent to try that. The label said it was “Garlic Roasted Garlic” sauce; not just “garlic” sauce, or “roasted garlic” sauce. They wanted you to know there was more garlic in this sauce. Luckily for them, doubling the garlic was a positive selling point with me.

Spaghetti is spaghetti, although maybe not. I just grabbed the first package of pasta I saw that said “spaghetti” and had “organic” on the label. I wonder if the FDA guidelines for “organic” food allow a certain amount of rat hair and bug parts, the way they do for other foods? Now that I think about it, for “organic” they could even allow more and argue that, hey, rat hair’s organic! What are you bitching about?

And, because you can never have too much starch in your diet, I bought a loaf of crusty rosemary bread, to soak up the sauce. Bliss!

Back in 1961 when the folks at NASA were trying to figure out how to land men on the moon, they came up with the F-1 engine, still considered to be the biggest, most powerful rocket engine ever built. It had a problem, though. It was so huge that the fuel burned in a way that made the engine unstable, which is an engineering term that means it blew up. Engineers could light the engines just fine, but shock waves inside the monstrous engine bell quickly tore the whole thing apart if they didn’t shut it down right away. That’s a problem you have to fix if your engine has to run at least three minutes to put a rocket into orbit.

What the engineers did was install a set of baffles that, most of the time, kept the burning gasses from swirling out of control, but not all the time. To make sure the fuel would always burn evenly, NASA engineers had to find a way to force the engine to become unstable, and because they were all guys, they used what any guy would use to try to make a rocket engine blow up: Bombs.

You don’t have to take my word for it; you can go look this up yourself. They’d light up the engine, get it running at full power, and then, if it didn’t explode all by itself, they’d shove a bomb up the bell, set it off and see if it stabilized. Engineers who went to college for years and were considered freaking geniuses thought this up.

Just incidentally, they were hoping to get the engine to snuff itself if the fuel wasn’t burning evenly within four-tenths of a second after the bomb went off. They not only solved the problem, they fine-tuned the engine so that it would stabilize itself in just one-tenth of a second. They exploded bombs in the engine and it was purring like a kitten again in one-tenth of a second! I get all goose-pimply just thinking about it.

And that’s my latest book report. You can learn all this and more by reading Apollo, The Race To The Moon by Murray and Cox. It’s geek-o-riffic!

Bloody Orange. Remember that. I’ll explain in a bit.

I had a very important date to keep with My Darling B at Peppino’s restaurant yesterday evening. Over the past two years, we’ve met there for dinner each and every Friday the Thirteenth after work. It’s very expensive for us but, luckily, there are only three times this year that the thirteenth falls on a Friday.

Our waiter this time was new, which wasn’t all that unexpected. We hadn’t been there in months, and I imagine there’s a brisk turnover of hired help even at an upscale place like Peppino’s. I suspect last night might have been our waiter’s first Friday on the job. I have no complaints; he gave us good service, but everything he said seemed to be something he’d been practicing in front of a mirror for a couple of days, even when he said, “Oh, you’re very welcome,” every time I said “Thank you.” He never said just, “You’re welcome,” or “Oh! You’re welcome.” He said, “Oh, you’re very welcome” every single time. It was like being waited on by a Disneyland animatron.

We started with drinks. I’d had the kind of day where I felt a certain need for a double whiskey, the cheapest kind they had, because I would’ve knocked it back in one gulp, and that’s exactly why I didn’t order one. Instead, I asked for a bottle of good old Fat Cow amber ale, and nursed it through the first and second course. My Darling B asked for a glass of Malbec, and it turned out to be tasty enough that we ordered a bottle and had that with the main course. Tim was coming to pick us up after the meal, so neither of us had any worries about driving home. Let me put that another way: We had no worries about being stopped after a few glasses of wine. Aw, I shouldn’t poke fun of Tim’s driving; he did us a service, and he really truly restrains himself when he’s driving us anywhere. He hasn’t scared me witless in months.

Our customary appetizer, crab cakes, was scrumptious as always, but the dressings on the salad were so peppery that I ate only half of mine and left the rest so I could have some time to let the fire in my mouth die down a bit in the hope I’d be able to taste the main course when it finally came. The last of the cold beer helped quite a bit there.

B chose the filet mingon as her main course; I chose a grilled salmon fillet. They were both excellent, meals to make us want to kick off our shoes and dance. We didn’t do that, because it’s sort of a tiny restaurant, so we just rolled our eyes back and made yummy sounds instead.

When we were finished and the waiter came to take our plates away, I asked for the dessert menu. They usually offer some delicious cake or other sweet trifle we can share as we linger over coffee. There’s no dessert menu, the waiter explained. They had just three or four choices for dessert, something like cannoli, tiramisu and “bloody orange cake.”

That last one, what was it again? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t have to. He repeated “bloody orange” at least a half-dozen times to emphasize that it was made with “bloody orange” liqueur. Must be a favorite with the zombies who hang out at the Count Dracula Lounge. We asked him to give us a few moments to think it over, and when he came back, B gently nudged him in another direction by asking him to describe the blood orange cake again, but again he said it was a “bloody orange“ cake, made with “bloody orange” liqueur.

I’ve heard of a blood orange, but never a bloody orange. When I asked the google later about “bloody orange liqueur,” I got zero results. I did get a few kazillion hits for a mixed drink known as a Bloody Orange, but I don’t think that’s what the cake was made from. When the waiter came back to take our dessert order, I tried, one more time, to nudge him in what I thought was the right direction. “We’d like to try the blood orange cake,” I said, as off-handedly as possible, and I swear to Zeus he frowned and acted for a moment as though he didn’t know what I was talking about, then smiled and said, “Oh, the bloody orange cake, yes, sir. I’ll bring you one right away.”

Oh, I give up.

It was delicious, by the way. And it gave me cramps. “It’s very creamy,” B cautioned me as she tasted it. I should have listened to her. She has a palate so sensitive she can identify every ingredient in a dish, but I thought, Aw, I’m only having a few spoonfuls, what can it hurt? Well, I produced enough gas to fill the Goodyear blimp, and the bloating kept me awake most of the night. So the next time she says that I’ll know to stop at just a taste, sit back and enjoy the memory of a wonderful meal.

We blew off breakfast at the farmer’s market again this morning. I just know that’s going to come back to bite us in the ass, karmickly speaking, but we made a decision the day before and wanted to stick to it.

Every morning, we drive past The Mermaid Cafe on the way to work and, at least once a week, one of us says, “We really ought to stop there some day.” Well, today was that day. I’d heard good things about it, and there was that Joni Mitchell song stuck in my head, and I just wanted to take B to some place new.

It turned out to be a good pick. The shop itself had a very cozy, friendly atmosphere. There were lots of people there this morning, obviously locals who visited so regularly that the Mermaid was as familiar to them as their dining room. We waited a bit as the woman behind the counter finished making hot chocolate in a couple of mugs big enough to swim laps in, then ordered breakfast sandwiches.

I have to admit, I wasn’t paying enough attention to realize I was ordering a breakfast sandwich. I expected to get a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon, and when it came between two pieces of toasted panini I was taken aback for just a moment, but it was so scrumptious I didn’t mind.

They serve coffee in three sizes: regular, large and bottomless. I asked for large, just to see what that was like, and it came in one of the bathtub-sized mugs I’d seen her make the hot chocolate in. “Bottomless” must be for regulars like the guy who was reading the entire daily issue of The New York Times in the front of the shop.

After breakfast we drove to the market to pick up a pork shoulder and some sausages, then I had to stop at Saint Vinnie’s to check out the book store, of course, but once that was done, we went home.

I’ve been spending some time in the work shop, brushing stain a shelf, but it was too cold today to open the windows, so if I start to sound as if I’ve been sniffing glue, that’s why. Of course, if you thought I’ve sounded all along as if I’ve been sniffing glue, I have no explanation for that, other than This Is Drivel.

I finally finished the shelf I’ve been promising to make for My Darling B to put her photos on. She had a pair of store-bought pine shelves once upon a time, but they were just ghastly, rough-cut things, and when I came across them as I was unpacking I stuffed them away in a corner of the basement so remote, even I can’t find them now. “I’ll get you some new shelves,” I kept telling her, then kept putting it off.

I’ve been in the shelf-building mode lately, though. After putting up a shelf in the kitchen that has become not only extremely useful but turned out to be not at all bad-looking, if I do say so myself, I bought some more lumber to make another kitchen shelf and, finally, a decorative shelf for B’s photos, which she wanted over the sofa in the living room. I ended up making her shelf first, hoping to have it done by Valentine’s Day. It didn’t get done until today, but, oh well. Close enough?

She wanted two shelves, overlapping slightly, and I used her design specification to make them one unit. I thought it would be easier to hang a box-like frame, and I wanted to try cutting the sides of the box so they’d look a little artsy-fartsy. I don’t know if anybody would call the way it turned out “art”, but I’m pretty happy with it, and, more important, so is B.

It’s been put together for about a week now, just waiting to be stained. I was hoping for some warm weather last weekend, and when that didn’t happen, maybe this weekend, but it’s still below freezing. I didn’t want to wait any longer, so I said to heck with it, and stained it anyway, with the windows closed. It didn’t seem to be as smelly as I thought, but the problem with working with volatile chemicals is you never know if they’re going to cause brain damage until you’re lying on the floor in a spreading pool of your own bile. I’m still upright, so I guess they weren’t as bad as all that.

To be able to even start on the shelf, though, I had to do some serious cleaning-up in the work shop, which has slowly slipped from chaos to cataclysmic disaster this winter. Knocking down a wall to make more room was big step in the right direction, but to do that I had to dismantle a lot of shelving and other storage space, and I still haven’t put it all back. Okay, I haven’t put any of it back.

I have a work bench, for instance, but all the crap that gravitated toward its flat, open surface made it unusable as long as a month ago. I decided I could really use it today, so the first thing I did after showering and putting on clothes was drive over to the hardware store and buy a couple bags full of handy-dandy plastic storage bins that hang from the wall. Everything that was on the bench went into those bins, and I still had room left over. Yet another plan that I managed somehow to pull off. I love it.

My Darling B called me in the evening from her cell phone to let me know she got out of work a little bit late and probably wouldn’t make it into town to pick me up until quarter past five at the earliest. She was terribly apologetic, believing that her delay would make me feel absolutely wretched, but the first thought that crossed my mind, I swear, was: Hot dog! I’ll have just enough time to get those tracking tables done before I have to leave.

The next thought to cross my mind was: O, ye gods, I didn’t mean it! And I cringed, waiting for the thunderbolt that I expected would put me out of my self-confessed misery, because who thinks thoughts like that? What kind of sad sack chortles with glee when fate sentences him to wait an extra quarter-hour in his cubicle? An office drone that doesn’t deserve to live, that’s who.

But the gods were feeling very generous today, or they simply weren’t paying attention, because they did not smite me. Yea verily, I even managed to update those tracking tables.

Dinner was beans and weenies. We’re practicing for dinners to come in the continuing Economic Crisis.

Not really. Okay, yes, really. It was a crock pot full of beans and weenies. What else could it be but economizing? Far from being an old boiled shoe, though, it was sausage links from our favorite local farmer, well stewed with pinto beans in the crock pot while we were away, nose to the grindstone at our day jobs. Maybe by the time the economy hits bedrock we’ll be substituting with Armor hot dogs and Van De Camp’s canned beans in high-fructose corn syrup, but tonight we could still afford the good stuff, so it was all locally grown and/or organic, whatever that means to you.

Except for a bottle of Shiraz from Ozzie-Ba-Ru winery in Australia. Hardly local, not sure if it’s organic or not. Don’t really care, you won’t be surprised to learn, but you probably would be surprised by how well a really good syrah goes with beans and weenies. B will scoff at my crude palate, but she had beer with the beans, so she doesn’t know.

I’m not sure what the difference between Shiraz and syrah is, by the way, or if there is a meaningful difference. According to Wikipedia, they’re the same thing, and, as we all know, there’s no higher authority on the interwebs than Wikipedia. You may be seated now. I like the look of the work “syrah” but I’m not sure how to say it, whereas I can pronounce “shiraz” even after I’ve drunk too much to ask for anything else, and expect to get some.

After dinner, we listened as Jim Doyle, the governor of the Great State of Wisconsin, delivered his budget to the state assembly. We’ve become such fuddy-duddies that we not only stay at the table to sip tea and listen to the governor’s biennial budget presentation, we listen to him make it on the radio as if he were FDR giving a fireside chat. And also, we use words like “fuddy-duddy.” That’s the first warning sign right there.

These are tough times, he said, and, blah de blah blah blah. He really said that. I don’t think he meant to, he was just getting tired, and probably hadn’t rehearsed it more than once. These new-fangled politicians, they’re not used to delivering a speech any longer than a two-second sound bite. It plays all right on the evening news, but it makes for a long, uncomfortable silence when you try it at a public appearance. Even the crickets are too embarrassed to start chirping.

What we were tuned in for was some teensy-tiny hint Doyle might give away to indicate whether or not state employees, like My Darling B, could expect to find the front door open and the lights on when they went to work in the morning. There have been rumors of furloughs, and the big D said he won’t rule it out, but hasn’t said it’s coming, either. He touched gingerly at the subject once or twice tonight, but in the end, he didn’t really commit himself one way or the other. Big surprise there. So we’ll just cross our fingers before we hit the road tomorrow, and hope for the best.

I had to remind myself yesterday evening, as I tiptoed through a minefield of day-old cat barf to get to the toilet downstairs, of all the good things that make us want to keep cats, and try to make those reasons stack up higher than the one, big drawback that most immediately confronted me.

There are others. To name just one: I’m not crazy about raking the cat box every day. I’ve managed to convince myself that scooping up sand-covered poop is better than taking a dog for a walk every morning and every night, because then not only do you have to hop right out of bed, get dressed and walk the dog in all kinds of weather, you still have to pick up their poop. Cats have it over dogs as far as the poop question is concerned, no contest.

The barf thing definitely detracts from all their advantages, though. Just for a start, trying to wipe up a freshly-yakked pile of warm, gooshey puke is at least ten times worse than picking up poop. I can’t put my hand in a plastic bag, neatly pluck the barf up off the floor, turn the bag inside-out and throw it away. If I could figure out a way to make that possible, I’d have my retirement fund all sewn up.

Then there’s the thrill of the unexpected. You never know where they’re going to yak. Cats can go virtually anywhere in a house. They can get into a lot of places we can’t. And, by corollary, they can barf in them. Makes me cringe just thinking about it.

Luckily, I guess, they typically choose the most open, heavily-trafficked part of a room to hork up their dinner, making their little gifts easy to find, and, again sort of luckily, they tend do it while we’re around, so we can clean it up right away. Boy, does that make me feel lucky.

If they weren’t so damned cuddly, I would just as soon sell them to the science lab for medical experiments, but I’m a soft touch, and tend to forget all about the barf when one of them crawls into my lap and starts purring.

The stuff that I poured into my hands this morning from the bottle labeled “conditioner” sure didn’t look like hair conditioner. I’d refilled it just the day before from another, bigger bottle labeled “conditioner,” but labels don’t mean much in our bathroom. My Darling B refills them from the bulk bins at the co-op, and sometimes grabs any handy container whether it’s got the right label on it or it doesn’t.

Once I was thinking about it, I even had a dim memory of her refilling the big bottle that used to be conditioner with hand soap. So the stuff that I was getting ready to slap on my head may or may not have been hand soap. I really wasn’t sure. Maybe it would soften my hair and make it easier to comb, and maybe it would explode into a frothy lather. The cautious thing to do in a case like this would have been to wash it down the drain and deal with tangly hair, but I’ve rarely felt anything resembling restraint at five o’clock in the morning. I smooshed it into my hair.

It was hand soap. Valuable lesson learned, there.

Later I came up out of my basement lair when I heard B moving around, so I could warn her about the hand soap. I’d placed a new bottle of conditioner by the door on my way out, but hadn’t remembered to remove the mislabeled bottle from the shower. “There’s no conditioner in there,” I said through the door, gently knocking.

But she was still too groggy to make any sense of my warning. Or maybe I was still too groggy to put one together, I don’t know. When she opened the door an inch to see if that would help, I had to push the new bottle through the crack, right into her face, to get it through to her that she shouldn’t use the bottle that was in the shower. It all came out all right, in the end, and a good thing, too. I’m sure I would’ve gotten the blame if she’d smooshed hand soap into her hair.

There was a light dusting of new snow on the ground this morning. Not too much, but just enough to let us all know that it was still cold and winter was not finished with us just yet, in case the last week of mild temps and bare ground had given us some kind of false hope. I hadn’t, but I got the feeling from the whimpering sound coming from the corner where she’d curled up in a ball that My Darling B had dared to think spring was near.

I’m a guy who likes hats quite a lot. I don’t know what it is this woman’s wearing. I thought at first it must be some variety of giant garden slug. I’ve seen garden slugs the size of bratwurst, and sea slugs at least this big, so it wouldn’t surprise me, but I haven’t seen any with feathery tails. If it were, though, it wouldn’t be a hat, would it? So just because it’s not a garden slug, doesn’t make it a hat, even though it’s sitting on her head. In this particular case, especially because it’s on her head.

I’ll admit I’m stuck on tradition, favoring the old tried-and-true styles: fedoras, bowlers, straw skimmers, a classic Panama. I’m intrigued if it’s a little out of the ordinary, and by that I mean maybe it’s got a band that’s navy blue instead of black or gray, or maybe sports a discrete spray of feathers about an inch high. But go too far off into weird, like Julie Weiss here, and you’ve lost me. She’s a professional costume designer. Can you tell?

I have no time for hats without class, and this one clearly doesn’t have any. A hat with class makes you look cool, not like someone’s played a joke on you by tricking you into appearing in public with a feathered garden slug trying to crawl up your brow.

Before I go any further, I want to be clear about one very important distinction: When I say “hats,” I’m not talking about baseball caps.

I don’t mind baseball caps. I even wear them now and again, but, although it is undeniably a hat, it’s not the headpiece for all occasions some people seem to think it is. Showing up at a wedding in a t-shirt a “favorite” pair of well-worn jeans is just as gauche as wearing a baseball cap with a sport jacket and tie. You think you look cool dressed like that, because you saw Brad Pitt get away with it in a movie, but once again you’ve been tricked into putting a slug on your face.

Nor does owning a baseball cap require that one wears it twenty-four hours a day. There are times, however hard it may be for some men to believe it, when one should remove one’s hat. During sex, for instance, or at the dinner table. Would you like to sit across the table from someone, even a loved one, who had a giant, feathered slug silently watching you from atop her head? Probably not.

I get all kinds of Miss Manners when the subject is hats, you see. Opinionated to a fault. Well, that’s what fashion does to me.

I have a growing collection of books about the Apollo program. Apollo, The Race To The Moon, by Murray and Cox, is very much unlike the others. It focuses on the cast of thousands who brought the program to life, instead of on the more famously well-known astronauts. Names like Armstrong, Aldrin and Lovell barely make cameo appearances, while others like Kranz and Kraft run throughout the book. Getting to know them and watching them do something they truly loved is the point here. Not so much getting to the moon, but their commitment to doing it.

There are a few names here that will be familiar to you if you grew up in the Space Age: Werner von Braun is probably the one nearly anyone would remember. But even though I was one of those astronaut wanna-bes who took for granted that I’d land a job some day as a rocket pilot, or at least a moon bus driver, there were quite a few names I hadn’t known before that were staggeringly significant to the space program. How could I have ever considered myself a science geek and not known and loved engineers with names like Rocco Petrone and Mad Don Arabian? I hang my head in shame to think of it.

Murray and Cox spent three years interviewing them, and put together this refreshingly personal history, instead of the geek-o-rama you often get when you crack open a book about the space program. Not that this wasn’t a long pleasure cruise on the Empress Of The Nerds. Reading about engineers building the biggest rocket ever and shooting it into space was a geek trip that took me back to my younger days, when I looked up to these professional ubernerds as heroes worthy of worship.

My only disappointment was that, after interviewing more than 150 people over a period of three years, all Murry and Cox could write was one slim volume, when they could have easily gone on and on until it was a boxed set big enough to make Stephen King’s gape in awe. If only I could run across that on the used book shelves at Saint Vinnie’s.

There are a lot of different ways to get around. About the most common, at least around here, is by automobile. The fastest is probably by plane, the coolest is without a doubt by train, the greenest is most likely by bicycle, and the oldest is on foot.

This morning I was using the most common to drive home after spending a couple hours at the office. It presented quite a challenge because the streets of our fair city were slipperier than a career politician and covered by five or six inches of new-fallen snow. So long as I kept moving in a straight line I was okay, but I wasn’t actually driving, Newton was. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, he said. Driving anywhere in town today would have provided all but the very dimmest people with the answer to the question, “Why should I have paid attention in science class if I never wanted to be a scientist?”

I kept the comically misnamed steering wheel of my car as close to motionless as I could, since turning it one way or the other only introduced hair-raisingly unpredictable changes to the direction I was going. (I’ve got very long hair, so whatever changes you were imagining, multiply them a couple more times.) It was a little like turning the rudder on a boat that had no keel; I could get the car to point in a new direction, but that didn’t mean it would necessarily go that way. Very unsettling.

My strategy worked only so long as I didn’t catch up to other people who were getting around using the oldest method. For some reason that I still haven’t figured out, a lot of them were walking in the road instead of along the sidewalk. SUVs were nearly pinballing off each other to avoid them, which, now that I think about it, would have been a pretty good reason to make walking in the street on a day like this worthwhile. But still.

My trip to the office was short. I don’t think My Darling B believed me when I said I wouldn’t be very long, but I kept it to just two hours. All I wanted to do was clean up a few things and fiddle with the format of a daily report my boss said he wanted changed. I promised myself I would stay no later than eleven-thirty, and that’s when I locked up and headed home.

But, heading home on Willie Street, custom demanded I stop at Saint Vincent de Paul’s to prowl the aisles of the used book store. A copy of Timothy Ferris’s book, The Whole Shebang, that I spotted last week was still there, and still mewling Buy me! Buy me!. It was only a buck, and I had that in pocket change, so I brought it home along with Michael Collins’s memoir Carrying The Fire. Collins was the Apollo astronaut who held down the fort in orbit around the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin got to go down and land on it, becoming instantly the most famous astronauts after John Glenn. They get all kinds of books written about them, while Collins’s book sat forlornly on the shelf, so I took it home.

Before I got back into the car to see if I could get home in one piece, I crossed the street to Lazy Jane’s because I knew that if I brought home a lemon scone for My Darling B, she’d probably let me smooch her. She did.

My plan today started with reading the Sunday paper with a cup o’ joe in one hand and some toast slathered with honey in the other, and it was very nearly derailed right from the get-go when I bumbled into the kitchen to discover there was no bread left to make toast with. I hate it when that happens.

But as it turns out, pita bread makes pretty good toast. The only trick is, you have to put it under the broiler in the oven for about four minutes, because it doesn’t fit in a toaster. Keep an eye on it at all times or it’ll go from fluffy, cruncy pita to blackened cinder in two shakes. Other than that, no problem.

The next part of my plan for the day called for a shower before I climbed into the car and drove to the convention center to check out the Mad City Model Railroad Show, and here once again my plan very nearly went off the track when I heard the unmistakable sound of Tim stirring from his slumber and, just seconds later, the bathroom door closing. That almost always means he’s gone in there to take a shower, which in turn means that nobody else will get to use the bathroom for at least a half-hour, but this morning I somehow lucked out: he went in there to pee, nothing more, and came out after just a minute or two to empty a box of corn flakes into the biggest ramen bowl he could find, douse it with a quart of milk and take it back to his room to devour it. Thank goodness for morning munchies.

Seeing my one and possibly only chance to get a shower before ten o’clock, I sprange from my seat at the table and sprinted to the bathroom, barricading the door by wedging the towel rack under the knob.

And that’s how I managed to pull all the parts of my plan together. I even got away with parking the car in the hotel parking lot right next door and jumping the fence to walk to the convention center. Otherwise, I would have had to spend five bucks just to park in their lot, right next to the hotel. It was so unethical, but that was five bucks I ended up using to pick up a dome-top passenger car at a bargain price. I suppose I’ll always look at that car and feel just a little guilty, but I’ll probably learn to live with it. Or maybe not. Maybe it’ll keep me up nights. Weirder things have happened.

I had a hot date tonight and didn’t get home until late, so this will be short ...

We drove to the East Gate cinema to see the film everyone’s talking about, Slumdog Millionaire. I haven’t taken My Darling B out to see a movie since we saw Wall-E last July, and as I was prying open my wallet to fork over seventeen-fifty for two tickets, I remembered why.

This is why I don’t understand economics: Back when it cost a dime to see a film, movie theaters were huge, ornate caverns, you bought a bag of popcorn for a nickel, an usher showed you to your seat and there was a newsreel and a cartoon before the main feature. Now, a ticket costs eight seventy-five, which is cheaper than a bucket of popcorn and a drink, the ticket seller points you in the direction of a tiny, distant projection room and the movie is all you get, unless you count the advertisements and the previews.

B bought the snacks, though, which cost eleven bucks. No, really. But I can’t say they didn’t give her her money’s worth. The popcorn came in a pail big enough to feed India for a month, and the medium soda was so huge I couldn’t figure out a way to carry it safely, so I didn’t. One unfortunate slip and we both would have been drenched by the splash.

I didn’t know what to expect from the movie. I’d heard it was supposed to be very good; couldn’t have not known that, what with the Oscars just a day ago. But I also knew that no movie could be as good as all the rooty-toot-toot this one’s been getting. I was surprised when it turned out to be, at its heart, a mooshy-gooshy love story, and I’m a sucker for love stories, the mooshier, the better. Enjoyed it a lot. Not sure it was Oscar-winning, whatever that means anymore, but it made for a nice night out with my best girl.

I had just two things to do tonight; three, if you count eating dinner. It was a damned fine dinner, so I’m not saying it didn’t count. I’d count it if I were printing an agenda of the evening ... oh, hell, since I’m pretty much doing that here, anyway, I’ll count it. Therefore:

ITEM: arrival at Our Humble O’Bode

ITEM: appertifs in the drawing room

ITEM: dinner (and a damned fine one, too)

ITEM: sparkling conversation in the drawing room

ITEM: gather round the television to gaze in rapt awe as Obama rallies Congress to his side

ITEM: clean the bathroom

No, seriously, that was the plan tonight: Watch the Obama, then clean the bathroom. There was no conscious effort to juxtapose the two, I swear, that’s just the way it turned out. Obama was on the telly, and the bathroom needed a clean-out. It happens.

Gawd, that man is quite a rock star, isn’t he? He received a fifteen-minute standing ovation just for entering the room, and couldn’t get away after the speech without signing a couple dozen autographs. Every other sentence he uttered brought the chamber to its feet for another round of applause. Or maybe that’s the way Congress conducts business on a daily basis. They were up and down out of their seats more often than Catholics at Mass, but they seemed to be used to jumping up on cue.

After the speech, the governor of Louisiana delivered the GOP response, but, much as I wanted to listen to yet another politician deliver a cliche-ridden campaign speech, one an evening is my limit. And I had to go give the toilet a good scrubbing.

I’ve got a nick in the end of my right middle finger that makes hitting the I and K keys feel like jabbing myself with darning needles, making typing a bit iffy. Oh, and the comma. That one really stings if I’m not especially careful. The top of the K feels as sharp as a knife’s edge when I poke it with the corner of my finger where the nick is.

And somehow there isn’t a single Band-Aid anywhere in the house, which is sort of a weird way of saying absolutely no Band-Aids, because where else would they be except in the bathroom medicine chest? They wouldn’t be on the coffee table in the living room unless we were a family of slobs who dropped things in the last place we used them. Okay, bad example. They wouldn’t be in the refrigerator and most likely won’t be until we start losing our marbles. Okay, another bad example. Maybe I should have checked the fridge and the coffee table when I went looking for Band-Aids last night, instead of scrabbling around in the medicine chest.

I was desperate enough to look in the bathroom closet, too, even though I knew the odds of finding anything except my comb in there are a million to one. The closet holds each of our own little plastic baskets where we keep our various toiletries. Then there are about a half-dozen other baskets which were, many moons ago, designated to hold toiletries that weren’t ours personally but shared by all, stuff like cough medicine, Q-Tips and, occasionally, Band-Aids.

And actually, what we have in there are the empty containers that used to hold the stuff. We never have the stuff. Is that masochistic, or what? Why would anybody do that? At one time or another, every one of us has come down with a strain of the Martian death flu, or sliced open a femoral artery, and gone rooting around in the bathroom closet in the vain hope of finding an over-the-counter medicine, or a tourniquet. At one time or another, we’ve each emerged from the bathroom to repeat the question, Are we really out of cold medicine / tourniquets / Band-Aids? And the questioner is usually met with cold indifference by whoever happens to be the listener because, hey, it happened to him last week. You’re on your own, buddy.

Every once in a great while, though, I can find a stray Band-Aid in the bottom of one of those baskets if I dredge long enough through the sedimental junk at the bottom, and last night I dredged a long, long time because I was in serious pain, but no joy. There wasn’t so much as a Band-Aid wrapper to be found, and those things are usually every where.

In the end, I just stuck my finger in my mouth and went back to bed, wimpering.

The puppy! The puppy! There’s news about the puppy!

Three and a half months after Barack Obama promised, on national television no less, to finally get his daughters a puppy, Michelle (she lets me call her Michelle) gave People magazine the scoop of the century by revealing there would be an actual, physical puppy in the White House no later than April.

Pundits have been parsing Obama’s every utterance for years. Web sites have sprung up to track how many campaign promises Obama will keep, and how completely. Yet about the puppy, the media have been strangely indifferent, reticent and taciturn.

Until today.

According to Michelle, they’re leaning toward buying a Portuguese water dog. Have you even heard of the breed before? Neither have I. I thought there were basically five, maybe ten breeds of dog: Labrador, Spaniel, Poodle, Beagle, Dachshund, Chihuahua, Retriever ... that’s it. That’s all I can think of. There are probably one or two more, not counting the made-up ones that evil breeders made up just to humiliate the dog race, like Cockapoo, Shi-Tzu and Labradoodles. Why those people haven’t been locked up so they can’t breed a Kakapoopoodookieweeweetinkle is beyond me.

And then of course way back in the mists of time, say around 1950 or so, there was just one breed, “Dog,” so even Spaniel is sort of a made-up breed, I have to admit, but it’s such a cool dog and, way more important, it doesn’t have a boring, made-up name like “Portuguese water dog.” They had a shot at naming a dog breed after their country and that’s the best the Portuguese could come up with? “Water dog?” Lame.

It was raining when Tim dropped us off on Atwood Avenue in front of the Barrymore Theater last night. That should have been our first clue that everything about the evening was going to be pretty weird. Raining in February. There are few things in the universe that make less sense than that.

We asked Tim to drop us off there because we had tickets to see Jonathan Coulton appear at the Barrymore with Paul & Storm. The way this was supposed to work out, we were going to have dinner at Dobhan, a restaurant just down the block, then meander up the street to the Barrymore and, after the show, call a cab to get home. So simple. So foolproof. What could possibly go wrong? Let me count the ways.

It was, as I mentioned, raining when Tim dropped us off, but for some reason neither My Darling B nor I thought to grab an umbrella off the seat of the car as we stepped out onto the curb. As I stood there on the sidewalk, waiting for B, it slowly dawned on me that I was being drenched, so I asked her if maybe we shouldn’t have an umbrella in case we had to wait in line later. She turned around to get one from the car, but Tim was already pulling away.

As I peeled off my jacket to take my seat in the restaurant, I realized that my wallet was not in my jacket pocket, but in my carry-all on the back seat of the car that Tim was now driving home at about sixty miles an hour. I would need the photo ID in my wallet to pick up our tickets at the window later. No ID, no tickets, no show. Without my wallet, it would be a short night out.

I had my cell phone, but I couldn’t get a signal. Isn’t that just the way it goes? I bought a cell phone for situations just like this, and in nearly every situation just like this, I haven’t been able to get a signal. Or the battery’s dead. Last night was a double whammie: unable to find a signal and there was just one bar left on my battery. Icing on the karmic cake, I guess.

So I asked the waiter if I could use the phone. He hesitated just long enough to make me think I had a boogie hanging from the of my nose before he said yes; it wasn’t until later that I realized he probably thought I was asking to use his own personal cell phone, because “phone” means cell phone any more. Nobody assumes you’d want to use a land-line if you had a choice. I don’t think he had ever used the house phone himself, because he wasn’t sure whether or not I’d have to dial ‘9’ to get an outside line.

I left a message on our answering machine asking Tim if he’d be so kind as to drive all the way back into town to bring me my wallet. “Answering machine” ought to be an anachronism by now, don’t you think? Our answering machine is a sleek plastic box no bigger than two slices of toast on a tea saucer. It’s a telephone, actually, but nobody answers it. We keep it only because it’s also an answering machine. But when I hear “answering machine,” I think of a square-cornered, clunky box big enough to hold a pair of hiking boots with a window in the top through which may be seen the slowly-turning reels of magnetic tape that record the voice of your mother saying, “I hate leaving messages on this thing.” She doesn’t say that on the sleek plastic box. She doesn’t leave any message on the sleek plastic box. She got tired of me screening my calls and doesn’t leave messages any more.

The answer to my question was, Yes, Tim would be so kind as to return my wallet. We had just finished our appetizer when he walked through the front door. It wouldn’t be the last heroic thing he did that evening.

We ate dinner at Dobhan, the same restaurant we visited when we stayed in town to see Leo Kottke at the Barrymore. B saw Leo Kottke having dinner at Dobhan before the show, and we half-expected to see Jonathan Coulton there with Paul & Storm, but we found out later, walking to the theater, that we picked the wrong Laotian restaurant last night for dining with the stars. They were eating at Lao Laan Xang, a block closer to the Barrymore. Now we know for next time.

The three musketeers were in a mellow mood tonight, Paul & Storm because Paul evidently had a case of the coughing crud that everyone and his mother has contracted this winter, and JoCo because he asked his fans to tweet their requests to him on his iPhone and the majority of the requests he got were for sad, mellow songs, if you consider musical numbers like Scullcrusher Mountain to be sad. I’d put it more in the genre of love songs, myself. You’ve never heard a heartfelt sing-along until you’ve heard the Barrymore packed with JoCo fans singing the chorus to Skullcrusher:

I’m so into you, but I’m way too smart for you
Even my henchmen say I’m crazy, I’m not surprised that you agree
But if you could find some way to be a little bit less afraid of me
You’d see the voices that control me from inside my head say I shouldn’t kill you yet

So touching.

After the show, we expected to step out onto the curb and hail a taxi cab to take us home, just like you see in the movies. I don’t know why people think that’s twerpy and naive. If you were a cab driver, what would make more sense to you than parking on the curb in front of the Barrymore about five minutes before the show ended? Sounds pretty damned smart to me.

But just in case there weren’t any cabs waiting, we both brought our cell phones, which would have been a capital idea if only we’d taken the trouble to ensure the batteries were charged. And I was still having a problem snagging a signal off a cell tower. I wandered up and down the sidewalk in the rain, staring at my cell phone screen, looking very much like a stark-raving loony, or would have if there weren’t a half-dozen other people doing exactly the same thing. After pacing for several minutes I finally got the shortest little signal bar to reluctantly show itself on my phone, then hit the speed dial for the only cab company I had saved in my phone’s memory.

“Hi, could I get a cab to pick me up in front of the Barrymore theater?”

“Which theater?” the dispatcher asked.

“The Barrymore, on Atwood Avenue.”

He scrabbled around in the papers on his desk. “What’s that address?”

I turned around and read the address off the front of the building to him. Must have been a new guy.

“Uh, I’m not getting that address. Which side of town are you on?”

“I’m on the east side,” I said, a little piquishly. Geeze. Who doesn’t know where the Barrymore is?

I could make out the sound of him punching frantically at a keyboard a bit longer before he gave up. “I’m sorry, I can’t pull up that address. You say you’re in the city?”

On my last nerve, I finally said, “Yes. I’m at the Barrymore theater, on Atwood Avenue, in downtown Madison, Wisconsin.” I really said that, italics and all.

He paused for about a heartbeat before he said, “Well, this is the Capital Cab Company in Arlington, Virginia.”

I held my cell phone at arm’s length and gaped at the screen. The damned area code did say 202. WtF?

All I can figure is, the last time we were visiting Sean in Washington, D.C. I must have plugged the number of a cab company into the phone’s memory so we wouldn’t end up stranded somewhere in the city, and then I helpfully labeled the saved number “cab.” Then my Swiss-cheese memory morphed from until I forgot it was the number for a cab service in Arlington and “remembered” it was the number of a cab service right here in town, because that’s what happens when you drink as much beer as I do.

“Never mind,” I told the guy, hung up, then dialed the only Madison cab company phone number I knew from memory. It’s buried there from the days when I used to listen to WOLX at my desk job and heard their jingle at least a dozen times a day. I could no more forget it than I could forget the words to The Brady Bunch. Don’t ask why I didn’t dial it instead of hitting autodial the first time around. I don’t know the answer. This time I got a dispatcher who was not only in the same state I was in, he knew where I was calling from. Unfortunately, their cabs weren’t running, he said. They were closed down because of the ice.

The ice, Dave? Yes. I should stop and mention here that the streets were glazed over by the time we got out of the show, after temperatures dropped well below zero and the rain continued to fall. People all up and down the street were chipping a thick layer of ice off the windshields of their cars. I can see how it would have made driving a very iffy proposition for most people, but I didn’t think there was any thing short of nuclear war that could stop cab drivers from cruising the streets for a fare.

Freezing rain will apparently do it, though. No matter which cab company I called, they either told me they weren’t running or they simply didn’t answer the phone. Which we knew was a damned lie, because I was dialing the numbers I read off the cabs that drove right past us as we made our way along the street. No matter how many different numbers I tried, though, I wasn’t getting through.

And Tim wasn’t answering the phone at home, either. It was after eleven, so I didn’t think he would, but so long as there might have been a slim chance that the ringing phone might wake him up, I kept redialing. I have to admit I lost hope and gave up after the third call, though. That, and I wanted to keep a little charge in the battery for when B slipped on the ice, fell and shattered every bone in her body, so I could dial 911. At least then we’d get a ride.

But, since a ride did not appear to be in the cards, we set off on foot in the direction of Monona, which we figured we could hike to in about two hours, if we didn’t freeze solid before we got there. I thought maybe we might stay warm so long as we kept moving, but I was so wrong about that. I froze my ass off before we’d gone more than three blocks. Really. I have no ass.

A cab rolled by while we were picking our way along the icy sidewalk as slowly and uncertainly as a pair of senior citizens. I tried to get the driver’s attention by hopping out into the road, jumping up and down and waving my arms, but he showed no sign at all that he saw us. Just our luck, the one cab driver I was willing to throw my mortal body in front of was the only one in the city who didn’t want to risk getting caught picking us up. He could have literally named his price and we would have gladly let him drive us to the nearest ATM to empty our bank accounts for him, although that wouldn’t have been necessary. It was payday, and B had several hundred dollars in her purse. I’m pretty sure she would have given him every penny of it, in exchange for a five-minute ride home in a warm cab.

We’d managed to hike as far as Olbrich Gardens, about three-quarters of a mile from the Barrymore, when the driver of a car coming up the street honked his horn at us. “It’s Tim!” B squealed, and we made our way to the corner to meet him. What a guy. The ringing phone apparently didn’t wake him up, but a full bladder did, and when he was on his way back to bed he noticed the answering machine was bleeping. After checking out our messages, he rolled the car out of the garage and went looking for us. A hero twice in one night.

And that was our night out on the town. It’s always an adventure whenever we go anywhere, dammit.

We ate what, by my reckoning, was the weirdest breakfast ever at the farmer’s market this morning: a square of shortbread covered in scrambled eggs and spaghetti, served with a side of spinach and tiny toast points dribbled with bleu cheese. The cooks they bring in to come up with these breakfasts always seem to be trying to out-weird whoever came before, but I don’t know if the next guy will be able to top that.

I have to admit, by the way, that I liked it, especially the spaghetti thing. I thought I’d like the toast points most of all, but I took one bite, then passed them to My Darling B, who gobbled them down. She loves bleu cheese, but for some reason it didn’t go with the rest of the meal for me.

B loves these breakfasts, but is still trying to get used to eating a salad first thing in the morning, and couldn’t bring herself to finish her greens today. Bad girl!

This is what I don’t get about the economic crisis: There was a story in this morning’s paper detailing why the federal government had to give one-quarter of a trillion dollars to the biggest insurance agency on the planet. The story said the feds will loan the money, but I have a funny feeling they’re never getting it back. If I owed anyone a quarter-trillion dollars, I’d challenge the legality of a made-up word like “trillion” and I’ll bet there isn’t a court in the world that would find against me, that’s what I’d do.

They had to loan this insurance company all that money because, if they didn’t, and the insurance company collapsed, all the banks in the world would collapse with it, or so many as to make no difference. Would you mind much if all the banks in the world collapsed tomorrow? All but the one your money’s in, of course. And the one I work at. The feds should definitely keep those open.

Why the government doesn’t offer their quarter-trillion dollars as collateral to insure the banks, and let the insurance agency self-destruct, is the part I don’t get. Surely if President Obama makes the announcement from a podium at the top of a hundred-foot-tall ziggurat of thousand-dollar bills, none of those bankers will care if their insurance company folds.

The other part I don’t get is, where did that quarter-trillion dollars come from? I know there’s not a big Scrooge McDuck-like vault behind the Federal Reserve building full of coins and bills. Congress passes a bill, the president signs it, and poof! A quarter-trillion dollars is manifested out of thin air. Wish I could do that.

My collection of books about the Apollo space program, also known as the moon-landing hoax, is nearing critical mass. The shelves at St Vinnie’s gave up two more books by moon-walkers Charlie Duke, who was one of the last pair of men to land on the moon, and Buzz Aldrin, who was one of the first two. Duke’s is titled Moonwalker. You can tell he’s a nerd, can’t you? Aldrin’s is Return to Earth, as if maybe he had a choice. “I could return to Earth, but I’m feeling like maybe a quick cruise to Venus instead. Oop! Low on gas. And air. Better go back after all.”

When The Cheering Stopped was a title that sounded familiar enough to make me pick the book out from it’s place on the shelf. It’s about Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. He’s the president that’s almost always pictured with an expression that makes him look like he hasn’t had a bowel movement in at least a week. I’m not much interested in Wilson, but I know I’ve heard the title of the book praised to the heavens, and it cost only a buck, so I took it home.

Engineers Of Dreams is all about bridges and guys who build bridges. The pages were dense with technical illustrations of suspension bridges, my favorite kind, although cantilevered bridges run a close second. Yes, I really have a favorite kind of bridge.

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© 2009 Dave Okonski.

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