this is drivel

I spent most of today in the work shop downstairs, making a shelf for the kitchen. It’s a very small shelf, only seven inches deep and about six feet long, to put up along the valance above the cupboards so My Darling B can stow pitchers and tins and nick-nacks and gadgets that she doesn’t use so much. The first one I made worked out so well that I made this new one just like it to put up on the other side of the kitchen. It’s a tiny little kitchen, so B could use all the extra shelf space I can make for her.

You’d think a shelf would be easy to make, or at least that’s what I would think, because I’m kind of simple and I’ve put up a lot of shelves that were easy to make. This shelf was for the kitchen, though, where the real people who occasionally visit Our Humble O’Bode might see it. All the shelves I made prior to this were for the work shop, or the garage, and although I made sure they were functional, usually by sitting on them or hanging from them, they were uglier than mortal sin, and it doesn’t get much uglier than that.

If you weren’t raised Catholic, that’s a sin that’ll send you straight to hell no matter what. I think. It’s been a while since my last Sunday school lesson. Or Mass. Or seen the inside of any church, come to that. But let’s assume that’s what it is, anyway, so I don’t have to come up with another metaphor. Thanks.

I wanted to make a shelf that would look nice, is what I’m saying, so it took a little longer to make than just buying a board and a couple metal brackets, screwing them to the wall and calling it done. After thinking it over for about six months, I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to do, bought the lumber and took it home to the work shop, where it sat in the corner for another month or so. I don’t like to rush these things.

The idea I came up with called for me to cut about a foot off the ends of the boards and use them to make brackets that the shelf would hang from. I could’ve cut them diagonally and called it good enough, but I wanted to make it look nice, remember, so I tried something artsy-fartsy and cut them in a gentle curve along the diagonal. I don’t have a saw that’ll let me cut anything but a ragged curving line, so after I cut the brackets I clamped them all together, put some fifty-grit sandpaper on a belt sander and ground the wood down until it was a close approximation of a gentle curve, then finished it off with some fine sandpaper. And it turned out okay. I don’t know how artsy-fartsy it is, but okay.

That was the first step. The second step was to figure out how to fix the brackets to the wall. I would normally jab a two-inch drywall screw into the bracket, lean hard against the drill and drive it in. Any old way would be fine. Drywall screws can dig into anything, and nothing short of the strength of a dozen blood-crazed zombies can pull them out, but they’re meant to be covered over with tape, plaster and paint, never to be seen again, because they’re hideous, even uglier than a sin that’ll send you straight to hell. I didn’t say there wasn’t anything uglier, I only said it doesn’t get much uglier than that, drywall screws being just hideous enough to peg the ugliometer.

I bought some pretty brass screws with round heads to hang the shelves, but had to work out a way to drive them through the brackets so they could bite into the anchors I’d set in the wall. That took a little more thinking, and some digging through the scrap box. Never throw your wood scraps away. They’ll always come in handy later to solve a problem like this. I found several strips of pine lath I could attach to the brackets so I could drive the brass screws through them and hang the shelves.

The next step was to stain the shelves. I like to paint my woodworking projects. It’s so much easier. Slap the paint on, let it dry — done! But stain has to be brushed on, you have to let it soak in a bit, but not too much, and finally you have to wipe it off. Very messy. But B wanted the shelves stained to match the cupboards, and I don’t know how to say no to B, so I gave it a try.

It’s a two-step process, as it turns out. I used a very soft wood to make the shelves, so I had to brush on some stinky stuff that prepared the wood before I could stain it. The stain was even stinkier. And I had no idea how long to leave it on the wood before wiping it off. I had a dim recollection of somebody telling me that, the longer you left the stain on, the darker the wood would get, which made some sense, but how long is a long time? But the worst thing about stain is, no matter how careful you are about brushing it on, it looks just terrible. The first time, you can’t help thinking you’ve just ruined hours of work. I was on the verge of tears until I wiped it off and it looked just fine. There’s no way to know that until you get all the way through it at least once, though.

That was making the shelf, which took most of the day. I didn’t get it hung, unfortunately. We ate a late dinner, and cleaning up took until almost nine o’clock; B likes to use as many pots and pans as possible when preparing a meal — and the end product is well worth the clean-up, he added hurriedly. I was in the mood to relax, not spend an hour on a step stool trying to juggle a power drill while holding the shelf up against the wall.

It also turned out, when I went back down to the work shop to give my latest creation one final look before turning out the lights, that the stain hadn’t dried completely. It turned the pads of my hands brown, but the shelf still looked okay. Wouldn’t have gotten away with that if it’d been painted.

First of all: cat poop.

I can’t believe I forgot to mention this until now. I was scooping the litter box before leaving for work one morning last week when I began to chant “cat poop” to myself. I know, I know, I’m a sick simpleton. I amuse myself in the smallest ways. I know it.

But those two short, one-syllable words have a magical property: they’re impossible to say more than once. I challenge you: Say “cat poop” five times as fast as you can.

Can’t do it, can you? I’ve been practicing for a week, but all I can manage is two times, and that’s when I’m lucky. Three times is out of the question. This may be the most important discovery in tongue-twisting phraseology since “toy boat.” Please remember that you read it here first.

Second of all: There is no second of all. I hung the shelf in the kitchen. It took all of ten minutes, and hardly qualifies as a ‘second of all.’ I was too wiped out to try anything else. It had been a long day, and all I wanted to do after dinner was stretch out on the sofa and snore softly into a cushion. And so it came to pass.

Here’s another thing I don’t get about what has come to be known as “our current economic crisis” — I know your eyes are probably glazing over already, but it’s my damn blog and I’ve been thinking about this all night:

When the stock market closed yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at less than seven thousand points. I have no idea what points are, except that they don’t cost as much as they did five years ago when the Dow was somewhere north of ten thousand points. And what I don’t get is, where’d all that money go?

I have an idea, sort of. I understand that, five years ago, everybody was paying way too much to buy stuff. When we bought Our Humble O’Bode, I knew we were paying more than it should cost, and that’s not just the old fogey in me waving his cane in the air and grumping, “In my day, a man could buy a house for ten cents!” Lovely as it is, our snug little home was probably overvalued ten to fifteen percent, but so was every other house in town. Plus, if we had gone on living in crappy little rentals, we’d be at one another’s throats in less than a year. It seemed like a good trade-off.

And that’s what I imagine happened to all the money. Five years ago, there were tons of money out there, but gradually, as everybody kept paying too much money for stuff, it got swallowed up by the inflated prices. But my question is, where’d the money go? It’s worth less, and it’s not being spent as freely, I get that, but the physical money has to be around here somewhere! Weather satellites should be able to see that much money from space!

And another thing: If there really are banks and insurance agencies and car manufacturers that are “too big to fail,” requiring the government to prop them up with so much money they have to use made-up words like “trillion,” then why isn’t the government chopping them up into teensy-weensy businesses so they won’t be too big any more? That’d be the first thing I’d do, even before I gave them the bail-out money.

“You want a trillion dollars? Well, okay. But first, you’ll have to promise to explode into at least a dozen smaller companies and never so much as look at each other ever again. Now step aside to let the next guy in line promise to explode.”

This seems like such a no-brainer I can’t believe the subject hasn’t been brought up already.

And I wouldn’t give the car makers one shiny new penny until they promised not to design any more cars as hideous as the Dodge Magnum. There hasn’t been anything that ugly on the road since AMC foisted the Gremlin on us.

At three-thirty this morning, my body was done sleeping. I didn’t know it at the time. I thought I was rolling out of bed to have a tinkle, and I was still tired enough that my eyes were too dried-out to open; I had to blunder my way to the bathroom by feeling along the walls.

But after I crawled back into bed I found myself thinking too much, a bad sign. I started by wondering how it’s possible that a thirteen-pound cat can steal so much of the quilts that my butt ends up freezing solid, waking me up in the middle of the night. Doesn’t seem possible she can do that, especially when I take great care to situate myself just so before lights out, but come three o’clock in the morning there I am, sticking my buttsicle into the freezing air. Somehow she’s a very large animal, something about the size of an elephant, squeezed into a very tiny cat’s body.

Then, of course, I started thinking about what I should do first when I got to the office this morning. I hate it when I think about work anywhere but at work. But I couldn’t stop. I’d try by thinking about the cat, or the book I’m reading, or by listening to My Darling B snoring delicately, but I kept coming back to planning strategies for attacking the backlog of work on my desk.

So when the clock struck four I gave up and got out of bed, wrapped myself up in a bathrobe and headed for my basement lair, where the computer Tim built for me had been downloading a software update all night long.

Since it’s a computer made out of spare parts instead of a store-bought model, it didn’t have Windows because we didn’t have a leftover copy of that, and I didn’t want to pay two-hundred bucks for whatever the latest version of Windows is. But Tim did have a copy of Ubuntu, an operating system he got free from the interwebs but never used because he uses his computer to play games, but the games he likes to play don’t work with Ubuntu.

I, on the other hand, don’t play games. I just read and type this drivel, and I’m cheap as hell, so a free operating system like Ubuntu was perfect for me. The copy Tim had was kind of old, but did I mention it was free? So I put up with the one or two complaints I might have had with it. When I got the notification yesterday that an upgrade was available, though, I pounced at the chance to see what improvements had been made. Only trouble was, in order to upgrade I would have to download seven-hundred seventy megatons of data.

“It’s megabytes, dad,” Tim corrected me condescendingly, when I warned him that I’d be hogging most of our router’s bandwidth. I’m a little insulted that he thought I was that stupid, and just a tiny bit disappointed that he didn’t think my joke was funny.

The upgrade was almost finished when I tromped downstairs this morning. All I had to do was click a couple buttons to finish up. Computers are like kids that way; they never seem to be able to finish a job on their own. There’s always one last button to click.

Right away, I noticed that this new version had flash player. Sounds like something a pervert would do, doesn’t it? It’s the software you need to see videos and listen to audio on most web sites, and the old version of Ubuntu didn’t have it. I tried to fix that myself, did a lot of research and downloaded a lot of patches but was ultimately frustrated, just like the forty-two million other people who wrote in to complain. When I downloaded the upgrade, though, there it was. Fixed in one night with no intervention from me. All those hours I’ll never get them back. Sheesh.

So I can once again watch videos and listen to music over my internet connection. I would understand if you didn’t see that as an improvement.

After puttering around on the computer for about an hour, there was one thing left for me to do before taking a shower and making breakfast: I put on some clothes, a coat and a hat, and I went for a walk around the neighborhood. I used to do this all the time back before winter got so seriously cold that, had I slipped and broken a leg on the icy streets at four-thirty in the morning, I could have died before anybody so much as woke up, much less happened across my broken body sprawled in the road, so I gave it up until the temperature climbed north of freezing for a while.

And this morning, it had finally been a while. Forty degrees out there when I woke up, and supposed to get above fifty during the day, so I had no more excuses not to resume my morning constitutional. It’s been so long that my legs were in the mood to complain about twenty minutes into it, although by that time I was just three blocks from home, so I slowed the pace enough to stave off cramps and make it all the way back in time to call dibs on the shower before Tim got out of bed.

Alma’s back at work today! Doo-dah! Doo-dah! I’m so happy! Now maybe I’ll have enough breathing room to pitchfork some of the ever-growing piles of paperwork off my desk! All de doo-dah day!

Alma’s the supervisor of a section of our department, and she’s been on vacation for the past week. And she went to Florida! Sunny Florida, warm and wonderful! And I just know she’ll come back with a tan and happy smile on her face. Lucky bug.

In her absence, I’ve had to do my job and her job. And I quickly discovered that I can’t do both our jobs at the same time. I had to do either her job or my job. After a couple days I almost learned how to juggle the two jobs, doing mine for fifteen minutes, then hers for fifteen, then mine for five, then hers for ten, and so on, but I haven’t been able to keep all the balls in the air for very long. We juggle a very different set of balls, her and I, and we’ve each got a lot of them. I can keep some of them in the air, but even after a week of juggling, I still haven’t learned to pick them all up.

The first day she was gone, I left work feeling like I’d stroked out. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t walk in a straight line, couldn’t feel my extremities, just wanted to throw myself on the sofa and lay there in a puddle of my own drool. Second day, more of the same. Lucky for me there was a weekend stuck in the middle of her vacation, so I could sleep a lot and play with my toys.

But I’ve been counting the hours until her return. And today, that final hour finally came to pass. I thought I might celebrate her return by getting her a card and a bouquet of a dozen red roses, then falling at her feet in supplication, blubbering into her pants cuffs about how glad I was to have her back, how the company didn’t pay her enough, maybe begging her never to leave again, but decided that might be a bit much. Don’t want to scare her off.

So I got her a ball and chain instead, which I’ll rivet to her ankle as soon as she’s got her back turned. I hope she got plenty of rest and relaxation in Florida, because she’s going to need to fall back on those reserves of serenity to help me catch up again.

Friday! Friday! FRIDAY! Friday! Fuh-RAIday! Good grief, I love Friday. I’d love it even more if it meant I didn’t have to go back to work tomorrow, which it doesn’t, but at least it means I don’t have to get up before the sun rises, and I can go to breakfast with My Darling B at the market, and we can stop on the way home at Saint Vinnie’s where I can round up an armload of books for a stupid cheap price. Then and only then will I have to face the commute to the office. Isn’t that a much more civilized way to start the morning? If only employment worked that way every day.

The unfamiliar sound that woke me this morning turned out to be rainwater sluicing through the eaves trough at the back of the house and draining into the downspout that was on the outside of the corner of the house our bed is in.

It must have been raining most of the night, because everything was well-soaked, and the morning newspaper came double-bagged. It must take the delivery guy just about all night to do that, and it would’ve been raining pretty hard to make him double-bag it.

My Darling B delivered newspapers for about a year to make some extra money and I even helped her, when I wasn’t working the next day. I know we bagged them a couple times because I remember delivering them in the rain, although I have no memory at all of actually bagging them; I must have blotted it completely from my mind. When you get up at midnight to deliver papers, it’s not a memory you treasure.

I checked the Nat’l Weather Service web page after dodging the rain to fetch the newspaper from the driveway. It said there was a 90% chance of rain today. They’re so on top of things.

Dan knocked on the wall of my cubicle yesterday morning and asked, “Want to go to lunch today?”

“Oh, hell yes!” I told him. It was only eight-thirty or nine o’clock when he stopped by, but it had already turned into one of those days that was threatening to add at least a week’s backlog of paperwork to the already soul-crushing piles that had completely hidden the top of my desk from view for the past two months.

So when the noon hour came I grabbed my jacket and hat and was out the door like a shot, although the weather turned out to be so nice that I probably could have walked the two blocks to Ian’s on State Street in my shirt sleeves. And since we didn’t have to walk far, we could relax and enjoy our lunch and even shoot the shit a little.

I had what had to be the weirdest pizza I’ve ever eaten. It’s a pizza-by-the-slice place, so they set out a couple slices of each kind of pizza they’re offering that day and I was looking them over when I pointed and asked the guy behind the counter, “My god, are those french fries?”

“Yep,” he answered.

“Okay,” I said, “I guess I’ve got to have a slice of that, then.” It was essentially a cheeseburger and an order of fries, served as a slice of pizza. It even came complete with steak sauce. I know it sounds pretty gross, but I have to tell you I liked it. I’m not sure I’d ask for it again, but it was one of those foods I’m glad I didn’t shy away from just because it looked weird.

Although it was a little more pizza than I like to eat in one sitting. Their slices are huge. It looked like it came from about a fourteen-inch pizza cut down the middle three times. That would make one slice a sixth, right? That sounds about right. It wasn’t quite big enough to be a quarter, but it wasn’t skinny enough to be an eighth.

And I had a fat chocolate brownie for dessert. When I go out for a lunch that’s meant to recharge my batteries, I go all-out.

A friendly word of warning you may or may not be able to use: If you happen to find yourself at Monte’s Grill & Pub in Verona, and you’re hungry enough to want a bite to eat with your pint of Capital Amber, I’d advise you to stay away from the cheeseburger unless you want to end up doing shots of Pepto Bismol later on in the evening.

I still love cheeseburgers. I order one whenever we stop at the Harmony bar for dinner after work, and it sounded like a great idea to me last night, too. Perhaps I should have been more cautious about eating a burger in a place where the flagship sandwich was called the Big Ass Burger. It was Friday and I was trying to relax a bit, though, so I missed that subtle warning sign.

My Darling B and the other two people in our party went for the Philly cheese steak sandwich, and they all liked it. If I’d gone along with the majority, I wouldn’t have been up after lights-out, snacking on Pepto-Bismol chewables. Let that be a lesson to you: Go with the flow.

When My Darling B and I drove north past DeForest this morning, headed for this weekend’s Black Horse Auction, it was pissing down rain, a miserable day, but we planned to be indoors all day anyway so it was that or stay home and nap until bedtime. We brought back a few nifty items from the auction, making it a pretty good day out, but weather-wise we probably would have stayed home if we’d known what we’d be facing after the auction was over.

We stayed until the very end because of the bean pot and the hankies. B’s been collecting a mind-boggling number of bean recipes and wanted a bean pot to cook them in. It’s a brownish crock pot with a lid that you put in the oven, and she spotted one that she wanted but it went up for auction at about the same time a box of antique hankies went on the block. She also collects antique hankies. Not to display or put in a box. She uses them, but she likes the ones that look old, not the boring white ones. So, to cover both sides of the auction, we split up. She went to watch the hankies while I stayed behind to bid on the bean pot.

I got my job done. B came back empty-handed. I was aghast. There might’ve been a hundred dollars’ worth of old-timey hankies in that box, and she chickened out when the bidding topped twenty-five, thinking that the woman she was bidding against was going to go much higher than B ever would. When I face somebody like that, my way of thinking is: Okay, then, make her go higher. Don’t give away the hankies for nothing! But B lost her nerve. The bidding went too high too fast, and she’d already spent more than her five-dollar limit on a pair of quilts, so she might have already been feeling a touch of bidder’s regret. It happens.

By the time we put our things together to take them out to the car, the pitter-patter of rain had changed to a blinding, freezing wall of snow. I’m not exaggerating at all. We left the parking lot at a crawl and I never got going any faster than twenty miles an hour as I worked my way up the road to turn onto the highway toward Madison. There were a couple inches of snow on the road, traffic was barely moving and visibility was about a hundred feet. For a while I thought we’d be using up the extra hour of sunlight we got today just as I was turning into the driveway, but the weather let up as we got closer to town. By the time we turned onto our street not only had the snow pretty much stopped falling, there was almost nothing on the ground, explaining why Tim acted like he thought his mother was a raving looney when she called as we were leaving the auction to ask him to shovel the driveway.

If one more person at the office comes down with a case of the coughing crud that’s been going around, they’ll have to hire a full-time nurse and double the usual order of Tylenol before there’s nobody left to answer the phone. In just our department, one of our staff called in sick this morning, one came in sick but left early, and at least half of the people who were left couldn’t go more than ten minutes without sneezing, coughing or blowing the entire contents of their skull into a kleenex.

I’ve managed somehow to go to work day after day in this environment without contracting a monster case of O-god-please-kill-me Death Flu. The only explanation I can think of that makes some sort of sense is that, out of the eight hours I spend at the office each day, for seven hours and fifty-seven minutes of that I’m cooped up behind the high walls of my cubicle. On second thought, that doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m the supervisor, so everybody else in the department spends almost as much time in my cubicle as I do. The ten square feet inside my cubicle should be the most disease-ridden office in the whole department. So that’s not it.

I didn’t even get the flu shot this year, the one that always gives me the sniffles. My Darling B didn’t get a flu shot, either. I think she might be one of the anti-mercury bunch. I don’t know how I feel about mercury in flu shots. I’ve had one every year for the past twenty or thirty years, give or take, so I’m pretty sure I’ve been injected with about all the mercury I can hold. I understand the dentist has been packing my cavities with fillings made from mercury. And even if I gave up flu shots and going to the dentist, I could never give up salmon. No matter how I figure it, there’s always a little mercury in my future.

So I wasn’t trying to cut down on the toxic metals. I fully intended to get my flu shot, but this year, I got lazy. Really lazy. A nurse came to the office, just like last year, to jab everyone. All I had to do was get in the elevator, poke the button for the third floor, taken two steps forward after the doors opened and she would have been literally right under my nose. Never got around to it. Don’t even try to out-procratinate me. You can’t compete with sheer lack of motivation on this scale.

That not to say I think what everybody’s coming down with is the flu. I don’t know what the hell they’ve got. Neither do the doctors, from what I’ve heard. My Darling B’s been coughing her lungs out since the week before Christmas, and all her doctor can suggest is that she’s probably got bronchitis. How’s that for vague? But even though she can’t stop coughing, and even though she prepares all the meals, I haven’t caught whatever she’s got. Maybe I’m from another planet. It makes as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.

Today’s first image has no relevance whatsoever to my babbling drivel. It just happens to be one of my all-time favorite cartoons. I ran across it while I was surfing the web this afternoon and I had to share. You’re welcome.

If it’s a little hard to read the words in the speech balloon, click on the image to see the full-sized version. And if, after clicking and reading, you think you might like more Kliban, here you go.

Kliban’s sort of a specialized taste, so I’ll understand perfectly if you’re not inclined to click on the link for more. He was most well-known for his guitar-playing, mouse-eating cats, which I never liked as much as his more puzzling cartoons. Most people went for the cats. I’m not trying to paint myself as a rebel. More like a weirdo. If you clicked, you’ll know what I mean.

Why do we have cats?

“Because they lower your blood pressure,” My Darling B reassured me, as I was cleaning up the cat puke Bonkers had just splattered on the floor, practically at my feet.

I keep hearing the “lowering my blood pressure” reason for keeping pets, and I hope there might be a grain of truth in it. Maybe when a cat’s sitting in my lap, purring contentedly, it does relax me enough to lower my blood pressure, but when I’m headed for the recliner for some cat-purring pressure-relief and one of them bazooka-barfs right before my eyes, necessitating a frantic clean-up, I get so torqued up that I can hear the blood singing in my ears. I’m pretty sure at that point they’re actually jacking my blood pressure right up to the ceiling. Does it all even out? I couldn’t say.

Laundry day! By which I mean that I had a date with the laundry, that special place in Our Humble O’Bode where we wash our clothes. But my priority wasn’t to wash dirty clothes, even though plenty of my dirty clothes were cowering in the corner of my bedroom, waiting for me to drag them screaming to the wash machine. No, today I had a high-maintenance date, in particular with the dryer.

Our clothes dryer is nothing special. Or, rather, I guess you could say it is. It’s the bare-bones economy special from Sears, a dryer with a timer and an “ON” button. But that’s all it’s got. It doesn’t have a digital readout, it doesn’t check the humidity of the clothes in the tumbler. The fanciest thing about it is, it’s got a light inside that comes on when you open the door, like a refrigerator.

It used to be able to dry a big load of clothes on high heat in about a half-hour, but lately it’s been having some trouble getting anything dry in less than an hour, so My Darling B asked me to have a look at it. Luckily for me, I was home this afternoon, waiting for a service technician to come make a yearly warranteed maintenance check on our dishwasher. It was one of those one-to-five maintenance calls, so I had to take the whole afternoon off, but he showed up right at one-thirty, which gave me the rest of the day to tinker with the dryer.

The problem wasn’t a mystery. The exhaust vent isn’t directly behind the dryer, so the hose has to make a very tight S-turn and gets kinked when people push the dryer up against the wall. They’re not trying to kink the hose; the dryer ends up getting pushed against the wall only after we’ve slammed the front door shut a couple hundred times. To fix the problem, I could either stop the door slamming by bolting the door shut, which would make the dryer sort of useless, or I could find some way to keep the dryer away from the wall. This called for a trip to the hardware store.

I had no idea there were so many products on the market made specially to connect clothes dryers to exhaust ducts. After opening several boxes to spread the products out across the floor of aisle twenty-nine, I came home with an elbow joint for the exhaust duct, a plastic collar that would keep the dryer eight inches from the wall at all times, a new length of high-strength exhaust hose, and, for icing on the cake, a flapper valve to keep the cold winter air from backing up through the exhaust vent.

Two hours later, I had a working dryer in the kitchen and a cold beer in my hand. I love it when the day ends with a feeling of accomplishment and a beer, but the project did not proceed without a lot of cussing, cut fingers and bashed heads. Just pulling the dryer out of its snug little corner is a major pain in the ass, because the geometry of the situation required me to grab it about a dozen different ways to slowly shimmy it out onto the dining room floor, and of course the damned dryer is attached to the wall by a short length of exhaust hose. I had to sort of splay myself across the top of the wash machine and do a dumpster-dive to extend my reach far enough to get hold of that.

Once I had an open space to work in, I took everything apart. It’s the best way to start a project like this: Just tear everything out and put it back together the right way, piece by piece.

First, the exhaust vent. It was a half-assed affair to start with, a hole cut in the wall with a foot-length piece of four-inch duct jammed in the hole to almost, but not quite, channel all the hot exhaust out the hole and into the wide-open world. The duct was a poor fit, and it didn’t connect properly with the draught excluder I installed outside last fall, so I tore it out. I expected to find it choked with lint, but it wasn’t too bad. Then I shortened it by about three inches with a pair of tin snips. Kids: Always wear your leather gloves when cutting tin. Either that, or keep lots of Band-Aids and antiseptic ointment on hand. I mean it.

Then I pulled the draught excluder off the side of the house and installed a flapper valve. We’ve had a bit of a problem keeping frigid winter air from coming in through the dryer vent. I installed a draught excluder that I’d read was the best on the market, but that vent has still been letting the cold air in. The flapper valve I bought had a collar that fit tightly over the exhaust vent to make sure all the hot air went out the vent, and didn’t let cold air in around the edges. I had to trim a little plastic off the collar, but it was such a good fit almost seemed to be made for the job.

Putting the plastic elbow on the duct should have been a simple matter of snapping the pieces together and slipping it over the end of the duct, very simple, so naturally it turned out to be a job that needed a lot of time, sweat, cussing and blood. It’s supposed to fit snugly over the end of a four-inch aluminum duct, but there’s just no way. I crimped the duct, notched it and compressed it, but no matter what I did, the duct was just too damned big. I eventually made it fit by the time-tested method of beating it into place with my fists until it was on there as tight as it ever would go, then drove a screw into it to make sure it didn’t slip off, and called it done.

The biggest challenge to connecting our dryer to the exhaust vent was the geometry of the situation. The vent was about an inch above the floor and maybe six inches to the right of the dryer’s exhaust pipe, which was also about an inch off the floor and behind the dryer. That means that, when the dryer was pushed back into its cozy little corner, the exhaust pipe and the vent almost, but not quite met each other. To connect the one to the other requires an exceptionally flexible hose, and it can’t be too long or it’ll double up on itself and choke off the vent.

Last time I hooked this up, I used a length of hose just two feet long. How did I reach back there to make the connections? I attached one end of the hose to the wall vent, pushed the dryer in as close as I could get it, then climbed up on top of the wash machine and did a swan dive into the gap between the wall and the dryer. Dangling there, I had just enough time to make the connection on the other end before all my blood rushed to my head and brought me dangerously close to total blackout.

This time, I had a longer hose. I’ll let the obvious double-entendre pass. Can’t believe it, can you? The plastic elbow on the vent pipe kept the hose from doubling over into a kink, and a plastic collar around the hose at the dryer end kept it from getting pushed all the way back into the wall. And I added a narrow wooden shelf to one side, to keep the dryer from walking over toward the corner and twisting the hose. Seems to work great now.

The bad news: The bathtub drain was clogged again.

The good news: It was just slime. No hair. It had to be because My Dear Mom sent me a little plastic drain guard to suction-cup over the drain about two summers ago, after listening to all my pissing and moaning from dealing with clogs on a near-weekly basis. I had my doubts about how effective it could be, but have to admit that ever since we started using it, the times between clogs have been getting longer.

I do not own stock in the company that makes these little gadgets; I only wish I did. No more poking around in the drain pipe trying to pull that nasty old hairball out with the crooked end of a coat hanger. If you’ve ever had to do that more than once, I’ll bet you’d pay a lot to avoid ever doing it again. I know I would. Not that you have to for this little gadget. But even if it cost its weight in gold, it’d be a bargain. No, honestly.

One hard, three-minute blast with the garden hose while administering an energetic jam session with a plunger cleared the drain right out. Unreeling the garden hose took longer, mostly because I got lazy last time and didn’t drain it. Not wanting to dribble water across the living room floor, I had to reel it out with more slow, careful precision than brain surgery. At least, I’d like to assume brain surgery is accomplished with snow, careful precision. If you have some kind of proof it’s not, keep it to yourself.

Cleaning up after was the second most time-consuming part. I had an up-close and personal look at the grunge that came out of that drain, so I took a long time scrubbing and sanitizing the tub after I put everything back together. Not that I ever take a bath in it, but I didn’t even want my feet to touch any of that procelain after what I’d seen.

Penny said she liked my hair. I used to work for Penny when I managed the company’s credit card program, way back when I could relax and enjoy myself at the office. I met her to talk about moving some office furniture to our department, then stood in the hallway for about five minutes, shooting the bull.

“It’s nice and full,” she said. “When most guys grow a pony tail, it’s like ... uuuhhhhg!” I think that’s how you spell it. It’s the sound you make when you think of something so disgusting that it makes you squinch your eyes shut real tight and shiver all over.

I know the kind of pony tail she’s talking about. I kept a close eye on mine to make sure it didn’t end up looking like that. It would have died a quick death if I hadn’t been happy with it.

Only girls say they like my hair. Guys poke fun, saying things like, “Get a haircut, you hippie!” or pulling on my pony tail. Girls say things like, “It’s so shiny and full.” Or maybe that’s the way they poke fun, I don’t know.

Gorgeous day today. Not just the weather, although that’s been gorgeous, too: Clear, deep-blue skies, temps in the forties after a week of freezing-my-ass-off deep cold. Can we call winter over yet? Man, I hope so. I need to get out of the house.

No, I’m talking about a gorgeous day: Sleep in until seven o’clock (after a bout of dairy-induced insomnia; see the following drivel), rise to put the kettle on, then loll on the sofa for ninety minutes or so in pajamas with the morning paper and a hot cuppa joe before taking a steaming hot shower, putting on clothes and heading into town for our weekly visit to the farmer’s market. GORGEOUS!

We skipped the breakfast, though. Still both a little full after last night’s ritualistic Friday the 13th gorging.

But we didn’t skip the visit to Saint Vincent de Paul’s where I bought even more books than I’ll ever be able to read, unless I’m laid up for forty-two weeks with injuries so serious I can’t move anything but my eyeballs. That kind of debilitation generally comes only to people who lose the faculty of reading, so I’m not saying I’m itching for the chance, you understand. I was just trying to imagine how I would ever have the time to stay at home reading the tons of books I’ve collected. Let’s just get off the subject before I put a whammie on myself.

After I packed away my books in the car, I offered to take My Darling B to Lazy Jane’s Cafe for coffee and a scone and she took me up on it, but while we were standing in line she saw that one of the specials was biscuits and gravy, her all-time favorite, so we ended up ordering brunch instead. I had the chorizo scramble. Bliss.

By the way, in the photo above there’s a floor lamp that My Darling B would like to have so desperately that I’ll consider selling an internal organ to get it for her, so if you know where we can find one, here’s a chance to get hold of an emergency backup kidney. Just think about it, is all I’m saying.

Relaxed, our sufficiencies surensified, we strolled back to the car to return to Our Humble O’Bode, where I walked off the brunch with a brisk walk through the neighborhood before I settled down on the sofa with a book and drifted happily into my afternoon nap. Does a day start any better than this? I suppose it’s possible, but I’m plenty happy with this one so far.

Here’s something important to keep in mind if you, like me, happen to be lactose-intolerant: Don’t eat lobster in cream sauce for dinner if you’re not ready to face the consequences, such as chasing away your loved ones with a butt that smells like a rotten egg wrapped up in an unwashed gym sock, basted in melted cheese and left on the sidewalk in the hot sun all day. Or getting out of bed in the middle of the night on account of a sour stomach.

I thought I was ready to face consequences like these. I’m pretty dumb that way. I’ve got these handy little pills that let me eat small doses of cheese and other dairy products. There are lots of these kinds of over-the-counter remedies on the market, and just a little while back I found one brand that’s especially good for me, but I think maybe I let them lull me into a false sense of security. Actually, I think I got the idea that they convey super-powers on me.

Well, they don’t, but it seems I’m not smart enough to learn this hard lesson without spending at least a couple sleepless nights. I did this once before, a month ago, when I decided I could share a slice of cake with cream frosting if I had just a couple bites of it. What was I thinking? I know what could go wrong with doing something as stupid as that, but I was in a good mood, out on a date with my best girl after a long day at the office, and I just wanted to enjoy myself. And I did, too, until about three o’clock in the morning, just like tonight.

Yesterday being Friday the 13th, we had reservations at Peppino’s, a wonderful restaurant on the south corner of capital square in beautiful downtown Madison, but nine-tenths of all the items on their menu are served in cream sauce. Delicious stuff, but it might as well be rat poison to the likes of me.

But these pills I found are very nearly magic. As my tolerance to dairy weakened until it vanished entirely, I had to give up pretty much everything that had so much as been near a cow. I hadn’t been able to eat ice cream for years, and then B noticed these pills while we were doing our grocery shopping, so I gave them a try. And suddenly WOW! I can eat dairy again!

Or most dairy. There are some things the pills just can’t neutralize enough of. Cream, for instance, or anything with cream in it. But when the waiter recited the specials for the night and I heard lobster in cream sauce, something tripped in my head. I had to order the lobster. There was a far-away voice warning me not to, but I pretended not to hear it. I took three pills, with big gulps of water, and enjoyed my dinner.

And I mean really enjoyed it. I love cream sauce, and this was really creamy, buttery cream sauce, just delicious. I loved it more than I loved that lobster. I loved it more than life itself. But it was forbidden love. I should have known better.

The first sign that all was not well came about an hour before bed, when I began to, ah, emit. Nasty. That’s normally fair warning that I shouldn’t even try to go to bed, but I decided to chance it anyway, and turned out the lights at about eleven. I got about four hours’ sleep before I woke up feeling like I’d been sucker-punched in the belly.

Well, I did it to myself. And I knew there was no point in trying to fool myself by laying there, wide-awake with a bellyache, so I went to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea, took it to my basement lair and sat down to natter on about how stupid I was to eat lobster in cream sauce so you could read about it. Lucky you.

I spent most of the afternoon throwing crap away. Not literally. Although some of us lapse into periods when we’re less than diligent about cleaning up after ourselves, we have never degenerated to the point where we left piles of actual crap lying around the house. Sometimes, though, when I’m pawing through the assorted junk we’ve chosen to put in a box and store for years, it sometimes seems as though we might as well, for all the difference it would make.

Most of the crap I threw out had been hidden away in my basement lair, but when I knocked a wall out in the basement to make room for a bigger work shop, my basement lair disappeared and I had to move all the boxed-up crap that used to be in there, heaping it up in piles wherever I could find room. Quite a lot of it was still piled up around my desk, and almost all the rest of it was stashed underneath the benches my toy trains run on. Used to run on. Will run on. There might be a time paradox there, but I don’t have the brain power to work it out right now.

I was getting tired of tripping over one box of drek or another, so I devoted a couple hours yesterday and a couple more today to rooting through them and culling what I thought I could get away with throwing out. Most of the junk I got rid of was old books and magazines that I myself packed away months ago with a view to deciding later whether or not to throw them out. Today was later.

When our trash can was about half full I stopped, thinking I had to leave some room for usual household trash. I’ll probably empty a few more boxes as the week goes on, and keep it on the side so that, if there’s still some room on top of the trash can and Thursday comes around, I’ll stuff it in there before wheeling it all out to the curb.

But even after hauling enough crap out to fill a thirty-gallon trash can halfway, I still can’t walk a full circle around my desk without tripping over something. Wahh-wahh.

In what has to be a watershed moment for the internet, I joined Facebook. “It’s now officially lame,” my oldest son remarked, after I ‘friended’ him. Yes, when people like me start using Facebook you can no longer kid yourself that it’s cool and, by association, so are you. You’ll have to find some other way to trick the world into thinking you’re still with it.

Number two son was even more dismissive of my trek into social networking: “You’re on Facebook?” he asked. “You’re dead to me.” Probably not a fan, what do you think? Guess that explains why I came up with nothing after I did a search on his name.

I made myself an account after my brother passed me a message he got from one of our cousins. I thought I would have to reply using Facebook, so I signed up and quickly found I could have just e-mailed her. I also found out what a complete Neanderthal I was. I thought I had this internet thing down cold, but as far as modern web communication is concerned, I’m already extinct. I just haven’t fossilized yet.

I did have a good time playing with all the features I could figure out, however. Being new to the medium, though, I’m pretty sure I broke all the rules of etiquette, and annoyed the hell out of everyone I might have been able to ‘socialize’ with on Facebook, so my wall will remain blank and I will never be poked. (That’s bad.)

I drove in to work with Tim today in his little Honda, and when I say “little,” I’m talking about clown-car little. I have to squat on the pavement and twist myself butt-first through the door to sit down, and that’s just the first of many steps that involve folding myself up to get in. Then once I’m inside I have to go through several more steps to unfold myself. Although I have to admit it’s not at all an uncomfortable car to ride in, after all that folding and unfolding is finished, and it drives like a sports car. Lots of fun to get around in.

My Darling B hung back at home today. She had a routine appointment this morning with the doctor, who wanted to draw her blood, for which B was required to fast all night and right up until the moment they had the last drop of blood they needed. “Now, go enjoy some coffee,” the nurse commanded, cleaning up after. B didn’t hesitate a moment. She already had several coffee joints to visit in mind.

So long as she was taking off the morning to make her doctor’s appointment, B also took the rest of the day off so she could huddle in the basement with her seeds and her little black plastic planting trays. “I planted my garden today,” she said happily to me over dinner.

“And in a couple months, you’ll get to plant it all over again,” I reminded her. She is so looking forward to that.

Dinner was beans and rice. We’re practicing to eat poor, although I don’t know how poor it is when B spends three hours cooking it and adds too many spices for me to even guess at. “C’mon, you can tell me just one spice you taste, can’t you?” she prodded me.

“Pepper?” I guessed. And I got it right. But it was an easy bet; the beans she made were burning my lips off.

You’ve probably heard enough about corporate executives from “too big to fail” insurance agencies taking home millions in bonuses funded by government bailouts, and one more word from me will probably make your eyes glaze over, but I’ve just got to ask: How can it be possible that people like that walk the earth among us? How can they not be so consumed by self-loathing that the knowledge of their boundless greed doesn’t compel them to gnaw their own faces off? I can’t figure it out.

Yuusuke asked me to find a one-act play for him. As if I go to a lot of one-act plays. Or any plays. Okay, I take My Darling B to the theater in the woods out past Blue Mounds once or twice a year. Last season we saw Henry IV and The Matchmaker. I think Yuusuke’s looking for something a little shorter than that, though.

He’s the actor, I’m not. I met him after I agreed to appear in a kabuki play, “appear” being the key word. I didn’t think I’d have to act. If I had, I’m not sure I would have agreed. It turned out, though, that they expected me to try to act at least a little bit.

My first attempts were dismal, brandishing a Japanese sword with all the grace of John Belushi while stomping across the stage to indicate what a menacing badass I was. If I remember right, I think Yuusuke’s advice to me that night was, “Try to act without looking like you’re trying to act.” I tried, and I think I may have even improved a bit after those first few nights, but I noticed they put me in smaller, background parts.

I didn’t mind. What I liked most about acting with Yuuske and the rest of that bunch was the way they all got along. And the parties were a lot of fun, too. They never missed an opportunity to hang out together, eat a lot of good food and drink sake. Those were good times.

Yuusuke wants me to find him a play in English that’s fairly easy to read. He can speak and read English really well, but probably doesn’t want to be tied up in linguistic knots, and I can see where he’s coming from because the only plays I ever acted in with him, I had a non-speaking part. Wait, no; I chanted “Tsa! Tsa! Tsa!” in a dancing skit, but I don’t think that counts as speaking actual Japanese.

He wants a play that has just two characters. He’s got two friends in mind, a man and a woman, who could do it, which helps me out a lot. The collections of one-act plays I checked out from the library are almost all for four or more people. Out of the three books I checked out yesterday, just one play in one book was written for two actors. I went back and checked out four more books today, so I ought to be able to find at least one more.

And he wants it to be funny. I have no idea how to gauge this. I started out by looking for a collection of one-act comedies, or vaudeville, something along that line, but found no joy at all. There were lots of ‘best of’ books, prize-winners all, but nothing that guaranteed laughs, just culture. Made me want to pull a Herman Goering.

At first I thought of just shooting him a link to an on-line transcript of Abbot & Costello’s Who’s On First? routine, but that would’ve been such a cop-out, don’t you think? You can’t answer every question by surfing the web for ten minutes. It’s like not even trying.

So I’ve got a book with a possible candidate, and four more books to leaf through, and I’m trying to figure out: How does a guy whose idea of comic drama starts at butt jokes and gratuitous nudity figure out what makes a good play? Well, it’s in a ‘best of’ collection, so I’m not even going to worry about whether or not it’s good. If it’s not, that’s not my fault, is the way I figure it.

And as for trying to decide which play would be best for Yuusuke and his buddies, that’s why I plan to send him two or, if I’m lucky enough to find more, at least three. He can look them over and decide which one would work out best. And if they all look good to him, hell, he’s got two more for back-up.

Dinner last night was shepherd’s pie, our nod to Saint Paddy’s Day. We thought it’d be better than getting falling-down drunk. Not that we have anything against getting drunk. It’s the falling-down part that we strive to avoid, actually, and why we had only one beer with dinner, even on Saint Pat’s Day.

I didn’t wear green to work yesterday. Nobody in our department did, actually. There’s not a lot of Irish heritage down there, I guess. And so I passed most of Saint Paddy’s Day pretty much isolated from the festivities going on in the world outside until I had to run an errand to the library, on the other side of cap square.

The square is usually thronged with people on most days, but yesterday the temperature was in the seventies, the sky was clear and the sun was shining. Every office worker downtown was out for a lunch-hour ramble around the square. After I got what I needed from the library, I joined them by taking the long way back around the square to stretch my legs and take in a bit more of the fresh air.

I got about halfway around the square before I thought: That’s weird. Everybody’s wearing green.

For reasons that have never been clear to me, Tim likes to enter and exit the house through the front door, while My Darling B and I typically use the rear door inside the garage. I pull the car into the driveway after the commute home from work and stop just outside the garage to let B and Tim get out, because the garage is so small that, if I pulled in, they wouldn’t be able to open their doors. They circle around the back of the car while I pull in, and Tim goes to the front door while B gets the mail, then heads to the back door.

I usually sit in the car, waiting for B to pass. If I get out and step to the back of the car to get my bag out of the back seat as I always so, but I don’t wait for her to pass by, we meet somewhere in between, bonking into each other like a couple of sleepwalkers meeting in the hallway. We’re either so brain-dead after a long day at work, or just so friggin stubborn, that she won’t back up, and I won’t back up, and we’re trapped there going bonk, bonk, bonk. It’s really pathetic.

So I let her go by, then I get out, which is why I’m usually the last one into the house. When I came in last night I found Tim and B at the front door jiggling Tim’s key in the lock. “Get dad to try it,” B suggested, as she gave up and walked away.

“The door ate my key,” Tim told me, and stepped aside as I approached. I jiggled it too, then twisted it and jiggled it. I also jabbed at it, waggled it back and forth, and yanked it, but Ididn’t have any better luck getting the key out than he did. There wasn’t any play to it at all. It was like it had been welded in there.

There is one all-powerful way to fix anything in the All-Purpose Guy Book: Hit it with a hammer. I’m serious, this works. Once, while I was driving across the Arizona desert in my Volkswagen van, I pulled in to a rest stop and, when I climbed back into my car to hit the road again, I couldn’t get it to start. The engine didn’t turn over, the starter didn’t go click, nothing. Oh, Shit, said my inner panic voice when I realized I was in the middle of the freaking Arizona desert in a VW van that wouldn’t go.

I had a handbook (still do!) titled, “How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual For The Compleat Idiot.” This is a book you’ve got to have if you own a Volkswagen. There was a whole chapter called “Engine Won’t Start”. I turned to it and found this sage advice: Hit it with a hammer. Specifically, it said I should hit the front of the starter, near the gear that meshes with the engine. There’s a switch in there that gets stuck, it said, and giving it a couple solid taps with a hammer will free it. With nothing to lose, I pulled on my coveralls, grabbed a hammer from my tool box, crawled under the bus and hit the starter with a hammer. Then I climbed back into the driver’s seat, said a quick prayer, and turned the key. The engine roared to life and I was on my way. True story, I swear.

To see if a little gentle persuasion with a hammer might free Tim’s stuck key I fetched a hammer from the work bench, took it up to the front door and gave the key a few taps, then tried to pull it out again. No joy. A couple more taps, a jiggle; still no joy.

Well, no dumb lock’s going to tell me I can’t pull the key out of it. One screwdriver and about two minutes later, I had the lock squeezed in the vise on the work bench and was ready to try Version Two of Hit It With A Hammer. Using a finishing nail instead of the hole punch I own but couldn’t find, I tried to tap the key out from the back end. It still wouldn’t budge.

At that point I completely lost control of myself and kept taking things apart until there was nothing left to take apart. The key didn’t come out until I slid the cylinder out, and then it only came out after all the little pins popped out and went skittering into the darkest corners of the work shop floor. It didn’t do me much good to have the key at that point.

That’s how I turned a stuck key into a trip to the hardware store to buy a new deadbolt lock for the front door. Just about all the locks they sold were made in China, except the one I decided to buy, partly because the outside part was a solid, seamless piece of steel, but mostly because it was made in Mexico. Isn’t that ironic? In the country that’s all about feeling safe and secure, you can’t find a lock made right here in the USA.

It came with only two keys, so I’ll have to get a third one made this weekend to give to My Darling B, not that we use the front door much, as I’ve already mentioned.

I had a particularly rough morning today, hardly got away from my desk until noon, so when the lunch our finally came I put on my jacket to get out of the building, maybe take a quick walk around the square, and clear my head with some fresh air. What I really wanted was to find some place really quiet, sit down there for maybe a half-hour or so and do nothing at all. And I knew just the place: George’s barber chair.

That’s right, for the first time since June I got my hair cut. “Feel like you’re ready for a challenge?” I asked George as I stepped up to his chair. He was only too happy to take on my request. I didn’t get it cut as short as before, but he clipped the ponytail, blocked off the back and shortened up the sides so they weren’t flapping around against the sides of my head like a beagle’s ears. That was really starting to bug me, I must say.

The headache was the worst, though. Much as I’d like to blame this morning’s headache on work-related matters, I have my suspicions that pulling my hair back first thing in the morning and keeping it firmly pulled back all day long was not helping to reduce the tension, literally, nervously or metaphorically, in my life. So it was with no small amount of relief that I strolled back to work with my hair neatly cut, tapered and blocked, to resume the rat race. Plopping my skinny butt down in George’s chair to relax while he hacked away at the wild growth on my head was about the best thing I could have done with my lunch hour today.

Well, Hi, there. It’s Friday, and I’ve got that creeping feeling, or maybe it’s the creepy feeling, that the self-inflating pile of work on my desk is calling me. Do you ever get that? No, of course you don’t. Normal people can stop thinking about their day jobs when they’re supposed to be relaxing in the bosom of their families. I’m especially fond of my family bosom, yet my mind is still preoccupied with paperwork and planning puzzles. That’s a lot of alliteration lolling lightly on my lips.

The worst is waking up in the middle of the night and then utterly failing to get back to sleep when I start thinking about what I have to do first thing in the morning. Luckily for me it was very, very cold last night and, because we took the comforter off the bed during the heat wave earlier this week, I was freezing my butt off even though I was snuggled up tight against My Darling B. My butt was the part of me that wasn’t snuggled. If I’d properly snuggled my butt to warm it up, I would’ve frozen my nipples off. It’s a conundrum.

We keep a couple extra quilts hanging from a rack at the foot of the bed, mostly for show, but on nights like the one we had last night I get up and spread one of them on my side of the bed, not to be mean, but because B seemed to be sleeping just fine and was warm as toast, from what I could tell. She’s always warmer than I am at night. I love to cover up with lots of quilts, while she likes to stick arms and legs out into the open air or fling the covers off altogether.

Last night, though, even she somehow felt cold, and my little warm patch under the extra covers must have activated her heat-seeking radar, because over the course of the next few hours she snuggled up to me and we migrated over to my side of the bed. And I thunk nothing but happy thoughts all night long.

I fully intended to go for a walk as I headed for the front door at about two o’clock this afternoon.

The front entrance of Our Humble O’Bode is screened off from the rest of the house on one side by a wall with a decorative shelf, and the floor is linoleum. Really ugly linoleum, the kind you get in a box in twelve-inch squares with peel-and-stick backing. It must’ve been installed years ago, because the corners had all curled up, allowing all kinds of dirt and other grungy stuff to get underneath the tiles. As I reached down to pull my shoes on I picked at the corner of one of the tiles, not for the first time, and wondered how much trouble it would be to pull them all up and clean the adhesive off the floor.

But today, for the first time, I pulled the corner of one tile back about three inches. And pulled it back another inch. Then I poked at the exposed adhesive with the tip of my finger. It was awful stuff, sticky as carpet tape and laid on the floor as thick as peanut butter on toast.

My Darling B appeared over my shoulder. “Whatcha lookin’ at?” she asked. I showed her the adhesive, and wondered aloud if we had any Goo Gone. She said yes, we had lots, and she went to look in the hall closet for it, but I found it first in the kitchen under the sink. Score! Then I fetched a pair of pliers from the work shop, used it to get a firm grip on the corner of the tile I’d started to peel back, and ripped that one tile completely away from the floor. After flinging it out the door onto the porch, I soaked the adhesive generously with Goo Gone, gave it a minute or two to soak in, and found that I was able to scrub it away with a rag.

And that’s how I derailed my plan to take an afternoon walk and ended up scraping adhesive off the floor with a putty knife. Scrubbing it with a rag worked, but not as well as scraping it up with a putty knife. In the end I worked out a procedure: I had to soak every square inch of the entry way with Goo Gone and scrape it up with the putty knife. Then I had to soak it with Goo Gone again and scrub it hard with rags that I never wanted to use again. Then, and only then, I could give it one more spray with Goo Gone and scrub it almost completely clean with paper towels. It’s still a little sticky in spots, but it’s good enough to call done.

I ran out of Goo Gone toward the end, of course, and had to run an errand to the store that ended up being an expedition to three different stores. Copp’s was my first stop, a big-box grocery store that has two hundred-foot-long aisles of cleaning supplies and yet somehow still can’t manage to stock Goo Gone. How can that be? Menard’s was right down the street. They have two similarly long aisles of industrial-strength cleaning supplies, and normally stock Goo Gone, according to the sign I found at the base of the empty corner of one shelf. Man!

Back at home, I phoned the Ace Hardware store up the road to make sure they had Goo Gone in stock before I drove all the way up there. They said they did. On the way there, though, I passed Walgreen’s and wondered if they might have some and could they save me fifteen minutes of diving time? They did, and they could. I managed to score the last two bottles of the stuff from their shelves, and headed home a very happy man. That gave me more than enough Goo Gone to finish the job of tearing out the last four tiles and scrub the whole floor clean so our shoes wouldn’t stick, stick, stick as we walked in the door.

One Hell of a News Story: The Pennsylvania Department of State turned down an application from one of its citizens, George Kalman, to incorporate his company, which he named, “I Chose Hell Productions, LLC,” on the grounds that the name was a violation of a 1977 state law forbidding blasphemy, even though the same Pennsylvania agency had previously given the thumbs-up to corporations named “Devil Media,” “Vomit Noise Production,” “Satanic Butt Slayers,” and — my favorite — “God Damn Gun Shop.” Mr Kalman later successfully incorporated as ICH Productions. He is now seeking to overturn the state’s blasphemy law. Please give generously.

We didn’t skip our weekly trip to the farmer’s market this week. Couldn’t, really. They were serving biscuits and gravy as the main course, and My Darling B adores biscuits and gravy. She shouted it out when she read it from the emailed menu they send to her every week. “Biscuits and gravy! Gotta Go!” Not that I would raise an objection. It’s one of my favorite breakfasts, too.

We got up early and hit the road as soon as we could, arriving about five or ten minutes before they started serving. We thought maybe we’d get there early enough to avoid any line, but biscuits and gravy is apparently a big favorite with just about everybody. The line was backed up to the door when we got there. No problem. One of the vendors came up the line offering free samples of fresh-baked panettone, and a lawyer running for judicial office was walking the line with a tray stacked with coffee cups and a jug of fresh java. We were not left wanting while we waited for breakfast.

The breakfast itself, I have to say, was disappointing. My serving was lukewarm, as if it had been sitting on the counter for five or ten minutes. It’s not the most enjoyable way to eat biscuits and gravy, unless you’ve been interred in a prison camp for about a week. And the scrambled eggs were not only cold, they were mixed up with broccoli, which wouldn’t have bothered me as much if the broccoli had been diced, but they were practically whole, and there was more broccoli than eggs. I felt a bit cheated. In any restaurant, I would have sent it back, but because this is a fund-raiser I ate it cold and tried not to grumble. Until now.

We didn’t have a lot of shopping to do, so we were back in our car and driving home almost as soon as we were done eating.

And the next stop, of course, was Saint Vinnie’s used book store! Could they still possibly have any books in there that I hadn’t seen and wanted already? Yes, they could!

Failure Is Not An Option was the first one that jumped out at me. I’ve been looking for a copy of this for years. Kranz was one of the most gung-ho flight controllers of the Apollo space program, and well-known enough that he was depicted as the flight controller at Houston when the movie Apollo 13 set the cast of characters in stone. Although Kranz was on duty when the accident occurred, two other flight controllers and their teams took their turns in rotation, but that’s Hollywood.

The cover of Kranz’s book makes it look as though it’s all about Apollo 13, but it’s not. Kranz has lots more stories to tell, and he’s pretty good at telling them. The only thing better than a book about his experiences would be a video of him just talking. Actually, I’ve seen a video like that, and it was fantastic. I can’t wait to read the book.

Abigail Adams was the next book that made me snatch it off the shelves. I just saw the title and had to have it. I have no idea if this volume is any good, but the lives of John and Abigail are so amazingly well-documented that the odds of this particular book being a dud are small. And if it is, well, it only cost a buck.

Thinking about John Adams might have made me pick up The American Democracy, or maybe it was that I thought I knew the author, Harold Laski. I didn’t. I looked up a few bibliographies of him and didn’t recognize a single title, but I must have read his name somewhere, maybe as a source in another history book.

It was only after trolling the aisles for fifteen or twenty minutes that I came across the last book in my take-home pile, Original Meanings; Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution. Sounds like a real page-turner, doesn’t it? I’ve read about originalism before, the ideology that you must interpret the Constitution in the context in which it was written. So, for instance, if the framers of the Constitution were all right with the idea of slavery, then you have to consider that idea as constitutional. It’s a bullshit idea as far as I’m concerned, but I’m still interested in learning more about it.

When I buy books at Saint Vinnie’s, I try to keep myself to no more than five dollars’ worth, and technically I did that on Saturday; the books added up to five dollars. The nifty old clock I bought for fifteen dollars isn’t a book, so it didn’t put me over my limit.

Friday’s beer tasting at Star Liquor featured some mighty tasty beverages, courtesy of Two Brothers Brewing Company near Chicago, Illinois. Tim was not at all pleased that we were stopping; he wanted to go straight home, not pass Go, not collect two-hundred dollars, and he sure didn’t want to wait around while we were lollygagging in some neighborhood liquor store tipping back samples of free beer. That boy’s got a lot to learn about what makes life worth living, even if he can’t take part just yet.

We started with a sip of Domaine duPage French Country Ale, a very drinkable, light ale. So what the hell does ‘very drinkable’ mean, you snooty beer snob? Why would you put it in your mouth if it wasn’t drinkable? My, you’ve got a smart mouth, haven’t you? But it’s a good question. Among beer snots (and wine snots too, it seems), ‘very drinkable’ means it’s a beverage you could drink on its own, or with food; in hot weather or cold; whether you wanted to guzzle it, or sip it, or just taste it; and that almost anybody would like it. ‘Very drinkable’ means it’s an all-around good-tasting beer.

We moved on from there to try a sample of The Bitter End Pale Ale. I scrutinized the expression on My Darling B’s face as she sipped from her cup, thinking I might get to drink the rest of her sample. She doesn’t usually go for hoppy beers, and most breweries hop the hell out of their pale ales. They seem to want bragging rights to having the hoppiest pale ale of anyone. Certainly some beer drinkers like to brag about drinking the hoppiest ale, and most breweries tend to cater to that kind of ostentation. Why, I don’t know. The Bitter End was not pale ale from most breweries. It was subtle and smooth and a pleasure to drink. B liked it a lot, so no extra for me.

I figured for sure I’d score on our next sample, though: Heavy Handed India Pale Ale. IPAs are always too hoppy for B. She takes one sniff and passes them on to me. Except this one. She liked this one, too. Damn you, Two Brothers!

Not even Hop Juice Double India Pale Ale was too hoppy for B! Our host bragged that his brewery strived to balance the hops with the barley in all their brews so the hops never overpowered the finished product, and it wasn’t an empty boast. If a brewery can produce a pale ale rated at 100 IBUs that My Darling B can not only drink, but enjoy drinking, then they’ve done something truly remarkable. Not that it will win them any more acclaim than I can give them on my dopey old blog.

And as if that wasn’t enough to amaze me in one day, the next sample, a dixie cup of Northwind Imperial Stout, went down both our gullets just as smoothly. I’m trying to think of the last time B recommended that we take home a six-pack of stout for both of us to drink and I can’t. She just doesn’t like dark beers. Except this one. Bless you, Two Brothers!

The last brew our host poured for us was Red Eye Coffee Porter. It really is a porter brewed with roasted coffee beans, but our host confessed that it’s just for flavor; it won’t give you a caffeine buzz, regardless of what their marketing implies. I usually don’t like coffee-flavored beer, but once again this one was so nicely balanced that I believe I could drink a glass or two. I’ll have to take some home to carry out further tests.

We were there longer than usual because our host was not one of those reps that will silently pour a sample and stand there with his arms crossed while we swish it around on our tongues, waiting for us to ask for the next pour. He was clearly very enthusiastic about beer and wanted to talk about the beer he was serving, and we love to listen to guys like that so we encouraged him up as much as we could, asking lots of questions and generally chatting him up. I think we were in there at least twenty minutes, maybe thirty, before we selected a six-pack of Domaine duPage and another of Northwind, said thanks to our host and headed home. It was a delightful way to end a busy work week.

My Darling B has spent most of the winter reading blogs about food. Before the snow started flying, it was blogs about gardens, but the long, cold winter put the kibosh on that. Apparently it’s like dangling raw meat over the heads of starving prisoners, so she temporarily retreated to reading mostly recipe blogs and blogs with news about food. These blogs have to be ridiculously specialized to survive on the interwebs; one of her favorites is a blog that combines food, currents events and President Obama, called (what else?) Obama Food-O-Rama.

More than a few of these “foodies” (people who blog about food) are based right here in Madison, and one of B’s favorite Madison-based food blogs is Eating in Madison A to Z, a blog started by a couple who decided to blog about eating at every restaurant in the Madison area. Since there are about a zillion restaurants in operation around our fair city at any one time, they had to come up with a plan: How to get to them all without favoring some over others. The answer was as simple as visiting them in alphabetical order. When they finish with one letter, they break stride, back up and visit the newly-opened restaurants they would have gone to in order.

And last week B found out that the couple who started the blog were going to be interviewed at a show in town. In fact, the location was right down the block from the office building where I work, so we arranged with Tim to take the car home, then come pick us up later.

This downtown location turned out to be The Frequency, a skinny little tavern down at the very end of the one-hundred block of Main Street. It looks a lot like the kind of bar I would have hung out in about twenty years ago when I was, for a brief period (about a week or so), a bar-hanger-outer. The shop front is a room about twenty feet deep, the bar features band logos under the clear lucite top, and if you follow the passage to the back, you’ll find a stage with an open space just big enough for about forty or fifty people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to watch a show.

Both B and I had just finished a pretty grueling Monday, and the show wasn’t billed to start until six, so we pulled up a couple stools at the bar, ordered two pints and sat nursing them while we swapped stories about work or tried to guess the names of the eclectic mix of bands playing on the juke box (Christopher Cross followed by Gary Neuman?). When there were about ten minutes left before the top of the hour, we ordered a couple more beers and took them to the back room to find a seat.

Everything in the back room was painted flat black. Everything. I got the impression that if we sat there long enough, eventually the owner would stop at our table and spray-paint us flat black.

Also, we were the oldest people in the room with just one exception that I could see, and that was the mother of the headline act, Dan Potake. I was the second oldest person; B was the third. The fourth-oldest person was probably two or three years younger than our oldest son. In fact, my age plus B’s was probably more than the combined ages of all the other people in the audience. Sore thumbs? We stuck out, all right, but a lot more obviously than that.

Show time was billed as six o’clock, but they apparently meant in another time zone, or really somewhere between two time zones. At six, there were less than ten people in the audience, and none of them looked as though they expected the show to start any time soon. They were the friends of the host. At six-thirty, the audiences started to thicken, and the show didn’t start until sometime after, although I wasn’t paying much attention to the clock by that time. No point, really.

The Dan Potake Show was preceded by a few minutes of stand-up comedy, or what passes for it in the back rooms of taverns around here. Then the host of the feature show bounded through the crowd, clapping shoulders and shaking hands with members of the audience, and the fun began. He was a doughy guy with a helium-huffer voice and a presence so frantic he made Howie Mandel look reticent and taciturn.

But I have to admit, I found myself liking this big geek. There wasn’t a whole lot to his act that I thought of as laugh-out-loud funny, but I had a hard-core smile on my face all through his act, and he never let it slow down. And he made lots of time for audience participation, a sure-fire way to draw everyone in. I didn’t participate, but he dragged lots of other people up on stage to play games such as Wheel of Fantasticalness and Guess Who’s Wearing Only A Thong? That guy’s got to have some major mojo to get three friends to appear on stage in skimpy underwear.

The part of the act we came to see, the interview with foodies JM and Nichole, didn’t start until ten minutes before the end of the show, so we had to sit through every bit of foolishness that came before. Now, although the food blog is occasionally funny, it isn’t played for laughs. The Dan Potake Show, however, is, every bit of it. The host’s name isn’t even really Dan Potake, and I imagine when he’s off stage and out of character he sits in a window seat at his neighborhood coffee shop thoughtfully smoking as he pecks away at a laptop with two fingers, growling at the waitress from time to time for more coffee.

That’s not to imply I think the guy’s a big phony. He’s a comedian taking his carefully crafted personality out for a walk now and then. JM and Nichole, though, aren’t, so I couldn’t help watching the interview thinking, Is he making fun of them? And even though he got a few good laughs with the questions he asked them, it looked more like he was channeling Leno than taking them for a ride.

Nichole was very cool through the interview, but JM was nervous as hell. He crossed and re-crossed his legs, and wagged the foot that was in the air faster than a Pomeranian waves its bobbed tail. I thought I got bad bouts of stage fright, but I’m Mister Smoove next to this guy. (I lie. I lock up like a zombie in front of a crowd, and not one of these new-age turbo zombies, either.)

It was all over by eight and our chauffeur delivered us safely home long before our usual bed time. I still went to bed almost right away, though, having indulged in a few beers at the tavern. There’s no staying up late for this guy on a school night any more.

Long day. Really long. My bladder woke me up at about four o’clock this morning and the remains of a bizarre dream about being chased by spooks (dead people, not the CIA kind) kept me awake, more or less, until my alarm clock began to squawk at five. So right there, my day was already longer than it should have been.

I traded the comfort of Our Humble O’Bode for the hard-edged confinement of my cubicle at six. There’s been a stack of paperwork literally five inches thick (or it was until today) haunting the shelf over my keyboard for the past week. I couldn’t stand its buzzard-like presence any longer, so I spent an hour and a half this morning signing my name a couple hundred times. The pile is now four inches thick. I’m going to slice another inch off it tomorrow morning. That probably means the spooks will chase me again tonight.

When My Darling B found out that the clay in the cat litter we used was strip-mined by Halliburton, she made me go right out and buy a bag of kitty litter that was not. What kind of kitty litter do you suppose was not touched by the hand of Halliburton? I wouldn’t have the first clue.

What she told me was that she wanted a flushable kitty litter so we could give the finger to Halliburton and stop throwing cat poop in the landfill at the same time. I still don’t see what’s wrong with poop in the landfill. If there’s anything you’d want in a landfill, I’d think it would be poop, and lots of it. Heaven knows there have already got to be plenty of poop-filled Huggies and Pampers composting up a storm in there.

But My Darling B’s wish is my command, so I motored into town to visit Mad Cat, the Madison area’s headquarters for all things feline. Some dog stuff there, too, but mostly it’s for cats. You can tell as soon as you pull up to the curb by the forest of cat trees crowding the window. And a good thing, too, because a pet store for dogs named “Mad Cat” would probably confuse customers quite a lot.

I was hoping they might be able to tell me something about the great big bags of flushable cat litter in the front of the shop by the door, and wasn’t disappointed. I don’t remember a word of it now, possibly because I wasn’t all that interested in what it was made of or how big the bags were. What I really wanted him to tell me was which kind to buy.

I hate shopping. I wanted to walk in, grab a bag, pay for it, and walk out, and when I found two completely different brands, one kind made out of corn and the other out of wheat, I got a brain cramp. When it locks up like that I go on autopilot, seeking out the first warm body that seems to be in charge of things, in this case the guy behind the counter.

“Can I help you?” he asked me, which caused my cramped brain to blurt out, “Yes! Can you tell me something about flushable cat litter?” Meaning: Please tell me which cat litter to buy. But he didn’t catch my meaning. Instead, he gave me a little sales pitch on each brand, telling me all kinds of information that might have been useful to me, if I had a ready supply of wheat or corn on hand and I wanted to make some of my own. His information wasn’t especially helpful to more immediate objective of buying something and getting the hell out of there.

So in the end I chose a brand more or less at random. Actually, I chose it because of its name: World’s Best Cat Litter. How could I go wrong with that? It’s made of corn, it’s flushable, and it’s named World’s Best Cat Litter! Awesome!

I bought the 17-pound bag instead of the 34-pound bag. That way if it turned out our cats hated it so much that they absolutely refused to poop on it (and that’s got to be about as much as anybody can hate anything) I’d be stuck with only half as much. What’s with the size, do you suppose? Seventeen pounds? Did they pick that number by throwing a dart with their eyes closed?

I very tentatively tested the new litter with the cats by filling a cardboard box with the stuff and setting it next to the old box. Shortly after I put it out, one of them tiptoed through it, leaving only tracks behind, but other than that they stubbornly ignored it for days until, yesterday morning, one or both of them approved it in a most feline way. Good enough for me, I thought, and Made The Switch.

They’ve never been all that fussy about what kind of cat litter we set out for them to use, and we’ve tried quite a few. I wanted them to have nothing but good feelings about this new stuff, though, so I gave their box a thorough cleaning before I filled it up with The World’s Best Cat Litter. Nothing on earth is as awful as cleaning out a cat box. You may think you know something that’s worse, but if you do, it can only be because you don’t have cats.

The effort paid off big time, thank goodness, when I could see the unmistakable signs that they were still using the cat box and not, for instance, my pillow to do their business, so the switch to using non-Halliburton corn-based flushable cat litter could reasonably be considered a qualified success. It’ll probably turn out to be GMO corn, what do you think?

I served pizza for guy night, served in the sense that I fetched it from Angelo’s Pizzeria, put it in the middle of the dining room table and flipped the top of the box open so I could serve a slice to My Darling B. It was such a cop-out, but it had to be that way. I neglected to plan for dinner, was utterly tired and didn’t have an emergency back-up plan ... unless you count picking up the phone and calling Angelo’s as a back-up plan. I certainly do. Did.

Last night’s order was a sixteen-inch Porky’s Pride, a pizza topped by forty-two kinds of meat and just enough cheese thrown in for flavor. B was feeling concerned enough about her cholesterol after a recent blood test revealed slightly elevated icky fats in her blood that she asked for an eight-inch veggie pizza with peppers and a double-shot of onions. And beer. I’m glad she remembered the beer. Eating pizza without beer to wash it down will get you sent straight to hell.

Dinner the night before was corn dogs, but not the food you’re reminded of when I saw ‘corn dogs.’ B wanted to create an entirely new kind of corn dog, one that she wouldn’t have to deep-fry and, more importantly, one that she could make from the materials she had on hand. She trolled the interwebs until she found a recipe for corn dogs she could bake in the oven. She had all the ingredients to make the batter, and she thought it would compliment the emu-meat hot dogs she had in the freezer. Yes, I said emu. Those fuzzy little birds from New Zealand. A local butcher makes hot dogs out of them. Best thing to do with emus, if you ask me.

That’s not the only emu product you can buy at the Dane County Farmer’s Market every Saturday morning. The lady who raises emus for slaughter, or maybe there’s more than one, I forget, sells their green egg shells and the tanned skins of their paws, or claws, or whatever it is that emus call their feet. I’m not sure what you’d do with these grotesqueries if you were moved to buy one or two. They look exactly like what they were, the feet of flightless birds, stripped from their limbs and dried in the sun. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been this close to asking her why she sells such bizarre mementos of her trade, but always chickened out in the end, pardon the pun.

Tonight B served fish, a fillet of steelhead trout marinaded in a sauce made of soy and maple syrup, sooooo scrummy. Steelhead is in fact a kind of salmon and, if there’s any fish that would move me to vote in favor of plundering the planet’s oceans so we could fill the shelves at the local fishmongers’ shop with delectable fillet o’ fish, it’s salmon. What the hell, it’ll probably be extinct soon anyway. Might as well get my fill while I can. It’s all about me anyway.

B kept fussing with it while the fillet was under the broiler, worried that she would overcook it and ruin our treat, but I wasn’t worried. She was setting her timer for thirty-second intervals and carefully testing it for flakiness with a tiny fork each time the alarm began to bleep. Master chefs aren’t this fussy, even when they’re defending their doctoral work, assuming they have some sort of final examination. B isn’t worried about exams, she’s just trying to get it to live up to her exacting expectations. Perfection is her goal. I believe she’s achieved is several times already, but doubt she will ever be satisfied.

LINK

I scored a major victory over a telemarketer last night when I made her so disgusted with me that she hung up, and I did it by telling her the plain truth. So honesty really is the best policy. For me, though. Not so much for her.

“Hi, could I speak to Bob?” she began when I answered the phone.

“Bob?” I answered in my best puzzled-dog voice. “There’s no one here by that name.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Is this Dave?” Ah, very smooth. And we’re on a first-name basis already, or almost. I never did get her name.

“Yes, speaking.”

“Hi, Dave. I was in your neighborhood the other day to slip a copy of our special offer under your door and I couldn’t help but notice how much Creeping Charlie you have in your lawn,” she said. I frankly doubt she had ever visited my house, because she called my next door neighbor “Joe” and didn’t get his address right, either, but she was right about the Creeping Charlie. I have a lot of it in my lawn. I have it all over my lawn. I put it there. I love Creeping Charlie.

I understand there are more than a few people who do not feel the way I do about Creeping Charlie. Quite a few, in fact, feel the same way about Creeping Charlie that they do about dandelions (I happen to love dandelions, too) and would like nothing better than to wipe Creeping Charlie off the face of the earth, with napalm or nuclear weapons if necessary.

Well, good for them, and if they can do it without poisoning the earth and all the rest of us by calling in the satanic armies of Chemlawn, I say they can go for it. When I see people digging out Creeping Charlie with shovels and rakes and similar, non-poisonous implements of destruction, and not by fouling my lawn, my house and the air I breathe with a lot of sprayover, then I’ll accept the argument that I’m giving them trouble by letting a few weeds grow in my yard. [Steps down off soap box, bows, thanks you for your attention.]

So I didn’t have any problem admitting to my telemarketing friend that I had lots of Creeping Charlie on my lawn. “And when those purple splotches break out all over your nice, green lawn I’m sure you’d like to find a sure-fire way to get rid of it, am I right?” she asked. Here again I wasn’t so sure she knew what she was talking about. My Creeping Charlie has a beautiful powder blue blossom. Maybe there are different kinds.

“No, actually, I like it,” I told her sincerely.

“Oh, come on now, Dave,” she said, in a you’re-pulling-my-leg tone of voice, “I’m sure you don’t mean that.”

“I do,” I assured her. “I think it’s very pretty.” I really do. It was blossoming in a corner of the back yard when we moved in and I’ve encouraged it ever since. If I mow it regularly, it’s fairly easy to herd in whatever direction I want it to grow.

“Well, maybe you think it’s pretty now, Dave,” she said, trying a different tack, “but by the time summer rolls around and it’s all over your yard, you’ll probably feel differently.”

“I don’t think so,” I answered. “I’ve been planting it everywhere. It’s already all over my yard.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that at all. Sputtering, she blurted out something about their low introductory rate. I flat-out told her that I wasn’t interested in having my lawn sprayed with herbicides no matter how affordable she could make it, and she hung up on me without so much as a good-bye. Score!

After a hard winter during which virtually everybody I know came down with some form of the Killer Death Flu or the Coughing Crud, and I managed to avoid catching any of those bugs in spite of the fact that I couldn’t avoid being in close contact with them and didn’t get a flu shot last fall — after all that, now I seem to have come down with some kind of raspy throat that makes me mewl like a wet cat.

Every time I picked up the phone or opened my mouth to answer a question, the wet cat would try to climb up out of my throat. It must have been a kitten because its claws were sharp as needles. I couldn’t get more than a couple words out before I had to cover my mouth and hack away the pain.

To make sure I could carry on a conversation I tripped right on down to Walgreen’s on the morning break that I usually forget to take and bought a couple bags of Riccola cough drops. I tore open the bag as I was leaving the store and popped one in my mouth for a little necessary relief as I was walking back to the office. For the rest of the day I kept one on the tip of my tongue with an emergency-back up in my pocket at all times.

Really, what kind of crap is this? I’ve been working in a chilly basement office all winter with fourteen people. They’ve all been coughing and sneezing and blowing their noses for six months. I’ve been touching the same door knobs and copy machines and computer mouses they’ve been using. I’ve been sleeping next to a woman who’s just now getting over a nasty case of bronchitis that she contracted the week before Christmas, for crying out loud! And now, at the very end of March, when the snow is finally gone, the grass is greening everywhere and the plants and trees are budding like mad, now I get sick? That’s not right.

This is for My Darling B:

LINK

Oh hai.

Did you get any snow? How’d you like it? We hated it. It was unanimous here at Our Humble O’Bode, not a single vote of dissension. Universally loathed. We griped about it all night, right up to the moment we turned off the lights, then started griping about it again first thing in the morning. I’m pretty sure Tim had some especially choice words for it as he was shoveling it from the driveway this afternoon.

But today the sun came out and the snow was almost completely gone by dinner time and with any luck at all we’ve seen the last of the winter’s snow around here, thank you very much, Mother Nature, have a nice freaking day.

It’s been a weekend devoted to relaxation and naps. One does not always necessarily follow the other but we made a special effort this weekend to make sure it did. We made plans to do as little as possible. I took My Darling B out for coffee and a Danish at Emian’s bakery Saturday morning, although when she saw that they served breakfast sandwiches she changed her mind and I did, too. We loitered at Emian’s for about an hour, long enough to make sure we got a refill on our coffee, anyway, before we hopped in the car and made a special trip to Willy Street to pick up a few things at the co-op and to make a necessary stop at the thrift shop.

I bought just one book yesterday at Saint Vinnie’s. My Darling B was stunned. I could have brought home more, but the biography of Einstein was the only thing that I felt I absolutely had to have, and why overdo it? When I didn’t see anything else and we’d spent enough time there, I checked out with my one book, and we headed home.

I can claim to have done at least one productive thing this weekend: I added a garbage disposal to the kitchen sink at the request of My Darling B. Ever since I replaced the teensy-tiny steel kitchen sink with the monster acrylic sink we’ve had to do without, because the drain ended up being directly over the sewer pipe. The geometry of the situation didn’t leave enough room for the big-ass garbage disposal. The sewer pipe would have to be shorter. I would have to cut it off. Cutting it off meant crawling into the narrow confines under the sink with a hacksaw. I was so not looking forward to that.

I replaced the sink last December, and let the job of installing the disposal go as long as I possibly could. Longer, really. I guess I was sort of hoping that My Darling B would get so used to not having a garbage disposal that she’d say something along the lines of, “You know, I’ve gotten so used to not having a garbage disposal that I guess you really wouldn’t have to put it back in if you didn’t want to.”

Instead, about two or three weeks ago, she said something along the lines of, “You know, one of these days you could do me a big favor and put that garbage disposal back.” Oh, well. Can’t say no to B.

So yesterday I bought a couple shiny new hacksaw blades at the hardware store, and this morning at about ten o’clock I changed into some grubby working clothes, plopped my butt on the kitchen floor and started clearing out the space in the cupboard under the sink. B wandered in to refill her coffee mug as I was preparing to work.

“Uh-oh,” she said, “the cussing’s about to start!” She knows me so well by now.

Actually, I got through the whole job without cussing at all, a first for me. Starting early in the day helped a lot, and I had to make only one trip to the hardware store for parts. I bought a new disposal, as it turned out. The old one was, well, old, and it still had a great big butt. I bought a more svelte model that gave me a little more room under the sink to work with.

I finished up at about one-thirty when everything was installed and seemed to be working well. “And I am not doing a damned thing for the rest of the day,” I announced, heading off to the bathroom to take a very long, very hot shower.

LINK

Dinner last night was Philly cheese steaks, in honor of our youngest son, who came out of his room for a precious hour or so to dine and visit a bit with us, an auspicious occasion however how measure it.

When My Darling B has the opportunity to ask Tim what he would like for dinner, holding onto the dim hope that he might still want to eat with us occasionally, he unfailingly answers, “Steak,” as she knew he would. But being the cuisine-loving food junkie she is, she doesn’t want to do the easy thing and just broil a steak; she has to find a new way to prepare steak each and ever time she does it.

This is a wonderful attitude, as far as I’m concerned, because I love her kitchen experiments almost as much as I love her, but she’s dashing off in the opposite direction of Tim’s dietary proclivities, which are so predictably repetitive that an unadorned slab of cooked meat is his idea of culinary bliss. If she prods him into naming a vegetable to serve with steak, and he actually gives in, he will always say, "potatoes." Always.

So last night’s dinner was a nod to his favorite food, although I don’t remember her asking him for his opinion, she just made it, figuring that, since it was a cheese-covered steak sandwich, he wouldn’t say no. And he didn’t, although he did say no to the fried onions and peppers she prepared as a garnish. More for us.

On last Friday’s trip to the local liquor store & market (they sell briskets, ground chuck and barbecue sauce for the burger-burning beer drinkers out there) I noticed that sometime in the recent past they started selling “Pick Six” six-packs. Behind one door of their walk-up cooler near the front of the store they have a mix of locally-brewed beers, along with a few well-known out-of-staters, that you can mix up in a six-pack for the awesome price of eight and a half bucks. I grabbed the first six that looked interesting, loading up a six-pack in about ten seconds, although I could have stood there all day debating the merits of this microbrew over that one, a good enough reason to just grab six different bottles and get the hell out of there.

I love it when we find a place that does this. The liquor store in Cottage Grove had a cooler where we could pick six, and we did so every time we went in there. Why buy six of one when you can go home with a variety and try something new every time you pop open a cold one? And the beauty of it is, even if the first one sucks, chances are pretty good the other five won’t.

My Friday afternoon pick turned out so good that I combined my afternoon constitutional on Sunday afternoon with a trip to the market so we could have them with our Philly cheese steaks. Bliss!

LINK

As I stumbled through the early-morning darkness of my bedroom today and reached into my underwear drawer, I got that cold, empty feeling in the pit of my stomach that comes from reaching into an utterly empty underwear drawer. There was nothing. No amount of swishing my hand back and forth could find so much as a hanky. I was underwear-less.

On any other day I would make my way to our microminiaturized laundry nook, just off the dining room, where there would be two or three laundry baskets piled high with clean but unfolded clothes. I would pick the one that appeared most likely to contain boxers and briefs and, after about ninety seconds of intensive rummaging punctuated by grumbles and curses, I’d have to wad all the dish towels together in the basket again and take another guess. Half-asleep at five o’clock in the morning, I could hardly ever guess right on the first try.

Usually after the second try, though, I’d find myself a rumpled pair of boxers and a t-shirt so wrinkled it wouldn’t be hard to mistake me for one of the California Raisins, but one that spent way too much time in the basement writing drivel on his computer.

Unfortunately for me, today turned out to be anything but normal with regard to the status of my underwear. No matter how long I rooted through any of our laundry baskets, all I could find were clean dish towels and gym socks. I suppose I could have safety-pinned enough of those together to make emergency back-up underwear ... no, that’s just too freakish to even think about. So sorry I even began to plant that visual in your mind. Shake your head real hard, maybe it’ll go away.

I had given up searching and resigned myself to the reality of recycling a used set of underwear, maybe sprinkling something stinky like mouthwash or hair spray on it to cover the smell, when ... what’s this? Neatly stacked on the sofa with the socks and t-shirts she folded the other night while watching an episode of Lost? My Darling B must have mixed up a few pairs of my printed boxers with the load of darks she washed! I’m saved!

And for a t-shirt, I just stole one of the oversized v-necks she wears to the garden. Nobody was going to see it anyway.

Here’s yet another thing I don’t get about The Current Economic Crisis ... y’know, someday soon (I hope) it’s not going to be a current economic crisis and we’ll have to think of a real name for this thing. Something along the lines of The Not So Great Depression. Or how about something like, That Time Everybody Woke Up And Couldn’t Remember Where All The Money Was. Or this: The Suckiest Sucking Suck That Ever Sucked. Those are just off the top of my head. I’m sure somebody other than me will come up with something better. But you see what I mean.

Back to the thing I don’t get (so easily distracted, sorry): Why do we have to give General Motors a trailer-truck full of thousand-dollar bills? Wait, that wouldn’t really describe $30 billion, would it? One billion would be a million thousand-dollar bills, and that would be a stack as high as the Empire State Building, or some other believe-it-or-not cartoon graphic out of a Ripley’s weekend color panel. So. Picture thirty Empire State Building-shaped stacks of thousand dollar bills. Kind of makes you wilt, doesn’t it?

You know what makes a company like GM worth that kind of cash? You don’t know, do you? ’Course you don’t, nobody does. The feds say we’ve got to keep it afloat, though, or The American Dream is lost. I sort of thought the American dream was liberty and justice for all, but it turns out to be crappy cars. All those years spent reciting the pledge of allegiance, and now they tell me.

Back to February, 2009   |    Occasionally Updated Index of 2009   |    Onward to April!  
 

© 2009 Dave Okonski.

drivel
Dave’s web disaster
o-broze.net