this is drivel
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
I’ve had a song stuck in my head for the past three days, a song so very bad I’d like to stick a corkscrew in my ear and dig around until I snag it so I can pull it out. I’m going to tell you what it is even though it probably violates the Geneva Conventions or the Red Cross No-Nos or some humanitarian legal ban to do so, because you’re not going to remember it. It’s Southern Nights by Glen freaking Campbell. You can’t remember it, can you? Count yourself lucky. I’d completely forgotten it until last weekend when the local oldies station gave it a whirl (thanks a lot, WOLX), and now I can’t stop it from replaying over and over and oh my god over again in my head. Make the voices STOP!
This rinky-tinky little ditty was so immensely popular back when Glen recorded it in 1977 that it went to the top of the pop charts, and I seemed to be one of the few people who felt the urge to spontaneously combust every time it was broadcast over the airwaves, which was virtually all the time. I lived kind of out in the sticks back then where AM radio stations favored country tunes like this one, and in the summer of ’77 it was possible to spin across the dial at any time of the day or night and find this song playing on one station or another. If you wanted to hear it again after it was over, just give the dial another twist. Not that this was a good thing.
After thirty years it’s back, and so tightly wedged into my brain that no amount of humming the theme song from Gilligan’s Island will make it go away, unless I just keep humming Gilligan’s Island forever and what kind of personal hell would that be? As soon as I stop, there’s Glen’s nasal twang echoing off theinsides of my eardrums. My only consolation is that, when I googled his name looking for a goofy photo for this drivel, I found his mug shot, so apparently he’s been to jail, but probably not for singing this song.
As we chatted over dinner the other night about Our Current Economic Crisis (Obama just signed the bill requiring every conversation to eventually dwell on OCEC for at least three minutes), My Darling B mentioned her long-held belief that we bought Our Humble O-Bode at the very peak of the housing bubble. I’ve never tried to contradict her. For a long time, right up until last night, as a matter of fact, I believed exactly the same thing.
Then, as I was reading the Planet Money blog and doing dozens of other productive things on the interwebs (more coloquially known as “wasting time”), my eyes happened across this graph. Good news, hon! According to A Price-Tracking Company With A Very Important-Sounding Name, the price of single-family housing didn’t reach its peak until about mid-2006, almost a whole year after we bought our house! And then, as this really scary-looking graph illustrates, the price of a house rolled over and went into a steep tailspin, as the broadcast news folks like to say. More of a flat spin, if you ask me. They’re way scarier than a tailspin, although I admit “tailspin” sounds a lot cooler.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
“Do you ever buy anything other than khaki pants?” My Darling B asked me the other night as we walked out the front door of Kohl’s with a big bag stuffed with clothes. I love it when she gets all rhetorical on me. She’s seen me wearing pants that weren’t the color of sand, even within recent memory, although come to think of it neither one of us has a memory that’s worth a damn any more so maybe not. Either way, she saw an opening to take a jab, she took it, and she jabbed straight and true, even if it was hitting below the belt. (rimshot)
We stopped at Kohl’s on the way home because we both desperately needed to pick up some new things for work to replace the natty old stuff in our closets that’ll be hitting the shelves at Saint Vinnie’s thrift store when we do our spring cleaning this weekend. I think I can fill a couple grocery bags with the clothes I don’t plan to wear again ever, although replacing them will be a gradual process, dragging on for years and costing trillions of dollars. Wait, that’s not my wardrobe-building strategy, that’s Obama’s plan to end the current economic crisis. I got all the way to the bottom of the second paragraph and still hadn’t mentioned it, so it sort of automatically kicked in. At least we got that out of the way.
I picked out a couple nice shirts, polo and button-down, as well as a pair of trousers and two packages of socks. Just like underpants, you can never have enough socks. The trousers I chose to buy were a pair of olive-drab chinos, because that’s what I’ve always thought looked good on me, that or desert tan. I have a pretty limited talent for color-coordination, so I’ve stuck to earth tones for years and it’s always seemed to work out. Brown shirt, green pants. Green shirt, brown pants. Green and green. Brown and brown. You can never go wrong.
Back when I used to wear blue jeans, many, many moons ago, I compensated by amassing a wardrobe of mostly bluish clothing, mostly blue flannel shirts and tees. Blue was then my favorite color. When I try to figure out why I joined the Air Force, I can’t deny that one of the factors may very likely have been that their uniform conflicted least with the clothing items I already felt competent to match up. I like to keep my life fairly uncomplicated.
I tried for a little variety by taking home a rust-colored polo shirt to wear on casual Fridays. I’ll probably wear that with the tan pants.
Egg sandwiches for guy-prepared dinner tonight. I wanted a meal that was simple, hot, and preferably a sandwich. “How about if I fry up some eggs and a couple thick slices of crusty bread and stick the eggs in between the greasy, fried bread slices with some cheese?” I asked My Darling B after dinner on Wednesday night, trying to make it sound as appealing as possible. I could have thrown some bacon in there to clinch the deal, but I didn’t want to spend the time on it or clean up the mess after, but even without the bacon she was all for it. Before she picked me up after work, she even stopped at the store to get a loaf of crusty bread.
I’m a little more than halfway through Parting The Waters, a history of the civil rights movement by Taylor Branch, and I have to admit that I never thought I’d make it this far. It’s a thousand-page book. I’ve read exhaustively long histories before, but that’s impressively huge. Steven King doesn’t write books that long. Neither does Tom Clancy. Not that I read stuff from either one of those guys, they’re just the first two examples that popped into my head of people who write books large enough to be seen at maximum zoom on Google Earth.
Parting The Waters turned out to be pretty riveting stuff, however, and I’m sure when I get to the end that I’ll get that sad, sinking feeling of knowing there isn’t any more of a really good book. I would’ve been up all night to read to the end of the chapter about the drive to register black voters in Alabama if had the kind of physical constitution that would allow me stay awake past eleven-thirty, but I don’t. Even so, I’m awfully proud of myself for making it to eleven-thirty.
Friday, April 3, 2009
On this, our first night attending the Wisconsin Film Festival, I met My Darling B on the campus of the University of Madison to see the “experimental” film RR which, you know if you’re a train nerd like me, stands for “railroad,” just like on the crossing signs. The festival began yesterday but B didn’t plan far enough ahead to schedule vacation time from our day jobs. We both managed to duck out early today, though, and met at the entrance to Cinematheque, a campus movie theater cunningly hidden deep within the bowels of one of the humanities buildings. I wandered around on the street level for five minutes before I realized I had a cell phone in my pocket and dialed B’s number. Weirdly, I locked eyes with her across the street the moment the phone began to ring.
B picked this film out because she loves me, bless her heart. Why else would any woman consent to sit in a darkened room for an hour and a half watching film clips of trains? And not just any trains; freight trains. Not old freight trains of brightly-colored box cars pulled by chuffing steam engines, but boring, modern freight trains, car after blank-sided car virtually all the same color, pulled by blocky diesel engines that have the sex appeal of tomb stones. But this was an art film, and we wanted to try a little bit of everything, and B did pick the film for me, so we gave it a shot.
The opening scene was a mostly featureless wide shot of a farm field with a train track running through it. The rumble of an oncoming train could be heard just before the engines blasted into the scene from stage left, towing what turned out to be a mile-long string of boxcars, tanker, flat cars and so on at moderate speed. There was no music, no voice over, nothing, just the noise of the train. Not the typical clickety-clack you might remember when you think of train wheels moving over track. This was just noise. The camera never moved, and the scene didn’t end until the train passed completely through the scene and faded into the background.
The next scene was a different location, but exactly the same thing happened. I thought at first it might even have been the same train, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. The third scene was exactly the same as the first two scenes, and so on. Sometimes the train passed over a bridge, and sometimes through a tunnel, but other than that there was no variation at all that I could tell.
Then, about five or six scenes into the movie, a subtle difference: Before the train rumbled into the scene, a radio broadcast of a baseball game was imposed over the usual background noise of the oncoming engines, as if the cameraman himself had become so bored with the movie that he left the camera rolling and went back to his car to listen to the game while waiting for the train to show up, then got so caught up in the play-by-play that he couldn’t be bothered to turn the sound down while he was filming.
Following this, there were five or six more trains rumbling along as usual.
“We don’t have to stay for this,” I whispered to B after about twenty or thirty minutes. I didn’t want her to think she had to endure to the very end of the film. I thought she would bolt for the door at the mere suggestion that I might not be as interested as she had at first thought, but she answered, “I’m relaxing,” whatever that meant, so I settled deeper into my seat and turned my attention back to the screen to see if anything new was happening. No luck there.
The film didn’t offer the next surprise, but a member of the audience did: The head of the woman directly in front of us pitched suddenly forward and she woke herself up with a sound like ZAWP! Then she cleared her throat and took out her hanky to blow her nose, trying to act as if that’s what she’d been doing in the first place. My Darling B was trembling all over in silent laughter and for several minutes I thought she’d shriek out loud, but she has the strength of a thousand women and could manage to contain herself, as much as she wanted to bust open and cry with delight. Thank goodness we didn’t leave when I suggested it or we would’ve missed that.
The final straw was a scene of a freight train rumbling along a mountainside track while someone read bible verses in a monotone voice with all the conviction of an eight-year-old boy trapped in a church basement on a warm summer day. Up to that point I didn’t think the film’s maker could possibly find a way to make watching trains even more wretched and torturous than he already had, but this was evidently a guy with a finely-honed talent for composing bad cinema. “Let’s get out of here,” I hissed at B, with feeling. She giggled as she grabbed her coat and ducked through the darkness toward the exit. Twenty seconds later we were blinking in the daylight.
This is from the film’s synopsis, printed in the festival guide:
The near-classically composed shots in RR are determined by the length and speed of the trains that [the film’s maker] observes with his mathematician’s eye. This variation on a thematic structure, a hallmark of [his] most recent films, enlivens the senses as we eagerly await the next train, each building a successive rhythm, pictorial depth and sense of vibrating illusionism.
I’m not sure what the hell “vibrating illusionism” is, but the only eagerness I saw was in the hasty exit several dozen people made from the theater before us. Out of the original audience of roughly a hundred people, I can’t imagine more than five or ten stayed to the bitter end.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Lunch today was two Belgian waffles and a plate of bacon. It cost sixty bucks. Let me explain.
I love Belgian waffles. B loves kitchen gadgets. About two weeks ago we were looking at the kitchen gadgets in the thrift store and I started thinking out loud about how it would be nice to have a waffle iron so we could make our own darned waffles for breakfast at home instead of going out for waffles at places like Lazy Jane’s. Not that I don’t like going to Lazy Jane’s for breakfast; I adore going to Lazy Jane’s for breakfast. I’d stop there every day on the way to work to eat breakfast if I could think of a way to come up with that kind of disposable income. I still haven’t, which is why we see the inside of Lazy Jane’s maybe twice a month; so sad. But I digress.
When I mentioned how much I’d like to have a waffle iron right here in Our Humble O’Bode, My Darling B said she’d been looking for a cast-iron waffle iron for a while but so far hadn’t been able to find one. I asked her what was wrong with the models you just plug into the wall; she answered that she thought I didn’t like those. I wonder when I said that. I wonder even more why she remembered it.
I’ve checked out waffle irons here and there whenever we stop by a store, but they usually look like such inferior junk and they’re always made in China. As of today, I hadn’t reached that point where I just break down, accept the inevitable and buy the one that’s made in China. And then this morning B let me know she found one that’s not only made here in the States but is also sold at Kohl’s department store, one of which we just happen to have right here in Monona, but she wouldn’t be able to buy one until she put in an order for it, as they didn’t keep it on the shelves. I can only guess that they didn’t keep it in stock because it was the kind of waffle iron you lay on the burner instead of plug into a wall outlet, and who wants one of those?
We made our customary Saturday trek into town to shop at the farmer’s market, stopped by the co-op on the way back so B could pick up a few groceries while I ducked into Saint Vinnie’s used book store, and as we went back to the car I asked B if we could pick up a bag of lemon scones at Lazy Jane’s. She approved the idea because Lazy Jane’s lemon scones are so delicious that we’d both trample toddlers for the pleasure of eating them (the scones, not the toddlers), and because Lazy Jane’s is right next door to a really nice kitchen store that always has all the latest gadgets. She loves to go in there whenever she can to look at the crockery and handle the toys.
There’s always a long line to get into Lazy Jane’s, but one thing we’ve learned from our visits there is that they’ll let customers jump the line who want to order bakery goods for take-away. Customers who’ve been waiting in line for thirty minutes tend to take a dim view of this policy, so to get bakery-buying queue-jumpers in and out quickly enough that the customers in line can’t pounce on them and tear them to shreds with their bare hands, the management have left a bunch of pinwheels in an umbrella stand by the door. If you take one and wave it in the air as you head for the cash register they’ll have out of there so fast that the worst you’ll get is a few icy glares from the customers waiting in line.
At the kitchen store, B wandered among the gadgets while I checked out the coffee mugs. I’ve been looking forever for a solid-steel travel mug that would hold more than a sip of coffee. Coffee from a plastic mug tastes like plastic, and the steel-lined thermal mugs all seem to be built to hold one shot of espresso. They’re certainly not big enough to hold a satisfying slug of coffee. I’ve found aluminum-lined travel mugs that hold plenty of coffee, but the liner always, always breaks loose after just a week or two of use and falls out of the plastic shell not long after. What I want is a by-god American-made all-steel travel mug that’ll hold enough coffee to keep me going all morning. Is that too much to ask? Apparently the answer is “yes.”
(To be fair, I’ve got an all-steel travel mug right now that B bought at an Ancora coffee shop not long after we moved here. I’ve been using it for years to my great satisfaction, but the plastic lid is showing its age. It’s got coffee stains that have crusted on so thick they can been seen even on the black plastic matte finish. Hence the need for a replacement.)
As I was browsing among the completely inadequate travel mugs, B emerged from a corner of the store with a waffle iron, the very same waffle iron she wanted to order from Kohl’s. It was one of those coincidences that makes me almost want to believe in a higher power, if I could also believe a higher power capable of creating a universe was also interested in providing me with the means to make Belgian waffles in my kitchen, a theological conundrum that might flummox the most learned rabbis and other high priests.
This particular waffle iron was marked up a little higher than one she could have ordered from Kohl’s, but buying this one would support one of her favorite neighborhood merchants, and besides, we could have waffles right now. Couldn’t say no to that, so she checked out with it and, after ducking into the Willy Street Co-op again to pick up a package of bacon, we had a lunch so scrummy you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Belgian waffles, it turns out, are fiendishly complicated to make. I thought it’d be like making pancakes: whip up a batch of batter with flour, eggs & milk and go to town, but B took the better part of an hour to separate the eggs, whip the whites and yolks, add various other ingredients, blend them with a mixer, and mix the two bowls of ingredients together before she could even begin to pour batter into the waffle iron. Apparently that’s what makes them so light and fluffy.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Yowza, I was up so late last night I can almost remember most of what happened!
We drove into town to see two films at the Wisconsin Film Festival. How did Wisconsin end up with a film festival, anyway? That sounds so much like an east-coast thing, not an event you’d expect to find in a drowsy town like Madison. Must be a good story there.
The first of the two movies we picked started at ten-fifteen, so right off the bat we were up past our bed time. This being our first film festival, My Darling B wanted to follow the guide as faithfully as she could, and one of the recommendations was to be in line at least fifteen minutes before the gate opened, so we hit town about quarter till ten. That gave us plenty of time to park in the ramp on Lake Street and wander around the campus looking for the Union Theater for the next fifteen minutes or so. We’d been to the Union Theater about two years ago to attend a reading by author Sarah Vowell but we couldn’t remember exactly how we got there, so we ended up circling almost all the way around the building, bonking off the walls, looking for a way in.
The first movie we saw was Lightbulb, a story about a couple of down-on-their-luck guys who’ve been buddies since high school, now in their late thirties and still trying to make their first million selling animated wrist watches that show you what you’re dog’s dreaming about. Not surprisingly, their first million is still a long way off.
The ideas man, Matt, seems to be happily married to Gina, but little bit by little bit you get to see that he’s walking a fine line with her. He and his buddy Sam, the fast talker, have a gambling problem. Every time they pull some money together, usually borrowed on credit cards or a loan from Sam’s wife, Sam talks Matt into taking it down to the casino to build more capital for their next big idea. As much as they like gambling, they suck at it and Matt always ends up walking home, head hung low, to break the news to Gina.
They hit absolute bottom when another peddler with enough money to run advertising on cable television steals their dreaming dog watch, their business goes into receivership and Sam talks Matt into gambling away seven thousand bucks Gina got from her credit union on a loan. Matt ends up taking a day job in a furniture store to make ends meet while Sam goes back to framing houses.
The future looks bleak for our heroes when, sitting in a tavern drowning their sorrows in cheap beer, Matt gets the idea that will finally make them their million, if they can just manage to scrape together enough money to develop a prototype in time to exhibit it at the biggest trade show in the nation. How will they raise the cash? Will they gamble it all away, same as before? And will Matt get back together with Gina?
I don’t feel I’m giving anything away by revealing all this because there are no surprises in this movie, and I don’t mean that as damning criticism. I liked this movie a lot. It was solidly written, the actors wore their roles like their skin and the direction made sense. I wouldn’t vote Lightbulb one of the greatest movies of all time, but I gave it a “4” and I’d see it again, just for fun.
Which is more than I can say for Idiots And Angels, the animated feature-length film we saw right after Lightbulb. I gave it a “2” only because I sat all the way through it, although I would have begged B to walk out of it (and she revealed later it wouldn’t have taken much begging) if I’d realized it was going to drag on as long as it did.
I love well-made animated films, but I can’t say this was one of them. Film maker Bill Plympton took forever to establish the story and lingered far too long on most scenes. This film centers on a really nasty man who spends all day in a seedy tavern drinking. Why he takes the trouble to shower, shave and put on a suit every morning to go sit at a bar all day getting drunk remains an utter mystery to the end of the film.
There are rarely more than three other people in this dive: the owner, a greedy old fart; his wife, who waits for the moment her husband leaves the room so she can switch on some flamenco music and dance with her mop; and an overpainted, burned-out hooker who sits next to the door playing solitaire all day. The introductions to the various characters takes about a million years, but it feels longer.
One day, a butterfly hatches from a cocoon that landed in the hair of the really nasty guy as he backed out of his garage. The tavern owner sees it and dreams about exhibiting it to make money. The owner’s wife sees it and dreams about flying away to a better life. The old hooker sees it and dreams of breaking out of her cocoon to become a titty dancer on a burlesque stage. The nasty guy sees it, and kills it.
Violence is his solution to everything, and not the childish violence of squashing bugs. When somebody steals his parking spot outside the tavern, he convinces the interloper to move by stuffing a rag in the gas tank and holding a match to it. But after killing the butterfly, he wakes the next morning to find a pair of wings sprouting from his back. He cuts them off, but they grow back again. He cuts them off again, and of course they grow back again. I lost count of the number of times he cut them off; it seemed to go on forever.
Each time they grow back they get bigger until finally he can fly with them. He’s such a bankrupt character, though, that he uses the power of flight to spy on sunbathing women, and to swoop into crowds to steal from people. Too bad for him the wings have a mind of their own; every time he does something bad, the wings undo it. When he steals, the wings turn him around, swipe the money from his hands and give it back. When he swoops down to spy on topless women, the wings tangle him up in overhead power lines. These developments unfold over a period roughly equivalent in length to the Jurassic era.
I have to stop now because recalling all this is giving me a headache, and because it’s boring. I got the idea that this was a very bad guy right away when he woke up mad and threw his alarm clock at the adorable little birdie that sat on his window sill to sing for him. I didn’t have to watch another thirty scenes of him blowing people up and raping women. And I also got the idea right away that the wings were a symbol of redemption, and that they would test him, and that he would eventually be reborn as a good guy. Like Lightbulb, there weren’t a lot of surprises in this film, but Idiots And Angels didn’t have the tight story telling or direction that Lightbulb had. I wouldn’t watch it again with your eyes.
We had to shower and get dressed early for today’s movie, Paper Or Plastic?, showing at the Union Theater on the university campus at eleven-fifteen today. (Have to make sure I get the times right; I’ve been corrected once already for sloppiness.) B picked this movie on a whim, and thank goodness she did. It’s the best movie of the four we’ve seen this weekend.
It’s a documentary that follows eight contestants trying to win the coveted Golden Shopping Bag Trophy at the National Grocer’s Association Best Bagger’s Competition, a yearly event held in Las Vegas, Nevada. I couldn’t make that up if I tried.
Honestly, this turned out to be the best film we saw all weekend, and if it doesn’t turn out to be the best film we watch all year I’ll be drop-dead amazed. It didn’t have any big stars and it didn’t have any explosions, and perhaps that’s what made it such a rewarding experience. It was just eight people having fun and honestly trying to do their best at bagging groceries. You’d think that would be boring as hell, but it’s not.
Of the eight people the film features, one was a dude from California, one was a shy kid from Virginia, one was a mom from Pennsylvania, one was a college kid from Ohio, and so on, and all their stories were wonderfully told in a way that made me care very much about them. Not about whether or not they won the competition, but about them. The competition was very cool, too, but that really wasn’t the point of the movie.
Actually, the competition was very cool, I have to admit. I mean it. How many times have you watched a really good bagger and wondered if they ever try to beat each other? Well, they do. They have regional, state and national competitions. The California state competition is an amazing party of people dressed up in costumes and jamming to hip-hop tunes to show their enthusiasm; the director of the film called it the Thunderdome of bagger competitions.
There’s a whole hidden world of these kinds of competitions out there that you normally find out about only if you know somebody else who’s already involved in them, as B and I did when our kids tried out for Odyssey Of The Mind, so a film like this provides a rare privilege to peek into one of those worlds. If you get the chance to see it, don’t pass it up. I guarantee you’ll like it, or I’ll refund the cost of your film rental.
Monday, April 6, 2009
It’s Monday. I don’t know what to say about it other than it’s Monday. huhRAH.
Oh, and it’s over.
About two days ago I was thinking that it’s just about time to make my annual attempt at proving I can become fit and healthy again my biking in to work two or three times a week, maybe even every week day so long as I’m letting my fancy fly high into fantasy world. But just in case it could happen, I’ll get my bicycle down from where it’s hanging in the rafters of the garage, strap on a helmet and try it for a couple days, bust my butt, give myself cramps and arrive at work too tired to carry on for more than four hours. Then I can give it up until next year.
I was thinking I could try that tomorrow, get it over with, you know? Tomorrow was supposed to be warm and sunny, with temps in the fifties back when they were forecasting it on Saturday, but tonight the same goofballs at the National Weather Service are saying it’s going to be windy and in the low forties. Well, screw that.
So I guess I wait for at least another week, give the sun a chance to warm the earth right down to the marrow and calm the Merry Little Breezes a bit so I don’t have to fight a headwind going to work, and then again when I’m heading home. That’s not your typical old codger talking about walking uphill to school both ways in the snow, that really does happen to me when I bicycle to work, except it’s usually drizzle instead of snow. I’m not one of those very dedicated, year-round bicycle commuters you can see on the streets of Madison who bike in to work from Sun Prairie or Blue Mounds. Or Pembine. I’m strictly a fair-weather biker, and a five-mile ride from Our Humble O’Bode to cap square is all my butt can take in one shot. I want to start biking when the starting’s good. Right around June First would probably be best. Probably not very ambitious, though.
I’m going to try a computer experiment. I have grown to like Ubuntu so much, and Windows so little, that I want to try loading it on my laptop, and when I say “try loading it,” as if this were a fleeting whim, I mean I want to completely and utterly gut my laptop’s operating system and replace it with one I know next to nothing about, a conversion from which there is no coming back from because my laptop did not come with a back-up disk that would let me reload Windows in case the damned thing won’t work with Ubuntu for some unforeseen reason. Is it unforeseen if I already suspect there’s a good chance that’s exactly what’ll happen? Dumb question, never mind, forget I even asked.
If you’re thinking of a good reason I should do this, but you’ve resigned yourself to not warning me because you’re pretty sure I’ve already done it, well, you’re wrong, because I have hundreds of photos on my laptop, nay, thousands, and I have to find a way to copy at least some of them to another computer, not because I want to print them eventually; there isn’t enough printer paper in all the Walgreen’s stores on earth to print all the photos I have stored on my laptop. It’s not even because I know what’s in all those photos and I’d miss them. Clicking on a file folder and scrolling through the photos provides a pleasant diversion from time to time, but if my laptop imploded on itself, condensing into an invisible speck of dust, I might wonder about how many photos I lost, but I’d never remember any one of them in particular.
That’s why we have photo albums. And I don’t have one because they’re on my laptop. So I have to move them. This argument made some sort of sense when I began it, but it’s come completely unglued at this point, as if you hadn’t already noticed that. Okay. Deep breath.
I still want to save the photos, but I don’t have a medium large enough to hold them all. I sure don’t want to copy them all to disks. I’d need at least a half-dozen CDs to do the job, and who’s got the time to futz around like that? Not me. My next brainwave was to upload them to Flickr or Picasa or one of those on-line photo sharing web sites, but after fiddling with the two aforementioned for about an hour and a half before dinner I found that uploading takes too long, and downloading takes even longer. Fah on that. There’s got to be a better way that’s at least as easy and doesn’t require much more effort. I’m especially concerned with the part about not expending much effort.
The last thing I hit on was uploading them to my brother’s computer. He lives in Texas, so you might wonder how that’s easier that all the other juggling acts I was trying, but the way it worked was, I made a test run by uploading one file of photos the same way I upload this web page every night. It seems to have gone off without blowing up the server. No phone calls from Texas, at any rate. And it’s mostly automatic. Then, when it’s over, I can move them to any one of the other computers in my home network. Why I can’t just move them from one computer in my home network to another one is too embarrassing a question to even begin to explore right now. Let’s just say that, technologically, I’m very challenged.
So now that I’ve got that option open to me, all that’s left is to spend the next forty-two weeks moving photo files from here to Texas and back. Easy.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
I watched two movies a while back that I never mentioned at the time because I was either too tired to babble about them or I didn’t know what to say. If I don’t say something soon, though, I’ll have nothing to jog my memory later, and might even forget I saw them. Hell, I might forget they were movies.
Dreamgirls was a two-hour mini-history of Motown. It followed the trio of Effie White, Deena Jones and Lorrell Robinson, fictionalized versions of Motown greats like Dianna Ross and Aretha Franklin, and their manager, a used-car dealer with big dreams who wins it all but, in the end, turns into a control freak who loses everyone he loves. You never see that in movies about fame and fortune, do you?
It’s a very idealized story, but it’s a musical, so it can afford to be. The odd thing was that it wasn’t obvious it was a musical until about the point when Jamie Foxx started to sing. Not that Jamie Foxx is a bad singer, but I assume there’s a reason he doesn’t do it for a living, and besides, he was playing the used car salesman, so all I could think of was, Why the hell is the used-car salesman bursting into song?
Up to that point I thought I’d be watching a more or less conventional biopicture about ordinary people becoming celebrities through the usual challenges of fame, drug abuse, obscurity and comeback. They stuck that in there, too, but they also tried this new tack of having the stars break out of the narrative and sing their emotional hearts out when it was time to highlight an episode of their career.
It didn’t always work. As brilliant as Jennifer Hudson was, dominating the show with a knock-your-socks-off tribute to Aretha Franklin, she couldn’t save what was apparently supposed to be the big comeback scene for her character; while her manager looked on in satisfaction and the rest of the audience got all worked up over her performance, I thought the song was flat and boring.
On the other hand, Hudson rocked the big break-up scene and, for the most part, stole the show away from the more well-known star of the film, Beyonce Knowles. Renting the movie was worth it just to watch her do what she did so well, sing from the depths of her soul. Eddie Murphy’s drop-dead perfect channeling of James Brown through his character, Jimmy Early, was pretty damn good, too.
Burn After Reading was a quirky comedy right up until the moment when George Clooney turned it into a dark comedy. Now that I think of it, John Malkovich had it pegged at dark comedy right from the start, but Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand kept playing for the quirky angle.
Especially Pitt. He must have a lot of fun preparing for his movies. He never has to play the same character twice, unlike poor Tilda Swinton, who was an ice queen in this movie and in Michael Clayton, and looking into her filmography on IMDB.COM I can see she literally played the ice queen in Chronicles of Narnia. That kind of typecasting has got to suck.
On the other hand, Clooney gets to be Clooney wherever he goes and he seems to love it. Here he is, working for the Coen brothers again, and they’ve got him wired for high voltage.
Well, as you may be able to tell I wasn’t sure what to make of it and I’m still not. It’s a movie worth a bucket of popcorn and the price of the rental, I can go at least that far.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
The power must have gone out some time today in our neighborhood because the microwave clock was going blinky-blinky and my computer was still as a stone. All of the wall clocks were still ticking away, though. Being a Luddite is good for something, if only for not having to walk through the house resetting all the damn clocks after a power outage.
Dinner was a reheated bowl of pre-frozen (frozen before it was frozen) spaghetti and meatballs, because My Darling B was called away on short notice and I had to make dinner for myself but didn’t stop anywhere on the way home to buy lunch meat. It turns out I have become one of those guys who is absolutely clueless in the kitchen when the wife unit isn’t around, but luckily when she does cook, she makes a lot extra that we take to work for lunch, and anything that doesn’t become lunch we freeze. Hence the spagball.
The evening warm and sunny enough to make me want to put on my new summer hat and take a long walk through the neighborhood. I was out for thirty or forty minutes and the streets, usually teeming with dog-walking people, were weirdly deserted, just one dog-walker on a back street and a kid playing ‘beat the grass with a stick’ (one of my all-time favorite games) in her yard.
The fresh air I got during my evening constitutional must’ve done me good because I dozed off in my chair barely ten pages into the chapter I started reading at dinner, a clear indication that I should get out of the house more often to stretch my legs. I can usually go at least twenty pages before my eyes start slamming shut.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Nope. Just couldn’t do it. I tried several times to start yet another summary of the mundenaities of my daily life but I couldn’t find the lead that would get me going.
“I woke up this morning” sounded too much like I would have to pick up a guitar and start wailing about how much life sucks. I’ll grant that life can be hard sometimes, but I can’t play guitar so I had to drop that line.
Then I tried to bulletize random thoughts that I would leave scattered around the homepage for you to piece together on your own. It’s gotten me out of wresting real prose from my keyboard in the past and might easily have worked again, but my brain gun was shooting blanks tonight.
Nothing happened at the office worth mentioning, not even lunch. No, wait! Stop press! Hold the phone! (Do you have a favorite anachronism?) I left the office at twelve-thirty for a walk around the square! And I ate a brownie! Wowzers! Something different did happen today!
Technically it was a “blondie,” a brownie without the chocolate, not as boring as it sounds. A lot less boring, really. Actually, not boring at all. Pretty damn good. At least, the blondies at the Marigold cafe on Pinckney Street are. It’s been a long, long time since I stopped there for dessert and it went perfect with a walk around the square on this fine spring day.
Yep, that was about it. There must have been a higher than normal level of boring dust in the air today because even the cats were quiet when I came home, and that never happens. I had a walk after dinner, read a chapter, doinked around on the interwebs for about an hour and then wrote this drivel. And now, to bed.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
I made a solo trip into town this morning, parking the car at the Lake Street ramp and walking up State Street by way of Paul’s Book Store and the Land’s End irregular outlet. It was a walk as quick as I could make it; the weather was beautifully sunny, but the temp was a lot colder than I thought. I froze my nards off.
I was making a return trip to Paul’s after a short visit on Friday at lunchtime. Friday being payday, I decided to treat myself to a full hour away from my desk and a Potbelly’s sub sandwich, the “Italian,” easy on the oil. I always tell them easy on the oil because they apply it with a plastic ketchup bottle, squeezing the bottle as hard as they can, just for a second, to do the job as briskly as possible, a method that puts enough oil on the sandwich to make it come splooting out the sides with my first bite and run down my forearms as far as my elbows. I want only just enough oil that it dribbles down my chin whiskers, and if I tell the sandwich-maker “easy on the oil,” then fix a critical gaze on her (it always seems to be a young woman), she puts on just the right amount. Probably gets pretty creeped out, too, but I want it done right, dammit.
After wolfing down my sandwich for my Friday-afternoon treat I still had fifteen minutes until I had to head back and, being so near the end of State Street, I decided to stick my head in Paul’s for a minute to see if there were any new arrivals I had to have. It’s been ages since I’ve poked around in Paul’s, so it was nice to be back, but fifteen minutes is hardly enough time to sate my appetite for wandering among the books, so I vowed to go back as soon as possible. Today I kept that promise.
Paul’s is a classically independent second-hand book store with unfinished shelves from floor to ceiling, bowed under the weight of thousands of well-worn books. The place even has an authentically musty smell. I loved being with the books again so much I spent almost an hour there but didn’t find a single volume I had to have, even though I had several in mind and made a determined effort to find them. It’s hard to leave a book shop empty-handed but I wasn’t going to buy something just to avoid admitting defeat.
Stopping at Saint Vinnie’s on the way home I found two books I had to have: Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer and W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America. The first one is pure fantasy, the second will fill me in on some American history I know next to nothing about but am acutely interested in now as a result of the thousand-page book on civil rights I’m reading.
The only Fritz Leiber I’ve read befor this was Catch That Zeppelin!, required reading for a college course. I took some pretty light courses in college. One of them was, honestly now, a course highlighting the “Golden Age” science fiction authors: Asimov, Heinlein, Le Guin and their sort. I like the Golden Age authors, but reading them is not like studying Keats or Shakespeare. For a start, it’s not hard. I got an A in the class, and it was an easy A. Even at that time I was astonished that it was a full-time three-credit course, and I took it because I knew it was going to be easy enough to give me some breathing room in my schedule, not because it was going to be challenging. Truth be told, I’d give it a miss if I could do it over, but then if I could do college over I wouldn’t have majored in English literature. I would’ve gotten a useful degree instead, like accounting, or nursing. Spilled milk, water under the bridge, et cetera.
But a second-hand Fritz Leiber novel was without question worth a buck, so I plucked it off the shelf without much thought and took it to the check-out along with the Du Bois book. I’m woefully ignorant of the Reconstruction era. If I could do college over but only on the condition that I get a degree equally as useless as a BA in English lit, I would major in American History, preferrably the Revolutionary era but, I have to admit, I’m growing more interested in the hundred years after the civil war, and I’ve picked up on several references to Du Bois that made me pick up his book today. And it was only a buck. How I love the book room at Saint Vinnie’s!
My tummy was growling as I checked out; it was getting on half-past twelve, so I crossed the street to Lazy Jane’s to grab a scone and a take-away coffee, but when I saw the chorizo scramble among the daily specials I decided to stay for lunch, and I read the first five chapters of the Fritz Leiber novel while I was there, two while I was waiting for the meal, two more while I was eating and the fifth as I sat and finished my cuppa joe.
The good thing about flushable cat litter is, not surprisingly, that you can flush it, and all the deposits that your cats leave in it, down the toilet. It’s a big improvement over marching through the house with a ten-pound bag held at arm’s length announcing to the rest of the family, “Coming through! Man with cat poop! Make way!” so they won’t impede the progress of The Man With The Cat Poop on his way to the trash can, who at that moment wants nothing more than to put the cat poop down and make a beeline for the bathroom to wash his hands with a double-squirt of liquid soap and lots of hot water.
The not-so-good thing about flushable cat litter is that you have to rake up said deposits, convey them to the toilet somehow in a manner that leaves little or no trail across the floor between the cat box and the toilet bowl, drop them in and flush. The first step is not so very difficult as the cat pan is at the bottom of the basement stairs in a place that’s not three feet from a toilet. When we first made the switch to flushable cat litter I wanted to keep the pan as clean as possible, so every time I walked past it and noticed a little something in there I would stop to rake it out. It was a simple matter of scoop, reach, dump & flush, but it did not address the problem of the trail of crumbs left on the floor.
This is the basement floor, remember, so I wasn’t all that concerned about hygiene. However, I was concerned about clutter and I didn’t want to track kitty litter up the stairs and all over the house, but sweeping up after scooping got old real fast, so I grabbed an old waste basket and used it as a scuttle, tipping it against the cat pan so I could scoop litter straight into it, then carrying the scuttle to the toilet to dump it. Trail of crumbs problem solved.
Dropping the droppings into the toilet presents a different problem: Splash. I have yet to perfect a technique that abates it. Some of the bits and bobs slide in as noiselessly and cleanly as an olympic diver off a ten-meter board, but there’s always one or two that go in ker-plunk! and then it becomes a trick of avoiding the inevitable droplets that head straight for my face as if they had free will coupled with a determination to make me as miserable as possible, which is coincidentally exactly how I feel after I’ve been hit in the face by cat poop-splashed toilet water. yuck.
The problem with flushing is chiefly one of impatience. Cat litter clumps into rocky fist-sized chunks when cats pee in it. After dumping it in the toilet, I have to give the clumps a couple minutes to soak up enough water from the bowl to crumble into pieces small enough to pass through the s-trap in the bottom of the toilet. If I don’t wait, the water just backs up and I end up with a bowl of swirling floaties. Pretty gross.
Hey, were you eating breakfast? Oh, I’m sorry.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
It was a beautiful Sunday morning: sunny, clear and warm, although not warm enough to go walking in a t-shirt and shorts no matter how many total whackjobs were doing it. To go strolling on a day like today, I would have to wear a pair of trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, but to go for a spin on my bike, as I wanted to do, I would have to wear a sweat shirt and a pair of gloves. And I did. I don’t care how dorky I look, I value body heat way more than looking cool, although I have a pretty cool-looking sweater. The knit wool gloves were one-hundred percent dork-o-riffic and cancelled out any cool points the sweater might have scored.
My original plan was to ride up Monona Drive and back, reconnoitering it for coffee shops. There is an appalling lack of coffee shops in Monona. Wait, I should qualify that, because down in the strip mall next to the Beltline there’s a Starbuck’s, a Caribou Coffee and a Steep & Brew. I guess I’d go visit one of them in a pinch, but what I’d really like is a coffee shop I can walk to, and although it’s physically possible to walk to one of those three, I’d have to cross eight lanes of killer traffic to do it. Crap on that.
Emian’s bakery is the next closest place I can think of where I could sit down in a big, cushy booth seat to enjoy a danish and a hot cup of mud, but it’s a mile and a half away, just this side of the high school, as far north as you can go and still be in Monona. Beyond that there’s Crema, next to Bongo Video, and two blocks further there’s Java Cat, both places I’ve been before and enjoyed but so far away I’d have to pack a tent and a change of clothes if I was thinking of walking there.
But perhaps there was another place I’d missed. Perhaps if I rode up and down the strip on my bicycle at a slow and easy speed I might spy another place back in the corner of one of the other strip malls. The main drag through Monona is long and wide and traffic rarely moves at less than forty miles an hour. I don’t get much of a chance to sightsee on the daily commute to work; mostly, I’m trying to avoid being hit by the other commuters talking on their cell phones or weaving through traffic so they can get to work a minute an a half earlier than the rest of us.
As it turned out, I hadn’t missed any, and the business district is not laid out for people who want to walk to a coffee shop to relax with their morning joe. It’s not even all that easy to bike to any of the places; getting in your car and driving is about the least frustrating, to say nothing of the safest, way to find a cup of coffee in this town. I recommend Emian’s, if you happen to find yourself in Monona any time soon. The coffee’s fresh and strong, the baking’s lip-smacking good and the booth seating really is comfy.
A bike ride as far as Emian’s really isn’t all that far, so I went on, figuring on going at least as far as San Damiano’s, the friary across the road from Bongo Video. We really have a friary in Monona. It must be worth a couple million bucks, too, not that it would be the first thing to pop into your mind when you saw it. The first thing would be, My, what a beautiful place they have there. There is a relatively simple two-story house on the shore of the lake, set in a two or three-acre lot with lots of big trees and a garden so large that My Darling B bursts with admiration every time we drive past, which is every morning on the way to work.
And that’s why it’s got to be worth at least two million dollars. A tiny cottage on a half-acre lot would be worth a million to the kind of people who would bulldoze it and build a three-story trophy house so big as to block the view of the water. A developer who got his mitts on the San Damiano property could subdivide it and retire on the profit he made. Can’t iagine how that hasn’t happened by now. There’s a small historical plaque by the road identifying it as the Frank Allis house, so maybe its historical significance has somehow spared it from being overrun by developers. Our Current Economic Crisis might spare it for a few more years.
The ride up as far as Bongo Video was so pleasant, I kept right on going. Between Bongo and Olbrich Park, the ride is not all that pleasant. A biker has to pass through a narrow traffic corridor to get to the isthmus from Monona, four lanes of street traffic and a sidewalk on either side. Your more hard-core Madison cyclists will ride in the street, but I’m not totally batshit crazy so I stay on the sidewalk, a really tight squeeze when there are a lot of dog walkers and joggers. The only place to pull over for them is a strip of grass about a foot wide between the sidewalk and the curb but I lucked out today. There was no foot traffic at all.
By the time I got to Olbrich Park I thought to myself, Well, I’m already halfway around the lake and I’m not feeling at all tired yet. Why not keep going? And from that one addled brainwave I decided to make a circuit all the way around the lake, because once you’ve gone past the halfway mark there’s really no good reason to turn around, is there? It would make no sense at all unless man-eating plants from outer space landed downtown or the whole south shore neighborhood of Waunona burst spontaneously into flame. Barring events like that, you might as well keep going.
I turned up Lakeland Avenue so I could follow the shoreline as I biked on into town. Beautiful neighborhood, very quiet, billion-dollar homes lined up along the road. Honestly, you couldn’t sell enough of your organs to afford to pay the yearly property taxes on one of those houses. I thought the neighborhoods along the shore in Monona were hoity-toity but there is some serious money in the houses along that stretch of the isthmus.
I spun along until I got as far as the Yahara River, then turned up to Willy Street and followed the bike trail to Paterson Street, jinked one block south back to Williamson and made a pit stop at Escape, a combination coffee house and art gallery, where I ordered a coffee and a cookie. The coffee break was really a cover for using their potty, but they didn’t try to stop me. Not that they could have.
Just a little further down the road there was quite a bit of drama going on. I stopped in the driveway next to Machinery Row Bicycles to put on my gloves when an ambulance came whooping up the street, all its lights going blinky-blinky. I didn’t move because I figured the chances that it would pull into the driveway had to be minuscule, right? And on any normal day they probably were, but today the odds were not with me. The ambulance slowed down until it came almost to a stop right in front of me, but by then I was cranking on my pedals as hard as I could.
After they pulled in to the driveway both the driver and his buddy popped out and started scanning the surface of the lake with binoculars. Another biker pulled up next to me and asked if I could see the guy in the lake and I said no, but then just a little further on I could see a guy about two-hundred yards out, clinging to an overturned canoe or kayak. By that time the shore was teeming with police so I checked with one of them to make sure they could see him too, and found out they did. A power boat plucked the guy out of the water about five minutes later. It was an amazingly fast rescue and a good thing, too, because the water had to be pretty damned cold.
The rest of the ride was not as easy as the first half. I was already tired, for a start, and as I followed the gentle curve of John Nolan Drive I turned into a brisk headwind that was murder for as long as I was crossing the lake on the causeway. Then I got a bit of a breather while I was cycling through Olin Park, but the home stretch through Waunona is nothing but hills. Not really bad hills, but it’s not an easy way to finish a ride around the lake, especially when it’s the first one of the season. Next time I’ll start by heading through Waunona.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
My Darling B is back, returned from a visit to Dayton to see her family. We rode into town Monday night to get reacquainted over pizza and beer at The Roman Candle on Willy Street. Two pizzas, actually. She wanted one with veggies and lots of cheese, and I wanted a house special that had four or five kinds of meat, so we each got a twelve-incher and had enough left over for two lunches.
And then we went home and went almost straight to bed. To go to sleep. Our excuse was, we were both beat dead tired. I’d had a busy Monday and B was worn out from all the travel, so we changed into our jammies almost as soon as we got home and it was lights out by nine o’clock. Not that I wasn’t thinking of other things; the timing just wasn’t propitious.
Poets reading their own poems aloud present the single most convincing argument that poems should not be read out loud, and especially by people who aren’t thespians. Poets are arguably talented to compose works of art, but they’re rarely doubly-talented enough to perform it. Derek Jacobi can read verse out loud so it not only makes sense, but so that it conveys emotion; a professor of poetry at Stanford who was on the radio this morning, can’t. He read in the standard hollow voice all poets use when reading their stuff at an open mike night. Why do they do it? I don’t know.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
What’s your NPR name? Here’s how you can find out, thanks to Liana, a blogger with an ear for names:
Eric and I recently discovered a shared fascination with the slew of impossibly named NPR hosts we listen to every day: Renee Montagne, Steve Inskeep, Corey Flintoff, Korva Coleman, Kai Ryssdal, Dina Temple-Raston.
In fact, we’ve often wondered what it would be like to be one of them. A Nina Totenberg or a Renita Jablonski. A David Kestenbaum or a Lakshmi Singh. Even (on our most ambitious days) a Cherry Glaser or a Sylvia Poggioli.
So finally, after years of Fresh Air sign-off ambitions, we came up with a system for creating our own NPR Names. Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.
That makes me Davel Ashby de la Launde. Awesome.
I had to get a tooth drilled today and my dentist, who is the very best dentist I’ve gone to ever in my whole life, no fooling, shoved the needle of a syringe so far up into my left cheek that I had a bit of trouble blinking my eye after the novocain took effect. I’m not sure why he felt it was necessary to kill all the feeling as far north as my sinuses but I’ll tell you, there was no danger at all that I was going to feel the least bit of discomfort as he drilled a hole in one of my dog teeth. It’s the first time I’ve ever had so much pain killer in my face that I couldn’t sniff.
He’s not only the best dentist I’ve ever been to, he’s also the fastest. My appointment today was at ten past twelve and I was there spot-on time. He gave me a quick examination, three minutes at the most, slapped some topical pain killer on my gums before the shot, another three minutes, shot me up with novocain and left the room for ten minutes while it sunk in (I even had a little nap while he was gone), then drilled and filled and I was out of there so fast I had more than enough time to swing over to Java Cat to fill up my travel mug with a hot slug of coffee ... and I still got back to work before the lunch hour was over. Not that I was in a great big hurry to get back to work. But he was just that fast.
There was, of course, the little problem of how to drink coffee while half my mouth was paralyzed. I had to be very careful to plug the spout of the travel mug into the extreme right-hand corner of my mouth because even though I could almost pucker, I would have scalded my lips off if I’d tried to sip it from the center of my mouth like a normal person. And eating the little square of chocolate for my mid-afternoon treat became a cartoonish mistake. Chocolate usually makes me drool anyway, so it was not at all a good thing to nibble on after the dentist had exponentially increased my propensity to drool.
Driving back to work along Atwood Avenue I spotted a couple of guys on ladders out in front of the news location of Bunky’s Cafe hanging a sign over the door, and there were bright blue canvas awnings over the windows that I hadn’t noticed this morning. This is good news. They said they hoped to open up the first week in April but obviously that’s come and gone and, until this week, there was a rubbish tip on the front lawn filled to overflowing with scrap wood. The tip was gone on Tuesday, though, and when we drove past on the way home from work there was a guy putting the finishing touches on the landscape out front, which looked a lot less like a clay-filled wallow and more like a garden. I’d guess we can look forward to a visit there very soon.
I had Pop Tarts for breakfast this morning instead of my beloved toast with honey, a result of being one of those men who doesn’t do the grocery shopping but is starting to realize just how stupid that is. Pick up a loaf of bread, that’s all it would take. Have I truly become so clueless in the kitchen that I am not capable of keeping it stocked with the one foodstuff that goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization? Scary.
Actually, I did stop at the co-op last Friday to pick up a few things to get me and Tim through the weekend, and a couple loaves of bread were the first things I grabbed, but by Monday morning they were long gone. We ate a lot of sandwiches, don’tcha know. I think I casually threw the butt ends of the last loaf into the composter day before yesterday. What a dope. I would have kept them to smother in butter and honey this morning if I’d only known that I would become desperate enough to eat the emergency back-up Pop Tarts.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
It’s Thursday! Let’s make a list of all the things Thursday is:
– it’s not Wednesday, and if your response to that is No shit, Sherlock, then let me elaborate by adding that I mean we’re on the down side of the work week and just that much closer to Friday, so I believe it’s worth keeping in mind.
– it’s guy night, so I have to think of something to make for dinner. I have no ideas right now, other than falling back on my safety, fish with rice and a salad on the side, good, healthy and easy to make. I don’t have any fish, though, so I’ll have to stop on the way home, but that just adds to the adventure. I get the feeling that I should stop doing this on the fly and come up with a plan for Thursdays, but then on the other hand the deadline gives me something to work toward, so maybe not.
– it’s trash day. Tim and I forgot last week. Actually, I forgot. Tim remembered, but he remembered on Friday, so this Thursday turned out to be Mighty Big Trash Day.
Friday, April 17, 2009
For guy night, I went with the fish.
I almost got away with not cooking at all when My Darling B raised the possibility of eating dinner at Bunky’s Cafe, which was supposed to be open at their new location last night, or at least that’s what they told her when we called last week, and the new place looked like it was ready to open yesterday morning, but when we swung by on the way home it was very definitely not open. Damn!
So I back-tracked to the Willy Street Co-Op to walk the aisles and see what would inspire me, and the big slab of steelhead trout in the display case fairly screamed for me to take it home and broil it and serve it on rice with a little lemon and a salad, so that’s what I did.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
My Darling B took the day off from work yesterday to stay home and play in the dirt, so I hooked a ride in to the office with Tim. Sometimes he leaves early, sometimes he leaves very late, and I like to leave right around seven just because I’m used to it and it gets me to work early enough to get a few things done before the phones start ringing and people start lining up at the door of my cubicle to ask me questions.
My only other alternatives yesterday morning were to walk or ride my bike and I didn’t feel like doing either of those, so Tim was my ride in. To my goggle-eyed surprise he left the house much earlier than usual, although I never asked why. I don’t think he was going to his office because I’m pretty sure he can’t get in that early and besides, he’s an hourly worker and I don’t think they let him do overtime whenever he feels like getting an early start. I didn’t ask, though, so I’ll probably never know.
Work was work, blah blah blah blah, then I went home. I forgot to remind Tim that I rode in with him and he damned near left without me but remembered at the last minute, thank goodness, so I found him waiting in his car with the stereo blasting away, and we whizzed home down John Nolan Drive to the Beltway.
“How come you never take John Nolan when you go to work?” he asked me.
“Because everybody who uses John Nolan drives too damn fast,” I told him. It’s a drag strip any time of the day and I’m not a drag racer, even when I’m in a big hurry to get home. And besides, the lights have all been timed by sadists. What’s the point of having a four-lane highway right into town if you’re going to equip it with traffic lights every quarter-mile that are timed to stop traffic just as it gets up to speed? No wonder all the drivers on John Nolan act like card-carrying members of Irate Assholes Behind the Wheel. By the time I get to the Beltline I’m feeling aggressive enough to tailgate and weave through traffic myself. Who needs that after work, especially on a Friday?
Well, Tim does, apparently. “That’s why I like it,” he answered me. Takes all kinds to make a world.
When we got home I found My Darling B in the kitchen, fresh from the shower, setting out some veggies for dinner. Her cheeks were flushed pink from being out in the sun all day and she was sore in muscles she hadn’t used all winter, but she got half the garden tilled.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
I don’t mind sharing with you that my most recent bout with constipation has finally passed, as it were. I am so relieved, he o-punned again. It was one of those stories that started out badly but came out all right in the end. Poop puns are just the best, aren’t they?
You might mind my telling you about it, but I don’t mind broaching the subject at all. Not a bit. As my drill instructor used to say when he had something particularly unpleasant to tell us, which was practically all the time, “It’s mind over matter, boys, mind over matter: I don’t mind, you don’t matter.” He was quite the touchy-feely type.
I don’t know how I ended up getting constipated. I drink two mugs of coffee every morning; that’s supposed to keep you at least as regular as a daily dose of roughage, isn’t it? I keep telling myself I should probably cut down on the coffee because it’s supposed to be not all that good for you, really, but I don’t feel like getting off the caffeine happy train. It’s more or less habit to down a slug o’ joe first thing with my morning cartoons, and I take another slug to work with me in a travel mug. I don’t usually finish the second one, though, so that’s got to get me some points, don’t you think?
And Friday night My Darling B and I went to Java Cat where she sprung for gelato, a very Italian kind of hyper-concentrated ice cream that would normally send me sprinting for the men’s room if I didn’t pop a couple capsules of Lacto Safe from Nutrition Now (I’m not a stockholder, I just like to spread the word), which I did, but you’d think the gut would keep on truckin’, not shut down entirely.
Even so, I was starting to feel a little strain yesterday and went to bed with that queasy feeling, as though I’d just won a competition by wolfing down a fifty-pound sack of wet oatmeal and hadn’t horked it up yet, a feeling I still had this morning as I settled into the recliner with a hot mug o’ joe and the Sunday paper. Halfway through reading the A Section, though, I could just begin to make out the rumblings of a subway coming down the tracks, and before I could read my way through three more pages it was time for me to signal the train for a stop at Porcelain Palace. Okay, it’s not much of a metaphor, but it’s a poop joke. How sophisticated did you expect it to be?
Monday, April 20, 2009
Yesterday we had the first cookout of the season at Our Humble O’Bode. It was raining, but we didn’t let that mess up our plans. I just parked the Weber in the entrance of the garage and lit it up, then stood in the smoky updraft and tended to the grilling of four deliciously juicy steaks from locally-raised, grass-fed cows. Got them almost, but not quite perfectly pink; I’ll have to work on that, but it wasn’t a bad first try. Smelled like steak the rest of the evening.
We bought the steaks from a new vendor at the farmer’s market. Wish I could remember the name; maybe My Darling B will. She brought them home just to tempt Tim to the table Sunday night, and they did. Nothing does the job of bringing him to the dinner table as reliably as a thick, juicy steak will. He just wants steak, though. B tried to ply him with a few baked potatoes, too, but he declined, and the salad wasn’t even up for consideration. Just steak. Well, at least it’s grass-fed, so he’s almost eating his greens.
I spent just about all yesterday afternoon in the basement, playing with trains. It looked a lot like I was playing with my computer because I finally caved in to the first rule of model train modeling: Plan your track or your trains aren’t going to run worth a damn. And I’ve never done that. I never moved beyond the Lionel trains stage of playing with trains, which is not a bad thing at all. I love just slapping a lot of track together on a bare floor as quickly as possible so I can string together a really long train and get it going as soon as possible. Round and round in a circle is fine with me.
And that’s what I tried to do with my model railroad parts, but model railroading is not the same thing as Lionel toy trains. All the parts are a lot smaller, for one thing, and that’s important to remember because, if I make a little mistake, it’s a great big mistake to the little choo-choos. I have to be more careful. Slap down some track and the trains won’t go in a circle more than once without jumping off, which can be fun if you’re into crashing trains but I never was a Gomez Addams kind of guy where trains are concerned.
But my latest effort at laying track was done in my usual slapdash fashion and it didn’t turn out very well. There were stretches of track where the curves were so tight my prize steam locomotives couldn’t even go there. What’s the point of going to all this trouble if I can’t play with my favorite toys? So I pulled up the offending track and started over.
Many, many moons ago I discovered there are computer programs that will help stunted adolescents like me plan their train tracks. Well, of course there are. There’s hardly a modern hobby out there that someone hasn’t developed a computer application for. I never bothered with it because I go into anaphylactic shock at the mere thought of having to plan anything out, but by this time I was desperate enough to get some trains running that I downloaded the track planning application and got to work.
And a lot of work it was ... not planning track, but learning how to use the software. It wasn’t what you’d call user-friendly. In fact, it was so user unfriendly that I came close to doing a radical uninstall with a big freaking hammer. But I didn’t. I checked myself, walked away for a little while and didn’t come back to the problem until I’d done some deep-breathing exercises and popped open a beer.
As soon as I learned enough to draw a few basic curves and connect the ends of the virtual track together, the computer program showed me several ways I had made it all but impossible for my toy trains to run on my kinked-up track, so I’d have to admit it was worth the effort.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
I was determined to finish The Wanderer, a novel I picked up last weekend at Saint Vinnie’s, if it killed me. I didn’t think it could literally kill me until I read the following:
Don woke from his slumber, or thought he did until he realized that he was outside his body. He didn’t realize he was outside his body at first, but then he realized he didn’t have any arms or legs and he realized that couldn’t be right. Then he realized it was floating about six feet above his bed, and he realized that floating and not having any arms or legs indicated perhaps that he was not really there, so he tried to turn his head to see if his body was still lying on the bed below him but he couldn’t, of course, because he didn’t have a head because he was outside his body.
Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but only because I didn’t want to quote five more pages of disjointed text like that. I lived through it once, but I don’t think I could do it again, and I didn’t see any reason to put you through it, either.
At first The Wanderer was good fun, a romp through what is often called The Golden Age of science fiction when authors like Heinlein, Asimov, Campbell and this novel’s writer, Fritz Leiber, wrote space operas about square-jawed astro-explorers riding atom-powered rocket jets to Venus to meet a race of octopoids and either start a nuclear war or have sex with them. The Wanderer is about a space ship as big as a planet that pops out of hyperspace into orbit around Earth and starts to eat the moon. While the moon’s being broken up in to kibble, cat people in flying saucers abduct some Earthlings and have sex with them. There’s lots and lots of mass destruction and sex, although the sex is only hinted at while the mass destruction is described in excruciating detail.
I almost gave up in disgust about two-hundred pages into the book when Leiber kills off one of the most interesting characters, but by then I’d invested quite a bit of time and energy in it and there were only about a hundred thirty pages to go, so I pressed on, cheating a bit by skimming through the exposition and trying to catch as much of the story as I could from the dialogue, until I came to the part where one of the main characters speaks to another character via hologram, which he explains away as “actually an advanced method of communication; incidentally, I’m in space right now!” When the dialogue fails to hold your interest any longer, that’s a hint it’s time to give up any hope of finishing the story.
I took one last stab at making it all the way to the end by taking it to bed with me. After all, I had only thirty or so pages left, but they were pretty awful pages by that time. I got the feeling Leiber was sick of the story by then, too, and just wanted it to be over with. When I flipped open to the bookmark and started reading, My Darling B looked over and noted, “Oh, you’re almost done!”
“Thank goodness!” I added, and explained what a turd it was. She was amazed I was trying to stick with it.
“I thought reading was supposed to be something you enjoy,” she said, and that’s when I realized what I was doing by trying to finish was all wrong, and I realized I should put the book down, and I should turn the light out and I should float away bodiless to la-la land. The end.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
“Well, shall we make our nightly stop at Bunky’s to see if they’re open yet?”
My Darling B was referring to Bunky’s Cafe one of our favorite places to eat, partly because of the exotic decor they used to pretty up the dining room, but mostly because of the delicious Mediterranean dishes on its menu.
Bunky’s recently moved a couple blocks closer up Atwood Avenue toward Madison to what appears from the outside to be a much larger building but which inside looks about the same size, so I’m not sure why they moved, unless this building has a better kitchen. I have to say, as far as the location and the environs are concerned, I liked the old building better. It was a cozy bunching of oddly-shaped rooms in an old store front that was grafted onto an old house, which sounds pretty awful but I thought it had a lot of appeal.
Also, it had a parking lot. Not a big one, but at least it had one. The new Bunky’s doesn’t have any parking at all. The first time we stopped, I circled the block looking for a lot, maybe hidden up an alley or in the back, until I finally gave up and parked on a side street. As it turned out, that’s all they’ve got, street parking, pretty common in Madison and a real pain in the neck, especially on Atwood Avenue, the main thoroughfare through this part of town.
So I’m not all that jazzed about the new location, but how was the menu? Well, thank bleh they haven’t mucked around with that. Appetizers still include finger-licking good baba ganouj, falafel and stuffed grape leaves, and entrees don’t appear to have changed at all, featuring lamb kabop and freshly-made pesto and pasta, much of it gluten-free, by the way, if you happen to be allergic to that sort of thing.
Our favorite dish is the seafood platter. It’s a little on the pricey side ... well, no, it’s a lot on the pricey side, but it’s worth every penny. They grill a slice of salmon, two slices of sea bass and a half-dozen shrimp and serve it between a pair of stuffed grape leaves on a bed of rice. It comes with a side of yogurt, baba ganouj and tabouli and a basket of pita bread cut into points. There so much of it that B and I can linger over it for an hour and still take home a generously-stuffed box to eat for lunch the next day.
Their dessert menu is usually as enticing as the rest of their offerings but we didn’t stay last night. I wanted to attack the chunky chocolate cookie I knew was still lingering in the basket at home, so I offered to make an after-dinner coffee for B when we got home and she took me up on it.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
We finally remembered to return the movie we rented from Bongo Video last weekend. One-night rental of a first-run movie at Bongo comes to something like three and a half bucks. Older movies are even more of a bargain at, say, a buck ninety-five or thereabouts. Then, there’s the price we pay to rent a movie, after they add up all the late fees we never fail to rack up. It’s never less than five bucks, usually closer to ten. Really, they ought to charge us a flat fee, or let us pay on an installment plan.
The movie was OSS 117: Cairo: Nest of Spies, a spoof of spy movies in the vein of James Bond. The actor playing the spy was a dead ringer for Sean Connery and after a while I even imagined I could hear a Scottish accent even though the actor spoke French and I wouldn’t know if he was trying to sound like Connery or not. He was obviously trying to act like him, though, and doing a damn good job.This movie was featured at the Wisconsin Film Festival and we rented it because we heard a lot about how good it was from the other cinephiles. When B spotted it on the shelf at Bongo she snapped it up. I loved how they got the look right; it could have been shot during the same year Dr. No came out. Put them both side-by-side and you’d swear they were made by the same production company.
The story was something to do with the French secret service sending this goofball to Cairo to investigate the disappearance of another secret service goofball. The plot didn’t really matter, although, now that I think of it, they stole it whole from Goldeneye, but never mind. It was a terrific send up and worth every penny of the ten or fifteen dollars we paid in late fees. Well, maybe not every penny.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Time to crow about Friday! Huzzah! I get two days off to do stuff I want to do. That’s really kind of screwed up, when you think about it. Go to work five days a week to do stuff somebody else wants to get done for the privilege of having two days to myself to do whatever I want to do, and usually I’m so grateful about not having to get up at five o’clock in the morning that the one thing I want to do most is sit on my butt and do as little as possible for a change.
But at least (beat, beat) I’ve got a job.
This Friday is my payday, and I somehow mislaid my pay check. Not the whole thing. That wouldn’t even be possible. I haven’t gotten a literal paycheck since 1984. But every other Thursday I cash a check My Darling B writes for me to take to the teller line at the bank, and I get to keep one hundred bucks for my very own to spend on whatever the heck I choose, usually beer and books.
Yesterday I counted out my hundred, then put the rest in an envelope which I dutifully presented to My Darling B as soon as I got home. For the life of me, I can’t remember what I did with my hundred bucks. I checked my wallet, went through all my pockets, searched my sock drawer, even looked in places I never use to hide money in, but I haven’t been able to find it.
This sucks. I’ve been saving for weeks to buy some track for my choo-choos and if I can’t find it I’ll have to start from square one. And beer will be in short supply for a while. Books only cost a dollar, though, and I can scratch that together from the change I found in my sock drawer, so no worries there.
Almost forgot: Must mention the weather, because it’s the first time the car thermometer has displayed “85” since, well, last summer. B wasn’t ready for that kind of heat and was waiting in the car to pick me up after work with the engine running and the air conditioning keeping the cabin at a cool seventy-two, or thereabouts. “It’s too stuffy to open the windows,” she explained. Well, of course it was.
I swore to myself I would not spend the whole day in the office, that I would take each and every minute of my two breaks and my whole lunch hour, if only to make one circuit of capital square each time, but of course I flubbed that. Didn’t get out on either my morning or my afternoon break, but I did manage to escape the office at twelve noon on the dot, walk down State Street for lunch at Takara, the sushi bar, then come the long way back around the square to take in as much sunshine and fresh air as possible before returning to my desk for the rest of the afternoon.
Last night My Darling B and I passed the time after dinner by sitting together on the sofa listening to Stuart Gottlieb on At Issue with Ben Merens argue that torture was necessary to the health and preservation of liberty. Do we know how to have fun or what?
Gottlieb was typical of the variety of talk-show pundits that start out sounding more or less reasonable, the sort of person you might chat with for an hour in the break room at work and never raise any dust but, by the end of the program, sounds a lot more like the kind of guy you would find on a street corner warning passers-by about the ills of society, conveyed on a sign crowded by thickly-painted words six inches high, mostly misspelled, and an awful lot of shouting.
And Merens uncharacteristically handled Gottlieb with kid gloves, giving surprisingly short shrift to callers who dumped on Gottlieb’s half-baked claims that our federal government would have no alternative but to continue to torture anyone it suspected of conspiring to undermine it.
B heard part of the program on the way home from work and thought I would be interested, probably because I turned up the radio whenever a news reader or talk show host started hyperventilating about “the torture memos,” or I used to. I lost interest when they stopped talking about who can be tortured (correct answer: nobody) and focused on who should be punished for okaying torture. I don’t care. I’ll start listening again when somebody steps up to amend the law to say “this is illegal,” spelling out exactly what this is.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
We made our customary Saturday visit to the Dane County Farmer’s Market this morning, but under less than typical conditions.
First of all, just before we left home it started pouring down rain so hard that we were seriously considering giving the market a miss today. As I backed out from the driveway and the downpour intensified, the rain off the roof sounded more like a cascade of road gravel tipped on us from a dump truck than tiny droplets of water condensing from moisture in the air above us. But, because I could see no actual gravel out the windows, just water rippling along the glass, I had no choice but to believe science.
Second, today was the annual Crazylegs Classic, a five-mile run from capital square to Camp Randall to benefit something, I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s not a benefit, maybe it’s just an excuse to run in the streets and drink free beer. I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never been crazy enough to sign up and see what’s at the end (although I’ve heard about the free beer). All I’ve ever seen is the thousands (tens of thousands, this year) of crazy runners lined up in the street around capital square, waiting to start ... in the pouring rain.
The race doesn’t interfere with the market, just makes it hard to cross the street. Also, when we stopped at Marigold Kitchen for breakfast, the place seemed a little busier. No, a lot busier. When we walked in I spotted an open table right in front, but when I went to grab it a waitress shooed me away, saying she had people waiting but would help me find a table after I ordered. And she did; we were seated in a nice corner booth about five minutes after we each pulled a mug of coffee and stood aside to wait. But I couldn’t help noticing she didn’t shoo away the stern-looking biddy who slid into her seat at the table next to ours while her husband stood in line to order.
After a delicious breakfast we headed back to the square to finish our weekly shopping. Runners were warming up by sprinting back and forth past the Marigold along Pinckney Street. We were just in time to watch the start! So while My Darling B picked out some veggies and cheese, I wandered toward the starting line to listen to the UW band play marching music while an announcer counted down to the first wave. B joined me just before they started.
The guys in the first wave were the dead serious crowd, wearing sleek spandex running gear and setting their stop watches to zero when the announcer shouted “Go!” We spotted none of the groupies in chicken suits in the first three or four waves, so we moved on along the sidewalk to continue shopping.
The rain started coming down again at about the time we reached the halfway point around the square, so my role was mainly to keep B dry while she ducked into each tent to buy produce, a job that became harder, then impossible, as the rain came down heavier and heavier. In the home stretch, just a block from the car, she pretty much gave up trying to stay dry even while I still tried to maneuver close enough to her to keep the umbrella directly overhead between us.
In the car on the way home she volunteered to stop at Saint Vinnie’s so I could look through the used books, and I half-heartedly looked for a parking spot near the side street entrance, but since there wasn’t a spot open right next to the door and I wanted to get her home to a hot shower as quickly as possible, we pressed on home. There’ll be used books at Vinnie’s next week.
What is this word: “_ U _ C _ K _ R Y _”
Whatever it is, it’s the last part of the name of whatever’s going to open in the storefront on Atwood Avenue where Bunky’s used to be. When they started to remodel the place, they covered the windows in paper on which they wrote: COMING SOON and covered up the letters of the name with orange squares. Each day they’ve uncovered the letters one by one until today we could see that it’s going to be called “D A _ L Y C A F _ & _ U _ C _ K _ R Y _”
So it’s obviously “Daily Cafe & something”, but what could the something be? I thought it was going to be some kind of bakery until they uncovered the “C” and screwed up that idea. The first half could be “lunch”, but what can you attach to the back end of “lunch” that makes sense?
My Darling B thinks it ends with an “S” to make it a plural, but then the “Y” should change to “IE” unless they went to elementary school in another country. It could be that it’s a foreign word, but that doesn’t seem very fair. How are we supposed to guess that?
Speaking of foreign words, Tim says it’s probably a portmanteau, which means “suitcase”, but I don’t think that’s right because “suitcase” doesn’t have a “K” in it. (rimshot)
So it’s either spelled wrong, it’s a foreign word, or it’s completely made up. Any guesses?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
At about seven o’clock this morning we returned the movie we rented yesterday from Bongo Video. Where normally we would keep it until at least Tuesday, this one we returned a full twelve hours before it was due. My Darling B expected them to be so consumed with worry at this weird behavior that she was sure they’d call us to find out of we’d had to leave town in a hurry due to a death in the family or something similarly catastrophic. No, just got up early thing this morning to visit the market, and remembered to take the video back. It happens.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Holy Shit, we’re all gonna die of the Swine Flu! Everybody Freaking Panic! There, that ought to get me at least half a million hits on my web page today.
This is not to make light of the concern of people caught in the swine flu outbreak. It’s to make light of the concern of people who were not yet caught in the swine flu outbreak but were already using the word “pandemic” to describe it, hoarding Tamiflu and ammunition, and barricading themselves in their basements.
I listened to one hour of radio news this morning as I was making breakfast, and one hour this evening on the commute home, and I heard one hour, fifty-nine minutes of news about swine flu: what it is, how we catch it from pigs, what makes it dangerous when we stop catching it from pigs and start catching it from each other, and how it’s going to kill us. In case you missed that last juicy bit of gossip, it’s going to suffocate us by overwhelming our immune systems, which will tear our lungs to shreads as it overcompensates to fight off the flu virus, filling our lungs with fluids and drowning us. A death as gruesome as that is tailor-made for our CSI-addicted society, isn’t it? In my mind’s eye I can clearly see the animated graphic the local evening news channel would use to freak the hell out of at least a quarter million viewers.
Well, I’m not getting the swine flu. You can go ahead and get it if you want, but I’m not going to. And even if I do, I’m still going to go to work every single freaking day I have it, even if I have a fever of a hundred ten, sneezing non-stop and tearing through two boxes of Kleenex before lunch time. I’m going to ride the bus to work every day, and I’m going to Ian’s Pizza for lunch. And I’m going down to State Street to get a custom-made t-shirt with I’VE GOT THE SWINE FLU on the front and NOW YOU’RE GONNA DIE! on the back so they’ll print my photo above the fold on the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal, granting me long-lasting celebrity of the kind Typhoid Mary only dreamed of, right before I keel over and start pushing up daisies.
Because the swine flu is here. Now go get your shots.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
I was in my supervisor’s office the other day, explaining my plan to award vacation time for the minions this summer: how many people we should let off at any one time, who gets to pick first, that sort of thing. I finished up with, “... to resolve any conflict that might arise, I plan to force them to fight to the death.”
I delivered the line deadpan, managing to keep a straight face and delivering the line with just the right amount of gravity that he wasn’t sure how to react at first. Either that, or I caught him not paying attention. He blinked a moment, hesitating just long enough that I could tell he was rewinding his memory tapes to see if what he’d heard was in fact what I’d said. Then he chuckled and said something about a law against that sort of thing in this neck of the woods.
And now, here’s a link to the coolest blog post I’ve read all year: How to brew beer in a coffee maker, using only materials commonly found on a modestly-sized oceanographic research vessel. Learn these very simple instructions and you will forevermore be the most popular guy on the annual backwoods fishing trip. The instructions don’t require you to be on an oceanographic research vessel, so don’t be put off of trying these very practical instructions if you find yourself inconveniently not at sea. I don’t happen to have a coffee maker so I unfortunately can’t give you any idea how well this works, but the next time I see a Mister Coffee at a garage sale for a buck I’m going to be sorely tempted to take that sucker home and do a little kitchen counter zymurgy.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
We were crushed by disappointment as we drove home yesterday evening and discovered, rounding the bend on Atwood Avenue, that they didn’t uncover another letter at the Daily Cafe & MunchkeryX. Traffic was mercifully slow for once, traveling bumper-to-bumper at only fifteen or twenty miles an hour, which may not be how you do bumper-to-bumper in your town but for Madison traffic it’s practially crawling. In any case, it gave us plenty of opportunity to take a good, long look at the front window of the Dairy Cafe & DutchkeryZ, and we both let out a long wail when we saw that we’d been cheated.
Come on, Dairy Cuff! You can be a little more generous, you know! There are lots of letters still covered up! I know you want to draw out the anticipation for as long as you possibly can, but come on! We wait all day for this!
Kind of pathetic, isn’t it?
Actually, Monday evening was a huge let-down, too, when we drove past and discovered they revealed the “A” in “Cafe”, like we didn’t know that already.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
I hate to drag something as mundane as the weather into this stream of consciousness I call my blog, but I’m going to do it on this occasion because it won’t stop freaking raining. Not that my keepers let me out much to enjoy the weather, good or bad. They almost never do, in fact. The best I can hope for most of the time is a fleeting glimpse of the rain now and again as they hustle me past the window at the end of the hall, and then only when I’ve been well-behaved enough that they don’t put the hood over my head or hook the choker chain to my leg manicles. They’re always doing that, though, because “well-behaved” means I don’t get to bite anybody, and what fun is that?
The weather was on my mind today because we were hoping to order out for lunch from Vientiane Palace, the Laotian restaurant on Gorham Street, and that’s a five-block walk from our office. They don’t deliver, and I don’t have a car to drive down there. I brought an umbrella with me when I went to work this morning but I was hoping to have both hands free when I went to pick the food up. Walking back in the rain with a big box full of take-out food would have been a real drag
But it didn’t come to that, thank goodness. The weather was fine, even a little too warm, and one of the gals from the office volunteered to go along with me and help carry the food back. Good thing, too. Our order filled up a big, flat box that weighed ten or twelve pounds, and a fat plastic grocery bag filled with boxes of rice went along with it. I probably could’ve figured out a way to carry it all back myself, but it wouldn’t have been easy.
Vientiane Palace is known for its spicy food. When you place an order, you want to make sure you tell them how many stars you want, five stars being the hottest, no stars being not hot at all. Since I ordered a dish called “Spicy Plate” I asked for two stars, thinking I’d better not push my luck. “Oh, no,” the guy taking my order on the phone said, “you want three stars,”
“Three stars is better, you think?”
“Oh, yes, I eat three stars all the time. Makes me feel great. It’ll make you feel great, too. Try three stars.”
“Well, if you really think it’s better, okay then.” And you know what? It was pretty darned good, not too spicy by a long shot. It’s a noodle dish with lots of onions, eggplant and a leafy green I couldn’t identify, and comes with your choice of meat. I asked for the pork, so I’ll probably keel over dead from swine flu by the end of the week, which is officially not called swine flu, says the World Health Organization. It's “H1N1 Influenza A.” Sure. That'll catch on.
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