![[Okay, so I have a few more than three.]](http://lh3.ggpht.com/_s34S78Pjikk/SyJar0ed9pI/AAAAAAAAEO8/SjPtFh1GWks/s400/dsc09164.jpg){kind=link}
I can't believe I got absolutely no response to the beer lube post. The stuffed squirrels and the typewriter got responses, but the beer lube got zilch. I thought your imaginations would run wild on that one. Man, you guys are hard to gauge.
I told you I didn't get the squirrels, right? I'm still a little bummed about that. "Buyer's regret," it's called. I didn't know there was a codified name for not buying the stuffed squirrels.
Best buy this week: A pair of slippers. I finally broke down and ordered them after a few trips across an icy-cold hardwood living-room floor. My tootsies could take only so much of that. But yesterday evening the man in the chocolate-brown van brought a box to the front door that My Darling B thought would be the electric cat feeder. Talk about bummed. She really wanted it to be the cat feeder.
Which the man in brown brought today, by the way. Whenever we get home from work the cats are waiting at the front door and follow us from room to room until we feed them, and at five o'clock in the morning they hit the floor as soon as my alarm clock starts bleeping, their cue for the morning feeding. So we thought the solution would obviously be to buy an automatic feeder. Who wouldn't?
It's not a completely stupid idea. We have no idea how much we're giving them because we scoop a little here, a little there, whenever they start crying. Now that we can measure it out, and they'll get a chance to eat regularly four times a day, we should be able to keep them satisfied and maybe even control their weight a bit. As if.
Okay, enough blather. Because I said so, that's why.
The cats are scared as hell of their new feeding machines. Not that I blame them. The bowls rotate with the sound of mechanized death specially engineered to chew up and spit out cats. It's like they were trying to get these things to make the scariest sound possible.
The cats were both beside themselves with hunger last night, constantly pestering us for food right up until the moment that the feeders growled and gave them more. Then they hid under the dining room table, craning their necks to see the kibble in their bowls but going nowhere near them for about fifteen minutes. Then Boo went first, helping herself to a bit from her bowl. Bonkers waited his turn, eating from Boo's bowl, I guess because she'd already proved it was safe. He didn't eat from his bowl this morning either, until I coaxed him.
Holy Crap! Was President Obama channeling Rudy Giuliani last night? He wasn't even sixty seconds into his speech before his bloviation included tried and true conservative boilerplate phrases. As soon as he said the words "We didn't start this fight," I could feel the tripwire phrase "On September Eleventh, Two-Thousand One" couldn't possibly be far behind, and By God he used them.
You'd think the conservatives would be lovin' him up, but no, their undies are all bunched up over The Obama's "timetable." They don't feel it's fair to pressure the Afghanis at all into taking on responsibility for their own defense. That's kind of weird, coming from the mouths of the same guys who are always raving about cutting government interference.
So the mission is to stay in Afghanistan as long as the Taliban stays, fighting and dying to protect the largest opium-producing country on the planet. Might as well have voted for Grumpy-Pants and the Ice Queen.
If I seem to write a few too many posts about cats on this blog, well, too bad. I have cats, and they make fodder for all kinds of stories worth blogging about. And beside all that, when a cat, or really anything that weighs as much as a cat, lands on my nuts in the middle of the night, I have to blog about it. Have to.
It wasn't even an accident. She meant to do it. I don't suppose she meant to land foursquare on the most tender part of my anatomy, but she had been trying all night to maneuver her way into the warm cranny between my legs, and every time she crept toward it, I would wake up just enough to roll over, or cross my legs, or sweep one leg just enough to deny her the opportunity to insinuate herself in the one spot on the bed that would pin me down until I woke, an hour or so later, with aches so deep in my bones that My Darling B would be able to feel them on the other side of the bed.
Finally, at about three-thirty in the morning, frustrated by failure after failure, she stood up, arched her back in a classic feline stretch that made her shake, then popped straight up into the air from where she stood and came down in what I would have described as a beautiful arc, had it not ended in a nerve-jangling stomp on my scrotum, folding me up so tightly that I resembled the comma back there at the end of the word "scrotum."
Well, it was a little hard to get back to sleep after that, waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. Each time my heart slowed down a bit and I began to relax, Boo would shift just a little bit and a shot of adrenalin would put me on alert in case she went airborne again.
Tonight, I sleep on my stomach.
I say it doesn't count until it accumulates and it sticks. It can snow all it likes and even build up on lawns and on top of cars, but if it all melts off an hour after it falls, it's not really The First Snow.
"That's just really stupid," was Tim's opinion of my opinion, but even he had to admit that today was The First Snow, because we haven't had any snow build up on the ground until tonight. "Anybody who still thinks global climate change is open for debate should just be killed," he said. He's not a guy who sees many shades of gray.
Tim stopped by last night, after doing a little grocery shopping at the local Copp's store, to pick up a package he'd ordered. He still has his mail orders sent here, I guess because he thinks the box will be safer sitting out in broad daylight for hours on our front stoop instead of sitting in the lobby of his apartment building, where he says he never sees any sign of anybody coming or going. Well, okay.
While he was here, he had to say hello to Bonkers, who just loves it when Tim picks him up and holds him like a baby. Purring like a great big crazy purring thing, Bonkers spent five or so blissful minutes sprawled in Tim's arms, his tongue lolling from his mouth, just like you see in the comics.
And then Tim was gone, or almost. I stopped him on his way out the door by asking, "Are you going to take your box with you?"
He stopped, turned, and reached for the box he had set on the floor, the box that he came to get in the first place. "Yeah," he said, and then he was gone.
How often do you wake up in the middle of the night, your face covered in blood? Yeah, happens all the time to me, too. Sometimes I hate being a zombie.
I've got a busted something up my nose that gives me nosebleeds when the weather turns cold. The colder it gets, the more the furnace runs and the more the air dries out. My knuckles crack open and bleed, too. That's something they don't sing about in Winter In Wisconsin.
Most times, the nosebleed is just a few sniffles, nothing too bad, but I woke up early this morning with a bit more than sniffles. When I got to the bathroom and snapped on the light, my face looked like I'd just been to lunch with a pack of hyenas.
So I had to spend ten minutes with my head tipped back on the top of the toilet tank, my nose pinched shut and stuffed with tissue paper. I'm sure there are worse ways to wake from sweet slumber, but right now I'm drawing a blank.
Wow, we made it to the end of another work week! "I'm going to miss the enormous relief of making it to Friday after we retire," My Darling B said to me over a dinner of pizza and brazed chicken at Micky's on Willy Street.
If and when we ever get to truly retire, I'm going to remind her of what she said last night and see how much she honestly misses it. My bet is, not all that much.
After shedding a silent tear of joy, let us raise our glasses in remembrance ...
FOUND in the neighborhood consignment store this morning, a glass-walled percolator. Is this AWESOME or WHAT?
I didn't even have to decide whether or not I wanted to take it home with me. It was a moot point. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't, maybe it would make a loud pop the moment I plugged it in and erupt in flames. I didn't care. I was possessed by this piece of retro-kitsch and nothing would keep me from taking it home.
Almost nothing. When I went to pay for it, the Visa card machine jammed and wouldn't make a copy of the receipt. I said don't worry about it, I'll just remember that it cost me all of six dollars and tell My Darling B when I got home. That crisis narrowly averted, I left the store with my new gadget under my arm.
On closer inspection, it turned out to be in nearly-immaculate condition, as if the previous owner had used it once, maybe twice, then tucked it away under the counter and left it there until today. Or maybe they used it only when friends came over. But honestly, for an appliance nearly forty years old, it had hardly any wear at all. The handle and base were make of Bakelite instead of plastic and that stuff doesn't chip very easily but it does wear around the edges, yet there was no sign at all that it had been in daily use. And that pot should have cracked long ago. Maybe it was a replacement.
The electrical cord, usually the first thing to go, was pliable and uncracked. I wasn't the least bit worried about electrocution as I plugged it in. Well, maybe a little, especially as the pot had a hole at the bottom where the percolation stem plugged into the base. The hole was sealed by a rubber gasket that appeared to be in good working order, but if there were any hidden cracks for water to seep through, our new kitchen gadget would probably go out with a snap, crackle and pop.
I'm happy to say it doesn't leak. Bubbles rose from the heating unit as soon as I plugged it in, and it did start knocking as the water burped up into the basket, but I watched it very closely for signs of fire and smoke and there was none of that, thank goodness. The burping water soon established a pleasant rhythm that I remembered from way back when, and in ten minutes or so the water in the pot went from clear to coffee.
It not only worked, it made a pretty decent cup of coffee! I'm not sure I've ever had coffee from a percolator before this. I guess I probably have in a diner somewhere, maybe. I started drinking coffee late in life, long after the point where everyone I know converted to drip coffee makers. Mom says coffee from a drip cone is better than from percolators but I honestly can't tell if there's a difference. This cuppa tasted just as good and I got to watch it perk!
Some kid rang our doorbell tonight and invited us to help him pursue his dream of becoming a lawyer by buying a subscription to a magazine from him.
"A lawyer?" My Darling B sneered at him. "Why don't you just become a banker instead?"
Kidding. She turned him away nicely. But she turned him away. Mamas, don't let this happen to your babies. Tell them to get a respectable job, like drowning cats or stealing candy, anything but sales.
I think what it means is: No matter which channel you're watching, it's all the same shit.
If it means anything at all. Maybe it's just for fun.
It's finally done! Well, almost. I still need to stain the ledge I installed for the cats to sit on. Also, it could probably use some curtains. But that's not my department.
Last night I set up the miter saw and cut several pieces of molding to length. I even got them all right the first time, or a little bit longer than I needed. I can fix that. I can't fix it when they're shorter.
I got this super-cool power miter saw at an estate auction last summer. It's about thirty or forty years old. I can tell because it's made out of cast iron, which apparently wasn't heavy enough because they added a base with about a hundred pounds of lead in it to hold it down. Didn't care. Don't have to cut raggedy-ass miters by hand any more. Pull the trigger, WOOSH! — I have a perfect forty-five degree angle cut in my piece of lumber instantly! Oh, and it shrieks louder than Tina Turner. I wear ear plugs when I use it.
Now that this window is (almost) done, I have to figure out how to finish off the windows in the rear entrance, but I've got all winter to do that ...
Here's the day I knocked the window out.
This is the most awesome thing I've ever seen. Literally. I have never seen anything that has struck me with the intense and overpowering awe that this has. Call me a guy with low expectations. I don't care.
It's a bike, it's got beer, it carries pizza, it has its own sound system and it's entirely pedal-powered. It's the dreamchild of the Hopworks Urban Brewing company of Portland, Oregon. Well, duh.
Read more about it here. Go. Read. Now.
Flu Pandemic Much Milder Than Expected
Does that sound more than a little weird to you? To me it's like reading a story headlined, "Bubonic Plague Kills Fewer Much Less Gruesomely" or "AIDS Not Really All That Bad."
So! My Darling B and I are hoping that the snow brought by the humunguous winter storm currently dumping on Our Fair City will be much heavier and more catastrophic than expected, which would be pretty much impossible, because every news service from Channel 3000 to The Wisconsin State Journal are predicting conditions so incredibly disastrous that it's basically the end of the world as we know it.
We're hoping it'll be so much worse because it would take something like the end of the world only much worse for either of our employers to even consider calling off work so we could sit home all day, drink coffee and read books. Well, half-hoping. If there was enough snow to shut down the city we could enjoy sitting at home all day with a cat in each of our laps, but if it were the end of the world as we know it, or worse, I don't think we'd be sitting around much. Enjoying a good novel while sipping from a freshly-made cup o' joe isn't one of those things you read about people doing after the world falls apart.
But you get the gist. The Biggest Snow Storm Of The Year has descended upon us, and like little kids dreaming of a snow day we're just letting our imaginations run wild. It probably wouldn't happen. But we'd like to think it could.
Have you noticed that most stories start with 'so?' I haven't heard one in the past six months that didn't. Most of them actually start with, "Okay, so ..." And then every new paragraph starts with 'so.' It's the new 'like.'
And every answer to every question is absolute now. Every. Freaking. Answer.
"Mind if I ask you a question?"
"Absolutely!"
"Do you think there's a chance that congress will muff the health care bill?
"Absolutely!"
"Can I have some fries with that?"
"Absolutely!"
We've been blizzarded upon. It's not a lot of snow, only a foot, maybe a little more, but the city of Madison announced last night that all non-essential services were going to be closed for business today. So did virtually every school district for a hundred miles in every direction.
"Stay off the roads," the radio announcers were warning this morning. "Don't go anywhere unless you have to." Gee, I wish they'd tell my boss.
UPDATE: They did tell my boss! They called a snow day at the office! Back to bed!
Here's the bad thing about blizzards: You have to go out in them. Or rather, I supposed you don't have to if you don't mind the roof caving in under the crushing weight of accumulated snow, or you never want to ever back your car out of your driveway for the rest of the week.
I'd like to avoid the caving-in roof, so I'll have to stand in the yard for an hour or so raking snow off it with a twenty-foot-long rake while snow swirls up the sleeves of my jacket and my boots fill up from trudging through snow drifts. That's always fun.
And this morning My Darling B and I shoveled the driveway because we thought we would have to go to work eventually. That took about thirty minutes, but we made it all the way to the road. That last ten feet is murder, isn't it? All you want to do by that time is finish, so you keep slogging away no matter how much your back cries out for a break.
Of course, there's that really good thing about blizzards: When they call a snow day. Doesn't happen often. Almost never, actually, which makes it that much nicer to sit on the couch with a hot cuppa.
I don't know if your city has one of these, but here in Madison we have a radio station, WOLX, that plays Christmas music 24/7. It's overkill if you ask me, but never mind, I can turn it off and I sure don't want to be thought of as an enemy soldier in the War On Christmas.
Also, I like Christmas songs, or some of them. I don't mind being able to turn on the radio to hear a few cheery tunes and get away from news stories about famine and death and mayhem.
What I do mind is Christmas songs about famine and death and mayhem, songs like Feed The World. I guess it's a nice sentiment and it's hard to argue against raising money to feed starving children (although not impossible), but it's a dreadful song. There's a world outside your window and it's a world of dread and fear where the only water flowing is the sting of bitter tears. Gosh, thanks for that. I feel all kinds of cheery now.
I don't want to deny anybody their Christmas music, but here's my idea: If we're going to have a 24/7 Christmas music radio show, let's go all-out and have two. And let's put the songs filled with happiness and cheer, like Most Wonderful Time Of The Year or Sleigh Ride, one one channel — call it The Happy Christmas Channel — and the awful, depressing, sad songs on another channel — call it The Christmas Channel for People with a Compulsion to Beat Themselves Up.
Now, if I could just come up with a way to rationalize a channel to segregate Christmas songs that are just plain bad. I'm looking at you, Bruce Springsteen.
My Darling B found this article by Dr Ben Kim as she was googling for the answer to the question, Is farting an indicator of good health? She fed me bean soup for lunch and beer cheese soup for dinner, so the subject arose more or less as a matter of course.
B couldn't remember the medical terminology for farting (flatulence), so she googled "fart health" and surfed through the answers to find Dr. Kim's. Keep in mind this is a medical doctor. I so wish I could have him as my primary care physician:
“... farting is no joking matter. In fact, if you fart on a regular basis, I promise you that you could be experiencing much greater health than you are right now.
“The amount you fart is one of the best indicators of how well you are digesting your food. Farting is in part due to rotting of incompletely digested foods in your digestive passageway. Farting in itself is actually helpful, as it represents unwanted gas leaving your body. In fact, if you have an urge to fart, be sure to do so. The point is, if you are farting a lot, then you probably have a lot of toxin formation occurring inside your gut from rotting of incompletely digested food, and some of these toxins are entering your blood stream and contributing to the development of long term disease.
“Please note that I am referring to farts that make your family and friends yelp.”
Oh, I do that all the time, Dr. Kim. There's plenty of yelping going on at Our Humble O'Bode.
So, the three books I'm reading right now are:
Rising From The Rails by Larry Tye. It's about Pullman car porters. Not a history, exactly, even though Tye does go into some detail about George Pullman's extraordinary rise to become one of the richest, most powerful hoteliers in the nation. It's clear he's read a lot about Pullman. But even though he interviewed porters who worked for the Pullman company in the sixties, it's still not enough to make this book more than a retelling of already-told stories. I got about halfway through it before I was distracted by:
The War Of The World by Niall Ferguson. The world has been at war continuously, and in the past century particularly it seems as if it's been hell-bent on self-destruction. Ferguson would like to understand why. I would, too. It's a subject that's fascinated me since I was a teenager.
Think of it: Our country went from selling pencils to Total World Domination in four or five short years, mostly by sheer force of will. And although I don't doubt that it was a matter of fight or perish, I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if we'd been able to pour all that creative force into the improvement of civilization instead of its destruction.
Unfortunately, Ferguson doesn't have any answers, only a very deft hand at synopsis, not that that's any small thing. This is a fine guide for people who live by the maxim "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," but that's about all it is, unless I missed something. I was about halfway through this gripping retelling of the utter destruction of Western civilization when I opened the mailbox to find:
... a gift from my mother, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I made the mistake of cracking open the first chapter, just to see if it had a beginning that would capture my interest, and dammit, it did. Captured it and held it hostage, demanding that I keep on reading it. Man buys a farm where he and his wife raise dogs, have a son who speaks to dogs but can't speak to people. Thanks, Mom!
... and that's how I ended up with three books on my bedstand.
[Okay, so I have a few more than three.]
It's not my birthday today but I asked for today off anyway because my birthday falls on a Saturday and I can't ask for that off, can I? Okay, I suppose I could but, if I did, my supervisor would probably back slowly away from me while trying to maintain a neutral expression on his face.
"What are you going to do with yourself all day?" My Darling B asked me. I answered in a noncommittal way that I would probably just hang out or play with the cats, maybe paint a car or two of my toy train set, or read a book, but in reality what I'll probably end up doing is washing clothes and cleaning up the bathroom, because if I don't do it today I'll have to do it this weekend and I want a lot less to do it this weekend than I do today. There you go. The most boring day off on a birthday ever.
And probably I'll end up blogging a lot about it, so stick around, you get to hear all about how I folded towels and loaded them up on the rack. Fun stuff.
Well, why not live-blog the day off I got for having a birthday, even if it turns out to be an episode of Home Alone without the precocious, homicidal child? And without Joe Pesci? Hey, if I could get Joe Pesci to stop by for a morning cup of coffee you'd read that, wouldn't you? Every word, I bet.
So far the day's amounted to pretty much what I thought it would: Laundry, dish washing and assorted housekeeping. I actually like doing this stuff, when I can to a little bit of it every day. All at once, on a weekend, it really sucks, but washing a stock pot, then throwing a load of clothes in the machine, not so bad. I could really get into being a hausmann if I could figure out how to stay home all day long and get paid for it. I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, but to date I haven't figured out how to make that work. Dammit.
I sorted the clothes trying to keep in mind which I would need most, and decided to throw a load of darks in first, for the socks and boxer shorts. Waited while the machine filled up. In weather this cold I usually keep one eye on it when it fills and drains because I have all kinds of wide-awake nightmares about the pipes bursting and wash water overflowing from frozen drains. I know what makes that happen and that it's not likely in this case, but I watch anyway. I'm just that paranoid.
Then on to the dishes. We have a dish-washing machine but it's your normal-sized dish washer, not the colossus we'd need if we wanted to wash some of the oversized pots, trays and cutting boards that My Darling B uses every day in food preparation. She's got a cutting board that's roughly half the size of a Kansas corn field, and she just finished up making vegetable soup stock in a stock pot so big we could sublet it to a family of four when she's not cooking with it. It all has to be washed by hand, a surprisingly easy task. B's going to read this and ask why I don't do it more often if it's so easy, and I don't know the answer to that. Just because, is the best I can come up with.
When I returned to work on Thursday, the day after the big snow storm, this is the sight that greeted me as I crossed Doty on Carroll Street:
The snow fell wet and clingy and built up faster than it melted off. Its weight was more than these young ash trees could bear, and they lost quite a few branches that had yet to be cleaned up even though they had dropped in the street.
These trees were not only wonderfully shady in the summer, they gave this stretch of Carroll a splash of color and broke up the monotony of the concrete and asphalt. I suppose we were going to lose them to the Emerald Ash Borer sooner or later, but I was hoping for later.
I thought I was going to take a walk around the block after I finished washing the dishes. I was wrong. It's cold enough out there to give me an ice cream headache just by walking into the wind. So these are the only snapshots you're going to get of the neighborhood after The Big Snow.
This first shot is the cedar in our front yard. It's so overgrown and ugly I've been thinking for years that I ought to cut it down, and now the storm has gone ahead and started the job for me. One of the boughs is bent all the way to the ground under the weight of the snow that clumped up all over the poor thing like Christmas flocking and still hasn't fallen off.
Here's a close-up of the damage to the trunk of the tree. It's no small cedar. It's probably been growing there at least ten years and cutting it down would have been one hell of a job. Will be one hell of a job.
The steeple of Grace Episcopal Church on capital square, in the light of the rising sun. This is the day after The Big Storm and the temperature is two. Wind chill is Minus Antarctic. I snapped this picture quick, and ducked inside.
Bonkers woke me at six-thirty this morning so I would be able to enjoy as much of my birthday as possible. What a great cat! I shot him in the face. Twice. He's just smart enough to run around the corner and hide in the next room when he hears me get out of bed, but then he just stands there, apparently believing that I won't remember from last time that he goes in there, which works out just fine for me. I just duck around the corner, shoot him in the face, and go back to bed. Too bad it doesn't stop him from walking right back into our room and crying some more.
After getting up the second time to shoot him in the face ... I mentioned that I'm shooting him with a squirt gun, right? Nothing but water, right? I don't want to hear from any militant PETA members about this, although if you'd like to break into my house in order to set Bonkers free, be my guest.
Where was I? Yeah, after getting up the second time I wasn't getting back to sleep so I shuffled to the kitchen to brew the morning coffee, as opposed to the afternoon coffee, the after-nap coffee, the after-dinner coffee and the shot o' joe nightcap. Just in case you wondered about the terminology. Bonkers followed me all over the kitchen, rubbing up against my leg whenever I came to a stop or even slowed down a little bit. He either loves getting shot in the face or he forgets I did it to him seconds after I squeeze the trigger.
Then I settled onto the sofa with a hot cuppa and my laptop to look over the morning news. Here's a recap: Tiger woods, war, climate change. There. Now you don't have to read it.
A story from the front page of this morning's New York Times:
“Mortgage rates in the United States have dropped to their lowest levels since the 1940s, thanks to a trillion-dollar intervention by the federal government. Yet the banks that once handed out home loans freely are imposing such stringent requirements that many homeowners who might want to refinance are effectively locked out.
“Refinancing could save owners hundreds of dollars a month, which could be spent, saved or used to pay down debts. Extra spending would help lift the economy, and lower payments might spare some people from losing their homes to foreclosure.
“President Obama, in his weekly address on Saturday, placed much of the blame for the recession on "the irresponsibility of large financial institutions on Wall Street that gambled on risky loans and complex financial products, seeking short-term profits and big bonuses with little regard for long-term consequences."”
Unless I'm missing something here, and please, please help me out if I am, the big, bad banks that got us into this mess in the first place by lending money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back are now the big, bad banks who won't continue to lend money to people who can't afford to pay it back. Is that how you read it?
My Darling B took me into town yesterday to see Grease performed at the Overture Center. She managed to make it a complete surprise, too, even though she had to give away several clues when she told me we were going into town for several hours, and even that it was near State Street, but I didn't guess what we were about to do until we were walking past the Overture Center and I noticed that quite a lot of people were gathering in the lobby, and that Grease was playing a matinée performance.
I'd never seen Grease before, not even the filmed version, so it was a real treat. The performers were all wonderful except for the one billed as The Star, a celebrity wannabe named Taylor Hicks who was apparently a winner on American Idol and was traveling with Grease as a vehicle to whatever the next level of stardom is. He may have been able to keep up the pace on Amercian Idol, but he was a huge disappointment in this show. A note to Mister Hicks: Music consists of pitch and rhythm. If you lose track of the beat, maybe a quick glance at the band leader now and then would help.
But other than that fly in the ice cream, the show was plenty of fun from beginning to end. It opened with the guy playing Vince Fontaine coming out before the opening act and getting the audience to sing along with several songs from the 50s. He had a little more fun getting members of the audience to shout out the name of the town they came from, and trying to repeat them with a Wisconsin accent he exaggerated for the names he had the most fun with. Fond du Lac came out something like, "Found doe Lock," for instance. Mazomanie was the name he liked best, and snuck it into the play during the second act, telling one of the high school girls he was hitting on, "Let's go to Mazomanie, then, I hear it's legal there!"
After the show, B took me to The Old Fashioned on cap square for a birthday dinner. The Old Fashioned is meant to be the number-one example of a Wisconsin tavern serving iconic Wisconsin foods (heavy on the cheese and other dairy products) and the signature Wisconsin highball, the Old Fashioned, mixed four or five different ways.
Speaking of drinks, they have one-hundred fifty Wisconsin beers on offer, so many that their drinks menu is several pages longer than their food menu. And you can join a club that awards a trophy and a t-shirt to any customer who can work his way through all one-hundred fifty beers. I joined the club. I had to.
Our appetizer was a plate of haystack onion rings so huge that I could only see B's face from the nose up until we grazed a bit off the top. For the main course, I enjoyed a brat on a bun with a side of potato salad, and B tucked in to a dish of mac and cheese with polish sausage. I told you these were iconic Wisconsin foods.
Is it an extreme close-up of a one-eyed albino spider, recently discovered by scientists on a remote Pacific Island?
Is it a brain-eating cyclopean space alien from a newly-released Paul Verhoeven movie?
Is it the skeleton of a whale, cryptically painted with curious markings and put on display at the New York Museum of Modern Art? It is.
It has begun.
My co-workers have started to bring their baking overages to the office. From now until sometime in mid- to late-January, we will all eat too many cookies, too much cake, and way, way too much chocolate. Yes, as a matter of fact there is such a thing.
Today's blog entry is a typecast, courtesy of a dusty but willing and able 1921 Underwood:
It's a typewriter, folks! When's the last time you saw one of these?
Oh, yeah. That's when.
(click on the photo to embiggen)
I know it's not great literature. I was only trying to see how well it still worked. It sat in storage for five or ten years. It should be locked up solid with rust by now, but the action is remarkably free-moving.
This is how I spend my free time, folks: Playing with the junk I collect. When the thought crosses my mind that I might more usefully spend my time I remind myself: Some people golf.
It's a plastic mixing bowl, forgotten in the oven, then removed ... too late!
It's the frozen carcass of a whale that fell out of an airplane and went splat.
It's a piece of Antarctic stone, carved over thousands of years by wind and sand into crazier shapes than can be imagined. It is.
See this and other ventrifacts, wind-shaped stone, at The Dry Valleys, a blog by a guy camping in the Antarctic. Didn't know they had wireless in the Antarctic? All this, and more!
Absolutely nothing going on at work today worth talking about. Totally boring.
Oh, wait: Somebody brought the most awful Christmas candy ever to work, a huge blob of marshmallows smothered in chocolate. With nuts. It was disgusting. I ate some anyway because, you know, can't pass up Christmas candy.
It's like they threw together the first three ingredients they could lay their hands on and called it candy. They didn't even try to make it look good. It wasn't sectioned into squares, or even shaped like anything, not even a square. It was a great big blob o' chocolate and marshmallows. If you wanted to stick any less than the whole thing in your maw you had to break off a chunk.
The one thing I did love about this candy was the way everybody stood around it, talking about how disgusting it was while simultaneously breaking off chunks to gobble up.
"Tomorrow it'll probably be a big bowl of sugar and a spoon," My Darling B guessed, when I told her about the marshmallow loaf, "or a bottle of syrup and some glasses."
I bought my way out of guy night by treating My Darling B to dinner at Harmony Bar on Atwood Avenue this evening. It cost me thirty clams but was worth every bit of it. I had absolutely no inspiration whatsoever and probably would have ended up setting out cheese and cold cuts and calling that dinner. Lame, lame, lame, lame.
After spending way too much time shopping for groceries, then stopping a little further up the road to shove a Christmas tree in the trunk of the car, I swung the nose of the O-Mobile back up the road and pulled into a side street where we could walk to Harmony. It's a homey place to eat a good, solid dinner. I had a sandwich, B ordered herself a pizza. "Got to think ahead to tomorrow's leftovers," she explained. Made sense to me.
While we were waiting for our food to come from the kitchen we exchanged war stories or just vented about the experiences we had at the office that day. "You know how they say, 'Too bad stupidity isn't painful?'" I asked after blowing off some steam that built up to dangerous levels when I discovered a particularly awful screwup that was going to take me an hour or more to fix tomorrow morning.
"Oh no, it hurts all right," B said, anticipating what I was going to say. "But it hurts the wrong people."
There was a big flat-screen television on the wall over our heads that my eye wandered to every so often. During one of the lulls in the conversation, I couldn't help but take a good, long look at an advertisement.
A basketball player talking to some guy sitting at his desk in a generically boring office cubicle. I couldn't hear what was going on, but I didn't need to. The visual was what engaged me. He was seated in a high-backed chair of red velvet. A throne, really. Gilded, with an ermine pelt thrown casually over the arm. I looked at it and told My Darling B, "I need one of those in my cube."
"A throne?"
Yes. A throne. That would be perfect. And I would sit upon it and wait for those who do my bidding to approach.
Trouble is, rather than do my bidding they often approach to ask me a lot of questions. I guess that's not exactly a bad thing, having people lined up to beg my indulgence, but really, if they're going to beg, at least they could do it upon bended knee. It would only be proper.
And instead of questioning me, these supplicants could submit their prayers. It's not without precedent. Many, many moons ago, a petition presented to congress was referred to as a prayer, so I don't see why my minions couldn't humor me in this. It's only a matter of terminology, after all.
So instead of, "Hey, I've got a question," I was thinking it could be more line, "Humbly I, your supplicant, submit this prayer upon bended knee," as I regard them ever so casually from atop my gilt throne. That's not too much to ask, is it? Or is it? It probably is, isn't it?
Andy Rooney had the same affliction I have that makes me collect typewriters:
There were six Underwood #5 typewriters [in the newsroom] and two L.C. Smith typewriters. The Underwoods were my age, twenty-three, but had lived a harder life. Those old Underwoods were the best typewriters ever built — one of the best of anything ever built. Even when you weren't writing anything interesting they were satisfying to pound on and I never outgrew my sentimental attachment to them. To this day, I have in my possession seventeen Underwood #5 typewriters and I'm reluctant to admit that I'm writing on a Toshiba T3200SX computer. I love my Underwoods but you can carry the gold old days too far. I wish Underwood had made the keyboard on my Toshiba. I'll never have seventeen of these.
The Underwood #5 is the first typewriter I bought, making it the foundation of my collection of old typewriters. If there was ever a typewriter built to be the foundation of anything it's the Underwood #5.
It's thirty-five pounds of cold iron and it's about the size of a microwave oven. You could anchor a battleship with just one Underwood #5 at the end of a long chain.
And Rooney's got seventeen of them. Seventeen! Where does he even keep seventeen of them?
Sean's here to visit while his school is closed and the kids are gone home for the winter break. We drove to Mitchell airport in Milwaukee to pick him up, drove him back and sat down to a delicious dinner of fresh pizza from Angelo's right up the street. Dinner was supposed to be the chili that My Darling B had worked so hard on all morning, chopping up the onions, browning the ground beef and pureeing the tomatoes. She left it all in a crock pot cranked up to high before we hit the road for Milwaukee at eleven-thirty, figuring we could sit down to dinner as early as five o'clock, but at seven the beans were still pretty crunchy, and that's why we had to order pizza.
Sean brings a tiny little laptop with him wherever he goes. B likes it so much that she wanted to get one for herself so she asked Sean if she could try his out first. As he handed it over he reminded her about its one little idiosyncrasy: It acts as if the function key is always on, so when he types anything he has to hold it down. "I've tried everything I could think of to fix it," he said, "but it's too much trouble and anyway I'm sort of used to it now."
B googled "function key stuck" and in thirty seconds she found out how to unlock it. That just about made her day.
Today is Do Nothing But Read Day, a suggestion started by a grad student at UW Madison, Amanda Lanyon-LaSage, that gained a much wider audience after she appeared on Joy Cardin's WPR talk show on Friday evening.
Now that's a holiday I can get behind. I spent the afternoon just as she suggested, curled up on the sofa with a cat on my lap and a freshly-brewed cup of tea by my side and finished up reading My War by Andy Rooney.
I thought I'd be able to blog a little something when I got home from stress yesterday evening, but really I was a little too worn out and a lot too much filled up with bratwurst, French fries and beer. I had just enough energy left to brush my teeth, change into my jammies and hit the hay.
My Darling B was lucky enough to get the day off yesterday, so she spent the day with Sean. They wandered around town a bit and did a little shopping after they spent a couple hours at a local grocery store ringing a bell for the Salvation Army. B handed out candy canes and Hershey kisses to guilt passers-by into tossing their spare change into the bucket, and said it worked pretty well. One guy stuff a couple of five-dollar bills into the kettle. I hope she gave him two candy canes.
Then after I finished up at the office I met her and Sean and Jim and Sue at The Old Fashioned for dinner and a few laughs. We hung out there for a couple hours before finally heading home.
The Word of the Day is "consistory:" it's the formal meeting of the College of Cardinals. We learned this one last night because it's written on the wall of the men's room at The Old Fashioned. Why it's written on the wall is a question for another day.
My Darling B and I switch places tomorrow as she heads back to the office and I get to stay home and putter. I can't wait to putter. She can very definitely wait to go back to the office. Every so often she lifts her head from the article she's reading and mewls "I don't want to go to work," pouts just a bit until I stroke her hair and murmur, "There, there," then returns to her reading. It's very sad.
I must have done enough things right around the department the past few weeks to convince my supervisor that I could stay home from the office. Things have been a little crazy but I got most of the paperwork off my desk and a pre-Christmas lull has set in.
Tomorrow I'm going to get up early enough to make coffee for My Darling B and drive her to work, and then I'm not gonna do nothin I don't want to do, not even feed the cats. They can catch some mice and bugs for lunch if they get hungry enough.
I wasn't going to get up any earlier than five-thirty this morning to fix coffee for My Darling B, but the cats had an agenda and the first item on it was scheduled at five.
Bonkers jumped into bed first. This is a new tactic. Before this, he would stand at the end of the bed and cry. Now he jumps on our heads and purrs. The crying was so annoying it made my head explode. It's hard to get mad about the purring. It's also hard to sleep through. He gets right in our faces and purrs loudly enough to rattle the windows.
Let me modify what I said about sleeping through it: I have a hard time sleeping through it. My Darling B can sleep through an artillery barrage.
And even though her alarm clock is set at quarter till six, she's been known to hit the snooze button a few times and generally doesn't roll out of bed until sometime between six and six-fifteen. Hence my desire to wake up no earlier than five-thirty, which would have given me plenty of time to have a steaming pot of coffee waiting on the kitchen counter for her.
That was the plan. Oh well.
I still haven't decided whether this is a Belorussian or Urkrainian typewriter. Or maybe it's got enough characters on the keyboard to be either of those and a Russian typewriter.
Wherever it came from, this typewriter's put on a lot of miles, and it wasn't the most solidly-made typewriter in the first place. It's got a fairly solid chassis and the design appears to be simple, but quite a lot of the parts are stamped sheet steel that have reached a point in their career when they're going to start to fatigue and break ...
... such as the bracket that's supposed to be holding this roller in place. It broke once already, many moons ago, and some very industrious tinkerer repaired it by soldering a piece of tin across the break, but the solder has failed and I'll have to re-solder it or figure out another way to fix it, because it's impossible to load paper in the machine without this roller, and if you can't load paper into a typewriter it's just an exotic paperweight.
Coolest thing I found while I was taking it apart: "Krirkoviz" scratched his name into the underside of the cover. Previous owner? The guy who repaired it?
Whoo! Just finished shoveling snow off the driveway. Gotta sit down a minute.
I found this coffee mug at the thrift store yesterday and had to bring it home because I got a thing for choo-choos, but also because "Bangor & Aroostook" sounds enough like a phrase you'd hear in a foreign-language porn film that it makes me grin.
We got rain coming down on snow that's turning to ice. The Great Ice Storm of 2009 cometh. There was barely a half-inch of snow on the driveway but it was all locked in place by a glaze of ice and soaked through with enough water that I might as well have been shoveling away a half-inch of crushed granite. My arms and legs are quivering like jelly.
Walking back to the house up the sloping driveway turned into a mad scramble on the layer of ice I exposed. Made me wonder if I'd done the right thing, but I'm sure as hell not putting all that snow back.
My Darling B made peppermint bark! Huzzah!
All four of us, Tim, Sean, My Darling B and I, sat down for a Christmas dinner that B knew the boys would gobble up, her world-famous pasta dish (I can say that without lying even a little bit because she's prepared it in every place we've lived) that we call pepperoni-rigatoni. It's pasta and pepperoni in a casserole dish smothered in tomato sauce and cheese. The boys have always loved it and it's quick and easy to make, which left us for the one other thing we do when we all get together: Play a board game!
Last night it was Monopoly. There was a sort of lukewarm feeling about playing a full-blown game of Monopoly so I suggested we deal all the deeds randomly and go from there, and everybody went along with that until we'd made two or maybe three laps around the board, when it turned out everybody really missed the part about buying the property, so we started over and everybody had a great time after that.
I bought all the railroads. I always do this because nobody else does. "Nobody ever lands on the railroads," is the reason I hear, and yet I notice that, when I buy up all the railroads, the refrain quickly changes to, "Two hundred dollars to ride on the Reading? I didn't even want to ride on your stupid railroad in the first place!"
Even though nobody ever lands on the railroads, I had to promise My Darling B she could ride on them free if she sold me the Pennsylvania so I could have all four. And she did, and then landed on them almost every time she rolled the dice. Saved herself a thousand bucks, easily.
The game ended in a draw at about nine-thirty when nobody was coming out ahead but nobody was really going under, either. All I had was Baltic, Oriental and all the railroads, couldn't develop any property, the rest of the players had houses all over the board that I kept landing on, and still somehow I had more money than anybody else. When nine-thirty rolled around we called the game on account of not being able to bankrupt anybody.
Tonight's game: RISK!
We were supposed to be on our way to Mom's place this morning to share a Christmas dinner with her, but the weather isn't cooperating. Although yesterday we experienced what was very nearly a heat wave, the temp up to forty-six and rain melting all the snow we got last week, after the sun set and the snow started falling again the temperature plummeted to twenty-four degrees, turning every flat surface, such as roads, into snow-covered ice skating rinks.
Mom called just after supper to tell us Jim & Sue wouldn't be making the trip, and after talking it over we agreed it wouldn't be such a hot idea for us to make the attempt, either. It's a three-hour drive on a good day. Weather like this could easily make it twice as long.
So we'll be staying here this weekend, probably staying inside all day as temps have dropped into the teens. From what I understand, probably everybody in my family will be. I heard through my Mom that my brother, who lives in Texas and likes to brag on how good he's got it down there in the winter, says that they had a white Christmas yesterday with temps in the twenties.
Christmas here in Our Humble O'Bode was about the most laid-back Christmas I think we've ever had. Tim didn't come by the house until about nine-thirty, and Sean didn't even get out of bed until Tim had been here a while and was threatening, very loudly, to go wake Sean up.
We didn't exchange presents this year, even though we had a tree. B bought a bunch of stocking-stuffers for me and the boys, and I bought her a few trinkets for her stocking as well, but it was all over in about five minutes and we spent the rest of the day in various states of repose, lazing around the house reading or surfing the web. Mostly reading.
Our sumptuous Christmas repast was leg o' lamb and mashed potatoes, with a pecan pie for dessert. After that we were too stuffed to play Risk, funnily enough, and we couldn't decided on a movie, so we all ended up reading books until bedtime. Big change from the days when the boys rousted us out of bed at the crack of dawn and tore through the house all day long, playing with their new toys.
Who the heck is that guy in the back?
It's like I'm this guy who happened to be walking past and I saw these three posing for a photo so I ducked in behind them quick before they could stop me, stopped long enough to glance at the camera and then, maybe, I got lucky enough to escape before they grabbed me and dogpiled me.
This photo captured Boo's utter contempt for holiday photos, didn't it? Never have I seen an expression of such pure hatred on the face of a cat.
Happy Holidays to all from the O-Folk!
We finally got around to playing that game of Risk last night.
B fixed some doner kebaps for dinner using the leftover lamb from the night before. A doner is a Turkish gyro, roast lamb sliced thin and piled in the pocket of a pita-like bread with lots of veggies and yogurt sauce. We discovered them while I was stationed in Berlin and loved them so much we still miss them ten twenty years later.
B has learned to make a sauce that comes so very close to the original doner sauce as to make no difference, and it's easy to get the veggies right. The ingredient we can only approximate is the lamb. It was slow-roasted with lots of spices. I haven't tasted lamb like that since.
But B keeps tweaking her recipe to see how close she can get. The doners she made last night were delicious, and took almost no time to make (compared to the food preparation she goes through for other dishes), leaving us lots of time to play Risk.
We started the game in the usual way:
Tim staked a claim in Australia and swore to hold it against all invaders. He did this, and more. There's a first time for everything.
B announced she was going to remain completely neutral throughout the game, and even though she never made a move that you could say was intent on taking over the world, yet somehow she managed to stay in the game until the very end, and made a pretty good showing of it, too.
I tried staking a claim on Asia this time, mostly just because I hadn't done that in quite a while. Unfortunately, I have no strategy for holding on to Asia, something you must have if you want to build an Asian empire, even in a game so basic as Risk. The experiment failed miserably. I'll stick to North America from now on.
Sean set his sights on North America this time and did a pretty good job of hanging on to it, right up until the very end. His last, significant move came when he turned in his Risk cards in exchange for something like thirty or forty armies and went on a rampage across Asia that destroyed quite a lot of Tim's forces (Tim had conquered my territories by that time) and might have even wiped Tim completely off the board if he hadn't painted himself into a corner in China. There he sat with fifteen or twenty armies and nowhere to go.
Tim's turn was next. He slaughtered Sean.
B was still on the board but, by that time, all she wanted was for the game to be over so she could go read a book. Sean was feeling much the same way by then, so they both conceded and Tim declared himself ruler of the world.
Kids today got it great. I understand how it sucks to be looking for your first job in today's economy, but they've got the internet and it's got great geek comics like this one. I would have just wet myself from glee every single day if I'd had the chance to read web comics like xkcd and blogs (blogs?) like Bad Astronomy.
It all leads me to believe I was born thirty years too early. My dad used to say the same thing when I was in high school, except for him I think it was because of the way girls dressed.
Man, that stings. That is the most wicked paper cut ever. How's paper even get to be sharp enough to do that, anyway?
And right on the end of my finger, of course. I've got to type all day with that, too.
A paper cut was the last thing on my mind, though. You'd think I'd remember every W, S and X but no, I just barely noticed when it was time for lunch.
I remember Carol Burnett describing what childbirth was like: "Grab your bottom lip and pull it over the top of your head."
Today was not quite that bad. I guess I'd rate it on a par with sticking my tongue in a toaster.
When it was finally over, though, My Darling B took me to Harmony Bar for a cheeseburger, her treat. Talk about a silver lining.
Wow, these guys got all the answers, I'm tellin' ya.
Fox guy: "This guy was able to get through security in Nigeria..."
Huh, I wonder how hard that is? Maximum security at American airports is they make us take our shoes off and confiscate our shampoo. I'm thinking they're probably not checking underpants in Nigeria.
Fox guy: "...got on this plane with this high explosive, PETN .. does that mean the terrorists are coming up with new weapons that can defeat our technology?"
Lieberman: "Richard Reed had a similar device on him eight years ago ..."
So, no.
Lieberman: "A terrorists from Yemen went into Saudi Arabia with this same explosive and blew himself up ... only slightly injured Prince Mohammed bin Naiev."
The shoe bomber utterly failed to blow up an airliner, the underpants bomber failed to blow up an airliner, and there's this other guy who failed to blow up the Saudi counterterrorism chief ... if I was the Quaeda quartermaster I'd take that lot of plastic explosives back to the factory threaten to blow myself up if they didn't give my laundered money back. That'd get a few laughs, I bet. "What are you gonna do, blow up your underpants at us?"
Hard as life must be for Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reed, who got pinned with the dumbest terrorist nickname ever, not to mention that goofy photo, no amount of away time and psychoanalysis is going to let Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab live down the sobriquet "Underwear Bomber." That's gotta suck.
Lieberman: "The 9/11 happened because of a failure of imagination. We could not imagine that people could do what they did."
Because it would be just impossible to imagine driving an airplane into a building a thousand feet tall. How would that even occur to a sane person? Just unimaginable.
[Oh, Joe, did you really say "the 9/11"? Thank you, thank you so much.]
Lieberman: "There have been privacy concerns about the use of these whole-body imaging devices, but I think those privacy concerns, which are frankly mild, have to fall..."
He says that now, but Senator Lieberman's tune will soon change after the ghostly image of his pee-pee and buns shows up on the internet.
Pete the Pointing Guy: "We have about 90 Yemenis left in Gitmo. They should stay there. They should not go back to Yemen. If they go back to Yemen we will very soon find them back on the battlefield."
Okay, then we could shoot them, right? Send them back to Yemen, have a planeload of Delta Force guys on the same flight, as soon as the Yemenis step off the plane onto Yemeni soil, blam. That's got to be legal. They're officially enemy combatants. There's only ninety of them. How long could it take for our boys to mow them all down with Tommy guns? I don't see the problem here.
Lieberman: "[Guantanamo] is a first-class facility, it's way above what's required by the Geneva convention or our Constitution"
Except maybe for that one teensy-tiny insignificant part about indefinite incarceration without due process, or a right to a speedy trial. Other than that it's so totally Constitutional that George Washington himself would bust a chubby over it.
Lieberman: "If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war."
Am I presuming too much to hazard the guess that "acting preemptively" translates to "INVASION!" Silly me.
I don't know how I did that, but I am! I was so far behind in the growing pile of work that completely obliterated my desk every day that I was sure I'd still be working on it after the new year, but no! Somehow between the phone calls and other requests for help today I managed to get it all cleared off my desk just in time for the big pterodactyl to scream his head off. I am amazed at how these things work themselves out sometimes.
My Darling B is even luckier than I am today: It's her Friday! State workers don't put their noses to the grindstone tomorrow morning, on the assumption, I guess, that they'll be too busy planning the drunken revelries they'll be heading to that night to care about anything they're doing to do it at all, much less well. Or am I being too harsh? In any case, she's off scott-free tomorrow while I have to report to work at the usual hour, although my employer has seen fit to dismiss me two hours early so I can go get sloshed with the rest of the kids, too.
We have tickets to attend the New Year's Eve bash at Harmony Bar tomorrow night. This might be the first time I've gone anywhere to celebrate on the night before the first of the year since my brother Pete married his lovely bride on New Year's Eve all those years ago. I know they'll have live music at Harmony and a buffet spread, but other than that I have no idea how normal human beings celebrate this annual event so it will be quite a treat. With any luck, there'll be a story to tell.
Bobby McFerrin plays his audience like a great big pianica, and he only has to give them two notes to tune them up!
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
You've got to read this story in the New York Times that's trying to make a great big deal out of the bugaboo that ground beef injected with gaseous ammonia still has e.coli in it. I had to read the first few paragraphs a couple times to get the point that they were incensed about the e.coli, not that the processing company is INJECTING AMMONIA INTO GROUND BEEF! Because, you know, why would a little ammonia in your hamburger patty scare you? Squirt a little ketchup on it, garnish it with a few pickles and you hardly notice.
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
— Abraham Lincoln
My goodness me that man could write.
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© 2009 Dave Okonski.
