this is drivel

Monday, February 1, 2010

It is an ashtray, but I haven't taken up smoking.

It's an ashtray exactly like one my parents had for years and years. For all I know, Mom might still have it. Or, this might be that very ashtray.

I was wandering the aisles of Saint Vincent de Paul's thrift store on Willy Street when my eye happened to fall on this. Not literally. That would be pretty yucky. I'd have to find a way to wash it off and stick it back in, and I'm pretty sure I would be too panicked to do any of that.

My hand reached out to pick it up without my having to tell it to. It had made up my mind for me. I was going to buy this ash tray.

There are some little baubles that take you back, aren't there? Even when it makes no sense at all. I mean, an ash tray. Really. I'm guessing my parents would grimace at the notion that an ash tray would remind me so powerfully of my childhood, but maybe not. That was back when everybody smoked and there were ashtrays everywhere. And this one was in our house. Or one just like this one.

[Footnote: I wonder if I'm the only American over forty who's never smoked? I asked The Google, but it doesn't know.]

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

"Why's it impossible to starve in the desert?" I asked My Darling B the other day.

A longish silence intervened. I hadn't attempted to tell B an actual joke in years and I think she may have suspected I was asking for an honest answer. After weighing the question for what seemed like a full minute she finally appeared to decide it was most probably a setup for a punchline, so she gave up. "I don't know. Why?"

"Because of all the sandwiches there," I answered.

Crickets.

"Because of all the sand which is there," I repeated.

Still nothing ... no, wait! A glimmer of recognition! Ah, but then confusion.

"But it should be, 'the sand that is there,'" she explained.

"Sure," I chuckled, "but you can see how that would sort of kill the joke, right?"

"Right, but it doesn't make sense the other way."

My wife, the grammar police.

This is the coolest thing I've seen all day.

Much more of Martin Schwebs Rasmussen's scratch-built Saturn V rocket and other models of space ships on his web page.

If you look at nothing else, at least check out how he built the rocket engines from balsa wood! I stand gape-jawed in awe!

Wednesday, Feburary 3, 2010

Duncan Hunter, Republican representative from California and proud to be a Marine doesn't want transgendered hermaphroditic gays and lesbians (well, maybe lesbians would be okay) wontonly peeping at his wee-wee, he only wants that ‘special bond’ that exists in 'very close situations' in military life, and says so in no uncertain terms in the interview he gave to NPR:

Rep. Hunter: I think the folks who have been in the military that have been in these very close situations with each other, there has to be a special bond there. And I think that bond is broken if you open up the military to transgenders, to hermaphrodites, to gays and lesbians.
 
Melissa Block: Transgenders and hermaphrodites.
 
Rep. Hunter: Yeah, thats going to be part of this whole thing. Its not just gays and lesbians. Its a whole gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual community. If you're going to let anybody no matter what preference - what sexual preference they have that means the military is going to probably let everybody in.
 

Everybody! Dogs and cats! Living together! It'll be anarchy!

Guess what we did last night? We went dancing! We've been saying for years that we wanted to take dancing lessons and last week B made a command decision and signed us up for an introductory lesson. We plunked down twenty-five bucks at a studio just north of here for forty-five minutes of private instruction so we could learn to dance the Foxtrot and Waltz.

Sort of. My Darling B and I are not the most graceful of people, and together we make one of the biggest balls of clumsy you've ever seen, which is why it's a good thing this was a private lesson so you never could've seen it.

It's not that we don't dance ever. We shake our booties to the rock and roll tunes on the radio in the privacy of our own home and, on very special occasions, and usually only with the benefit of a little liquid lubrication, we will put our booty-shaking on display in public.

We have never been much for going out on the town to paint it red, though, and the way we dance together has never required us to actually coordinate our movements. And, as it turned out, it just may be that we are genetically predisposed to remain uncoordinated booty-shakers all our lives. Or maybe not. Neither one of us ever did step on the other's feet, so I supposed that should be an encouraging sign.

Thursday, Feburary 4, 2010

Notice anything missing? I didn't, until I got to work yesterday. It was like that dream where you're in a big crowd of people and you suddenly realize you're wearing nothing but underwear.

My coworkers were very understanding about it. All day long as I padded around the office I expected somebody to say something to me, but they never did. Nobody so much as smirked. Maybe it's happened to them, too.

It's not like I walked to work in my stocking feet, I'm quick to point out. I put on a pair of snow boots before I leave the house in the morning. Then, when I get to the office, I change into a pair of brown leather shoes that I usually keep under my desk. But, the day before yesterday, I took them home with me because I thought we'd need them for our dancing lesson. I didn't. We danced in our stocking feet. It was sort of a foreshadowing of my day at the office yesterday.

Friday, February 5, 2010

One day I'll be able to stop shredding these things, but today, it's confetti.

I think because I'm officially retired from the Air Force, the Aid Association for Retired Persons thinks I just sit in the front room in my rocking chair reading novels all afternoon while I wait for the mail carrier to bring me another one of their trial membership cards.

They send one to me about once a month. The most use I can get out of them is to keep the teeth on my shredder sharp, because they're too thick for bookmarks.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Ah, Saturday morning: When I can wake up at a reasonable hour, when I can lay in bed for a while after I wake up, when I can sit on the sofa with my morning coffee until I decide I'm ready to start the day. And even then, "start the day" means take a long, hot shower, dress in comfortably shabby clothes, and head into town with My Darling B to visit the farmer's market, then stop at the thrift store on the way home to pick up some bargain books. I love Saturday morning.

I might add that Saturday afternoons aren't too bad, either.

The first time I watched Top Gear, Jason Dawe was teaching grannies to do a parking-brake turn. It was the most hilarious thing I'd ever seen anyone do in a car, and I tuned in again and again whenever I could.

The production values have soared since then, apparently. Here's James May taking a ride to the edge of the atmosphere in a U-2 and all but succumbing to the same rapture that moonwalker Edgar Mitchell famously described as the epiphany that changed his life.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Stiff muscles ... aching joints ... swollen ligaments ... this is the hand of a man who participated in the company's annual bowling event, the same man who hasn't bowled a single frame since 2006. Ouch.

Every year, Bill B (the guy at the office who hired me for my first job after I retired from the military , actually) organizes the company bowling event, partly because he likes bowling so much that he has one of those cybernetic strap-on arms, but mostly because he's just such a great guy.

I signed up for it the year after I hired on, and enjoyed it so much that I wanted to do it every year.

The second year, I was in an office of not-bowlers, which are different from non-bowlers in that they absolutely will not bowl no matter how much you cajole them or what you threaten to do with their e-mail the next time they walk away from their computer without locking up the screen. I didn't realize then that I could still bowl even if I rounded up five random people from anywhere. I didn't have to get them from my office. I could have signed up five of the homeless people who hang out on the park benches on cap square all day.

So this year, as soon as I saw that signups were open, I walked around the office and asked who wanted to go bowling this year. I got four people to make a team in just two minutes, as long as I agreed to be the team captain. Being team captain means delivering the money to Bill B, and that's it, so I agreed. Easy.

Monday, February 8, 2010

If you're a Luddite like me who doesn't watch television, you missed the much talked-about Super Bowl commercials. No fear! Someone has helpfully compressed them into this thirty-second summary:

Hmm. Doesn't make me want to get cable yet.

Aaaaand ... apparently we're not going to get any part of the monstrous snow dump we were promised this morning when the goobers on NPR told me at least six times we could expect six to twelve inches by nightfall. Well, it's nightfall. We got nothing.

It's not that I was hoping for maybe another snow day. I'm thinking pigs will fly out of my butt bearing gift boxes of Havana cigars before that happens again this winter. And I certainly wasn't looking forward to driving in it, or shoveling it off my driveway and front stoop again, but for some weird reason I really hate being told it's going to snow, and then psyche! No snow. At all.

My Darling B, on the other hand, would rather not see any more snowfall at all this season, promised or not. And I have to say I understand her feelings perfectly. She can't wait to plant her garden again, and the sooner it stop snowing and she can see the ground again, the more it feels as if planting a garden seems like a possibility within reach. So even though I'm pissed off about being diddled by the heavy snow forecast that didn't pay out, I'm also pulling for B.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

I was showing Katrina, one of my coworkers, how to use the laser printer to address envelopes, which is way cool and a whole hell of a lot easier than trying to get the address on a letter to line up with the window in a window envelope, or print an address on a label and stick it on an envelope. You burn up more paper that way than Nazis at a book-burning rally.

The procedure is dead simple: Just open Microsoft Word, type the address as you would like it to appear on the envelope, click on the tab labeled "mailings" and select "envelope." What could be easier?

It's certainly a lot easier that typing the address, at least for me. When I got to the zip code I doubt very much that I got a single digit right without having to backspace and start over. Sometimes I had to backspace twice and transpose. When I finally got to the end after a half-dozen tries I threw my arms in the air and shouted, "GOAL!" Then collapsed in exhaustion on the desk top.

"And it's only Tuesday," Katrina said.

"I'm not going to make it to Friday," I sobbed.

No more men on the moon! Talk radio's Tom Ashbrook was jackhammering into the subject of the Obama Administration's decision to kill off the manned space program with three guests, one who was against the decision and two who were all for it. One of the two was Buzz Aldrin.

Buzz says we shouldn't go to the moon because we've already been there. Okay, I suppose he's probably got a more deeply thought-out reason than that, but what his argument boiled down to was that we've already done that, and we should instead be burning up the money we don't have to go to the moon to go to Mars instead.

Way cool, Buzz, but just slightly unrealistic, don't you think?

Not to be outdone by Buzz, though, the guy who was arguing that Nasa should go ahead with the mission to the moon also wanted to send Buzz and Neil Armstrong back for a fiftieth anniversary party! I suppose if you're going to re-stage a stunt, you ought to somehow make it more incredible, and if we could land two ninety-year-olds on the moon, what could be more incredible than that? Stupid, but incredible.

Okay, maybe I'd get cable television if every commercial were as funny as this one.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Linda Holmes at the NPR blog Monkey See is apparently suffering the advanced effects of cabin fever as the snowpocalypse drags on. Among her list of "Olympic Events We Will Invent Ourselves In The Next 24 Hours If It Keeps Snowing," she mentions: Driveway Ice Dancing, Whiskey Gulping, Digging For Pedestrians, Despairathon, and Screaming Like A Crazy Person Out Open Window While Sobbing Uncontrollably.

And to think, just the other day I was feeling more than a little jealous of all the people living on the east coast who've had a whole week off from work.

Wowzers! I was looking for some photos of the third stage of the Saturn V moon rocket and found the Nasa Image Archive!

This is space porn to the nth degree! The search tool will find dozens and dozens of photos, no matter how obscure your request is (like "Saturn V S-IVb stage"), and the display will let you zoom in so far it makes me dizzy! I could do this all night!

Friday, Feburary 12, 2010

Breakfast this morning is just a cup of coffee, because that's all that I can hold. I'm still feeling full after last night's dinner.

After saying for I don't know how many years that we were finally going to eat dinner at L'Etoile, we broke down and did it last night when they offered a special New Orleans style Prix Fixe dinner of cornmeal fried oysters and Creole fish stew. That sounded so yummy that we couldn't pass it up.

"Prix Fixe" is French for "cheap enough that any bumpkin can afford it," although "cheap" in this case is a very relative term. The people who dine at L'Etoile appear to be the kind who put on suit coats and evening dresses to go out on the town, although how that one guy got into a size four cocktail dress will be the subject of speculation for weeks to come.

So we were just a little out of place, although there were plenty of diners dressed just as casually as we were, and one woman put on her best track suit. I didn't feel so terribly out of place.

It's a beautiful little restaurant on the second floor of an old building on capital square. The dining room's very cozy, maybe twenty tables arranged in a room about twenty feet wide and fifty or sixty feet long with a bar in the back and big picture windows in the front.

We had reservations for six o'clock, the first seating, which could be why we got a table front and center giving us a beautiful view of the capital dome, all lit up bright red (for Valentine's Day?). Or it could be that they realized we're just that special and gave us the best seats in the house.

The first course was cornmeal fried oysters, lightly breaded and very tender, served on a bed of shredded cabbage and served with a tangy tartar sauce. That was followed by a big bowl of Creole fish stew, rice and a spicy stock swimming with halibut, wild rock shrimp and thin slices of smoked andouille sausage. This was one of those dishes that make you go "Oh!" and "Ummm!" with every spoon full you put in your mouth.

That was enough to fill us up, but there was more: Dessert was bananas Foster, a banana sliced up the middle, covered in melted caramel and served with a dollop of ice cream. Bliss!

And that's probably going to be our big night out for a while. We blew more on the tip that we do on hamburgers at the Harmony tavern on a Friday night, but it was worth it, and especially so because I think it did a world of good for My Darling B, who hadn't been feeling well all day. She's better now. Happy Valentine's Day, B!

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Friday was the last day for one of the people in our department, so a bunch of us ordered sub sandwiches from Potbelly's and everybody threw in a little extra to buy Sandie's lunch.

The delivery guy from Potbelly's came to the office about thirty seconds after I took a phone call that I couldn't beg my way out of. I held up my index finger to give the delivery guy the universal sign for "just one minute" and he nodded and mouthed "okay."

It was a conference call. I tried to keep my answers brief and steer the conversation toward a conclusion, like that was going to do any good. In no time at all the other two people on the call started babbling about something I had nothing to do with, so, keeping one ear on the conversation, I dug a wad of bills out of my pocket and gave it to the delivery guy.

Delivery Guy counted what I gave him, handed it back and said, "You gave me seventy-nine."

"What's the total?" I asked.

"Eighty-two," he said.

I'd added up the total ahead of time, but I must have added wrong because the total I got, plus tip, came to eighty-two. Still, I heard (with the ear that wasn't listening to a conference call) eighty-two, and the half of my brain that wasn't trying to keep track of the babbling (in case I had to jump into the conversation) said, "Eighty-two! That's what I got!"

I peeled off three more dollars, gave it to Delivery Guy and said thanks. He gave me an icy look and walked away. I thought, What, fifteen percent isn't enough any more? Then I forgot about it.

Until the phone call ended and I sat down to eat my sandwich. While I was munching happily away I passed an eye over the receipt, saw the total at the bottom, eighty-two, and a troubling thought slowly took shape in my mind: Hey ... did I just stiff that guy? Oh, SHIT, I did stiff that guy!

Of course I had to walk down to Potbelly's on the other end of State Street to apologize and pay him. My whole weekend would have been nothing but guilt and worry if I hadn't. As it turned out, Deliver Guy was behind the counter when I got there, getting ready to make another run. I offered him my hand, said I was sorry about a million times and passed him a sawbuck. "No hard feelings," he said, and gave me a cookie.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

I dreamed about a blood-sucking spider monkey last night. I went to a pet store and bought a spider monkey for a guy as a joke because he lost a bet with me, and while we were waiting in a bar for him to show up I let the spider monkey out of his box and he sat on the end of my shoe and wrapped his arms around my calf, which I thought was pretty cute until one of the people I was with pointed out that it looked like he was biting me.

"Naw, he's not biting me," I said, because I figured it would hurt a lot if a spider monkey bit me. I didn't feel anything except the monkey hugging my leg, but I looked down anyway and just about pissed my pants when I saw gouts of blood streaming from the ragged hole the little bastard had chewed through my sock. That's when I yanked him off and stuffed him back in his box, and then somebody drove me to the emergency room so I could get my leg sewn up and get a rabies shot. Fun.

It was one of those dreams you wake up from and can't get back to sleep because you just can't stop thinking about it. I dozed off several times only to find myself right back in the emergency room with a nurse cleaning out the wound on my leg. "We'll have to kill your monkey to find out if he has rabies," he was informing me tentatively, as if I might object. In one of the later versions, after I got good and sick of turning up in the hospital again, I asked him, "Can I kill the monkey?" It made the rest of the night about a million years long.

Monday, February 15, 2010

My Darling B and I finally went to the roller derby on Sunday, because nothing is more romantic than watching women on roller skates beating the crap out of each other.

It was the Mad Rollin' Dolls' "Love Hurts" match-up, with the Unholy Rollers facing off against the Reservoir Dolls in the first half, and Madison's own Quad Squad versus Appleton's Paper Valley Roller Girls in the second half.

I have to say, this was a whole lot of fun. More fun, truth be told, than the Badger hockey game. We had a really good time there, too, but the crowd was a lot more entertaining there than the game was. At the derby, there was no question that the Mad Rollin' Dolls were more fun to watch.

And the game rules are a lot easier to understand. All I know about hockey is, the puck goes in the net. I don't know or understand any of the subtleties about how it gets there because the action's a little too fast for me and it's pretty hard to see that tiny little puck most of the time.

I don't know much more about roller derby, either, but there's not a lot to know. There's five or six girls from each team on the track. One of them, usually the fastest, slipperiest one of the bunch, is called a "jammer." And the object of the game is for the jammer to lap the opposing team as many times in two minutes as she can. The opposing team, naturally, tries to stop her.

That's it. Anybody can follow it. And it's surprisingly easy to appreciate the strategies the women use to play for points. When only one of the jammers is on the track, for instance, her team mates will slow down to a crawl, forcing the other team to slow down, too, because they can't block the jammer when she's not in the pack. That lets the really fast jammers build up speed to do their slippery eel thing and score a lot of points.

And unlike the roller derby you might have run across on late-night television, the play doesn't break down into a girl fight every five minutes, at least not in this league. The Mad Rollin' Dolls were there to have fun. Not that they weren't competitive as hell, but they very obviously didn't take themselves too seriously. The costumes are a dead giveaway, it seems to me. You can't be too all ate up about the sport when you call yourself Ally Gator and sew a tail and horny spikes down the back of your green satin skating dress.

Holy Crap, Michael Buble recorded the theme song for the next James Bond movie!

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Yesterday was the fifteenth, and every month on the ides our favorite liquor store hosts a wine tasting and gives a fifteen percent discount on all the wine in their store that isn't already on sale. It's not hard to explain why Star is our favorite liquor store.

I'm not snooty about wine, or maybe I am, but only to the point that I won't spend ten bucks on a bad bottle of wine when I could spend twenty to get a good one. It wouldn't have to be a really good one, although we have been lucky enough to find one or two at that price, but it does have to be good enough that we would want to buy another bottle someday ... or even the same day.

And I'm finally reaching the point in my knowledge of wine where I can answer when My Darling B asks me, "We can get one more bottle. What are you thinking?" And instead of saying, "The one with the kangaroo on the label," I can answer, "I think that nice Australian Syrah from New South Wales would be perfect."

We brought home a big basket of wine to replenish our cellar and broke open a bottle of tasty Gewurztraminer to drink with the scrummy Creole stew B made on her furlough day. Bliss!

(We don't really have a wine cellar. It would be nice, but we don't. We have one of those tinker-toy wine racks, a great find at a garage sale, that we put up on one of the shelves in what I rather grandly call the brewery. We don't have a brewery, either. But it seems to be the corner of the basement all the alcohol in the house gravitates to.)

My first question was: How does he even know what he's making that copter do from one second to the next?

My second was: How many times did he hit himself in the face with it while he was practicing to get this good?

... more amazing evidence will invalidate your arguments at Your Argument is Invalid!

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wow, dancing's hard. Our instructor keeps impressing on us how easy it is, and I guess I have to agree with him. A Foxtrot two steps forward, on step to the side, bring your feet together, and keep repeating that for as long as the music continues. Really, you'd think anybody should be able to do that.

And now that I mention it, the half-time entertainment at the roller derby last weekend was a couple seven-year-old kids from the Fusion Dance Academy demonstrating their moves. No, really. What, you thought maybe the crowds at a roller derby were a little less refined than that?

I think that what makes dancing difficult is that it's about one percent knowing the steps and ninety-nine percent poise. And I ain't got a whole lot of poise. I learned a basic box-step Waltz in about ten seconds, but making it look good will take the better part of a year, if My Darling B is patient with me and we take the time to practice every night.

Last night was only our second lesson, so I wasn't expecting too much, a good thing because we didn't advance much. Our instructor reviewed the three basic steps he taught us last time (Foxtrot, Waltz, Swing), then played some music for us to practice with, and that's when I discovered how hard it is to dance. I was doing just fine when I could concentrate on remembering the steps and counting "One, two, three" out loud, but if I split my attention to listen to the beat of the music, I got hopelessly screwed up and stepped all over B's feet. That's the part that she's going to need a lot of patience for.

But we still had enough fun that we signed up for another six lessons and will go back next week. B wants to join the group lesson next time. That ought to be good for an embarrassing story or two.

Here's something that'll keep My Darling B awake all night: STREET LEGAL BUMPER CARS!

More street-legal bumper cars at CoolThings.com and this Flickr page.

Tonight's talk radio was full of metaphors. Bad ones. Really bad ones.

It started off with a discussion on the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Waziristan and all those other stans. There were quite a few bad actors on that stage, one of the listeners called in to say, and another one called in to venture the opinion that the conflict started with bin Laden. "When you look around that Monopoly board," he began with a lead-in that made us wince, "he's the goose that laid the golden egg."

Geeze. Even wet cement doesn't get that mixed.

It shouldn't have been able to go any further downhill than that, but it did when a librarian called in to tell an author that she couldn't keep his books on the shelf. "They're flying like hotcakes," she told him.

Flying. Like. Hotcakes?

Hmmmm. They're flying ... like ... um, I don't know ... something with wings ... that flies ...

"Birds?"

No ... you know, those flying things ...

"Airplanes?"

... hmmm ... no ... it's right on the tip of my tongue ...

"Paul McCartney?"

... oh, I know! Hotcakes!

Sorry, license to use the English language revoked!

Thursday, February 18, 2010

I finally went over the edge and bought a plastic model space ship.

I used to build models all the time when I was a kid. Airplanes, mostly, but some ships, too. All my life, though, I built just one space ship.

That said, it was pretty awesome model, a complete Saturn V rocket that stood almost as tall as I was. I got it for Christmas and after I had it all put together my best friend and I landed on the moon with it several hundred times.

To make a Saturn V about the size of a twelve-year-old boy, that model was scaled so an inch equaled twelve feet.

The model of the Apollo Command and Service Module I have on my work bench right now is scaled so an inch equals about two and a half feet. It's a pretty big difference but, sadly, the model isn't very good. I used to be gaga for model airplanes made to this scale because they could be packed with details that I just loved to model. Instrument panels, for instance, had all the dials and switches and I'd spend days painting them. The result was awesome.

The Apollo Command Module has an instrument panel that's about six feet wide and is packed end to end with switches, dials and buttons. This model has an instrument panel that's absolutely flat. It has nothing. Worse than that, you're supposed to pretend that the laughably low-quality sticker they supply with the model looks a little bit like an instrument panel when really it looks like a cartoon pizza.

So, while I'm trying to figure out how to fix that, I glued together the halves of the service module and put together the little widget that the engine bell is mounted on. The widget is a gimbel so you can swivel the engine bell up and down, back and forth. Nerdgasm!

Saturday, February 20, 2010

The dish washer is on the blink. Seems to be something wrong with the logic in the software, something I can't fix with a screwdriver and a hammer. When I load it up and turn it on, the timer says it's going to take 199 minutes to wash everything. Two hours later, the timer says 185 minutes, or something like that. The first time I noticed this problem, it'd been running for three or four hours. I'm pretty sure it would run all night and into the next morning if I let it.

I can still use the dish washer (I'm the dish washer operator here at Our Humble O-Bode) because it has an emergency stop that still works. I throw some detergent in there, cranking it up and come back an hour and a half later to hit emergency stop. Then I run it for about five minutes after that to give the dishes a thorough rinse. Not gonna go back to washing dishes by hand if I can help it, and I still can, so I don't.

My Darling B phoned to schedule a service call and of course they'll come only on a week day, so she picked Monday. Good pick, really. If you're going to take a day off from work to wait for a service call, you might as well see if you can take Friday or Monday off and make it a three-day weekend, right? And it worked out just like that: I asked my boss for Monday off, he said fine, and now we're on the sofa looking at the start of a three-day weekend.

"I'm going to laze around today," B announced while we were waiting for the percolator to finish its magic. "Read a book or something."

Me, too.

Going to the Mad City Model Railroad Show tomorrow! Gonna spend all day looking at trains, talking about trains, reading books about trains and otherwise saturating my brain with trains, trains, trains. Don't you wish you could go?

Neither My Darling B nor I are breakfast-eating people. I had to think awhile about how to punctuate that sentence so it implied we were people who didn't usually eat breakfast, and not so that it sounded like we would even think of eating people for breakfast. Because we do, every morning. Everybody in Madison does. It's required by law. Okay, not really. But if we did, wouldn't it suck to blow it all wide open because I slipped up punctuating a sentence? Stuff like that keeps me awake at night sometimes.

Every Saturday, though, we eat breakfast. We eat it at our favorite restaurant, which used to be Cleveland's before the owners gutted it and turned it into their life-long dream, a Greek dinner restaurant, and consigned our beloved greasy spoon to the realm of fond memories forever.

Since then, our favorite breakfast place is, I believe, Lazy Jane's, a restaurant in a two-story clapboard house on Willy Street that has the best chorizo scramble ever, anywhere. And eggs Benedict. And Belgian waffles. Really, their whole breakfast menu is to die for, and I say that knowing I'll be ridiculed endlessly for using the phrase "to die for," but it's worth the shame.

Every so often we breakfast someplace new, if I may be allowed to use "breakfast" as a verb the way the English still sometimes do, and I think I may after using "to die for" and possibly getting away with it. Yes? No catcalls from the crowd yet, so we'll move on.

About a month ago, we finally visited Willalby's Cafe to see what breakfast there would be like. It's a warm, snug place where you can linger over a cup of coffee for as long as you want while, for instance, plowing your way through the Sunday paper. It's the kind of place where people who still read a newspaper linger for hours. It's a very neighborhood cafe. The regulars are easy to spot. In fact, B spotted one of the regulars sleeping in the basement hallway B had to travel to get to the ladies' room. It's that kind of place.

And in the winter, we breakfast almost weekly at the Dane County Farmer's Market, because we like to support the market and we like to try new things. The people who organize the Dane County Farmer's Market rarely disappoint us in that respect. They bring in local chefs from restaurants all around the Madison area who volunteer their services to present the weirdest foods I have ever been offered for breakfast. By that I mean, how often do you eat carrots or steamed broccoli for breakfast? That's a rhetorical question. Maybe you eat that kind of thing every morning, but I don't. In fact, before My Darling B found her muse in preparing delicious meals from home-grown veggies, I thought of vegetables as the stuff that makes cows and pigs tasty enough for me to eat them.

It's not just veggies, it's other weird stuff, too. This morning's breakfast, for instance, was potato pancakes made with salmon and trout. Who even thought of that? I can imagine a lot of out-of-this-world things, but if you had asked me to make breakfast for you I would have buttered some toast and served it with a glass of orange juice. Never in a million years would I think of making potato pancakes, never mind adding shredded trout and salmon to make it even scrummier.

The potato pancakes came with a poached egg on a tiny slice of toasted sourdough bread with a dollop of hollandaise sauce. Why poaching makes an egg taste so much better is one of those cooking secrets that I'm willing to let remain a mystery to me. In case you've never had poached eggs, they're made by cracking open an egg over a pot of boiling water so that, in theory, you end up with what looks like an egg fried over-easy, except it's round and white as a pearl. I say "in theory" because poaching an egg takes a lot of practice and, until you've got the knack, what you end up with looks like a pot full of boiling snot. When you finally get the pearl and pop it in your mouth, though, it's totally worth all the disappointment.

The scone was a delectable unknown. I couldn't tell you what was in it other than probably flour and water. It came with a sticky-sweet dribble of preserves that I couldn't identify, either, but it sure was good.

And, because this was a breakfast at the farmer's market, there was a helping of spinach and carrots so generous it filled up half the plate. Thankfully, they didn't stew the spinach or boil the carrots.

Spinach should never be cooked. If you hate spinach, the likely reason is that you've only ever had it served to you cooked. Rinse it under cold running water, eat it with your favorite dressing or even raw, and it's just delicious. People who cook spinach will have to serve an eternity in purgatory eating hot dogs and nachos smothered in Velveeta cheese for every meal.

The carrots were pan-fried, I believe, and then only just barely enough to leave them tender, but not mushy. I was a good boy and ate all my veggies this once, partly because I feel so guilty about leaving them uneaten after somebody tried their darndest to serve me a delicious meal, but mostly because this time, they succeeded.

I damned near left out the baked apple half, smothered in caramel and sprinkled with nuts and raisins. I don't go for apples but this was, as B noted, like eating an apple pie without the crust. I ate every single bit of it.

I ate everything. Cleaned my plate. It was, I think I can safely say, the best breakfast we've eaten at the Dane County Farmer's Market this season.

What have I been up to all afternoon? So glad you asked.

These assembled rocket engines are the result of about an hour's careful work with a hobby knife, a couple of files and a bottle of Ambroid glue. It doesn't look like it should have taken that long, but when you tally up all the time I spent on my knees searching the floor for these little pieces after they popped out of my grip while I was whittling away at them, I think I made some pretty good time, really.

There's a lot of teensy-tiny detail work like this I have to take care of before I can put the whole Apollo CSM together, which is perfect for the little dribs and drabs of time I can give to this project. Consider, for example, the probe that fits into the nose of the command module:

The probe is made up of seven extremely flimsy pieces, every single one of which had little bits of plastic junk stuck to it I had to painstakingly whittle away and file flush before the probe could be assembled. I think I spent another an hour on this. I may have developed a permanent squint from doing it, too.

How this is relaxing, I can't explain. It just is. It's even fun. It'll be even more fun when I can put things together after I give the whole thing a primer coat of paint. Lucky for me I'll be at the Mad City Model Rail Road Show tomorrow, where I can pick up a couple rattle cans of spray paint to make that happen.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

I spent most of the morning and a big part of the afternoon at the Mad City Model Rail Road Show today because I'm a train nerd and therefor I must. Therefore. Whatever.

Train shows are really as geeky as I get. I don't go to Star Trek conventions. Okay, I did, once, back in 1969 when I was eight years old and my best friend talked his dad into taking us so we could see the blooper reel (which was as hard to see as the Pope then but you can watch any time you want on Youtube now) and buy a plastic model of the Enterprise. But that was way before people started dressing up in costumes and speaking Klingon.

Train shows are way geeky, though. I'll admit that in a heartbeat. Quite a lot of the guys who bring their choo-choos to them, and you will find that ninety-eight percent of the exhibitors there are guys, dress up in the stripey bib overalls and pillbox hats of locomotive engineers, or navy blue suit jackets and caps emblazoned with a brass nameplate that says "CONDUCTOR." The ones that don't dress up and make pretend that they actually drove a train at some time in their lives are there to sell something.

And it's all great fun.

More photos from the Mad City Model Rail Road Show 2010

Monday, February 22, 2010

Our dish washer's broke, so we had to call Sears to get a technician out here to look at it and it's one of those service calls they can't give you an exact time for because timetables embolden the terrorists and endanger national security. So I took the day off from work to sit in the front room all day and watch for the dish washer repair guy.

It's sort of like being a house cat. I could curl up on the sofa and doze while I waited, getting up from time to time to stuff kibble in my face and poop, if I wanted to make it exactly like being a house cat. Doesn't sound like a bad idea, if only I weren't on my second cup of coffee already. Won't be doing much dozing right now.

The view out the front window is of a yard and street freshly covered in a light dusting of snow. I'll have to forgo dozing to shovel that off the front steps so the service man doesn't track it through the house on his boots. Or not as much, anyway. There's still a gentle sprinkle slowly sifting down upon us. Unless I go sweep the stoop every ten minutes, there's no getting around that.

Once the technician's on the road he's supposed to phone to give us an idea when he might be coming around, but no call yet. Or maybe he's not going to ring us until he's at the house before ours and just finishing up.

Pensively waiting ...

I'd been sitting beside the phone for about an hour waiting for a phone call from the technician who's supposed to come fix my dish washer. At some time this morning he promised to call and tell me when he'd be on the way.

When the phone finally rang, it turned out to be a telemarketer who wanted to pitch her special offer from Charter Communications. "No, thanks," I said, as soon as she paused long enough to let me politely butt in.

"I understand you don't have Charter service right now, but we do have several options..." she continued.

I didn't wait for her to draw breath this time. "No thanks," I interrupted, "I'm not interested."

That took her aback. She sputtered a bit, grappling for a line from her script that she could use in a case like this. "How about telephone or internet service?"

"I'm really not interested, thanks," I explained.

"Uh, okay...," she allowed, stringing out the "okay" as long as she could, perhaps to keep me from just hanging up. I would just like to point out that I was still saying "please" and "no thank you."

"Could I ask why you're not interested in even listening to this offer?" she asked, dropping all pretense of offering me a service and segueing right into making demands.

Well, Charter Communications, not that I feel compelled to answer your questions, but when I want your services, I'll call you and ask for them. That's what phones are for, for me to make phone calls to you. You are not supposed to call me unless I've already called you and asked for service. Only people I would call friends are welcome to make my telephone go ting-a-ling-a-ling. You, Charter Communications, are not a friend, and despite the recent Supreme Court ruling I do not even consider you a person. There's probably a bullshit first amendment argument to be made for your right to call me whenever you feel like it, but the fact is that I paid for the phone line so it's not a public venue protected by free speech, it's my phone line and I wish you'd stay off it, just like it's my front stoop and you should keep your sales people off that, too.

But I didn't say that. I was trying to be polite to the telemarketer who was not Charter Communications, she was just some working schmuck like me, probably trying to make enough money to pay her rent, buy groceries and maybe have a little left over for a beer or cigarettes or some other guilty pleasure. So instead I told her I was waiting for an important phone call. And to her credit, she was nice enough to accept that and hang up after giving me Charter's 800-number in case I woke up in a cold sweat after realizing my terrible mistake at passing up Charter's amazing offer.

But that's not going to happen, Charter Communications, so you can just stop calling me.

IN THE COMMENTS: A representative from Charter Communications left me this message: "I can certainly appreciate not wanting to get sales calls at home. If you will e-mail your Name, Address, and Phone Number to Umatter2Charter@chartercom.com, I can have you placed on our “Do Not Call” list which will prevent future calls or mail solicitations. Have a great day!"

I'm still trying to decide whether to be well and truly creeped out that Charter is apparently employing a web bot to search blogs for all mention of their corporate activities, or to be truly amazed at the awesome power of technology to respond to my rant so quickly. Truth be told, I'm feeling a little of both.

I e-mailed my name, address and phone number to the address he gave me and asked them to put me on their "Do Not Call" list. I received this reply within a few hours: "We’ll be more than happy to add you to our do not call list. However, we were unable to find an account under the name and phone number you provided. Can you please send us the following so we can add you to the list?"

Maybe I misunderstood. Do they really mean to imply that I would need an account with Charter to be on their Do Not Call list? Whatever, I told them I don't, and gave them my contact information again. It remains to be seen whether I get fewer calls from Charter, or they launch an all-out overkill assault on me via phone, snail mail and door-knocking salesman.

A gaggle of gun-totin' self-defenders gathered at a Starbuck's in Sussex yesterday to pick up some java before demonstrating at the headquarters of the State Patrol. Starbucks corporate policy allows people to pack heat in their stores if state law allows it.

I love the quote from Krysta Sutterfield, one of the protesters, who generalized sweepingly, "If people see a gun, they immediately think 'criminal,' but criminals don't wear their guns in holsters."

What, seriously? They never holster their guns? So they just carry their guns around all the time in their hands, then? Isn't that sort of inconvenient?

Actually, Krysta, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. I haven't googled it yet, but I'll bet there is plenty of evidence to prove that criminals use holsters at least occasionally.

And when I see people walking around with holstered guns, the first thing I think is not, 'criminal.' The first thing I think is, 'Wow, paranoid!’ It's one thing to keep a gun in your home for self-defense. I can almost get behind that. I think it's dangerous, but it's your home and if having guns in it will make you happy, then go for it, so long as you keep them there and you don't discharge them when I'm around.

But to feel so afraid for your personal safely when you go out to Starbucks for a latte that you resort to not only packing a pistol in public (I love alliteration) but that you also have to have it hanging out there on your hip for all to see, that's just sad. Sad and paranoid.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pete added, “Really? Paranoid. When I see a gun enthusiast, paranoia is not what I think about. I think about somebody who is just itchin’ to shoot somebody legally. Go ahead ... make my day.”

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

When I retired from the military and went on the job hunt, I was offered a job at a bank and took it, thinking it would be pretty financially secure because, you know, that's where the money's at. In banks.

Or maybe not.

And when we went shopping for cars, I was dead set on buying a Toyota because they had an awesome reputation for dependability and held their value.

Well, not quite.

Is there another shoe? No, that's two. Maybe the shoes are done dropping for a while. I hope so.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Your barber is like your doctor. He can say things to you that ordinary people can't say to each other, not if he expects to get away with it. Your doctor can tell you you're fat and flabby, and do it with a straight face. "You're twenty pounds overweight. You should go to the gym at least three times a week." And you have to take it. You can't fire back, "Yeah? Well, you look funny and you have bad breath!" Not if you want to see him again.

And your barber, it turns out, has the same kind of safety net. "Mind if I trim your nose hairs?" my barber, George, asked me as he was finishing up with my haircut, dusting the hairs off my nose and cheeks.

"Um, sure," I answered him. Well, he offered, and that's hair, too, so why not? A few deft sweeps with an electric clipper and he was done. Or almost.

"It was looking like a couple dead flies were dangling their legs out your nose," he said, clapping my shoulder.

See? If it has to do with hair, it's acceptable.

Our cats are both "lappy," Bonkers more so than Boo.

Bonkers almost always sits in my lap, Boo in B's lap.

When I was too busy to share a lap the other night, though, Bonkers jumped up in B's lap after he thought he'd waited long enough.

Then Boo, green-eyed monster that she can be, jumped up on top of Bonkers to claim what lap she could.

Didn't seem to bother Bonkers much.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

When we push all the furniture in the living room to one side, it turns out we have almost enough room to practice our dance steps. Almost, but not quite.

It would probably be enough room if we had a little more floor time under our belts, so we knew how to fit the dance steps we knew into an odd space, but after just three lessons we're still taking the biggest, broadest steps possible in exactly the direction we were taught. We can make our living room into a pretty generous-sized dance floor, but we still end up dancing directly into the wall.

My Darling B insisted we schedule last Tuesday's lesson early enough in the evening that we could stay for the group lesson after. Her idea was that we could have time to practice so we wouldn't forget, and with an instructor close at hand we could ask questions about the parts we got wrong.

The instructor for the group session had other ideas, though. He was teaching a waltz dance step that probably has a name but, if he mentioned it, I've forgotten it now. It took the better part of an hour to walk us all through the steps but by the time we were finished we looked like we were performing the final number in a Hollywood musical. Okay, maybe more like a high school production of a Hollywood musical, but if so we had as much fun as high schoolers.

The dance was rather long and had a lot of turns and twirls and a promenade and a walk-through and we didn't want to forget any of it, and that's why we pushed all the furniture aside last night and tried to walk through it again. We found that we could still do just about every step, although we're not sure about the step-through and twirl at the end. B thought she should twirl one way. I thought she should twirl the other. We practiced it both ways, just to be sure we could do one of them come next week.

Hey! We're in the Dane County Farmer's Market Newsletter! It's almost like seeing ourselves in the newspaper! Maybe even more so, now that there aren't any newspapers.

We're standing in line for breakfast, probably something with potatoes and lots of leafy greens. It definitely wasn't last weekend's breakfast. I was the one with the coffee cup in hand then, and I wasn't wearing the hoodie.

My Darling B is mortified that they snapped a photo of her on a morning that she went out without washing her hair. You skips your shower and you takes your chances. I don't mind telling you that Saturday mornings I would rather leave the house without my morning shower if it means I can get to the farmer's market early enough to beat the line. Stinks to be me!

See the whole thing by clicking on this link!

Friday, February 26, 2010

My barber congratulated me on keeping myself looking so fit in spite of being just shy of fifty years old. He guessed my age to within a few months, but he was way off about the keeping fit.

"You go visit the gym every day, don't you?" he asked.

I frowned at him. "What?" I asked. I sincerely thought I'd heard him wrong. Nobody has ever asked me that and my logic detectors couldn't figure out why he would say such a thing.

"You work out a lot? You look pretty fit."

Again, it seemed to be a question so far out in left field I was at a loss. "Really?"

"Sure! You're, what, six months shy of fifty? You look pretty good for fifty. You must work out."

"I don't work out at all," I advised him. "I've always looked like this."

It was his turn to be nonplussed. "No kiddin? Lucky dog!"

He got a pretty good tip.

Just hours after I posted my rant about a telemarketer trying to sell me a Charter Communications cable package, I comment appeared after the post that was apparently from a representative of Charter offering to put me on their Do Not Call list if I just gave them my name and phone number. I was gobsmacked. Charter routinely scours blogs looking for posts about Charter? That's a little bit creepy, but it's also an example of the magic of the internet. And my name and number are in the phone book, so why not give it to this guy?

Then, last night, I got this comment to the post I wrote about waiting for the repair guy who was coming to fix our dish washer:

To Dave,
My name is Brian and I’m part of the Sears Cares Escalations team. Forgive the delay in finding this post, but I wanted to reach out to you and be sure that the technician arrived and everything is moving as it should. If there are currently any problems or if any problems do arise, please don’t hesitate to reach out to my team and we will be glad to be of assistance. At your convenience, please contact my office via email at searscares@searshc.com. In the email, please provide a contact phone number and the phone number the range was purchased under (if different than the contact phone number) and we will call you directly. Also, please provide the screen name (Dave) used to post on this site, for reference to your issue, and we do look forward to talking to you soon. Thank you,
Brian J.
Senior Case Manager
Sears Cares

A few niggling points, "Brian J", for you to ponder:

I think you're a web bot. And not a very good one, either. It was a dish washer, not a range.

When you use a web bot to "reach out" to people, it's creepy. I wasn't sure before, but I'm sure now.

And be advised that "Sears Cares Escalations team" sounds like you're mounting a military attack. "We tried caring, but that wasn't aggressive enough! Now we're going in with guns blazing!"

Your comment is spam. Call me. We'll talk.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

My basement workshop filled with the reek of burning plastic as I cut the hatch out of my scale model Apollo command module this afternoon. I want to display it with the hatch open and the model doesn't come with a removable hatch, dammit. What would be so hard about that?

It's probably better that they didn't, after all, because the hatch they molded into the shell of the CM had a window that didn't look right. Building one from scratch would have been a pain, but since I'll have to build one anyway to display it opened up, oh well.

So I put a cutting wheel in my Dremel tool, bit the bullet and sawed a rough hole out of the plastic body of the model. Trouble is, a Dremel tool spins so fast (if you haven't invested in a variable speed control, which I haven't) the cutting wheel doesn't cut the plastic so much as it melts it. Hence the stink.

I wasn't planning to make any big modifications to this model, but I kept going back photos of the CM to look for details I could add to make it look a little better, and this one became my favorite:

In fact, this photo has been a favorite of mine for years. That's Dave Scott standing in the open hatch of Gumdrop, the Apollo 9 command module. The LM pilot, Rusty Schweickart ("Rusty" is a perfect astronaut's nickname, isn't it?), snapped this photo of Scott while Schweickart stood on the "front porch" of Spider, the moon lander. They were the first crew to take an LM into space and fly it around to make sure it worked the way it was supposed to. It did.

I wanted to be an astronaut the minute I saw this photo. I wanted to stand in the open hatch of a space ship as I casually wound the key of the film feed on my Hasselblad camera so I could snap a few photos of my home planet as it rolled beneath me. Fucking wow.

But, since I suck at math so bad that any space ship they strapped me into would spontaneously combust, I'll be happy enough with my little plastic model. And it's going to have an open hatch with a little plastic astronaut standing in it, just you wait.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

I heard from somebody in Chicago who was googling the interwebs for a definition of “surensified” and found a post I made to blogger back in November of 2006. Rosie Real says she decorated her kitchen to look like a 50’s diner and wanted to make up a sign asking her guests, “Has your sufficiency been surensified?” Rosie said her grandfather often used the phrase, “My sufficiency is surensified!” after a delicious, satisfying meal.

My father used the same phrase, but I'd always assumed it was a gobbledygook word. After several other googlers commented on my web post, though, it was obvious that the word was a well-used, in spite of the fact that it doesn't appear in any dictionary.

I googled “surensified” but didn’t find much until I changed the spelling a bit to “serensified” and ZOW! The floodgates opened!

The word appears as serensified, serrancified, suffancified, suffulsified and many other variations, but always in the past tense. Look for examples of “serensify” and you get nothing. Examples were at first centered around the Great Lakes region but the word is also popular in the Appalacians and on both coasts. Serensified seems to have spread so far and wide as the result of being loaded in a highly-polished phrase that almost pegs the needle on the Purple Prose-O-Meter:

I am sufficiently serensified. Anything further would be superfluous to my capacity.

Variations, of course, keep the phrase alive. This one's my favorite (from jazz musician Brandon Schmidt, see sources below):

My sufficiency is suffonsified and further indulgence would prove injurious to my gastronomical salubrication.

[Full Disclosure: This is a re-posting of some drivel I wrote back in 2007. I phoned the radio show A Way With Words to see if I could find out more, but my question never came up on the show, drowned in the deluge of their voice mail file, no doubt. Then, today, they took a phone call from a woman asking about "sufficiently suffonsified" and then begged her to look up the answer on their web site because it would take too long to explore her answer on the air. This, after playing games tacking "I" on words to make punny product names in the manner of the Apple iPhone, as if that hasn't been done a million times already, then going on to repeat more "Tom Swifties." I ran to my basement desktop to link from their web site, only to find the episode won't be available until March 1st! This is frustration bordering on cruelty. So, thanks to the torture of finally hearing my question brought up on what was once my favorite radio show, then not answered, you have the benefit of my trolling the internet all morning to find the answer my darned self. You're welcome.]

Sources

From the web:

In a short story by Jackie, the question: “Has your insufficiency been sufficiently serensified?”

In a mystery novel written by author Madison Hill for National Novel Writing Month, the phrase: “Nesbitt's flock, satiated with holiness and serensified with love, would wend their ways back home.”

Dawn Smith-Pfeifer writes a monthly column for the North Dakota Farm Bureau web site and used the phrase, “My sufficiency has been serensified” to demonstrate something called Immense Utterance Syndrome.

Karen Edmisten thought the phrase “I have eaten diabolically and I am highly serensified” was worth noting in her blog.

3H, a “progressive rock” garage band made up of a father and his two sons, has just released their second album, Exploration Room, featuring the track “Sufficiently Serensified”

Jazz musician Brandon Schmidt of Los Angeles, CA, recorded this number he entitled, “My Sufficiency is Suffonsified and Further Indulgence Would Prove Injurious to My Gastronomical Salubrication”.

Ruth Gaeta wrote to the web site World Wide Words asking for help with “my sufficiency is serrancified” which brought up the variations suffancified and suffoncified.

Blogging from the Yukon, Janet spelled it “suffulsified” until she was corrected by one of her friends.

This Canadian blogger calls her web blog Suffonsifisms!

... and there are twenty or thirty iterations of the question “What does it mean: Sufficiently Serensified?” posted on the Words & Wordplay message board of answers.yahoo.com

[AND IN THE COMMENTS: Grant Barrett posts the link to an article from the journal American Speech that finally tells the whole story. Thanks, Mr. Barrett!]

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