this is drivel

Listen to these dorkwads! “If we are elected to the majority next year, we’ll fix everything! We’ll even use common sense to do it this time! But only if you elect us to the majority! Otherwise, you can just suck it. We’re not going to fix a damn thing until you get off your asses and elect us! That’s not a promise, that’s a threat. Now get out there and get us elected, minions!”

Is it just me, or do the words “congress” and “common sense” go together like “breathing” and “water”? I’d have a look of extreme skepticism on my ugly mug, just like this guy, if I heard those chuckleheads talking like that. Oh, wait, he’s a member of congress, isn’t he?

This is where it all starts: People waiting in line (in this case, at Star Liquor on Willy Street) to buy their tickets to The Great Taste of the Midwest, which is quickly becoming the biggest celebration of craft beer in the nation, to say nothing of it being the most sought-after ticket in town.

Last year we got tickets by mail. They have a lottery every year, but the odds aren’t very good: There are only one-thousand tickets available, you must send your check in on one particular date, and about a gojillion people write in. We were flat-out amazed when our check was cashed and still flat-out amazed when the tickets arrived in our mailbox a week later.

The two years before that, we got our tickets through the generosity of a guy My Darling B works with. He always bought four tickets, because they let you do that back then (you can only buy two apiece now) and because he figured he would run into somebody who would like to go as much as he did. And lucky us, he asked B if she wanted a couple tickets after it turned out all his other buddies had something else going on that weekend.

How do you forget the biggest beer festival is going on and plan something else that weekend? It’s beyond me, but I can’t say I spend a whole lot of time wondering about it.

This year, we didn’t want to impose on anybody and we didn’t want to rely on being lucky enough to win the lottery two years in a row. And last year, our friends at Star Liquor said that everyone who got in line for tickets went home happy. Some of them were so dedicated, they got in line at five o’clock in the morning. We weren’t as gung-ho as that. We jump in the car and head over didn’t head over there until nine and got into line at maybe nine-fifteen. By then, the line stretched around the corner, down the street, around the next corner and halfway down the back side of the block.

A couple of guys from The Madison Homebrewers and Tasters Guild were selling the tickets, and they had just six hundred to sell at Star. You could get tickets and two or three outher liquor stores in town, but Star Liquor had more than anybody else. And they’re our buddies. We wouldn’t shop for our liquor anywhere else. *schmooze, schmooze* When B and I got in line we were handed slips of paper with “264” and “265” on them, guaranteeing us a couple tickets each, so we got there just in the nick of time, although next year we’ll probably have to leave the house at eight o’clock if we want to get tickets.

Even though they were handing out numbers, at least one of us still had to stand in line. They strongly suggested it would be bad form for us to leave our lawn chairs to hold our spots while we went to breakfast, shopped for groceries, went home to get a nap and then came back, but we’d planned to stand in line all morning, anyway. I had a couple books in my backpack, and B had plenty of reading material to help her while away the hours, too.

To make the morning even better, B won the raffle for a 1/6 barrel of Furthermore beer! That’s really good beer, in case you’ve never had any. And she didn’t even have to buy the ticket! They were handing them out free to everyone as a way of saying, ‘thanks for waiting in line all morning!’ Then, at around eleven-thirty, a great cheer arose from the direction of the liquor store as the winning ticket was drawn, and shortly thereafter one of the guys from the store came walking down the line holding up a sign with the winning raffle ticket number magic-markered on it.

I checked my ticket. “Damn! One number off!”

“That’s because it’s my number!” My Darling B said, and held her ticket up in the air.

Here’s the lucky girl with her winning ticket. We’ll let you know when we pick out the date for the patio party at Our Humble O’Bode!

Next stop: The Great Taste of the Midwest!

I spent four hours mowing the lawn on Saturday. It wasn’t unwelcome work. We had a warm, sunny day, simply beautiful weather, and I can always use some excuse to get out of the house and get some exercise. But it was four hours of nothing but mowing. That’s at least three hours too long to be doing just about any one thing I can think of.

I want a robot lawn mower, dammit. I want it to cost less than a month-long trip for two to Tahiti, and I want it to be an honest-to-goodness robot that will mow the lawn all by itself without being told that the grass is getting a bit long. If I have to punch a button to make it get out there and mow, never mind flip a joystick on a remote, I’m not interested.

This is the twenty-first century, for crying out loud. An astronaut is, at this very moment, tweeting snapshots of space ships (and robot space ships at that!) from his orbital hotel room! I really don’t think a robot lawn mower is too much to ask for.

I splurged this year and bought myself an electric lawn mower. It’s light as a feather, whisper-quiet, and I don’t have to yank on a cord to start it. I really like it a lot, but come on. My grandfather had an electric lawn mower. It’s super sweet, but it’s technology that’s more than fifty years old!

It’s not like I’m asking for a talking mechanical man that will push my lawn mower around. Lawn mowers have plenty of extra room to slip a little artificial intelligence into. It shouldn’t be too hard to do. I get special offers for cat poop coffee automatically mailed to my g-mail account by web bots that can read my blog. There should be an AI out there that can figure out when the dandelions are getting too high.

Most of the robot lawn mowers I’ve seen, after doing an extensive google search and reading advertisements on at least three different web sites, are basically Roombas, little plastic turtle-looking things that sort of blunder their way across your lawn in random patterns, turning away from your house after bumping into the foundation. My kid built a robot out of Legos that could do that, and that was ten years ago.

There is one super-cool-looking robot lawn mower out there, the RG3, a robot mower with artificial intelligence developed to mow putting greens on professional golf courses by the same MIT crew that worked on robot cars for the Department of Defense. It retails for $29,000.00, a little out of my price range, but there’s no denying it makes the grass look awesome! If they could just bring that price down a bit ...

All these years I’ve been living a lie!

For as long as I can remember, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation has been a must-read novel in the science fiction genre. You can’t credibly represent yourself as a sci-fi geek if you haven’t read it, any more than you could if you hadn’t plowed your way through Dune.

Now here it is, sixty years after it was published, and I’ve finally gotten around to reading Foundation. I didn’t even own a copy until now. What kind of messed-up non-geekiness is that? I’ve got a dog-eared copy of I, Robot that I flip open every so often, cradling it carefully in the palm of my hand to keep its broken spine from splitting wide open, but last weekend was the first time I spotted a copy of Foundation on a book store shelf and felt guilty enough to finally take it home.

I, Robot is, by the way, the ne plus ultra of Asimov’s works, and I’ve read every single word in it about ten million times, so I sort of feel as though I should be forgiven for waiting this long to finally break into a copy of Foundation.

Mandatory Disclaimer: There is nothing about I, Robot that even remotely resembles the movie Alex Proyas made. Get the book, clear your mind of Grade-B Will Smith movies, and enjoy.

I’m only a hundred fifty pages into Foundation and although I haven’t actually counted, I’d bet that at least a hundred forty-six of those pages are dialog and the other four are made up of maybe a dozen paragraphs of descriptive writing, plus some white space and chapter headings.

Asimov’s writing style leans heavily toward making everybody talk all the time, but in Foundation he topples over and disappears into a gaping chasm of dialog. There’s no way of knowing what anybody looks like because he never tells you anything about any character beyond maybe his hair color and whether or not he’s got a mustache. Reading this novel is like sitting in the middle of the table at a dinner party and listening in on every conversation with your eyes closed.

It only bugs me a little bit, but mostly I like a lot of dialog. It keeps a story moving, and this is a very long story, so maybe that’s why Asimov wrote Foundation the way he did. Maybe it’ll start to wear thin by about page eight hundred. I’ll let you know.

Christopher thinks I have the potential to be a dance instructor. Just to put that in perspective, I can dance with My Darling B, who I’m used to dancing with, but only if I step on her toes. A lot. And just forget about how I dance when I have to change partners.

So either Christopher has a super-power that enables him to see something in the essence of me that’s not readily apparent to any of my own five senses, or he believes anybody can be a dance instructor, given enough time to practice.

Which I just might have, come this summer. I was informed yesterday morning that I would not be hired to fill the supervisory position that was created to replace the position I’m currently in, but was deleted from the org chart two weeks ago.

I’m employed until June 30th, after which I’ll have plenty of time to lace up my boogy shoes and practice my Cuban motion all day long.

We learned to Mambo during last night’s lesson, switching on every Goofy cartoon that’s ever gotten stuck in my head, for reasons that are too obscure to get into right now. We Mambo’d and we Salsa’d and it was a lot more fun that I thought it would be. Whenever I see other people dancing Salsa it looks like they’re just making shit up, and maybe they are making some of it up but it turns out there are real dance steps that make it look way better.

There’s lots of twirling, for instance. I just love twirling. We learned two kinds of twirls, or one and a half, really, because Christopher only had enough time to teach us half of the second twirl, a quick turn-around with a side-step and something else that looks like a lot of fun but I couldn’t catch even though I was watching him with my dance-o-vision dialed all the way up to its highest power.

Waltz is still my favorite, even though Christopher switched it up in our private lesson and gave us some new instruction on how to execute the traveling box that really boggled my brain. We could do it so well together last week, but this new wrinkle defied our every effort to wrestle it into submission, don’t know why.

He showed us how to add a twirl to the cross-body lead, though, so I wasn’t nearly as bummed out about fumbling the traveling box as I might have been. Twirls rock.

It’s called “Hikky-Burr” and it was the theme song to The Bill Cosby Show — the first Bill Cosby show, not the one where he was a doctor. Until the minute I followed this link from a story on NPR’s web site, I didn’t know it was any more than a catchy jingle to introduce Cos’s show, never mind that it had a name. This is almost as good as finally learning the name of the jazz tune they played in Bugs Bunny cartoons whenever Bugs was working in a factory, or was threatened with being squished by a pile driver.

(Did you forget already? It was "Powerhouse.")

The NPR story was all about television theme songs, and they also had links to the theme from Mannix (my second all-time favorite theme song after the awesome "Hawaii Five-O") and a jazz quartet (Alison Brown playing lead on the banjo! Seriously!) playing their version of the theme from Spider-Man. The theme to "Gilligan’s Island" was nowhere to be seen, thank Jah. Enjoy.

Here it is, the tango, in one simple diagram. Ready? Let’s go!

My Darling B loves the Latin dances. I’m more of a waltz man myself, but more than anything I want to make B happy, so we went out for our second class of the week because on Thursday nights Christopher is leading group classes through the tango.

Tonight was the first night of an eight-week class, so naturally enough he stuck to the basic steps. Very simple, you only have to walk forward with three long, slow steps, step quickly to the side, then bring your feet together.

Anybody can do that, right? Well, we’re not just anybody, as it turns out. It’s so simple, it defies execution. B was having some trouble keeping with the count, and I was having trouble not stepping on her toes. If I could get through one round of basic without crushing seven out of ten of her dainty little digits, I thought I was doing pretty well.

But Christopher can never stop at just he basic step; he has to throw in at least one or two different steps, daring us to fall over each other. The promenade was a lot of fun, crab-walking off to one side before snapping around and finishing off with the back half of the basic step, but the "leg crawl" seemed to baffle just about everybody. We must have spent half the class struggling to get that right.

Awesome! Just Awesome! Just Frigging Awesome!

I drove into town early this morning to take the state worker’s office support exam. I hear the state still has a hiring freeze, but there are an awful lot of vacancies appearing on the state’s employment web site. Assuming they’re not putting them there just to keep somebody busy, I’ve been applying for as many as I think I qualify for. Most of them require that I take the office support exam, hence my getting out of bed a lot earlier than I usually do on a Saturday.

And I wasn’t the only one. The test is given in the same lecture hall on the UW-Madison campus that it was in when My Darling B and I took it five years ago. I’d guess it holds maybe five hundred people. We had to sit in every other seat so that’s what, two-hundred fifty people if it was filled to capacity? It was, or so close to full as to make no difference. A lot of people looking for jobs. And almost every one of them there to take the office support exam, even though they were proctoring several other tests. About fifty people were there to take the HVAC maintenance test, maybe twenty were taking the Sheriff’s sergeant exam, and just one woman was there to take the assessor’s test. "Whatever you, don’t withdraw," the lead proctor advised her. "Your chances are looking real good."

We had four hours to take the test. I don’t know how thick the other tests were, but the office support exam was almost two-hundred questions, most of which were about proofreading, operating Microsoft Office software applications, calculating pay and grammar.

I’ve gotten quite a lot of practice proofreading correspondence in the past two years, updating templates used to generate correspondence and reviewing letters my coworkers wrote to mail out to customers, so I felt pretty good about that part.

I can operate just about every software application in the Microsoft Office suite but I found this part of the test slowed me down quite a bit because most of the questions weren’t accompanied by graphics, but instead ask for key combinations. For instance, to make a type face bold you use what combination of keys? I do that every day but I don’t think about it, I just do it. I found myself tapping out key combinations on the desk top, then trying to remember which keys were under which fingers.

Calculating pay was a cinch after calculating mortgage payments, so the past two years working in loan services served me well there.

Grammar might have been a problem if they’d asked me to parse sentences. I’ve never been all that good at identifying parts of speech, but that wasn’t their purpose. Questions leaned toward the obvious: "Which is correct: Please pick up you’re pencils, or, Please pick up your pencils." All of the questions like this also had "Either is correct" as an option. I’d really, really like to know what percentage of the people taking the test answer C.

After slogging through it and turning in the test material, I was shocked when I saw that I’d finished it in two and a half hours. And a little relieved. I used to test for promotion every year and they gave us four hours to complete that test because it took four frigging hours! Not this one.

Parking at the UW is usually so limited that it’s crazy to even try to find something close to the lecture hall. There’s a parking lot not too far away and I headed straight for it. On the way, though, I was absolutely gobsmacked to find an empty curbside spot just up the road. The problem was that it was only half-empty because a woman in a Ford Explorer was parked across two spaces. She was in the car with the engine running, though, so I wasn’t going to let her get away with that.

I pulled up next to her, put my car into reverse so she could see the lights come on, signaled right, dramatically threw my arm over the back of the passenger seat as I turned to look back and successfully locked eyes with her. She smiled, but otherwise didn’t do anything. She wasn’t gabbing on her cell phone. She wasn’t singing along with the radio. She was just sitting there, smiling at me.

So I backed into the half-space behind her. There was no room to turn in properly, but that wasn’t my intention. I only wanted to get the butt-end of my car firmly planted on that spot and leave the nose of my car sticking out into the lane, where she could see it in her side-view mirror. And I waited.

After fifteen or twenty seconds she let the Ford inch forward a bit, acknowledging that she had more than enough room in front of her but not giving me enough room to turn in. I waited a bit longer. She moved up maybe another three or four inches. Still, I waited. And finally she gave me all the room I needed by pulling out and driving away. Okay, not what I was after, but at least I could finally park and quit blocking traffic.

Cupcake Cannon!

Summary of Today's Meals (why? Because this is exactly the kind of drivel the internet is for):

Breakfast: Granola, drenched in milk. Lactose-free milk, of course, or I'd explode like the Hindenberg. Or like that volcano in Iceland, for those of you who need a more contemporary reference.

Brunch: Coffee, same as always.

Lunch: Leftover pizza. Is there anything better for lunch than leftover pizza? I don't think so.

Dinner: Grilled chicken drumsticks. My Darling B bought a dozen last week, sauteed them overnight in a spicy chipotle sauce of her own devising, and served it with home-made potato salad. Scrummy!

Midnight snack: Cat food, same as always.

Gaze upon the Monster Mac, and despair!

This is supposedly a real hamburger that you can order at your local McDonald's if you know how to ask for it, according to The Coupon Sherpa's guide to secret menus of food so mind-blowingly disgusting you may never eat there again.

I mean to say, who even thinks of sticking a chicken sandwich in between a double cheeseburger, much less sticking it in his mouth?

What I'm thinking is, this not-so-secret menu is a clever internet ruse to get people to wander into their favorite fast-food restaurants and entertain the otherwise stunningly bored teenage staff by muttering improbably weird request like, "Can I please have a McGangBang?"

Not feeling quite up to snuff tonight so I sent B on her way to dance class on her own so she can learn the secrets of the tango and bring them back to Our Humble O'Bode where we can practice them over the weekend.

My problems are slight, just feeling a headachey all day and have a bit of a scratchy throat coming on since shortly after lunch. I'm hoping a good night's sleep will take care of it. That, and a cup of hot Jasmine tea.

Finally, a week that ended with a Friday that was nice enough to walk around at lunch time. I tried taking a walk yesterday during my lunch hour but I got rained on. Pretty miserable rain, too, so cold and harsh it felt like a "no" from the girl I had a crush on my whole freshman year. I went about halfway around capital square before I decided it just wasn't worth it, cut the next corner and went back to the office where it was at least warm.

Same thing happened Wednesday during lunch. Out the back door, around the corner and barely a block up the street I was already cold all the way through and well soaked even with an umbrella (which I forgot yesterday). I was starting to feel as if I was living in Portland, but things are looking up, weather-wise, now that Friday has finally brought us some warmth and sunshine. Will all this jabber jinx it? Wait and see, wait and see.

Chips. Tons of them. I spent the whole afternoon making wood chips, and I mean the whole afternoon. I thought it would take an hour, maybe two, tops. It took four and a half hours to reduce the stack of spruce boughs I had piled up at the edge of the yard into wood chips that My Darling B could spread out along the pathways of her garden to keep the weeds down. I never want to chip another damn branch all summer.

I don't need no stinking reason to put the granola in the refrigerator, do I? I can absentmindedly put it in there without it meaning anything, don't you think? I put it there before I drank my second cup of coffee, so I wasn't even hitting on all four cylinders yet (I'm a compact model). So it doesn't necessarily mean I'm losing my marbles, right? Besides, I'll bet granola keeps longer if you put it in the fridge. Just sayin'.

It's been a day of being distracted by things I've been planning to do for days, weeks, years, and finally doing them. I didn't have solid plans to do anything specific today; mostly, I planned to sit on my butt and read. I finally cracked open my copy of Rocketman, a memoir of moonwalker Pete Conrad, last night and gobbled up the first ten chapters even though it kept me up past my bed time. I started right in again where I left off while I made the morning pot o' java after I looked out the front window and saw the newspaper hadn't been delivered yet. I'm a little more than halfway through the book already and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it kept me up past my bed time again tonight.

Because I keep getting distracted, right? I took a trip to the hardware store this morning, looking for some pipes to drain the rainwater away from the downspout at the corner of the garage, and came back with some shelving brackets, plywood and four bags of topsoil for the planter out front.

The topsoil was pure inspiration. My Darling B has this yearly ritual of buying a flat of posies in the spring, then leaving them out front on the porch or the sidewalk or, a variation this year, on the back deck and forgetting about them until they die. For whatever reason, the image of a flat of dying posies flashed before my eyes as I passed the gardening supplies and, lucky me, the top soil was on sale. I stuffed as many of the bags as would under my push cart and moved on.

The plywood got ripped into bookshelves for my basement lair because I wasn't going to pay eight bucks for a finished bookshelf when I could rip three shelves from a two-by-four foot piece of half-inch plywood I could buy for four dollars. And the bookshelves were a gotta-have. I've been carrying home bargain books from Saint Vinnie's all winter long so they're falling off the shelves in the basement where they're doubled up and stacked until every bit of every shelf has been crammed with books. A set of shelves over my desk was long overdue.

A set of shelves which, by the way, somehow emphasized how little direct light I have on my desk. I'd been thinking about repositioning the overhead track lights all winter, when I had plenty of spare time to do that sort of thing, yet never got around to it, somehow. Today being a day of distractions, though, I found myself up on a stool with a power drill, unscrewing the tracks and moving them to a spot on the ceiling over my desk where I could point them so I could see stuff. Zow!

With that all done I finally had time to ... wait, I've got to re-hang all the photos I took down to put up the book shelves.

Pictured: A freshly-beheaded thorny shrub from hell.

Correction: No, not from hell. Is there some place worse than hell? Some place way more painful? Because this shrub is worse than anything hell could spawn. It's got thorns sharper than kitten's teeth. Brushing up against it absent-mindedly will cause searing pain and draw blood. To remove it I had to don a pair of heavy leather gauntlets and then, working very gingerly from the outermost branches, prune it one sprig at a time until nothing but the bald root ball was left. I'll hack that out of the ground later this week.

I admit it, I don't understand landscaping. It's one of those arts I just don't get. Why anyone would consider for a moment planting this abomination in a yard where presumably they'd want to be able to move about without having to wonder if they're going to injure themselves while retrieving a frisbee is beyond me.

I do understand the whole yin-yang thing, that everything's got its place in the world, that even things which seem bad have their good points. This is, I have to admit, a pretty shrub after its leaves turn rusty red, but those killer death thorns take away from all the pretty redness of the leaves. I don't want to be in the same county, much less the same yard, with a shrub like this one.

This was the last one standing. There used to be two more in the front yard. I let Tim tear them out with a pick axe, which he was all too willing to do after he poked holes in his hands (I told him to be careful). This one was growing in the spot to the left of the air conditioning unit where it was mostly out of the way, so I let it live until today. I'm going to finish painting the house this summer (promise, Dear!), though, and that shrub was going to be in my way, so bye-bye devil shrub from worse-than-hell! Time to die!

I walked into a store about a week ago wearing this t-shirt and both the guys behind the counter were just flat-out wowed by it. "That's an awesome t-shirt," the first guy said, and the second guy asked me, "Is that a vintage shirt or, you know, a favorite shirt that you've had for a while?"

I liked the way he substituted "a ratty old t-shirt you've kept about five years too long" with "you know, a favorite shirt that you've had for a while." That was very considerate of him.

They were both wearing "favorite t-shirts" and probably had a huge collection of them in their closets at home. It took a moment to dawn on me that they both probably shopped for new t-shirts that had been sandblasted or soaked in lye to look old. More likely than not, they pay quite a lot more money for old-looking, vintage t-shirts than I ever would. My limit's about twelve bucks. Not a lot of t-shirts out there for twelve bucks, I know. I'll go as high as twenty if it's got something really funny on it. I had to buy this t-shirt last summer because it was just about the funniest thing I'd seen all year:

I don't know why a cartoon of dead presidents doing a zombie dance tickled my funny bone. It just did. (Yes, I know Franklin wasn't a president. Whatever.)

This year, I'm thinking I may have to buy this one:

I couldn't stop giggling after I saw a guy wearing this while we were standing in line to buy tickets for the Great Taste of the Midwest. This one's twenty-two bucks before shipping, though, so I still haven't taken the plunge.

Brushing. It's not just for teeth any longer. It's the key to dancing a well-executed Foxtrot, and last night My Darling B and I were introduced to this embarrassingly difficult element of style.

"Brushing" means your feet have to brush past one another. When we learned the Foxtrot, all the instructor said we had to do was take two slow steps forward, then quickly bring our feet together, and that was about it.

Don't let them fool you! They're only telling you that to get you to sign up for lessons! They'll let you do it the easy way for a couple of months, ratcheting up the comfort level and throwing you lots of compliments to make you think you're doing a great job, then zing! Suddenly there's about a thousand other things to learn!

Did I mention rise and fall yet? How about very small steps when you bring your feet together? And that left turn you learn on day one? It goes from being a simple waddle to a chain of steps so complicated it would make Einstein's brain explode.

Brushing turns every simple step into a ballet on a tightrope. And for some reason this tiny little change makes B want to take an extra step backwards. I end up chasing her all over the dance floor. I still love the Foxtrot, though, mostly because we can use it to dance to just about all of our favorite Dean Martin songs.

Mom called me the other night to let me know I shouldn't sent her e-mail because she didn't have a computer. She was disconnecting the cables from the back of her computer when she got to one that was ... stuck, somehow, so she gave it a good, hard jerk and it came out, all right, but it turned out to be one of those plugs you have to unscrew before you can remove it. A chunk of the motherboard came out with the plug, which still impresses the hell out of me. My Mom pulls computers apart with her bare hands, just like The Hulk. Cool.

I went back to the daily grind Thursday morning after a relatively relaxed day at a management seminar on Wednesday. This once-a-month series is broken up so that each day-long session covers some important aspect of managing a work place. Yesterday’s subject: Time management, something I could always use help with. Even if I learned only one thing, it would’ve been worth taking a day away from the office to find a way to make better use of just one minute. Hours would be better, but I’ll take minutes in a pinch.

And I did learn a few more good tricks, but what I’ll remember about yesterday’s seminar for a long, long time is that there are still some people out there who think Steven Covey’s da bomb. Seriously. Steven Covey, the guy who raked in a butt-ton of money by getting every managerial wanna-be from here to Poughkeepsie to make his management guide Seven Habits of Highly Effective People mind-bogglingly popular, not to mention the most irritating book I’ve been forced to read after Moby-Dick.

Seven Habits became such a runaway best-seller that even the United States Air Force adopted its management lessons. Unfortunately, they did this while I was in the mid-career, so for several agonizing years I sat through leadership classes listening to The Word of Steven Covey delivered by one sergeant after another with the inextinguishable enthusiasm of a newly-converted Christian.

Classes that espouse the Covey doctrine are exhaustingly dull because Covey’s pronouncements are trite and obvious to me. "First things first" was one of the seven habits, for instance. I’m pretty sure that was old, worn-out advice back when Ben Franklin left it out of Poor Richard’s Almanac. "Put yourself in the other person’s shoes" was another habit, and so was "change starts from within." This guy plagiarized everybody from Jesus to Lao-Tsu and made a million bucks selling day planners and motivational posters emblazoned with his banal one-liners.

I can’t deny that Covey had made a long-lasting stamp on our culture. Ever been advised to be more "proactive"? That’s a Coveyism. Ever heard a manger agonize over how to best strive for "synergy"? Covey again. Do you understand what "win/win" means? Neither do I, but Covey does. Or says he does. But just because managers are still spouting Covey-coined words and phrases doesn’t make it worthwhile, much less interesting.

And a great deal of what he says just doesn’t make sense, when you think about it for more than two seconds. Just what is the difference between being "highly effective" and merely "effective"? If you’re effective, you’re getting things done. If you’re "highly effective," you’re getting things done ... how, exactly?

Here, for what it’s worth, are my Seven Habits of Effective People:

1. Get your ass out of bed every day.

Everyone who has ever gained a reputation as a mover and shaker got that way only because he got off his ass and did something. People who just laid there, wallowing in wretched self-indulgence? Not so much.

2. You can drink more coffee from a bigger mug.

Modern science has yet to devise a truly bottomless cup of coffee, so a big-shot boss drinks from a big-ass coffee cup, right up to to day that acid reflux sets in. It helps if the cup has "#1 Boss" on it.

3. A kick in the tail is a step forward.

If you’re not advancing, you’re in the way. There’s a lot to be said for motivational speaking, but it’s proven that nothing gets a slacker moving like a size twelve boot inserted rectally at high velocity. When you get one of these, don’t get mad, be grateful.

4. You do better work in a comfy chair.

After you land that office job, look around to see who’s got the newest, most comfortable office chair. Your first goal should be to get your ass in that chair. I’m not talking about the job that goes with the chair, just that chair. After you’ve been in the office a couple weeks, come in early or stay late one day. Move a bunch of the chairs around and make sure the comfy chair ends up in your cubicle. Then fart in it a lot so nobody ever wants it back even if they do figure out you’ve got it.

5. Make the coffee.

Even if you’re the supervisor, make the coffee. That way, you get the first cup and you can take as much as you want. Nobody will ever grumble about it, or blame you for draining the pot or not making more.

6. Let every call go to voice mail.

It reduces interruptions. Also, get a wireless headset, wear it all the time and, when people come to the door of your office, raise a finger while staring intently at your computer screen, read something off the screen, then look at your visitor and mouth, “On the phone.”

7. Pet the cat.

Take a long walk on the sunny days. Stop and smell the roses. Whatever.

If anything good came of the BP oil spill off the coast of Louisiana last month, it was this: I know how I can break the clog in the drain of our bathroom tub now.

The drain gets clogged at least two or three times a year and the only sure-fire way to break the clog is to force water down the drain with a garden hose. It’s effective but it takes thirty or forty minutes to drag the hose out, connect it to the laundry spigot, uncoil it across the living room to the bathroom, take the cover off the drain, shove the hose in there and run a couple gallons of water past the clog. And clean-up is a bear. There had to be a better way.

There was, and the answer came from a guy who cleans up birds and other animals that have been fouled with crude oil. He does that for a living; what a great job, eh? Anyway, he uses ordinary dish soap for the job. The soap is strong enough to break down the oil, but mild enough that it’s easy on bird’s feathers and such. He said he tested every kind of dish soap on the market and found that Dawn dish soap worked best.

So yesterday, while I stood staring at the bathtub drain, trying to figure out how to bust the latest clog that was backing up an inch of slimy water every time one of us took a shower, I found myself reasoning this way: The clog’s not hair, because I put a screen over the drain to keep hair from getting down there. Some hair is still going to get through, but not enough to clog the drain, so it must be a greasy clog. And if it’s grease, I should be able to break it up with something. And that’s when I remembered what the bird-cleaning guy said about Dawn dish detergent.

Forget using Drano or other caustic clog-busters like that. They just don’t work, or at least they don’t on the kind of clogs we get in our bathtub. Worse, if you pour a bunch of Drano down the drain and it doesn’t work, then you’ve got to work on busting the clog while trying not to splash a bunch of Drano all over yourself.

But dish soap won’t hurt you. At least, I hope it doesn’t, given that I stick my hands in it every day. And it gets crude oil off birds and furry creatures. So when I drove down to the grocery store yesterday to buy some bottled water (for brewing a batch of beer) I picked up a bottle of Dawn dish soap. The only hitch there is, there’s maybe a dozen different kinds of Dawn. They make antibacterial Dawn, Dawn with aloe, organic Dawn, and I don’t know what else. It took me about five minutes to eyeball the bottle of Just Plain Old Dawn in the lineup.

As soon as I got back from the store, I poured about a third of the bottle straight down the drain, then filled the tub with water and added about a cup of Dawn to that, too. I meant to get back to the bathroom in about fifteen minutes to let the water out and see how it drained, but I got caught up brewing a batch of beer and never got back to the tub. It was left to My Darling B to pull the plug and wash the clog down the drain, when she went to shower off a day’s sweat and dirt after gardening all day. "It worked like a charm," she told me later. "I wasn’t splashing around in a puddle, and I took a pretty long shower."

So there you have it. Next clog you get in your tub, bust it with some Dawn. The guy who cleans birds recommends it, and I do, too. I wish I owned some stock in the company.

Banging away at my office keyboard yesterday morning, I was distracted by an Outlook pop-up reminding me I had a very important meeting that afternoon. I’ve got Outlook set up to give me these things all the time. I can hardly remember to feed myself without them.

Trouble is, they’re only as good as the lead time you build into them. The one that pops up to tell me I should generate the morning reports doesn’t need any lead time. Just click on “OK” and do it. For the one that tells me I’ve got a meeting with Michael in his office, just down the hall, I give myself enough time to visit the bathroom, then grab my notebook.

As for the pop-up that reminded me to drive to the very important meeting on the other side of freaking down, I should have given myself at least twelve hours of lead time so it would have reminded me the night before. I should have, but I didn’t, so I didn’t remember to drive B to work and keep the car. Curse you, Outlook! Do what I want you to do, not what I tell you to do!

Lucky for me someone else in the department was going to the same meeting, a presentation by a job placement service, and agreed to give me a ride after I groveled shamelessly. I’m not sure the groveling was necessary, but I figure it never hurts.

I never thought much about using a job placement service before, but it’s provided free of charge by the company so why wouldn’t I? And even if they can’t find me a job, at the very least I should be able to pick up some pointers. As a bonus, it turns out they’re going to write a resume for me at the next meeting. I’ve got that one marked on my old-fashioned desk calendar in big, red letters.

Remember Katrina and the Waves? Maybe? No? How about their uberhit “Walking on Sunshine?” There, see? I thought you’d remember them.

“Walking on Sunshine” came out twenty-five years ago this week or, to put it another way, it’s been stuck in my head, forcing me to hum it whenever my mind wanders a bit, for roughly half my life. It’s the Methuselah of earworms.

Click your way over to this NPR story about “Walking on Sunshine” for the story behind the tune, the answer to the question “Where are they now?”": or – and you absolutely must do this – to have a listen to the blues version of the song. You can’t imagine it. Not until it gets stuck in your head, anyway.

When does summer start for you? What’s that first day you have to do something, or something is done to you, that you stop and think, This is it. This is summer. We turned on the air conditioning for the first time this week when the weather got all hot and sticky. If I hadn’t stopped and thought about it before then, I did as soon as that cool, sweet air began to fill the rooms of Our Humble O’Bode.

And lately I’ve noticed, as I’ve been standing in the kitchen window taking those first few life-giving sips from my morning cuppa joe, that the temperature hasn’t dipped below sixty all week. A couple mornings back I glanced at the thermometer right after I turned on the kitchen lights and it was seventy. That doesn’t happen unless it’s summer.

Comments:

Summer in Oregon begins when the total days of the week I don't use the umbrella finally out number the days that I do.

G*J, gary@jugbo.com, Droll Exhaust

12:30 a.m.: Insomnia has struck again. This is just the weirdest affliction ever. It’s chronic, but only in the sense that it inflicts itself on me once every six months or so. There is no pattern to it that I can discern. For long stretches I can sleep as normal, and then bing! I wake up in the middle of the night for no reason I can put my finger on and simply cannot get back to sleep. I usually suffer it for just one night, very infrequently two nights. I don’t recall suffering it for three nights in a row or longer. And I don’t have entirely sleepless nights. When I wake up in the middle of the night and realize I won’t be able to get back to sleep any time soon, I get out of bed to read a couple chapters of a book or surf the internet, something quiet that’ll help me pass a couple sleepless hours. When I start to feel tired again, and I usually do some time between sixty and ninety minutes later, I head off to bed and fall asleep fairly easily. I almost feel guilty about calling it insomnia, because I know that some people suffer insomnia that keeps them awake all night, night after night, but I’m not sure what else to call it, other than a fucking nuisance.

Worst thing about it tonight is, I’m supposed to help someone move house tomorrow. I can just imagine how bright-eyed and chipper I’ll be, round about mid-afternoon.

I had a beer Friday after work with some of my coworkers. We gathered around a small table outside Genna’s and, while the conversation drifted from one topic to the next, I couldn’t help noticing that almost everyone was carrying on two conversations at a time: One with those of us sitting around the table, and one with whomever they were texting on their cell phones. Two of them were texting constantly, and two would check their messages every so often, replying occasionally. Not one of them acted as if this was rude in any way, or even unusual.

All of them were half my age, some of them probably a few years younger, not that their age would necessarily make them more or less likely to text while talking. I wouldn’t presume that people my age don’t do this. I know they talk on the cell phone while they drive, and probably even text behind the wheel, but I would guess that the younger generation would be more likely to do it and less likely to regard it as odd.

And I suppose on some level it isn’t all that odd. They were, after all, sharing the remarks of their texting friends with the rest of us in physical attendence, so it was like virtually doubling the number of people at the table. I had never seen this done before, though, so the culture shock made me unsure how to reply, or if I was meant to reply at all, to someone who wasn’t actually there.

One day this will not, I am sure of it, be as familiar to me as making a phone call. Or maybe it will, but I doubt it. My great-grandmother, I am told, was never very happy with dial telephones; to place a call, she wanted to pick up the receiver and talk with an operator. The change to using a dial to place a call yourself was not something she could get used to. I get the feeling that having someone joining a conversation by proxy will take a lot more getting used to than transitioning to a rotary phone, and I’m not sure I’m up to it, or will be some time hence.

I spent virtually the entire day yesterday helping to launch two people on one of the greatest adventures of life: Moving! As in, moving house. As in, packing all the detritus of your life into cardboard boxes and hauling them from point A to point B. And when I say “one of the greatest adventures of life” I mean of course one of the biggest pains in the ass humankind has ever devised to transform life into the most agonizing torture ever. My Darling B and I have moved our own house six or seven times in our twenty years together, so I feel I speak with the wisdom of experience here.

Jim & Sue are moving. They sold the house they’ve been living in for twenty-some years so they can build their retirement home in the country. Somewhat oddly, they haven’t actually built a retirement home to move into yet, so we didn’t help them move into a new place to live. Instead, we helped them move most of their stuff into a U-Store-It ten-by-twenty garage where it will remain until such time as they have a home to retire to.

Their retirement home is, at this time, a vacant lot. Quite a charming vacant lot, as vacant lots go. Two acres of land at the peak of a gentle hill with an outstanding view of the other vacant lots, carpeted with lots of waving field grass and studded by several picturesquely gnarled oak trees. But still vacant. Construction on the retirement home will begin this summer, if I got the story right, and until then the happy couple will semi-retire to a temporary home in a rental (or, as my Texas-ized brother would say, a rent home).

Moving began first thing in the morning. I wasn’t there to see The First Box loaded into the moving van because My Darling B and I did a little grocery shopping at the farmer’s market before heading over so they started without us. There were many, many boxes to load onto the truck, however, so they still had plenty of work for us to do when we finally got there.

Moving the boxes went fairly smoothly. Boxes are easy to carry, stack in the back of a truck, and unload. Very simple. Children learn to do this in kindergarten with wooden blocks. It was during the second round of moving things, when almost all the boxes were gone and we had to move the furniture, that the fun began. Furniture doesn’t stack neatly. It’s not supposed to. Just about every stick of furniture ever made is designed to stand on the floor right-side up, so that’s how you have to put most of it in the truck. If you’re really inventive and really, really careful, you can make some of the chairs ride piggy-back, or lay a book case on its side across the top of a dresser or a table, but there’s only so much of that you can do, so the truck fills up rather quickly.

And there almost always seems to be one piece of furniture that’s monstrously large, or heavy as a planet, or both. In our house, we used to have a pair of book cases made from oak plywood, both about six feet tall. One was only four feet wide; we still have that. The other was about six feet wide. It wasn’t especially heavy but its size made men from Germany to Japan cuss in an amazing variety of ways. On our move to Germany, they tried and tried to get it up the stairs and, when they couldn’t figure out how to get it around that last bend, they simply left it in the court yard and were about to drive away when I asked them what they were going to try next to get it into our apartment. “We can’t,” was the answer. “It’s too big.”

“So you’re just going to leave it here?” I asked. He shrugged. Apparently, he thought that’s exactly what he was going to do. I eventually talked him into trying again, and the crew put their heads together to come up with the brilliant solution of using a fire hose to hoist it up to a balcony and bring it in that way, but for a while it looked as though we might have to forget about the book case.

And for a while I was thinking Jim might have to forget about taking his table saw with him. It wasn’t an especially large piece of hardware, no bigger than an end table, but it was a table saw from back in the day when they made table saws from six-inch-thick battleship armor. The body of my table saw is made from high-impact plastic and the whole thing doesn’t come to more than twenty pounds. Jim’s table saw probably tips the scales at something in the neighborhood of two-hundred pounds. Carrying it up the basement stairs should have put any two healthy men in a hospital.

Jim’s Plan B for getting the saw out of his basement work shop involved taking it apart to make moving it much less hazardous to his health, but disassembly turned out to be a lot more complicated than it first appeared to be so he reverted to Plan A, grabbed the bull by the horns, so to speak, and wrestled it up the stairs with the help of his son-in-law who, thank Zeus, is half my age and strong as a horse. Getting under that saw and muscling it up the stairs still made his eyes pop out, though.

Getting everything into the storage unit was every bit as challenging as getting everything into the truck, times two, because we could fill up the truck twice and be as sloppy about it as we wanted, so long as we could close the door, but we had just one try to get all the boxes, furniture, shovels, rakes, bicycles and whatnot into the storage garage so we could close the door. And somehow we did it. Not sure how, don’t really care. It’s in there, the door’s closed, the day is done.

We finished packing away the last of the furniture and assorted hardware late yesterday afternoon. I don’t know exactly when because I was too exhausted to look around for a clock. All that was left was to drop off the truck and head back to Jim & Sue’s, where we could flop our butts into the remaining lawn chairs and wolf down some brats and potato chips. The end of the day found us sipping beers under their back yard pergola, telling stories until well after dark.

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