this is drivel

For a significantly large part of the day yesterday we had no coffee. I find it just a bit hard to admit this because in our house I am Java Man, responsible for making the coffee, maintenance of all coffee-making gadgets (I have a growing collection, natch) and, most important of all, ensuring there is an adequate supply of coffee beans on hand so that there will never be a coffee-less day. Well, yesterday I failed my charge. I hang my head in shame.

All that remained of our bean supply was a single tablespoonful, maybe twenty beans that rattled around in the bottom of the jar on the coffee shrine. My Darling B gamely ground it up and made about a cup of what looked like tea but had less flavor. She loaded it up with cream and sugar anyway and pretended it was delicious, but I noticed she didn’t finish it.

I made do with a cup of tea. They say that tea has every bit as much caffeine in it as coffee, sometimes more. If that’s true, there’s something else in coffee, but not in tea, that puts me in a good mood. I had a hard time focusing on anything I was doing all morning; I was distracted by just about anything I happened to catch sight of, which I admit isn’t out of character for me under the best of circumstances, but I’m going to blame it on the lack of coffee anyway. I might even go so far as to blame our lack of coffee for my spectacular failure to put the tomato trellis together correctly, what the heck. I think most coffee drinkers would believe that.

After the trellis fiasco I drove up the road to the hardware store to pick up some tomato stakes, a trip that took me right past Java Cat, our local coffee house. Hey, they sell coffee beans! I remembered, And it’s even Fair Trade coffee! I stopped and went in. There wasn’t much of a selection on hand; everyone else in Monona must have misjudged their coffee supply on this long weekend as well. When I put the bag on the countertop, the gal at the register asked, “Just the beans?”

“That’ll do it,” I confirmed.

“Would you like the free coffee?”

I blinked. “Sorry?”

“A bag of beans comes with a free medium coffee,” she explained.

Free coffee? “Well, heck yeah!” And the rest of the day went much better after that.

My Darling B was up until midnight making ice cream last night. Actually, I don’t know how late she was up. I went to bed at about eleven and laid there reading a book until eleven-thiry, but I could still hear the ice cream maker churning when I turned out the lights, and she had a big clean-up job to do after the ice cream was done, so I can only assume she didn’t turn in until well after twelve bells.

For three days she’d been threatening to do something with the avocados that had been haunting the kitchen countertop ever since she bought them last week, and last night she finally followed through. This was after we got home from our dance lesson. My guess is there was still too much adrenaline in her system after doing the mambo, and it was too dark outside to garden, so she naturally gravitated toward the kitchen.

Last summer she was jonesing for some home-made strawberry ice cream and a new kitchen gadget at the same time, so she trolled e-bay until she found an ice cream maker that attaches to the food processor she’s owned since she was, like, twelve years old. I stand in awe of determination like that.

When it finally arrived in the mail she washed it up and made strawberry ice cream that very night, if memory serves, and an awesome batch of ice cream it was, too. It literally inspired awe. I can’t remember tasting ice cream as delicious as B’s home-made ice cream, and I would have wolfed down half of it if there weren’t enough lactose in whipping cream to make my back end play the tuba part in just about any polka you can think of. As it was, I took three milk pills so I could just taste a tablespoon or two, and I still squeaked out a few notes afterwards.

I didn’t get to taste last night’s batch of avocado ice cream because I was sawing through a pretty big log by the time B was finished making it. Our group dance lesson was a jitterbug-like salsa step that gives B the energy to stay up all night, but tuckers me right out. She loves all that latin dancing, while I’m more a waltzing kind of guy. After that and mamboing through our private lesson I only wanted to go home and go to bed, but I had a few chores to do and I wanted to read another chapter. I think I permanently damaged my willpower by staying up past eleven, though.

The cats let me sleep until around three in the morning, when Bonk let out a tentative wail, then ran into the bathroom to hide. He hasn’t done that in months, not since we bought robot cat feeders. After he woke me up, Boo walked across my face, the same thing she used to do when she was hungry and wanted me to get up and feed her. What the hell?

Sometimes it takes me a while to figure these things out. When enough of my nerve endings were fired up, it came back to me that one of the things I tried to remember to do before bed, and utterly failed at, was reload the robot cat feeders. They hadn’t even seen kitty kibble since the dish spun it all away at nine-thirty the night before. Since they weren’t about to let me go back to sleep, I got out of bed, trudged through the murk to the kitchen and reset the feeders so they could have a little after-dark snack.

After that, a passing storm kept me from getting back to sleep right away, and when it finally let up I think the change in pressure made B roll over and start sawing lumber. I spent the rest of the early-morning hours alternating between dozing off and whispering, “Turn over, dear.”

In yesterday’s issue of The New York Times we met Alex Pemberton and Susan Reboyras, a happy couple who uncomplicated their lives by the simple act of deciding not to pay their mortgage any longer:

For Alex Pemberton and Susan Reboyras, foreclosure is becoming a way of life – something they did not want but are in no hurry to get out of.

Foreclosure has allowed them to stabilize the family business. Go to Outback occasionally for a steak. Take their gas-guzzling airboat out for the weekend. Visit the Hard Rock Casino.

“Instead of the house dragging us down, it’s become a life raft,” said Mr. Pemberton, who stopped paying the mortgage on their house here last summer. “It’s really been a blessing.”

What an outstanding idea! I’m embarrassed to admit I hadn’t thought of that myself. Why not string our mortgage lender along so we can enjoy a game of craps at the casino? Brilliant!

And Mr. Pemberton’s mother, Wendy, is even more happy-go-lucky than her son. She stopped paying her mortgage two years ago:

“I tried to explain my situation to the lender, but they wouldn’t help,” said Mr. Pemberton’s mother, Wendy Pemberton, herself in foreclosure on a small house a few blocks away from her son’s. She stopped paying her mortgage two years ago after a bout with lung cancer. “They’re all crooks.”

Well, of course they are, Mrs. Pemberton! What else would you call people who lent you a shitload of money so you could live in your own house instead of renting a flat? Naturally you shouldn’t be expected to pay any of that back just because you signed a contract. Only douchebags repay their debts.

I was up awful late last night, but it was so worth it, practicing tango steps with My Darling B after we moved as much of the furniture out of the living room as possible. If we push the recliner into the front entrance, move the coffee table into the hallway and plop the beer crate in the dining room, we have just enough room to do all the tango steps we know. Really short tango steps.

The tougest part about dancing a tango is keeping step with the music. Not because the steps are so difficult: Learning the actual steps takes a lot of practice, but it’s doable for just about anybody, even doofuses like us. Finding a tune that keeps a steady beat is just about impossible, though. Most of the tango music we’ve been able to find starts out so slow we can’t do anything but stand there for an awkwardly long time, looking like lost kids in the lobby of a busy bus terminal. Then the speed picks up and has a danceable beat for about a minute and a half before it slows to a crawl again. This seems to be the rule for most tango music. I’m sure you’re supposed to be doing something very stylish when that happens, but we haven’t advanced far enough in our classes to have a clue what that might possibly be.

Since we started taking lessons, My Darling B has been checking out collections of dance music from the library. The library likes it a lot whenever B checks out music CDs because they know they’re going to make a lot of money when she forgets to bring them back on time, and she almost always forgets. The idea, of course, is to try all kinds of music free, then pay for what we like. Maybe some day we’ll figure out how to make it work out that way.

Every time she finds a CD with plenty of the music she likes, B buys a copy of it through mail order. Last week a copy of a record called “The Absolute Best Tango Album Ever.” With a name like that, it ought to be just crammed full of tunes we could dance to, right? Well, so far we’ve found two. Yarg.

The next toughest part about dancing the tango is keeping time with the music. Or maybe it’s not so tough. Maybe we’re just klutzes. That seems very likely. In either case, the trouble we were having was getting our inner timing cue, the earworm-like tango music playing in our heads, to sync up with the tango music that happened to be playing on the stereo at the time at which we were supposed to be dancing to. If there’s a failure to learning to tango the way we were taught, it’s that we ended up dancing to “Step, together, step, collect, tang! Go! Close!” and hardly listening to the music at all, except to start.

But last night we managed to find a couple tunes we could dance to, and how to make the steps to a routine we’ve been working on match the rhythm of the music we found. It was an Aha! moment worth staying up past our bed times for. Or at least I thoght so until my alarm clock woke me up this morning.

The City of Madison is advertising a vacancy for the position of Parking Enforcement Officer. A Parking Enforcement Officer makes more than I do in my present position. He makes more than a police officer. Probably takes way more shit than either of us. I’m so tempted to apply for the job.

You can view the job announcement on the city’s web page, but what it seems to boil down to, and I apologize in advance to the valiant men and women who do the job for oversimplifying what is certainly much more complex than I’m about to make it out to be, is just this: you’re the guy who tickets and tows people’s cars when they park them where they’re not supposed to.

Obviously this isn’t a job for thin-skinned people, but even though I’ve got skin that’s about as thick as Kleenex, I’d really like to ride in that cool jeep with the flashy lights. They’re pretty ugly but they don’t have just a bubble on top, they’ve got bright flashy light-bars on all the corners and the indicator lights blink left and right when the Parking Enforcement Officer pulls up behind you and tells you to get a move-on if you’re parked under the signed that says “No Stopping Or Standing.”

I’m thinking I wouldn’t get to ride in the cool jeep right away, though. I see Parking Enforcement Officers walking around town all the time, going from car to car, punching license plate numbers into their hand-held ticket-o-trons, then slipping their calling cards under the windshield wipers of all those drivers who thought it would only take a moment to run to the place down the block, so why plug the meter? The job announcement warns you that you should be prepared to walk up to ten miles a day. That’s probably what the new guy does. The guy who’s been in parking enforcement for five years is probably the guy who gets to ride in the jeep.

The job announcement also mentions several times that you would be responsible for impounding illegally-parked cars. That’s the part of the job that really intrigues me, not because I’d like to make life hard on people just because they did a dumb thing, but because I wonder how that goes. When you ticket a car that’s been parked all night on the side of Willy Street that becomes an inbound lane at seven-thirty in the morning and the owner oversleeps, or he’s still in the shower when you come by, but then he sees the flashy lights and comes out wearing nothing but a towel and starts to argue with you as the tow truck operator is loading up his car to take it away, what can you say to him when he asks you, “How am I supposed to get to my job without a car?” Yeah, I got a job, too. This is it.

I suppose when someone comes out of his house with nothing but a towel and wants to argue with you, those are the easy times. The hard cases are the ones who come out with something heavy and blunt in their hands, and they don’t want to argue much at all. I’ve never looked closely; I wonder if Parking Enforcement Officers carry sidearms?

The other night I got into bed the same way I always do: Sit down, rub the soles of my feet together, swing my legs under the covers, reach for a book....

“What is that?” B asked with a chuckle.

“What is what?” I answered.

“That thing with the feet,” she clarified.

“Gets the dirt off,” I told her, “like when you swat your hands together.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, nodding. “That makes sense.”

I paused and, after a moment’s reflection, asked, “I’ve been doing that for longer than we’ve been married. Have you been wondering what that was for twenty years and you haven’t asked until now?”

She had. Apparently this was the time to ask.

As I opened my inter-office mail yesterday morning I came across my termination notice and the paper I had to sign and send back to HR to make it official. My final day at the office is June 30, coincidentally the same day I signed papers to get out of the Air Force, get on a jet and fly to Madison.

Actually, as it turned out, the Air Force could get us no closer to Madison than Chicago. I had to rent a car to drive my family from O’Hare to Madison, no mean feat on the July 4th weekend. Here’s hoping things work out as well this time around.

We ate hamburgers in the rain!

We went to this year’s Burgers & Brew even though it was pouring rain outside! Pouring! And so did a couple hundred other people! We all ate burgers in the pouring rain! Cats and dogs pouring! Totally crazy pouring rain!

Quite a few people had umbrellas, and isn’t it a lot of fun trying to work your way through a crowd of people holding umbrellas? Sometimes we’d pass somebody who obliged us by holding their umbrella up a little higher, but most of us misjudged the overlap and ended up dumping all the water off their umbrellas down our backs, and we did the same more than once.

A few more people wore ponchos that helped keep them mostly dry, but only mostly. This was crazy pouring rain, remember, so even ponchos could only do so much.

Then there were quite a few who had no umbrellas or ponchos or any kind of rain gear whatsoever, who stood in the drenching downpour with water running down their faces and necks and choked down their burgers with a miserable expression that said, I paid twenty-five bucks for this burger and I’m going to eat every goddamn soggy bite!

Every so often the rain would let up just a bit. Once it stopped almost completely. When that happened, My Darling B would experimentally step out from under our umbrella, look up into the clouds and say, “I really think it’s going to stop now” with such optimism that even I believed it at first. Three minutes later, though, it would be pouring down rain again.

But most people, even a few of the people who were soaked right through to their underpants, looked like they were having a genuinely good time.

The burgers this year were delicious as ever, and it may just be me but I think they’re getting bigger. The first year they were just tiny little things, if memory serves, barely three bites’ worth, just big enough so you could get a taste of them. Two years later they were all so big that we couldn’t quite finish the last one; one of them was about the size of a burger you’d be served in any self-respecting tavern.

The beers were just as tasty as ever, too. I guess I’m a little disappointed the tiny commemorative shot glass they serve it in hasn’t grown in size to keep up with the bigger burgers, but oh well.

I thought it might rain today, but the grass in the back yard had grown knee-high in places after several days of steady rain falling over the past week. I was determined to get out there this morning and mow even while a steel gray overcast gathered overhead. Until I started actually getting wet, I had to make a try at cutting back some of the jungle growth, so I backed the mower out of the shed, hooked up the extension cords and began hacking away.

Two hours and not a drop of rain later I was finishing up with the weed eater (I’ve recently learned it’s a “string trimmer” to some of you, so here you go) and the yard looked almost like a proper lawn. Still need some work in the far corners and along the back of the house, but baby steps are important.

What’s in bird seed that makes the grass grow so lush under the bird feeder? Or is it maybe the mad poopin’ birds, or a combination of bird poo and bird seed? I haven’t been able to figure it out, but man is the grass thick right there. I have to make two or three passes with the mower, very slowly and patiently, to get it all, and by tomorrow I know it’ll have grown tall enough for the rabbits to hide in.

A wandering mind reads the morning news...

I get The New York Times delivered to my door on the weekends because I like reading a newspaper. Our local paper, noble effort that it may be, is rather thin on content compared to a paper like the Times, or even to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, and I understand some of the reasons for that, but when I sit down at the kitchen table with a newspaper I would like to run out of coffee before I run out of newspaper. I can read just about all of the Wisconsin State Journal during a single fifteen-minute break at the office. I almost never finish the Times in one sitting.

What catches and holds my eye when reading the Times is the language their writers use. Adam Nagourney wrote about a politician’s “propensity to puffery” when referring to the way they toot their own horns. Alliteration: It’s what’s for breakfast.

Nagourney was writing about Congressional doothead Mark Kirk, who made himself out to be an Iraq War veteran by saying he served in the invasion of Iraq, until it was pointed out he was in the States at the time of the invasion. He has since changed his web page to read that he was serving during the invasion of Iraq, covering his ass with the excuse that he “misremembered it wrong.”

“Misremembering it wrong” is a literally funny way to put that. I recall “misremembering” to be a nonsensical word coined by President Bush the Second in one of his more lucid moments. It’s now apparently being used in all seriousness by Kirk in a way that changes its meaning to the polar opposite of what he would seem to want it to mean. “Remember” means “to put the pieces together; “misremember” suggests that you made a mistake putting the pieces together. Does “misremembering it wrong” indicate that your mistake was wrong, that you mistakenly put the wrong pieces together, or that you’re negating the action of mistakenly putting the pieces together? I’m upgefuddled.

“Cypriot religious and political leaders unleashed a furious broadside on Friday...” began the story of the pope’s visit to Cyprus. How curiously appropo to couple the Catholic Church with an archaic term like broadside, a salvo fired from the main guns of one battleship at the flanks of another. Battleships haven’t fired an actual broadside in combat since the beginning of the Second World War, when aircraft carriers became the castles of the seas and made battleships obsolete. Well, I couldn’t help drawing the parallel. Mea culpa.

Bonus mixed metaphor: Why would a broadside yearn to be “unleashed,” as if it were a rag-tag collection of snuffling house mutts straining toward the next fire hydrant during an evening stroll? Not even the dogs of war were unleashed.

I’m encouraging six different maple trees to grow in our yard. I say “encouraging” because they’re all volunteers, growing from two-leaf sprouts that popped up high enough above the tops of the grass that I noticed them and stopped myself before I ran them over with the lawn mower. Then I looked around to see how close they were to the house, power lines, pavement, etc. and, deciding they weren’t a threat to any of those, detoured around them.

Hang on, make that seven. The first was a shoulder-high maple tree that was growing beside the back deck the day we moved in. There were no shade trees anywhere in the yard and I reasoned that a big, leafy maple growing beside the deck would be a good thing to have. And indeed it is: It turned out to be a very fast-growing maple, no idea which variety, but it’s now about twelve, maybe fifteen feet tall and its branches shade about half the deck. When I decided to let it grow, I did so with the thought in the back of my mind that I would cut it down if its widening trunk ever impinged on the deck, but I’ve grown so attached to it that I would now consider cutting away some of the decking to keep it a bit longer. Don’t tell My Darling B I said that; I have yet to figure out how to get her to go along with that idea.

The second one was a maple in the middle of the front yard, where there was apparently a mature maple growing many years ago before one of the house’s previous owners had it cut down because they believed they were in imminent danger of being crushed by its branches, should they fall down in a storm. There is a gaping hole in the lawn now where the stump used to be. I fill it with river rocks that B digs up from her garden, and when the hole stops gobbling them up I’ll top it off with some dirt and sow a little grass seed to cover it over. The maple that’s grown up right beside the hole may not be an offshoot of that older tree, or it may be a volunteer that fluttered into our yard from a neighboring maple, I’m not sure.

Those little propellor seeds can travel a lot farther than I ever thought they could. None of the maples in our yard seem to be related to one another. None grow as fast as the one beside the deck, for instance, and the one in the back yard by the garden appears to be a red maple. The two by the front door are growing as slowly as the one in the back yard by the shed, but that’s about the only similarity between them that I can see. All this would seem to indicated they’re the progeny of the various maple trees growing in the yards around ours, all of them more than a hundred feet away, many more than two hundred feet. Only one or two of them are more than fifty feet tall, yet so many of their propellors fall in our yard that they clog the eaves troughs and down spouts of our house completely two or three times a year.

Clogged down spouts are the only down side to having maple trees in your yard, though, as far as I’m concerned. Granted, it’s a pretty significant down side. I’d be just fine if I never had to climb a ladder to the edge of the roof ever again. I just love big, leafy trees, though, and can’t wait for them to grow big and lush enough to give us a little more shade. Or any shade at all. I’ll keep on climbing ladders for some of that.

The first crop of thistles is in! After cleaning up the dinner dishes, I spent the evening hours in the garden with My Darling B, pulling weeds. Now, every keystroke sends a pulsing bolt of pain through my fingertips. Got a pair of tweezers I can borrow?

I started in the lettuce patch because it was easiest to weed. Even a doofus like me can tell the difference between a thistle and a head of lettuce. I pulled up quite a bit of dill, too, but only because I couldn’t pull up the thistles without getting some dill, and they were all voluteer plants anyway. There are plenty more, all over the yard. It’s not like we’re going to be hurting for dill any time soon.

After I cleared out the lettuce patch of all the thistles (and some dill) I moved on to the bean patch. That wasn’t so easy. Well, pulling up the thistles was. They’re big and ugly as hell and they don’t look remotely like a bean sprout. Tomatilla sprouts, on the other hand, do look sort of like bean sprouts, and there were a milion zillion quadrillion of them growing in the bean patch. Tomatillas are the rabbits of the plant world.

We like tomatillas; they make great salsa, but they’re not supposed to be growing in the bean patch. The thing about tomatillas is, once you plant a bunch of them, you never want for tomatillas ever again. They grow like weeds, prolifically, everywhere. They grow in your hair if you scratch your head while you’re pulling them up. Don’t even think about rubbing your nose.

To weed them out, I had to slowly pick through the thick mat of tomatilla leaves to find a bean plant, then pull up tomatillas all around the bean until I could see dirt. After that, I could pull them out of the ground by the handful and toss them aside after shaking the dirt out of their roots before I had to slow down and pick through the leaves, looking for another bean plant.

Once the beans were free and clear I moved over to the corn patch where some monster thistles were rearing their ugly heads. All the rain we had this weekend made them easy to pull out. If I was careful I could get six or eight inches of root to come out with one long, steady pull.

After a couple hours of that my knees and lower back were stiff enough to warrent knocking off before the sun went down so I could stretch out my stiffened legs and imbibe some muscle relaxant.

Hot Tip O’ The Day: Monday’s aren’t so bad when you don’t have to spend them in the office!

One of the bennies that came with the elimination of my job, if that’s not a self-destructive contradiction, was that management hired a placement agency to help those of us who were about to be newly unemployed find jobs. We got two afternoons off to attend job-hunting seminars, and two private sessions with the agency pros to help us write resumes.

Today was my appointed day to meet with one of the resume gurus, so I took the day off, dropped My Darling B at work, then returned to my basement lair to brush off the resume that’s been gathering dust in the files of my computer and polish it up a bit myself before mailing it in to the pro for further beautification.

The agency is on the other side of town but right off the beltline. I was there in about twenty minutes. Would’ve been there in ten if I hadn’t gotten lost. I don’t go over there very often so I don’t know that side of town very well and expected to get very lost, which is why I left three-quarters of an hour before my appointment and brought a book with me.

Somebody who was not my resume guru came out of her office to greet me when I came in, asked me to take a seat in the waiting room and offered to get me a coke. Nice place. My guru showed up about ten minutes later, shook my hand and asked me to come to her office even though she still had ten minutes before our appointment and could have spent it updating her Facebook status or surfing the Failblog. Nice, again.

We spent a very productive hour in her office, she asking lots of questions and taking copious notes. I have very little doubt that she’ll produce one bang-up resume for me, so it was time well spent.

The alarm clock woke me up this morning right in the middle of a dream about being a very old Bruce Willis in the continuing story of The Fifth Element. I don’t know where that came from. I haven’t thought about that movie in years.

(Coincidentally, in a Facebook comment someone reminded Number One Son that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I don’t know who said it first, but whenever I hear it I remember Gary Oldman saying that as Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg in The Fifth Element. Because that’s how I’m wired. And because Zorg is my hero. “If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself!”)

I wish I could remember some of the dream so I could weird you out with it, but all I remember is being Bruce Willis, being in the movie, and being very old. Wrinkly. Gray-haired, what little hair I had. Permeated by a musty smell. Not a bad musty smell. When I’m old, I want to smell like old books. I don’t care if they’re old paperbacks, I just want the smell to remind me of my favorite used book stores. If I end up smelling like wet dogs I want you to come find me and set me on fire. With a blowtorch. Or a flamethrower, if you happen to have one in your garage, and don’t we all wish we did?

We met a guy with a flamethrower last weekend, as a matter of fact. He was having a housewarming and we brought a keg of beer as a big thank-you for getting us tickets to the Great Taste of the Midwest our first and second year. He told us he bought a flamethrower at Farm & Fleet to kill the weeds in his driveway.

I’m serious. It’s not the kind of flamethrower you see island-hopping Marines using in old newsreels that shoots a stream of napalm in a blazing arc; it’s a more sedate flamethrower that hooks up to a bottle of LP gas and burns up weeds with a blue-hot flame that doesn’t shoot very far but is still very cool none the less. I’d get one myself if I could find one for less than ten dollars. I’ve got plenty of weeds that deserve a good scorching.

We mambo’d the night away at group dance class last night. A mambo is like a salsa, but in mambo you step off on the second beat; in salsa you step off on the first. Seems like a really tiny, insignificant difference, one that wouldn’t be too hard to take into account, and there’s no doubt in my mind that most people do it easily, all the time. To me, though, it’s like trying to brush my teeth with my left hand.

No, wait: Waltzing in a right-hand box after doing a change step is like brushing left-handed (as contradictory as that may sound, it makes perfect sense if you think about it for a second. Okay, that’s good, now stop.) Switching from a salsa to a mambo is like trying to sing a round of “Row, row, row your boat” after someone else has already begun singing it. So simple, and yet you can’t help muffing it the first few times by laughing or stepping on the other person’s toes.

Christopher asked us to switch from salsa to mambo, and I quote, just to mess with us, because that’s the kind of guy he is. He’s the instructor so he gets to do that whenever he wants to. You’d think that, because we’re paying him, it’d be the other way around and we’d get to call the shots, but for whatever reason it doesn’t work out that way. Life is so cruel. Dance class is even more cruel.

There’s lots and lots of twirling in salsa. My Darling B used to like twirling but she’s starting to get a little vocal about all the spinning she has to do now that we’re dancing the salsa. To be more accurate about it, she’d like to know why the girl does all the spinning in salsa while the guy just stands there, twirling her around. She’s getting a little dizzy, is the gist of her argument.

I think it goes back to something Christopher said about dancing: It’s all about making the ladies look good. The guy does an occasional underarm turn but, most of the time, he tries not to steal the show, and instead he just flicks his arm or raises it up and spins the girl around so she can twirl, probably to make her dress poof out and show off her legs, I guess. Works for me.

We learned the underarm turn ages ago, and it’s so simple that we moved on straightaway to the figure eight, an underarm turn but with a twist, literally: we don’t let go of each other’s hands, so our arms end up tied together like a pretzel. Then we prance back and forth a bit before untying our arms.

And last week we learned the “sweetheart,” a left underarm turn where we don’t let go of each other’s hands. In that one, we end up dancing side by side, arm in arm. It’s cuddling while dancing. I suppose that’s why it’s called a “sweetheart.”

Then last night we learned how to wind the ladies up in a figure eight, prance around a bit, then unwind her and go straight into a sweetheart – and then send her spinning away before winding her right back up again like Duncan a yo-yo. Sweet! It’s a whole lot more twirling, but of course the lady’s the one getting motion sickness. The guy just hangs out, waiting for her to come spinning back to him. Mambo rules.

COMMENT SECTION:

from Jugbo: what happened to the wordpress drivel? I am sad that I can’t comment anymore.... or is that why it’s no more? Eeeeep!

No, Jug, I didn’t stop using Wordpress to stop you, or anyone else, from making comments. In fact, I switched to Wordpress in the first place because I was looking for a way to give readers (all three of you) the option to leave comments.

I wish I could say I liked having that ability so much that I will stay with Wordpress forever and ever, but I can’t. I stopped using Wordpress because I don’t like the way it looks. I want drivel to look just like this, and I couldn’t figure out how to make Wordpress do that. Well, I suppose I could, but it would take too long. I want it to take less of my time than every night for a whole month, which is about how much time I’ve spent futzing with style sheets and templates and I still can’t get it to look the way I want it to. Not even close.

So, if you’re a Wordpress format guru and know how to make it look just like this page, tell me the secret and I’ll switch back in a flash. Meantime, I’ll be happy to take your comments by e-mail, as quaintly old-fashioned as that may seem, and post them at the end of my daily drivel as if this were a real blog.

My attempt to grow a beard as lush as Walt Whitman’s has reached the stage where a guy could maybe begin to believe there’s a slim outside chance it could happen, if a guy was very patient.

Walt’s is a beard I’ve long coveted. What guy wouldn’t? Namby-pambies, that’s who. Anyone can shave. A beard has style. Walt always wore one.

Should I eventually achieve full Whitmanesque beardedness, I can only hope I would be able to wear it as well as Walt did.

Tonight was supposed to be tango night in the group dance class, but nobody showed up so it turned into a private lesson – and since we swiched our weekly private lesson from Tuesday to Thursday, that meant that tonight turned into a twofer!

We started off with a little test: Christopher wanted to see how well we could mambo if he put a little slip of card paper under the balls of each of our feet. It turns out that we’re supposed to slide our feet when we mambo, never lifting the balls of our feet off the floor. We’d never done that before, and it was damned hard to do it now, almost like having to learn it all over again. I wish I could say we caught on to it pretty quickly, but we didn’t. After maybe a half-hour of that we weren’t lurching around like Gort the Robot, but poise and grace are still a long way off.

Then we worked on our foxtrot a while. This dance has turned out to be a fiendish trap that started out deceptively simple but actually has so many details to remember that at this point I would feel less intimidated if asked to split the atom, right now, using only a few common ingredients found in any average kitchen. The first two steps are long, the last two are very short, you rise on yours toes at the end, you brush your feet as you go, don’t step to the side very much, lead with your heel, roll all the way across your foot, keep your knees bend HOLY CRAP HOW DID THIS GET SO COMPLICATED?

Still, we learned a sweet little turn to do after the cross-body lead that made the lesson worth all the sweat, and the back-to-back twofer was over before we knew it.

Last night I woke to the noise of rocket engines on the space ship to Mars blasting off right in our back yard. I’ve never been present at the launch of a rocket powerful enough to lift a satellite into orbit, but I’ve heard it described as a sound that you feel with your bowels more than your ears. That’s what this sound was almost like. It was the sound of a cloudburst, thirty million billion zillion tons of water falling on our rooftop in the space of about fifteen minutes. Cats and dogs doesn’t begin to describe it.

I think this must have been at about two or three o’clock in the morning. Sorry for the approximation but I didn’t flip up the blind on my alarm clock to check. I’ve got a digital clock with an LED face that glows with what I suppose the designers thought of as a soothing green light. They thought wrong. When I turn out the lights to go to sleep, I want darkness. If I didn’t, I’d leave the lights on. So the thing I did after plugging my alarm clock into the wall was tape a flap of cardboard over the face. That way I never wake up to its digital glare of greeness in the middle of the night. I can still lift the flap up when I want to know what time it is, if I really want to. Last night I didn’t really want to, so the exact time the deluge fell on our house remains a mystery.

And I thought briefly about getting out of bed to check the basement for leaks. That has happened before, but then I put extensions on all the downspouts to channel the rainwater out into the yard instead of into a great big pool of swirling mud around the foundations of the house. Seemed like a problem begging for a solution. We haven’t had a leak in years, but I still like to check when it rains really hard, just to reassure myself. I must have already been feeling more than a little reassured last night, though. The need for a warm fuzzy quickly passed and I fell back into deep sleep while the dogs and cats were still pounding on peaks of the roof.

Among the leafy greens My Darling B is growing in her fantastical garden is the leafy, lettuce-like plant known to the frou-frou organic crowd as arugula. Everybody makes fun of it, probably because you sound like an old-timey car horn when you say it. Ah ROO gyue lah!

In England the same plant is known as rocket. I don’t know why. It doesn’t give me gas and make smoke and fire come out my exhaust. Now, why would you call it arugula if you could call it rocket instead? Rocket is a much cooler name. Granted, it’s a lot more fun to say ah ROO gyue lah if you’re into sound effects, but that only works if you get to ask your grocer for it from time to time. If you’re just growing it in your garden you don’t get many chances to say it out loud, so it would be way cooler to have some rocket in your garden. That’s what we’re calling it from now on.

I cleaned out my desk yesterday, which is as archaic a way of saying packed up & moved out as it is to say I dial phones when I’m using phones that have no dials. In our office, there are no desks, only particle board slabs screwed to brackets on the walls of our cubicles. They’re shelves, really. I cleaned off my shelf. When you put that way it sounds even more sad and pathetic, doesn’t it?

Even though my job was terminated, a job much like mine was created in its place, and someone else within the company was hired to do it. She’s been working out of a tiny cubicle a few doors down (another anacronism; there are no doors to any of our cubicles), and when I say tiny, I’m talking broom-closet tiny, no exaggeration. It would, in fact, have been a challenge to stuff it with the typical janitorial supplies you would need to sweep and clean on a daily basis. Run a shelf along the wall of said tiny broom closet and you’ve got a good mental picture of her cubicle.

When I passed by it the other day, two other people were jammed in there with her. It was a conference. She’s been having a lot of them in preparation for the many huge changes she’ll have to make in the department when those of us whose jobs were eliminated vanish into thin air at the end of this month and she’s left with a much smaller crew to handle the increased work load. Compared to her cubicle, my office was the size of Texas. It seemed a little incongruous, and a poor use of the available space, that I, the outgoing guy, still had a big cube that I wasn’t using as much as she was using her tiny cube, so I shot her an e-mail: “Let’s swap desks.”

She didn’t want to. She said it made her feel like she was pushing me aside. And bless her heart for that, but I said I thought of this as practical, not personal. She needed the bigger desk (shelf, whatever) for the transition a lot more than I did. So we swapped cubes and I’ve got myself one bitchin broom closet now.

We made out like bandits at the thrift store this morning! You’re pretty excited for us, I know.

Both of us managed to get out of bed very early and get to the farmer’s market before the foot traffic was shoulder-to-shoulder all the way around the square, so we were able to finish up our shopping a bit sooner than usual and head on over to our next stop, the thrift shop on Willy Street. It was all happening so smoothly that I got there before the doors opened (B was at the co-op picking up a few items).

I had the book store all to myself as I prowled the aisles, and the pickings were good: I scored a copy of Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove, and can’t wait to crack it open so I can read more stories about Teller that will utterly fail to alter my opinion that he was one of the greatest menaces to world peace ever to walk on two legs.

Okay, I it turns out I can wait: I also took home a copy of The Great Influenza, the story of the Spanish flu epidemic. I made the mistake of peeking into the first few pages and ended up reading the first chapter right away. Great, now I’m working on two books at the same time.

I took home two more books, one about the grat depression and one about Eleanor Roosevelt. I’ll have to share the latter with my Mom, who adores all things Eleanor. The woman was a force of nature. (I meant Eleanor, but now that I think about it my Mom was, too.)

My Darling B always picks through the china while I peruse the books. She likes to bring home any plate or platter that has an interesting pattern, so our china hutch is filling up with mis-matched flatware, just the way we both like it. She found three plates with a retro pattern, to go with (or not go with) the retro plates she already has. She also found this super-cool lunch plate with a scene featuring an adobe arch and picnic basket laid out on a sarape. Another plate had the same kind of southwestern theme but was not part of the same set. She didn’t want to bring that one home because of a few chips around the edges, but I could see myself eating lunch off it so I brought it home rather than leave it behind.

I’ve been geeking out over this for the past three days and I’ll bust if I don’t share it with you right now:

Link over to Sorcery and Glue to see more of this space alien, the work of aspiring costume artist Holly Conrad. It’s an animatronic foam latex mask, strapped to the face of the guy who wears it so that when he talks, the mouth opens and closes in sync with his mouth. The eyelids are not strapped to his eyelids, but they are connected to electric servo motors so he can make the lids blink.

It’s a creature from the video game Mass Effect, which I’m not all that familiar with. It looks like one of the games T used to play, but my experience with video games stops in the era of Pac-Man. I did accept a few invitations from T to play the games he got for his Xbox but I usually got killed in the first thirty seconds or so. I’m just not wired for any game with controls more complicated than a left-right joystick and a fire button.

Animatronic costumes like this one are almost a lost art, now that most movies use computer-generated animation to bring characters like this one to the screen. Can you believe there are kids who don’t appreciate Yoda used to be a rubber dummy on the end of Frank Oz’s arm?

And speaking of some people’s kids not appreciating a good thing: When the gaming web site Kotaku linked to Conrad’s web site, some of the first comments made about it were from people who didn’t like her eyeglasses. Her glasses! Here’s a brilliantly creative mind doing wonderous work, and the critics come out of the woodwork to put her down because they don’t like her taste in frames.

Aside from designing and making nerd-o-licious costumes, Conrad’s goals are straightforward: “One day, I’d like to live in a mage tower and own a space ship.” Well, who wouldn’t? Nobody worth talking about.

There’s something about a talking refrigerator with a great big, anatomically correct mouth, right down to the dangling uvula, that’s intrisically funny, don’t you think? Huh? Don’t you? I do. It can’t be just me. C’mon, you must have at least cracked a smile.

Subnormality is my web comic discovery of the week. I don’t remember how I linked to it, but as soon as I got an eyeful of the artwork, I was intrigued enough to hit the “previous” link a few times, to get a feel of the overall flavor of the comic. I didn’t have to go too far back to be hooked.

Take, for example, the artist’s concept of hell. If it’s a concept worth visiting once, it’s worth visiting again.

One of the unusual features of Our Humble O’Bode is a dining room that was once a hallway into the house from the back door. Some people call it a mud room. I like to think it was a breezeway because I like that word a lot, but I think a breezeway is open to the front and back of the house. This might have been, long ago, but I can’t tell for sure.

And it doesn’t really matter now, because it’s not a breezeway or a mud room any more. Some time ago the wall that separated the hall from the rest of the house was knocked down to make the dining room bigger, and a good thing, too. The dining room must’ve been itsy-bitsy before they did that. Now it’s big enough to hold a full-size dining room table with a little extra room left over for a china hutch, and off toward the front of the house they added a nook big enough to shoehorn a washer and drier in so we don’t have to tromp down the stairs to the basement to wash our clothes.

Whoever did the remodeling raised the floor up off the concrete slab so it ran all the way to the far wall, leaving a crawl space under the far end of the dining room. You can get in, should you ever get the crazy idea that you’d want to, by removing a panel under the steps by the back door, or by moving the cardboard box that’s covering the opening in the garage.

I don’t recall whether I thought of the cardboard box, or B did. I’d like to blame B for it, but that would be impolite. The box was just the right size to cover the hole, which apparently had a door at one time that had long since been pried off its hinges and lost. I knocked it over for about the thousandth time today as I was sweeping the floor of the garage and finally pitched it in the trash.

Can’t just leave the hole gaping open, though. Winters get pretty cold here and if The Merry Little Breezes were allowed to blow through the crawl space they could freeze the water pipes. Also, the dining room would get awful friggin cold. Luckily I never throw away anything and, in a corner of the work shop, I had a couple of doors I pulled off a cabinet that were just about the right size. I cut one of them down a bit and took it up to the garage.

But before I nailed it over the hole I stuck my head in there to have a good look around, because I’m a curious cat and I like surprises. As it turned out, the crawl space held a few. Nothing as intriguing as a personal diary, or a pile of skulls, sorry. Just a few car parts: a distributor cap, an air filter and a water pump. Also, a gallon jug full of what looked like either transmission fluid or freshly-drawn blood. I’m leaning toward tranny fluid. If it were freshly-drawn blood, the jug probably wouldn’t have been covered in cobwebs.

Now that the hole’s covered over, the chipmunks will have to find another way to get into the crawlspace, where they were bringing their chipmunk girlfriends and having their chipmunk kegger parties. After I nailed the door over the hole I took my tools downstairs, and when I came back up I caught one of the stripey little goobers trying to figure out how to open it. I sure hope he didn’t leave his drunken floozey girlfriend passed out in there.

I do love Ubuntu (like Windows, but free) (yes, free), but getting it to talk to my wireless network is going to drive me to drink. Or something. What do maddening things drive you to when you already drink?

After spending about an hour and a half trying to get my laptop to talk to my network I had to get up and work out my aggressions, so I grabbed our largest weeder out of the garden shed. It’s got a handle that’s six feet of solid hickory and a sharpened V of iron on the business end that can slay any weed that grows in the green, effective earth. Striding across the yard with that weeder in my hand I feel as though I could repel Hannibal’s army, so it’s perfect for slaughtering the monstrous crown-of-thorn thistles that have infested the far corner of the lawn out front.

These beasts are not like the nettles that sprout and grow up six feet tall if you let them. The crown-of-thorns grow very close to the ground. If you want to get rid of them, you have to get the blade of your weeder well under the ground, probing until you can feel the trunk of the root. That’s why a stout weeder with a sharp blade is essential. Once you’ve connected, slice it off at least three inches beneath the surface and pop the crown of the thistle out. You’ll have to repeat this several times over the course of the summer with each weed before it finally spends every calorie stored in its roots and gives up the ghost.

Or you could just spray Round-Up on it, but where’s the challenge in that? You can’t work out your aggressions after wrestling with an intransigent software system by pumping a little Round-Up on weeds. BORing!

I just narrowly avoided a pants-wetting event this evening: After spending an hour and change polishing my resume, then closing the editor to upload the finished doc to my LinkedIn profile, I couldn’t find it anywhere! Even after taking a deep breath, getting up out of my chair and stepping away from the keyboard for a couple minutes to let the adrenaline dissipate, no search would find it, no matter what the key word.

Copious cussing ensued.

When calm finally descended over me once again I realized there was nothing for it but to start over, so I started to download it from the e-mail attachment I’d sent myself and just about crapped myself when the name of the polished resume showed up in the download manager window. Slowly, carefully tracing the path, I clicked on a temp file ever so gingerly because, y’know, sometimes those things pop like a soap bubble and you never see your data again. But there it was, my resume, not only fully intact but as polished as I’d left it. Breathing a sigh of relief, I saved a couple million copies of it to various folders on my hard drive, my web site, my LinkedIn profile, a server on the moon....

I think I’ve found my dream job.

Ideally, my dream job would allow me to work from the comfort of my basement lair, where I’d be able to sit back with a cup o’ joe and listen to Handel’s Water Music or whatever was on the turntable until the urge to start working again made me sit up and put the coffee down, and I wouldn’t ever have the feeling that someone was glaring at me. I’d get out of bed whenever I woke up (which is usually about six o’clock, but oh, well) and I’d go to bed when I was too tired to hit the keys any longer. I’d take on as much work as I could handle, I’d give it as much time as I needed to turn out a quality product, and I’d say no to unrealistic demands. And I’d go to work in my pajamas. That’s a deal-breaker, right there.

As I said, that would be ideal. I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, here in reality: I was going over the final version of the resume that had been very generously written for me by the placement agency my company hired to help me transition from their employment to someone else’s, the wonderful lady who’d written it said that she would be happy to look it over for me if I’d made any changes, and if I asked her to do a rewrite she would not charge me the full rate of one-hundred sixty bucks an hour the agency would charge anyone else who walked through the door.

Wait, what? my inner monologue yelped. You charge how much to write a resume?

Can this really be true? Are the services of a wordsmith so revered in the circles of business that aspiring moguls will shell out hundreds of dollars for a professionally-rendered resume? Because if they are, I want a piece of that!

Although, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t settle for a piece of that. I thought I might, just to be more competitive, but after some reflection I knew I really wouldn’t. When the full import of what she’d said hit home, the first thought that went through my head was, If I charged half that I would be satisfied, but I take that back now. Didn’t mean that. Was only kidding. I could get by on eighty bucks an hour, sure, but if the market will bear one hundred sixty bucks per, far be it for me to cheapen the product. I’m all about quality, as I said earlier, and I’ll slave for as many hours as it takes to produce the very best. That’s just how I roll.

I took my lunch hour in a coffee shop on State Street, where I could get refill price if I presented my travel mug, and they had a big circle of overstuffed chairs in the front. I slouched back in one, propped a book on my knee and passed the better part of an hour reading about infectious diseases that ravaged the planet at the turn of the century.

“What are you reading?” the guy in the next chair over asked me. I flipped the cover of the book toward him so he could reading the title, The Great Influenza. “What’s that about?” he asked.

“The Spanish flu pandemic,“ I told him.

“Oh, yeah,” he replied, gazing off into the distance as if he were recalling everything about it. Then he turned to look right at me and cackled like a fiend.

Ohhhhhhkay.

“Were you here for the Asian flu epidemic?” he asked, after he was done having his little chuckle at the deaths of millions.

“No, actually,” I said, “I was overseas at the time.”

“Too bad. If you’d been here, you’d be immue to SARS and Swine flu.” And then, like a cat who suddenly remembers he has to be in the next room right friggin now! he jumped up out of his chair and strode out the door. And that was as good a time as any to gather up my things and head back to the office, only not too quickly. I wanted to let Mister Immunity get a good head start on me.

Are you the kind of person who can walk & chew gum at the same time? I ask in all seriousness because I am apparently no longer in this category. I once possessed this super-power up until a few years ago, then somehow lost said skill.

And by “walk & chew gum” I mean “[do anything] & chew gum.” It’s a metaphor, you see, or at least the first half is. I don’t literally mean walking, although that can cause the same problems that anything else does. It’s the chewing gum part that’s one-hundred percent literal. I can do lots of other things in combination, three and four at a time, even, but throw gum-chewing into the mix and all the important motor skills get short-circuited. I can’t explain it.

This is almost enough to make me give up chewing gum. I still can, by the way. Gnashing away at a big, gooey gob of gum all day long isn’t the problem; splitting my attention between chewing gum and writing a short note, or reading a book, or, y’know, walking is where I run into problems. So it’s not that I’ve unlearned how to chew gum.

I wonder if that’s ever happened to anyone? I don’t see why it couldn’t. There have been plenty of times I’ve gotten up and walked all the way across the house from the living room to my bedroom and, by the time I got there, forgotten what made me want to go there in the first place. Don’t tell me this hasn’t happened to you. So how would it be far-fetched to imagine someone might unwrap a stick of gum, stick it in his mouth, then forget what comes next?

Great. Something else I can worry about.

The upshot of all this drivel is, when I absently put a stick of gum in my mouth while doing almost anything else, I invariably end up biting myself. If I bit other people as much as I’ve bitten myself while being distracted by the wad of chewing gum I was working over, I’d have long ago been put down like a rabid pit bull. You’d think that kind of negative feedback would give a guy plenty of incentive not to chew gum at all, but I keep popping it in my mouth anyway. I don’t want to guess what a shrink would make of that.

So: Is the tingly fresh feeling of chewing gum worth the piercing agony and fat lip I get from being an absent-minded klutz? I’ll answer that as soon as I remember what brought up the question.

“Airline Worker Stumbles Across Box of Heads” – now there’s a headline you can’t read without feeling compelled to find out more.

How does anybody “stumble across” a box filled with severed heads? Do they routinely open boxes at the Southwest air freight terminal as a quality check, or maybe to break up the monotony? Was the box already partly torn open and instead of taping it up and sending it on its way they lifted the flap to see what was in there and OH MY GOD IT’S A BOX OF SEVERED HEADS!

Southwest Airlines does transport human specimens for medical purposes, but spokesman Chris Mainz said the airline called police and refused this shipment because it was not packaged and labeled properly.

We here at Drivel HQ wondered what the proper labeling would be for a box filled with “whole and partial heads”: – something like, “You Do Not Want To Look In Here! We Mean It! You’ll Be Sorry!

Bottle washing, the down side of bottling your own beer.

What you see in the photo is actually bottle soaking. I soak the bottles I’m going to put my beer in for about a half-hour in a sink filled with water that has a dab of bleach in it, to kill off any little beasties that have taken up residence. Then I grab a bottle brush and scrub out each bottle individually with hot, soapy water, a project that takes sixty to ninety minutes. When I get to that stage of the game I’ll be much too busy to snap a photo. Also, I won’t be in a good mood. Bottle washing makes me hot and sweaty and I tend to cuss a lot when I pull the brush out of the bottle and get sprayed in the face with soap, which happens a lot. If you know the secret to washing bottles without getting a face full of soap, you could pass it along to me and I’d appreciate it so much that I’d send you free beer.

UPDATE: Success!

Bottling the beer went off without a hitch – without a single hitch! That never happened before! I usually break the siphon, or spill a whole bunch of beer, or run out of bottle caps ... something always goes wrong. Except this time. I shouldn’t feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I am.

Believe it or not, this is five gallons of premium home-brewed Irish stout. Most of those bottles hold 22 ounces of beer, so there’s a lot more stout in this photo than you’d think. Oh, wait, I filled a dozen pint bottles that aren’t in this photo, so okay, I guess the photo doesn’t show five gallons. Oh well.

I’ll be opening the first bottle next Saturday to see how it’s coming along, and the week after that it’ll be ready for mass consumption. Stop by and ask for a pour if you’re in the neighborhood.

Ever seen a rainbow come out at night? No? Well, here you go.

It was a dark and stormy night ... almost. It was actually about seven o’clock in the evening when I snapped this photo. A passing squall had turned what is usually still full daylight into near-night, and incidentally dumping about a quarter-inch of rain on Our Humble O’Bode and the surrounding neighborhood in the space of about a half hour.

Then, the edge of the squall opened just a crack in the western sky at exactly the minute the sun was setting, gilding the clouds to the west in a brilliant gold and painting this rainbow across the still-falling rain in the east.

I took the liberty of doing a little photoshopping to this photo to get the rainbow to pop out of the background. It was already rather faint, and my little pocket camera isn’t quite up to capturing a sight as etherial as a rainbow in all its brilliance, so I had to help it along just a bit. If I were better at photoshop, there would be more color, but I’m not.

On Father’s Day I get to do whatever the hell I want to do, and what I’ve wanted to do all morning is sit in front of my computer monitor in my underwear reading goofy shit off the interwebs. Here’s the first thing that made me laugh out loud:

It’s a Star Wars joke, which, in the eyes of many people, makes me a Star Wars nerd, although I don’t believe that’s necessarily true. If you told me no one had ever waved a hand at you as if to cloud your mind and uttered the words, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” I wouldn’t believe you. Everybody on the planet has had someone do that to them by now. You could travel to the Gobi Desert, the jungles of Cambodia, the interior of the Amazon, and find someone who knew that line, in English.

I suspect that’s because it’s so much fun to use. Every time you’re caught with your hand in the cookie jar, all you have to do is casually wave your hand and say the line. Unless the guy who caught you has a heart like a block of ice, he’s almost guaranteed to chuckle and tell you, “Move along! Move along!”

I am a Star Wars nerd, by the way. To give you an idea just how big a nerd I am for Star Wars, I’ll point out that the clip I linked to above is from a re-release of the first movie that had been “improved” by adding computer-generated special effects. There are various creatures and robots that appear to wander between the camera and the land speeder at the beginning of the scene, blocking the shot. A flying robot appears in one shot just long enough to be a nuisance, and what looks like a dinosaur made out of brown Play-Doh by a kindergartener lumbers through the background of the final shot. I would guess they were added to make the scene look more like it took place in a crowded city street but, if you ask me, all this added clutter does is distract the viewer from what’s going on between the stormtroopers and the main characters.

I can’t tell you how frustrated I felt not being able to find a clip that didn’t have all the extra crap in it, by the way. Star Wars was a fun movie before they hauled it out and glued a bunch of extra bling on it. Is this turning into a rant now? It is, isn’t it? Where the hell was I? Damn distractions, they’re all over the interwebs.

Before I even got around to doinking around on the internet, I spent the first couple hours of the morning in the customary way: leafing through the Sunday newspaper while downing cup after cup of coffee.

My Darling B spent the morning baking a delicious Father’s Day treat for me. She didn’t mean to. She meant to go out to her garden and stay there, plucking weeds, sowing seeds and whatever else she does until the skies stopped threatening to pour down rain and actually started to do it. It never did rain. She was out there all afternoon.

On her first trip to the garden, though, she looked up and saw how many of the berries on the mulberry tree were ripe and thought how nice it would be to bake a berry buckle, a sort of coffee cake, and leave it for me as a prezzie on my special day. Nobody does holidays like B does.

Thing is, a berry buckle isn’t something anybody, not even My Darling B, can throw together in a few minutes. It takes quite a long time to do it right, and when it comes to doing things in the kitchen, B is all about doing things absolutely right. No short cuts for her.

I’m happy to report that’s how it turned out: Absolutely right. A wonderful father’s day gift. I heart be, woojy-woojy.

Somebody’s been modding his scooter: I first caught sight of the rear quarter of this scooter and the first thought that came to mind was, How can that be street legal? Most of the body appears to be missing and several key parts, such as the rack and, I think, the rear light have been strapped in place with duct tape, as any self-respecting guy would do if his light fell off and he had to find a reliable way to re-fasten it.

So naturally I stopped to snap a few photos and, when I moved around to take a shot of the forward quarter I saw this. Pretty classy, eh? Ordinarily I’d make fun of any motorized vehicle in such an advanced state of decay, but in this case I want to applaud the owner for keeping up with the parts that are falling off by replacing them with even better parts. This is not just a scooter mod, this is a work of art in progress. I hope I catch sight of it again in a few months to see how it’s coming along.

Today is the first day of my last week at the bank! I’m still debating myself as to whether that’s a good thing or a very, very bad thing.

When I reminisce about the adventure we went on after I retired from the Air Force (exactly five years ago at the end of this month!) and came back to the States, the excitement of those days is still fresh in my mind. There was quite a lot of uncertainty in it, so much that I lay awake on more than a few nights wondering how we were going to get by, but I’m wired for worry. It comes naturally to me. After sun-up we were on the move, heading to the local branch of the library, where we had time reserved on their computers to submit the applications we’d prepared the day before, then used the rest of our time to search for new vacancies. I didn’t have time to be worried then, and the thrill of doing something completely new was just amazing. That’s when it seems like a good thing.

But there are still those nights ... I’m wired for worry, remember? ... if I spend any time thinking about what a stinkhole the economy’s still in, I get into a deeply-worn rut wondering if the excitement of this job search is going to be anywhere near as amazing, or just plain terrifying instead.

I’m hoping to secure employment somewhere outside the world of finance, by the way. I think I’ve neglected to mention that. My bad, sorry. The banking gig was enough of a challenge to be fun while it lasted, but I’m looking for something completely different this time. My goal is a career change so complete it will utterly eclipse the last one, the one where I retired from a life-long career as a non-commissioned officer in one of the most powerful military organizations on the planet to become an administrator and troubleshooter in the cubicle maze of a basement office.

I’ll let you know how that works out. Watch this space.

In Mouse-Catching News: Boo was acting all funny Saturday night, jumping around and chasing shadows across the floor. That’s usually the kind of thing Bonkers does, else My Darling B wouldn’t have taken much notice of her. “Whatcha doin’, Boo?” she asked, and when Boo turned to look at her, B noticed a mouse’s tail hanging from Boo’s mouth, just like in the cartoons.

I was in the bedroom so I didn’t see any of this, but I did hear B hollar, “Oh, gross!” Then she called for help when Boo spat the mouse on the floor. I arrived on the scene just in time to chase the mouse across the living room floor and stick it in a jar. It was playing dead until I reached for it, then took off like a shot, heading for the hallway with me in hot pursuit while B struggled to hold the cats in check.

B doesn’t like mice in the house but would rather not kill them if she can help it, so when we catch one, or the cats do, we take it to a nearby park and release it. B took this one to a park just up the block in an empty applesauce jar to let it go, then came back and, just as she was beginning to relax again, Bonkers brought a mouse up from the basement and started chasing it around the living room!

Unfortunately for Miss Mouse, B couldn’t get to that one in time for a live release. Bonkers beats them up pretty bad chasing them around, although they’re such small, bouncy things you’d think they’d be able to handle that a little better than being inside a cat’s freaking mouth! When B finally got Bonkers to let his prize go it was limp as a noodle, not playing dead at all. The applesauce jar was only a temporary holding spot on the way to the trash can for that little furball.

P.S. Today is the longest day of the year. Tomorrow will be six minutes shorter than today, and the days will continue to get shorter until December 21st, when the number of daylight hours will be roughly double the number of S.A.D., bloodshot eyes on my pasty-white face. How can it be almost July already?

In the category of Wish I’d thought of that.

It’s as simple as duct-taping an empty soup can to the frame of your bike. Zow! You’ve made your bicycle even greener than it was before. I love it.

It’s genius, pure and simple.

Big Pete asked: So what do you DO with the soup can?

Ah, yes. That wasn’t entirely clear from my initial post, was it? My Darling B asked me the same question. Timbo actually called me on the phone, a device he avoids using except in extreme circumstances, to ask what the hell the can was for.

You plant a tomato in it. I’m sorry, I should have either babbled a bit more about it so that I eventually got around to describing that, or taken a better photo.

Big Pete: I see. I thought he was gathering rain water or something. Not that I think a traveling nursery for one tomato plant is any less puzzling.

I so want to be out on the patio this evening, enjoying the cool, evening breeze that’s finally come along to reward us all from enduring the long, hot, muggy day, but going out there right now would be like diving into a swimming pool filled with Bowie knives packed together so tightly that the ends of their blades all point up. Why? Because we’ve had so much rain over the past three days it’s brought the mosquitoes out in swarms that settle on every square inch of exposed flesh as soon as you step into the open from the shelter of your back door.

My Darling B went out to her garden just before dinner, determined to bring in some leafy greens for our table and as many pea pods as she could pick and take to work for lunch tomorrow. She lasted about ten minutes. Safely watching her from the inside of our screened-over dining room window as she did the happy slappy dance, I was truly impressed that she lasted so long. She must have collected at least fifty bites in that short time, five every minute, or I’m a lying bastard.

So there’ll be no kicking back in the yard this evening, no matter how much I’d like to slouch down into one of our camp chairs with a tall, cool mojito in hand and watch the evening sky fade from blue to indigo to black. I’d be bled dry so quickly that the most accomplished medical team on earth, armed with a bottomless blood supply, would be powerless to revive me.

I probably bring this up every time I start talking about mosquitoes, but here I go again: Are you old enough to remember the days when the city crew would drive a truck through your neighborhood with an industrial-strength fogger mounted on the back, spewing a thick, white cloud of insecticide over all the yards and houses, and all the children would drop whatever they were doing to chase the truck and dance through the lethal cloud as if it were the most benign plaything ever? I still haven’t developed any malignancies that I know of from doing that, have you?

And another thing: When a mosquito gets into my bedroom at night, why’s he so fascinated by my ears? He’s got the whole, great big house to fly around in, and yet the one place he wants to be more than any other is in my left ear, and sometimes in my right ear. He’s not trying to bite me, because guy mosquitoes don’t do that, so it’s not like I should even be on his radar. Does he think my ear is the way out?

I finally finished The Great Influenza, a history of the Spanish influenza pandemic. Very cheery book. Millions died, nobody quite got the hang of a vaccination, and the message throughout the book was “The next pandemic is on the way!” You should read it.

Back home, I found a copy of The Right Stuff while I was fishing The Great Influenza out of my backpack. I’d been reading The Right Stuff up until I found The Great Influenza at the thrift store and made the mistake of opening it up to read the first few pages, see if it was any good. It was, so The Right Stuff got put aside, the last ten chapters unread.

Until yesterday. What a great book. Finished it off over my lunch hour. So for right now I’m between books and poking through the thickest volumes on our shelves for the next tome to attack. But I needed something light and fun before bedtime last night, so I picked up H.G. Wells’s The War Of The Worlds and got stuck on the first page, reading the opening paragraphs over and over. It’s like poetry:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.

I love Saturday. Any day you wake up and can decide to go back to sleep for another hour or two, or however long you feel like, is not just a day worth living, it’s a day worth loving. Can I hear an amen?

We were a little late getting to the market this morning because we both felt like sleeping in a little later than usual. I didn’t head for the kitchen to start the morning coffee until shortly after seven o’clock, and we didn’t hit the road until quarter past nine. There are some things you just can’t rush.

As it turned out, we didn’t get even so far as the end of the street before I realized something wasn’t quite right with the way the car was handling. I had to crank the wheel to the left to keep it going straight, definitely something I didn’t want to do for the six-mile drive into town. A quick walk-around after parking by the curb found the problem right away: the right front tire was almost completely flat. Changing it out cost us another twenty minutes.

Then, finally, we were on our way. We filled a basked with meat and veggies at the market, filled another with all manner of good foods and sundries at the co-op, but our weekly trip to the thrift shop was almost a flat-out bust except for the nifty platter My Darling B found buried amongst the china. We have almost as many platters as we have plates now. “We should start eating off platters,” B suggested. “Why not?” I agreed.

It was muggy and hot today, the kind of day when it would be best to crank up the air conditioning, grab a cool drink, push back in a recliner and read a book until the sun went down. I got as far as the first step, but as usual I got distracted and never did get around to the second step before I was doing something else.

“Something else” was yard work. There’s a corner of our yard, under the mulberry tree, where some volunteer raspberries have sprouted and begun to grow up, and I’ve recently acquired a taste for raspberries, so I’ve been encouraging them to grow.

Trouble is, there’s quite a lot of creeping charlie, night shade, wood violet and garlic mustard growing in the same patch of ground. I don’t mind having any of those growing in our yard, but in the past week we’ve had a little more than four inches of rain, and in our part of Wisconsin every quarter-inch of rain translates to at least a million mosquitoes. During the day, all those mosquitoes hide away from the heat under the leaves of whatever plants they can find, so that overgrown corner of the yard was one huge mosquito party.

In order to pull up all that undergrowth, I would have to dress up in long pants, a long-sleeved shirt and, just to make sure I didn’t end up looking like a smallpox victim the next time I went out in public, I’d have to throw a net over my head, the kind you see some bee keepers wearing. B bought one a year or two ago when the mosquitoes were really thick in her garden. Wearing all those clothes on a cool day that wouldn’t have been a problem, but on a day that’s muggy and on the hot side of eighty-five degrees, I didn’t have to spend much time in the yard before all my clothes were soaked through with sweat and I was gasping for breath.

I made three trips to the compost heap with our wheel barrow to haul away all the undergrowth I pulled up. It was thick and wet but came out easily in clumps. All I had to do was gather it up, hand over hand, and pull, throwing it over my shoulder as I worked my way across the patch. I thought it would be an epic battle but the hardest thing about it was enduring the rivers of sweat that ran off me, soaking every inch of my clothes.

After about an hour of that I was done and could go inside to peel off my clothes, which was almost more work than tearing up all that undergrowth. Then I sat in front of one of the air conditioning vents, sucking down pint after pint of ice-cold water, for about a half-hour until I felt normal again.

First: Christopher Walken dances! No, it’s not the Fatboy Slim video, although that’s a lot of fun all by itself. This is Mister Walken lip-syncing Let’s Misbehave before he tap dances his way through a strip tease, from the 1981 flop Pennies From Heaven. Stick with it all the way to the end, it’s worth every second.

And now, onward into drivel!

Dear Democratic National Committee: You’re pissing off the independent voters with your telemarketing script. Two of them, anyway.

Mister McChuckletrousers called Our Humble O’Bode on behalf of the Democratic National Committee this afternoon and My Darling B picked up the phone on the second ring instead of screening the call as we normally do. We get calls from telemarketers all the time, even though we’re theoretically on the don’t-call list and we tell every single one we speak to that we’re not interested in their products. We don’t try to be rude, we just tell them no, thank you. You’d think they’d take the hint after a few of those, but they keep calling back, so we screen ninety-nine percent of all the calls we get.

But B was expecting a call so she picked up ... and was treated to a hard-sell pitch from Mr. McChuckletrousers. When she could get a word in edgewise (we wait until they take a breath to jump in, rather than rudely interrupt) she told him thanks for calling but we wouldn’t be able to make a donation today.

I’ll say this about most telemarketers and soliciters: Nine out of ten times, that works. You tell them you can’t make a donation and they thank you and move on to the next call in their queue. They’ve got a quota to meet, after all. This dorkwad from the DNC, though, wasn’t going to be put off so easily. “We’re not asking everyone to make large donations,” he said, “a small donation would help us out, too.”

Not that it was any of his business, but B explained that money was a little too tight in our household right now to make a donation of any size to his cause.

“Whatever you could afford would be just fine,” he said. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want the Republicans to get control of Congress again, would you?”

Whoops. Wrong thing to say.

“Look, buddy,” B told him, “I’m an independent. I vote for whomever looks like the best candidate, so don’t assume who I would and wouldn’t want in office.” And it’s not exactly like the Dems have done a bang-up job changing anything after pumping us full of hope, either, she wanted to add, but didn’t. “My husband just lost his job and we’ve got to pay the mortgage on what I make, so we won’t be making a donation, okay?”

You’d think that would have pushed him back a bit, but you’d be wrong. “Well, there are other ways you can contribute,” he said, changing to a new tack and taking a big breath to launch into who-knows-what.

“Thanks,” B jumped in, “I’m expecting a call, so I’m going to hang up now.” And she did.

I don’t know if this would make anyone in the DNC re-think their hard-sell, but here are my two cents:

I can see why the DNC might think we’d be a soft touch for a donation or two. We’re both rather progressive when it comes to our politics. I think the federal government should provide basic health care for everyone, for instance. I don’t know how, but I sincerely believe it could be done at no great increase in spending, and without too much bureaucracy. I also think we should get our military the hell out of Afghanistan and the Middle East. Lend them whatever diplomatic help they need, but pull out our soldiers and refuse to sell them arms.

I said I think these things could be done. I even had some hope we would be seeing changes like these after the last federal election. I know it’s hard, bordering on impossible, to make big changes considering the political climate in Washington and across the nation, but so far I’m not overly impressed by the changes the Dems have made. And my opinion of the Dems sinks even lower when they call Our Humble O’Bode on Sunday afternoon and try to shake down my darling bride for money after she politely tells you we haven’t got any to spare.

If you must call, please don’t call on the weekends. We like to relax on the weekends, and the clanging of telephone bells all afternoon makes us cranky. Cranky people don’t give any money to anybody.

And, when someone tells you, politely, that they won’t be able to make a donation, don’t suggest making a smaller donation. That makes us cranky, too. See above for the result of making people cranky.

Synecdoche, New York is easily one of the top ten most baffling movies I’ve ever seen. I would have to watch it at least twice more to claim I knew what was going on in this story about a guy who either directs or produces stage plays, but I would rather jab myself in the eyes with a screwdriver than watch even one scene again. “Jumbled” is the kindest word I can think of to describe this mess.

The movie opens with a scene with the protagonist (very aptly described by any word that sounds like “agony”) Caden Cotard, the director/producer, rolling out of bed with worry on his face. He always has worry on his face. He is perpetually worried about dying from a mysterious medical condition he may or may not have. Although he certainly acts like a hypochondriac, several visits to various doctors imply that he is genuinely sick. He even manifests some weirdly divergent symptoms and eventually walks with a cane but, by the time these emerge, his life has veered wildly off-track from reality into la-la land.

Less than an hour into the movie, it’s not only impossible to tell what’s going on, it’s also impossible to tell what might be real and what’s a figment of Cotard’s imagination. For instance: Cotard’s wife, an artist who paints portraits so impossibly small that visitors to her exhibitions must view them through magnifying glasses, leaves him and takes their daughter, Olive, with her to Berlin. That seems to have actually happened to him. When he flies to Germany to visit Olive, the confrontation he has with her nanny veers into weirdness but might have actually happened. Later, he finds Olive’s diary and begins to read. At first, it’s about her life with Cotard. Then, impossibly, it’s about her life in Germany. Her childhood diary is filled with entries from her adult life, and by reading it Cotard learns that Olive becomes a tattooed stripper and dies because the tattooed flowers on her arm are dying. Or something. Did you follow that? Me, neither.

The whole movie is like that, building layer upon layer of weirdness. After winning a grant to produce his magnum opus, Cotard literally builds a replica of the streets of New York inside an impossibly large warehouse, a set on which he can stage every moment of his life. And because the production of this play is itself a significant part of his life, he builds a replica of the warehouse, inside of which is a replica of New York, inside of which is the warehouse, and so on, shrinking (or expanding ... if the distinction matters at this point) into infinity.

I tried to keep track of the various threads, and labored mightily to figure out which layer he was on from scene to scene, but after forty-five or fifty minutes that required way too much effort. Worse than that, I already desperately wanted the movie to be over. I don’t dislike movies that are weird for the sake of being weird, but when they make me want to give up trying to follow the plot, to say nothing of forcing me to threaten to claw out my own eyes rather than watch them again, I start to feel the weirdness has gone way past the point of being useful.

Well, here it is, my first day home after the termination of my position at the office. The whole day’s my own, yet somehow I have a whole week’s worth of work to do. Funny how that happens.

“I wish I could pay you to stay at home and be my house husband,” My Darling B said to me as I drove her to work this morning. She doesn’t know how much I wish she could, too.

Let’s start a list of things I’ve got to do, just for giggles:

• unload the dish washer, then fill it up again; how pointless is that?
• wash a Himmalayan mountain of dirty clothes; how two people can make such a mess is beyond me
• clean the cat pans; these are so smelly now, the cats don’t see the point in covering their shit any more
• load up the weed whacker with a new spool of floss and go absolutely crazy in the yard
• clean up the garden shed, which looks like a three-bedroom house that’s been turned inside-out by a Cat Five tornado
• pet the cats; this sounds trivial, but it turns out this task cannot be ignored whenever one or both of us is at home during the day.
• clean the bathroom; the less said about that, the better
• demolish the tomato trellis that’s been leaning against the side of the garage ever since I put it there, out of sight, after gluing it together wrong
• sweep the dead leaves out of the garage that have been piled up in the back corner since last fall
• take the tire that went flat on me Saturday morning to the garage to get it patched; can’t Toyota make anything that doesn’t break?
• take a bike ride; the day’s too lovely not to
• pull weeds from the herb garden in my copious spare time
• drink coffee while doinking around on the internet

I guess you can see which end of the list I started on. Making good use of my time, yes sir!

My goal today is simple: Fix this fubar attempt I made to replace a window in the garage two years ago. And to chop that tomato trellis to pieces. Two goals. My two goals today are simple: fix the window and chop up the trellis. And clean the bathroom. Three! My three goals! Okay, among the goals I want to accomplish today ... wait, I’ll come in again:

The window was rotten all the way around when we bought the house. Not a great big deal, I thought. It’s just a garage, right? But it was in such awful shape that my do-it-yourself gene kicked in and the next summer I knocked it out and replaced it with the least expensive vinyl window I could find at the local hardware store.

The rough opening for the window isn’t a standard size, though, so I had to knock together a frame from two by fours. It turned out all right, but when I nailed it into the rough opening I didn’t push it back far enough. The way it’s in there now, I can’t put any molding around it. The frame should be sunken into the wall at least an inch or the window will look more like a picture of a window hanging from the garage.

When I fixed the frame in place I used nails big enough to be tent pegs. I don’t know why. Probably because it felt really manly to beat them into the wood with my biggest hammer. Tearing them out would take me a whole afternoon and I’ve never worked up the ambition to do that, until now. In the meantime I mitered some cedar planks and nailed them around the gaps to prevent the Merry Little Breezes from blowing snow into the garage during the winter, and so it didn’t make the garage look like a hillbilly shack. There. That was a big improvement, wasn’t it?

First things first: Let’s chop that tomato trellis into teensy-tiny little bits.

I made it out of PVC pipe and glued it together with PVC glue, a glue so powerful that it sort of melts the plastic pipes and joins them together molecular by molecule. Once you’ve glued them together, there’s no getting them apart. So, I looked around the garage for something that would quickly and easily slice through PVC pipe and, what do you know, I found an electric reciprocating saw! I think I borrowed this from my uncle Jim last summer when I replaced a couple windows in the back of the house. Guess I should get that back to him now, huh?

The great thing about a reciprocating saw is that it’s like a hyperactive hunting dog: it can’t wait to get to work. When you grab the pistol grip on this bad boy, you can’t help but wrap a finger around the trigger; there just isn’t any room for you to put your index finger anywhere else. Why’s that important to remember? Because if you pick it up by wrapping your hand around the grip, the weight of the thing will force the nose down and you’ll pull the trigger. It’s as inevitable as death and taxes. I must’ve picked up this thing half a dozen times and it cranked itself right up. How I still have all my fingers I don’t know, but I do.

If you’re not clear on why I’m cutting a perfectly good tomato trellis to pieces, assembly didn’t exactly go the way I planned.

Okay, back to the window.

The first thing to do is cover over all the gaping holes between the window and the rough opening. My window is thirty-six by thirty-six, but the old window was about thirty-nine by forty. I bought the replacement off the shelf, and the shelf didn’t have any that were the right size, so I went with a smaller window, figuring I would fill in around it. Two years later, here I am, filling in.

I just happened to have just enough half-inch plywood to do the job, and a table saw to rip it into custom-made widths. Part of the reason I didn’t do this last year or the year before – a really big part of the reason – was that I would have had to do all this cutting with a hand saw. Ever ripped a length of plywood with a hand saw? If not, here’s something you can compare it to: Put a chair in your yard, grab a broom, sit down and use the broom to row the chair across the yard as if it were a canoe. Go on. I’ll wait.

Here’s something else I couldn’t do very easily before: Cut the mitered corners on brick molding.

I have a miter box, of course. Every guy does. I think they come strapped to toolbox saws as a bonus. “Buy the saw – get the miter box absolutely free!” I’ve even tried to use it a dozen times in my life, give or take, but they’re such a huge pain in the ass that I avoid it whenever I can.

Then, at an auction about four years ago, I managed to take home an awesome miter saw. It was a hand saw mounted on a miter gauge so it was still powered by my basic issue Mark One Biceps, but it made mitering a whole lot less like being stretched on a rack by the Inquisition. (I’m going to keep working the Inquisition into this post so you’ll remember to go back and watch the video.)

Even better: I stuck paydirt at another auction just two years ago when I put in the winning bid on a powered miter saw. I can set the cut to any angle I want, and the circular saw will slice through a two-inch-thick length of brick molding faster than you can think, “Oh, shit, I’ve cut my damned thumb off!”

Cutting all the mitres on four ordinary pieces of brick molding would have ordinarily taken me a couple hours, but with the powered miter saw it takes me ... a couple of hours. I’m not sure how that happens, but at least I don’t have to do it with a hand saw any more. And I get to make a lot more noise.

This looks like almost the same photo as the one before, but it’s not. I’ve cut up some more brick molding, mitered the corners and nailed it into place to fill in the gaps between the window and the outside ring of brick molding.

I’m not sure why it’s called “brick” molding, in case you’re wondering. It’s one of those homebuilding terms that you never stop any of the people at Home Depot and ask them to explain even though you wonder about it every time you go buy some. Brick molding is just pine stock milled so it’s got a fancy shape that makes it look like a picture frame when you use it to frame around your windows. You can get brick molding made out of vinyl, too, but it’s more expensive. I’m only framing a cheap-ass window in a garage so I wasn’t too worried about buying the premium stuff.

After all the molding was cut and nailed into place, all that remained was to caulk the hell out of it. Used up a whole brand-new tube of caulk to fill up the various gaps and cracks around the moulding. Most of them were pretty modest, but a couple were really very wide and drank up all the caulk I could crank out of the tube. Again, I’m not too worried about making it absolutely weatherproof because it’s a garage window, and because it’s been somewhat less than weatherproof for more than a year (see first photo). I have the feeling I’ll be re-caulking this window again fairly soon.

I should paint it, too. Brick molding comes covered in primer but should be painted. I had to buy a strip of unprimed drip cap, that bare strip of wood at the very top of the molding, because the only drip cap they had in stock that was already primed came in twelve-foot lengths. I don’t think my car is twelve feet long from bumper to bumper, and I wasn’t going to drive home with it on the roof, flapping in the breeze. I suppose I could have broken it in half over my knee so I could get it inside, but I didn’t want to and they can’t make me, nyah.

But I’ve been working on this all frigging day now, almost five hours straight under a hot sun, with a forty-minute break for lunch, so what I really feel like doing right now is not picking up a paint brush and mucking around with that. What I really want to do is take a long shower, then maybe sit on my ass with a book, or maybe even take a nap before I have to go pick up My Darling B from work. After I finish up doinking around on the internet so you can read all about my do-it-yourself home improvement adventures.

Don’t forget the Spanish Inquisition. There. I’m done now.

Just as I was sitting down to lunch, the phone rang and I picked it up without screening it first. I’ve got to stop doing that. Wasn’t thinking this time. I was half daydreaming, my mind long-lost in the days when a ringing phone meant that somebody you knew was calling. Remember when?

Actually, I was expecting B to call me. I’d left her a funny story on her voice mail and I was sure she would ring back to comment on it, so I really did think I was getting a call from somebody I knew. Silly me. It wasn’t B at all, it was Austin from Something Something Home Mortgage Brokers, who wanted to know if I had given any consideration to refinancing my mortgage.

As it turned out, I had, just a few months ago. “And I’ll tell you something that’ll make this a real short conversation, Austin,” I told him, “unless you can offer me a rate of less than four percent, a refinance just isn’t in the cards for us, thanks anyway.”

“Really? Why’s that?” he asked. I’m pretty sure he knew the answer, but he couldn’t just let it go, could he?

So I gave him both barrels. “Because home prices have tanked in this neighborhood, Austin, and we still owe quite a bit on the principal balance. Our rate is already pretty low, so unless your company will offer a rate of less than four percent, or no closing costs, we can’t even consider refinancing.”

“Well, what’s your rate right now?” he asked.

Wait, what? What part of my explanation didn’t he get? I thought I laid it out pretty clearly, didn’t I? Was there anything in my explanation that would have lead you to ask me, Well, what’s your rate now? What’s that got to do with it?

Okay, Austin, let’s see what you’ve got. “The rate on our mortgage is six and a half percent.”

“Well, we can offer you a thirty-year with a rate locked at four point eight,” he countered.

“And what kind of closing costs?” I shot back.

“I’m not the loan officer, so I couldn’t say –”

“Ballpark figure,” I prodded.

“Really, I can’t quote closing costs because I’m not a loan officer.”

“I’m not trying to be short with you, Austin, really I’m not,” I cut in, “but if your company’s closing costs are typical, then we can’t afford refinancing our home mortgage with you if the rate is greater than four percent.”

“Maybe we can work out some points,” he said, changing tack. “Are you a veteran?”

Work out some points? “Yes, I’m a veteran,” I answered. “We can’t afford to pay for points either, Austin.”

“Oh, you are, good,” he said, ignoring the second part of my answer. “Thank you for your service. It’s a great thing to serve your country and so many people forget to say thank you to our veterans, even on a holiday weekend like this one. My dad’s a veteran, too, from the Vietnam war, blah de blah et cetera and et cetera ...”

Okay, first of all: Austin knew I was a veteran the same way he knew I had a home mortgage: He looked up the recorded mortage at the register of deeds office, and the mortgage papers were made out by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. Sort of a huge giveaway, there.

Second of all: I don’t like it when other people play the veteran card to wheedle money out of me. Offering a hand in thanks, then trying to sell me something while still holding my hand, is about the weaseliest kind of thanks anyone could give. Makes me a little, um, cross.

And third: He was still trying to get me to refinance my mortgage! He asked me how much the balance was on our loan, he asked how much we made a year, and he wanted to know where we worked. It’s like he wasn’t listening to me at all, except to mine me for more information he could use to keep his sales pitch going.

So when he asked me how much I made and where I worked, I figured, Screw both barrels, that’s kid stuff. I’m shooting you in the face with a bazooka, Austin.

“Actually, my position was eliminated. I’m currently unemployed.”

Crickets. “Ah,” he said. Awkward pause. “So sorry to hear that.”

Finally got your attention, Austin, didn’t I? “So you see why we can’t afford to refinance right now?”

He allowed as to how he did, and said he would update the system and call back in maybe six or eight months to see if our situation hadn’t changed by then.

Hey, that worked pretty well. I’ll have to remember to use that on the next guy.

Today I was looking to accomplish much more modest goals than yesterday, because I was tired. I was not looking to repair windows or mow every square inch of the lawn today. Today I wanted to accomplish goals mostly while sitting on my ass.

Hmmmm....

The laundry! Of course! In the past two weeks we’ve washed enough of our clothes to fill four laundry baskets. There was even a bonus load of clean clothes in the dryer. And as if that wasn’t enough, almost all the socks we own were in the “socks basket,” waiting to be matched and folded. Folding all that should take a couple hours to finish!

And what’s my favorite thing to do while folding laundry? Watch movies! I can sit on my ass, fold all the clothes, and watch a movie at the same time! How does accomplishing your goals get any better than this? Well, I can think of one way, but it was pretty early to be drinking beer when I was folding clothes.

I borrowed Band of Brothers from T-dawg several months ago. I don’t know why he’s let me keep it as long as he has. Maybe he’s forgotten I even have it. In any case, I popped the first disk in our DVD player and watched the first two episodes while I folded all the clothes, then I watched the third episode while I matched and folded socks.

This is one of the best screen adaptations of any book I’ve ever seen. I can think of only one other book I’d want to watch if it could be rendered as a twelve-part miniseries as good as this, and that would be the two-volume biography of Teddy Roosevelt by Edumnd Morris. What a bad-ass-o-fest that would be! How bad-ass? This bad-ass:

Would you pick a fight with that kid? I wouldn’t. I don’t know what that swim cap on his head is all about, but seriously, a freshman with muttonchops? That just begs you to say something stupid, doesn’t it? And it deviously draws your attention away from his forearms, which appear to be muscled with something similar to steel cables. If the scowl on his face isn’t fair warning, you deserve the tap on the chin you’d get for poking fun of this guy, and I’m pretty sure that if Teddy were to land one on you, that’d be the last thing you remembered for a while.

I seem to have rambled a bit. Hardly unusual, really.

Once all the clothes were folded and put away, I still had some time to do a little yard work before I cleaned the bathroom, a task I absolutely had to get done today but which I also wanted to put off until the last possible moment because, y’know, yuck.

Out in the yard, I grabbed a bow saw, a pruning shears and a hedge trimmer and went at the shrubs in front of the house first, because they’re easiest to cut and shape. Then, after I’d warmed up on them, I took a long look at the lilac bush on the edge of the yard to try to figure out what to do with it. The simplest thing would be to set fire to it and walk away, but I was sort of hoping to keep it around a while, so I put some work into it instead.

Its problem is that it’s horribly overgrown, and it’s growing wherever it wants to. I don’t think it’s ever been pruned since it was planted, if it was planted. There are quite a few other lilacs in the yard, so it might be a volunteer. What this one really needed was a professional with a lot of time and an endless supply of patience, but all I can afford right now is me and my strange ideas.

After a little thought I decided to lop off the lowest branches, then trim off the wildest-looking stuff on top with the hedge trimmer. It was a modest proposal, but it still took about a half-hour and I had to drag away a surprising amount of brush. I’ll probably have to spend at least an hour feeding all that crap into the wood chipper tomorrow.

There was just one other bit of yard work I wanted to take care of today: A maple tree out back had a couple low branches that were impinging on the back wall of the garage. They’d have to come off some time this summer so I could finish painting the house, and since I happened to have my saw out anyway ...

With all that done, I went back into the house and finished the last of Part Three of Band of Brothers before I had to cry uncle and clean the bathroom. Yuck.

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