Thursday, September 27, 2007

Giggidy-Giggidy

It’s been a tough few weeks for Chuckles—working too much, travelling too much and not enjoying it nearly enough, not sleeping well, not eating healthy.  On the plus side, a few weeks ago I was finally able to get a replacement for the now-broken CD player my uncle had sent to me when he stopped listening to it - five years old and out for the count; the new one is no prettier but one hell of a lot more functional, and the remote is friendlier too.  At the same time, I got a little iPod dock to enable direct output through my stereo, which is a great convenience - no more shuffling five disks at a time to keep the mix going, I can just play all my music with the click of a button on the remote from across the room.  The only onion in that ointment would be that the ‘pod itself seemed to be dying.

I had gotten it FOR FREE as a gift FOR FREE from a very very dear friend who, I think, had gotten it FOR FREE as part of some high-tech corporate swag he gets as a high-tech corporate swagmeister.  I’ve had it since April 2004 and we’ve played it pretty much daily since then - mostly while out and about, occasionally on vacation with portable speakers and most recently through the iHome clock radio setup and the new Kensington pod-dock for the stereo.  Most all my music lives on it and I felt pangs of hardship when the battery started dying faster and faster and the damn thing became effectively unusable.  I could barely ride the bus to work without draining a full battery charge; I’d given up going running with it as it so quickly gave out on me. 

I’d taken it to the local Apple store for a diagnosis; they confirmed that it was a battery issue and I’d need to send it back to the company.  This happens with sufficient regularity that they’ve developed a special program for battery issues - you pay about $70 US and send in your old busted-battery ‘pod, and then they send you back a reconditioned identical one with a fresh new-style battery.  It’s a trade-out program and I was ready to trade, so I sent in my beloved musicmaker, carefully wrapped in cushiony bubblewrap, with authorization to charge me the agreed-upon fee.

A few days later I got an email - Apple couldn’t replicate the problem and was sending my ‘pod back unrepaired.  When I checked the “repair status” link it told me that I didn’t have a battery problem.  Then when the package was delivered, containing the good ol’ ‘pod securely packed in foam and bagged in plastic, an enclosed form letter told me that I had an unrelated hardware problem and nothing would be done about it. 

I was frustrated and confused.  I tried to use the ‘pod again but it still drained out a full charge in less than an hour - much less, if I scrolled the menus at all.  It was a 40-month-old 15-gig machine, far off the tech forefront, but I still really wanted it to work.  I didn’t understand the paperwork that told me why it still was broken so I made another appointment at the Apple Store and brought it back yesterday for further assistance. 

Staff members were sympathetic and looked my paperwork over carefully.  I’d brought it back in the box in which Apple had re-shipped it to me; it clearly hadn’t been damaged in transit.  As I explained the situation and the symptoms, naturally, the battery didn’t exhibit the quick-drain I’d reported - but there was no skepticism about my claims.  They favored me with a brow-furrow and told me they’d see what they could do. 

Several minutes passed, marked mostly by very pushy people charging the “Genius Bar” counter (where they offer tech assistance and where I was waiting) with snippy demands for immediate attention and assistance.  I waited as patiently as I could, peoplewatching and reading notes out of my little notebook.  My “genius” came back agreeing that a replacement was in order but that, sadly, my old 15-gigger was obsolete and they didn’t have one to trade out.  Would I be okay if they gave me a 30-gig instead?

Yes.  Yes I would.  Thanks for asking, but Yes. 

My genius went away, then came back and told me they didn’t have a 30-gig for me.  He sent me over to another genius, a genius captain no less, who would process my trade-out.  As I waited across the counter from him, occasionally checking my watch but biding my time, bitchy whiners kept coming up to pester and compain at him.  He always answered courteously but I could see he was getting annoyed.  I tried to keep out of his way.  He eventually walked away to get my replacement unit but it took him a long time to get back to me. 

“I’m sorry,” he explained, “You’ve been really patient and you’ve done everything you could to resolve this.  We appreciate how much of your time and energy this is taking.  However, I’m not finding a 60 gig unit for your upgrade-upgrade.  I’m going to upgrade your upgrade-upgrade, if you’re okay with that.  How about a video-enabled 80-gig model?  Black or white?”

I suppressed an audible gulp.  “Black,” I replied, as firmly as I thought prudent.  I was not about to look a gift ‘pod in the docking port, but I was going to hold fast to my identity as a patient but still unfulfilled customer.  Within a few minutes he’d finished the deal and handed over a small cardboard box containing more potential for portable music, video and photos than I’d ever imagined I’d have.  “One more thing,” he mentioned as I signed the receipt.  “Since your repair slip wasn’t just suspended but was actually closed, I’m not going to open a new work order.  That means this replacement will be made without the standard $70 charge.  Thanks again for choosing Apple.” I looked him in the eye and somehow worked up the breath to utter the words, “You’re welcome.” And he was. 

I charged my gleaming new ‘pod for a few hours at my desk and spent some of my time last night loading my full 18 or 19 gigs of music onto it.  Previously I’d had to turn some of my music “off” because it didn’t all fit my little old iPod.  Now, it’s all on, baby, 24-7 and 28.25 in February.  I even loaded in some new stuff, and listened to it on the bus on the way to work.  The display is bright and unscratched and full of brilliant color.  The sound is clear and crisp and nice and loud.  The interface is a few evolutionary steps beyond where I’d started, and the damn thing looks super slick. 

So that’s my happy story for yesterday.  Sure, we had ants invading the kitchen, and the boy threw tantrums morning and evening, and the overall stress level is still somewhere between my eyebrows and my saggital suture, but dammit, I scored 65 new gigs of fully-powered media capacity.  I think I may still have some karma to make up on the universal tallies, but I’m probably going to come out ahead on this one. 

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Shipshape, PLUS EXCITING UPDATE

Oh man, this has not been an easy day so far.  Leaving the gym this morning I noticed that, for the first time in months, it was still dark at 6:30.  I got back home to find that we’d had an ant invasion and spent the rest of the prep-time portion of my morning working with Kel to rectify things, poison my kitchen, and get Z fed, diapered and dressed as he very thoroughly tested our patience and boundaries in every way he could possibly imagine (and he’s an imaginative little cuss).  I got to work unshowered, unbreakfasted, and uncalm. 

How about this: I’ll try to share a moment I experienced a month or so ago, when I noticed what had apparently been before my blinkered eyes for years on end already but which I had never, apparently, seen.  That’s the sort of thing that might help me overcome my present state of irritation, and maybe even encourage me to find a way to enjoy myself today.  It’s worth a shot, anyway.  So:

Written as my bus pulled up:

I’ve stood at this stop hundreds of times over dozens of years and more, and, looking across the street, I’ve only noticed the blocky entrance grate and the big garish triangular metal marquee and the place where the Red Gorilla sign used to be stuck the to façade of the building but it’s now just a gluey smear on the wall.  That’s all I ever noticed – and now, today, I look up across the street and the sun is casting just right; and the storefronts to the left and right are both somehow darkened in shadow, but this building directly across the street from me is brightly lit, and on the wide section of wall between the two simple, unornamented top-floor windows, I discover a medallion frieze – a circular vignette of a sailing ship with sixteen sails, three masts, billowing waves rolling and breaking under her prow, a wide sky of magnificent cumuli.  I can almost see it in color, though it’s all just concrete and flat beige paint.  It seems to bell right out from the blank plaster face of the blank empty building; it seems to be sailing right out at me. 

All those years, and I never noticed it.  And today, goddamn it, I finally did.  I wonder what else I’ve overlooked. 

UPDATE: I wrote that little bit of text a month or so ago, and just transcribed it to the blog yesterday morning.  Late that afternoon I headed home by way of a brief visit with a friend at our favorite hanging-out park, and then headed toward the nearest bus stop - the one across from the little maritime frieze I’d just described for the world.  The building was shrouded in scaffold hung with cloth, but I was able to discern through the construction chaos that the top floor of the structure, where the little ship made its motionless journey for decades, had been completely removed.  I could see on the two adjacent buildings, signs of demolition going up several feet on their in-facing walls, and what had been a modest four-story office structure was now a three-story tear-out site.  Above the third floor, the roofline was jagged and rough, with rebar occasionally poking out to prod the sky like skeletal fingers reaching up from some Wes Craven grave.  The ship had sailed.  I’m just glad I caught it while I had the chance. 

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Club?  What Club?

The First Lesson of ____ Club is: Never Talk About ____ Club.

* Book
* Turkey
* The ®

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Use Deadbolt for Safety

One more site visit down today… one more road trip… and thankfully, no special weirdness to report.  Earlier this week I stayed over at a strange, creepy pseudo-Tudor motel in Sideways country, with an authentique olde englysshe tap roome (three tvs showing Cops, one showing QVC) and a computer-operated player piano and a dank little dungeon of a fitness center and carpets that seemed to be woven directly out of Febreeze.  But that was fine compared to my visit last week to the central valley, where I stayed at a very ordinary-looking place that, by the time I left after just one night in a jumbo-deluxe two-bedroom suite, I was pretty sure was haunted, possessed, or at least protoplasmically compromised.  Why, you ask?  Here are my TEN REASONS I SUSPECT MY MOTEL WAS PROBABLY HAUNTED:

* Mysterious knocking sound from inside my seemingly empty in-room refrigerator
* Humorless waitress at adjacent restaurant apparently a cyborg (or undead)
* Net-enclosed rubber-floored “sport court” in center of parking lot clearly a restraining cell for the violently insane
* Out-of-service elevator most likely filled with blood
* Dark grey (almost black) feral cat would have crossed my path had I decided to make a sharp left to stroll through motel landscaping
* Pay-Per-View movie queue contained no movies - not even porn
* Check Out Time: “Death O’Clock”
* Inexplicable wetness around toilet when I first checked in ("haunted" being the lesser of possible evils here)
* Bed comforter not remotely comforting
* Flesh-eating shower soap

I’m now looking forward to one more day trip to LA for a commission meeting next friday and then maybe things will calm down a little.  Then again, maybe they won’t.  That’s how this supernatural stuff works, right?  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go alone, in lightweight clothing, without the vaguest justification, to the area of greatest possible danger.  The power of Motel compels me! 

Thursday, September 20, 2007

The Moralizing Brownie, or, The Dessert of Repentance

Happy Yom Kippur!  No, that came out wrong, but then again, wrong seems about right for tonight.  I’m skipping services – work demands my participation in a field visit tomorrow and Kel is out of town on a girls’ spree in the Windy Apple.  I’ve been so freaking busy lately that I’ve barely been able to keep myself hydrated, much less update Mr. Blog here in any meaningful way.  However, given that this is a day of fasting for those who are observing it, and that my last post referenced weirdo jewcookies of my own creation, maybe it’s a good time for me to tell you about the other cookies – not made by me, nor even consciously selected for my larder – cookies that have taught me an important lesson about desire and restraint.  I therefore hereby share with you as follows:

I knew when I ordered them that I’d be doubly glad when they came, because by then I’d have completely forgotten about them – and of course I was proven triumphantly correct.  For truly, what greater thrill, what more sublime joy, what deeper profundity of pleasure, is there than that which arises with the words, “Dude, your Girl Scout cookies have arrived”? 

It’s not that they’re the best cookies in the whole world, though they are undeniably very good in their way.  It’s more like they’re archetypes of various platonically ideal cookies.  Their Thin Mint is the thin mint; their Samoa is the samoa – and don’t give me any lip about nobody else having a samoa in the competition, and the same for Tagalongs too.  These are classic cookies and I salivate just at the thought of my very own annual stack of brightly colored cardboard boxes, each with its heartwarming cover-photo of girls getting all scouty and healthy and confident.  Pure buttery goodness, packed into convenient plastic trays and delivered to my door by a friend with some kind of tangential relationship to a Girl Scout somewhere.  Anyway, once a year I’m asked if I want cookies, and I always do, knowing as I place the order that I’ll have forgotten about them entirely by the time they arrive.  That’s part of their special sweetness – they come as a windfall, and the cookie you do not anticipate is the most scrumptious cookie of them all. 

Or so I thought, until this year’s delivery caught me by its anticipated, lipsmacking surprise.  O frabjous day, the cookies have arrived!  My Thin Mints!  My Samoas!  My – what the hell is this?  Did I order an additional box beyond the two I always get (TMs and Samoas being the indispensable duo in my persnickety opinion)?  Sometimes I will throw in a third box on top for variety – a Do-Si-Do or some Tagalongs, you know, for giggles.  And since I’ve bought and paid for them untold months ago, they’re effectively free!  Free mystery cookies!  The bounty of nature’s abundance indeed exceeds even itself!

So which extra goodie did I get this time, I ask myself?  The dark green color of the box reveals nothing on its own.  I pluck it from the stack for a closer look:

Brownies!  Yay!  Wait – what?  Oh.  Sugar-free brownies. 

Hm.

Can these actually be any good?  I didn’t actually order these, did I?  I mean, I’d never have gotten them on my own behalf, I don’t think.  They’ve even got high cholesterol, just with aspartame instead of authentically sweet, sweet sweetness.  Inefficiently individually wrapped in clear plastic envelopes, several dozen more-than-a-mouthful chunks of ostensible chocolately goodness huddle at the bottom of the box. 

But come on, they’re from the Girl Scouts!  The chicks who brought me these Thin Mints and Samoas!  I gotta love’em!  Right?  Right?

Or will they suck?

I pluck a brownie in its hermetic wrapper from the box and open it, expecting a rich chocolate-butter aroma – but there is not even a whiff of cookiesmell.  My finger explores its surfaces, hoping to find the moistness that distinguishes the richest, most delicious brownies – but my groping leads only to disappointment, as the briquette is as dry as sand.  Signs bode poorly but still I soldier forward to administer the ultimate test: I pop a dry, odorless, sugar-free Girl Scout brownie into my mouth, and I masticate. 

The adobe cakelet shatters into chunks that evenly disperse with Brownian motion to every hidden corner of my mouth, where they absorb every molecule of water in my whole damn head.  I taste no chocolate.  I taste, at best, cardboard – and not even very good cardboard at that. I’m beginning to choke on pulverized muffinrubble; I need a big swig of something to extract even a scintilla of flavor out of this apparent anti-dessert.  Once I do eventually taste it, though, I can see why the flavor hid – it’s an anemic, ersatz flavor, uninspiring and bland, with an aglucogenic bitterness on the back end.  It’s hardly worth the effort to chew it. 

What a disappointment - Girl Scout brownies that are basically inedible!  I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but it’s hard to argue with an astringent mouthful of arid powder.  So I get me a slakedraught of tapwater, force the mealy dessicake down my throat, and try to move forward and put all the ugliness behind me. 

The next day, struggling with disbelief, I assay another SFGSB.  Again I’m immediately forced to question whether it even qualifies as a food product, or is better categorized as construction material. Consuming it takes so much work and gives so little satisfaction that a simple cost-benefit analysis dictates my course of action: after only a few chews I spit what’s left of the purported brownie into the sink (where it produces a particularly unsightly mess) and dump the remaining contents of the box right into a garbage bin.  I don’t want to risk the amnesia of desperation, that I might mistakenly sample sub-par baked goods yet again at some point in my potentially munch-addled future.  Then I break down the box itself and add it to our recycling pile, removing any trace of its taint from our household. 

These are not acts I undertake with an easy mind, but I feel compelled.  I love the planet and I hate waste.  However, when somebody screws up a brownie like these ones got screwed up, it really justifies my violation of my green ethic.  I’ll throw away food when it’s this bad, and I don’t care how many Girl Scouts – or even Brownies – I’m insulting when I do it.  Some things can’t be left to linger.  For god’s sake, there are children at risk here. 

MORAL: A bad free cookie is still bad. 

Saturday, September 15, 2007

New Year Meditation, Plus Can I Even Call Them Cookies?

Hey welcome back and Happy Jew Year to each and every one of you.  My new year festivities consisted of two main activities: cookin’ and congregatin’.  For the former, I found a provocative recipe for special traditional Rosh HaShana cookies (to be enjoyed during this festive season) – a thick heavy dough, cooked by being boiled in simmering honey and sugar (seasoned with ginger).  Can I tell you?  As great as it sounds, it just does not taste that special.  Think “taffy-ginger paste balls.” Whets the appetite, eh?  Plus, if you take your eye off the pan for one goddamn second, it boils over all into the underside of your rangetop.  And honey’s just as easy to clean off a neglected rangetop underside as you’d expect it to be. 

Then again, we went back to Chochmat HaLev for services and they were, as always, delightful and uplifting.  At one point they were chanting a prayer simultaneously in Hebrew and English, almost the same tune, and it got right into my head till I didn’t know which language I understood and which I didn’t.  There was a swingin’ combo on stage, the traditional trio of female canters, and lots of colorful clothes and people everywhere.  It was, in a nutshell, reviving, and the centerpiece was, as always, Rav Avram’s drash (dharma talk).  At the risk of overstepping my bounds, here are my notes of what he said during services, so you can get a whiff of the sublimity as well:

“Shana,” as in “Rosh HaShana,” means both “year” and “change.” Change is the only constant in our lives.  Change can result in deep depression, as when it comes as a result of illness or cruel realities.  But Rosh HaShana reminds us that change is joyful and brings blessings!

Our work is never done.
Our play is never done.

That’s the message the spiritual mentor of my congregation set as the focus for his devotions during this season.  I might as well glom onto it for good measure.  This coming week I’ll have one more overnight trip for work and then it might settle down enough for me to get through the rest of everything I need to accomplish by the end of the month, by which time it all needs to be accomplished.  Meantime, I’ve got some sticky pasteballs to choke down.  Come on, blog peoples – they’re gingerlicious!  Oh forget it I’ll eat’em myself.  May your new year be as sweet as they are, and significantly less pasty. 

Monday, September 10, 2007

Scoping Things Out

Jules, bless your soul; of course you get your kaleidoscope story, with a big new year’s hug.  It’ll be rosh hashona before I get a chance to update here again; I’ve got to do some travel for work and then will go straight from a site visit in Sacto to new year’s services in Berkeley.  That said, Jules has exhibited her typical wisdom in requesting a story about hidden delights and revived wonderment; these are excellent new year’s themes.  So let’s have at it, shall we?

I suppose there’s nothing that everybody likes, without reservation, no matter how benign and delightful.  Balloons, flowers, merry-go-rounds – whatever you’ve got, there’s somebody somewhere who’d be much happier if it just did not exist.  Some people get creeped out by butterflies; some find music depressing.  Nothing’s good for everybody.  However, I bet kaleidoscopes come close. 

Because, really, what’s not to like about a kaleidoscope?  They’re quiet, odorless, discretely proportioned.  You don’t want to take a peek at’em, you don’t have to.  They just patiently sit and wait to pour a riot of fractured colors into your eyeballs, on command, free of charge.  Non-toxic.  Renewably-powered.  Dolphin-safe.  I mean, really, what’s not to like?

It was just this line of thinking, or one very much like it, that led K and me to choose to collect kaleidoscopes way back in our respective halcyon days.  We were engaged to be married and doing it on what we thought were our own damn terms.  I’m not sure anymore exactly what that meant, but I do recall that we chose not to register.  Don’t make us tell you what to give us, we simpered superciliously – you don’t have to give us anything if you can’t come up with a single idea yourself. 

But we did wonder what we should say to some of our nice friends who did want to give us something we wanted, but didn’t know what that was.  We were ruminating over this question one day at a mall when we found, at a tchochketorium, an elegant stained pine box propped open to display a gorgeous kaleidoscope of highly varnished inlaid honey wood.  The glistening shaft was substantial in length as well as girth, though not unwieldy; packed along with it were six interchangeable disks, some transparent, some translucent, each offering a different target for the kaleidoscope’s mirrors of mystery.  There were seashells and rhinestones, sparkly stars, multicolored slow-dripping oils… a whole half-dozen universes of optical amazement.  Boxed multileidoscope kicked ass. 

It was expensive, but we coveted it so we made it ours with mutual simultaneous feelings of freedom and guilt.  And as we broke it open in the car to play with it in the parking lot before even coming back home, we’d already decided: if people didn’t know what to give us and they asked for a suggestion, we’d suggest kaleidoscopes.  We’d collect them.  We had decided to be kaleidoscope collectors, and damn but it felt right. 

So from that day forward we bought kaleidoscopes, nigh unto about eighteen months later, at which point we regrouped. 

We already, by that time, had acquired a solid half-dozen various kaleidoscopes and prismascopes, wood and metal and leather, simple and sophisticated, none of them particularly miniaturized but none garish or overblown, a friendly, homey nucleus of a collection… that sort of felt played out already.  It wasn’t that we didn’t like the scopes we’d gotten so far – the were each beloved and cherished in their own right – but when we considered getting another one from time to time we were already having trouble justifying expanding the collection.  There were way too many other cool things in the world to get to restrict ourselves to yet another preciously handcrafted diffracting rod.  Kaleidoscopes and us decided to start seeing other tchochkies.

The collection was never broken up, but we had to get rid of a few pieces that just fell apart.  The remaining exemplars wound up in different places in our household – some of them out on display, some in a drawer somewhere, and some all put away in their fancy-ass boxes.  Anyway, we kept our scopes, but we gradually found ourselves paying less and less attention to them. 

Later, it became now, or anyway the very recent past.  I was tidying up a little in a room where guests would soon be sleeping on the floorspace that the Sesame Street RC Construction Site Truck Set theretofore had occupied.  And in that room, there on a shelf, under the chess set with the cool Korean chess dudes: the original pine kaleidoscope box.  I broke it out. 

It opened, as ever, easily.  The thick foam padding, true to form, had defied aging and still tightly embraced its several contents: a gleaming inlaid cylinder and its six interchangeable screw-on caps.  They stood, stacked in a row below the shaft, like medical specimens on archaic slides, each a riotous fistful of color held in suspension for all those years.

I pulled out the old original kaleidoscope and screwed on the seashells-and-beads lens, raised it to the light, gave it a spin with the still-familiar brass spinning-knob.  It was all still there; though it had been left to its own devices for how many years, the colors leapt out into my eyes as if I were the first ever to pick it up.  I didn’t put it down for quite a while.

I may have aged some in the interim – I’m not saying one way or the other.  The kaleidoscope collection as a whole is certainly a little worse for wear.  But the primary kaleidoscope that lives in its wooden box, is still firing strong on all six cylinders.  I’m not a kaleidoscope collector anymore – that is to say, I’m no longer actively collecting kaleidoscopes.
This one seems to be all the collection I actually need, and it’s obviously got a lot more colors left to show me.

Friday, September 07, 2007

Brainpearls: Dribbleglass Edition

Feeling beset… tired and eyesore… gonna have a busy busy weekend and a very confusing following week… yet I feel compelled to get something up on the old ‘hutmobile.  So: here’s some shattered danglers from the dribbleglass of my mind:

Point: Today we heard a story on the morning radio news about an Army General named Jones, and his big loud report.  Kel, listening, raised her hands querulously with a vague look on her face, and uttered in a sing-song voice that she really, really wanted… something.  She didn’t know what.  “It’s sort of a general jones,’ she explained.  I came THIS CLOSE to blowing muesli out my nose.  (but in the good way.) (which is to say, I actually meant “muesli.")

Counterpoint: A few days ago K was gearing up to clean the kitchen AGAIN and mumbled in her exhaustion, “I wish we had beer that would make me awake.” No laughter at this one – just a sober and appreciative assessment of how great life would be.  Only if.

Antipoint: Some of the streetcars in town are “historical” examples from other cities.  Some of these are Milanese (thought unfortunately not minty, which is a condition to which all things Milano ought to aspire).  These Italian streetcars still have some of their unintelligible signage, like exit signs and some cute ads that are still in some damn imperial roman code or something.  My favorite one, however, was over some of the frontward seats that seemed, to my clumsy eye, to say in translation: “Reserved for war invalids and labor mutilees.” I tell ya, the old Europe is the same as the New Europe – mutilated and invalid.  Makes our “These seats must be vacated when needed by the elderly or disabled” seem a bit milquetoast.  Then again, I can whip up one hell of a plate of milquetoast. 

Nonpoint: If I were going to try to create a new broad-appeal mascot for a tobacco product, along the lines of Joe Camel but less “adult”, I think I’d go with Tarzan Nicotine.  There’s probably some kind of “brachiation” joke there that implicates the respiratory system but I’m too tired to generate it. 

Next week I’ll be out a lot from work, which really sort of screws me because there is a lead donkeybutt-worth of steaming deliverables on my desk, waiting for me to embrace it in my powerful grasp.  Eurgh.  I’ll try to get you a real post in the meantime.  What do you think, the smiley lady, the crappy cookies, or the kaleidoscopes? 

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Day Off My Eye

This week Z’s daycare is taking a few days of vacation, so I stayed home with the little muffin yesterday to do some bonding.  It was a highly positive experience.  I usually get just half of one day a week one-on-one with Zach, and just as we’re settling into our funyun-eatin’-and-Maury-watchin’ groove, Kel gets back home and I have to leave for half a day’s labor at Mr. Lashstripe’s Trireme.  So basically, a whole day to play and cavort with my two-year-old was a precious gift.

How did I spend that gift?  Here’s a basic – not exhaustive – rundown of my yesterday:

* To the gym at 5:45 for an hour on the bikes and machines
(Kel got the boy out of bed and out of a heinous diaper – thanks sweetness)
* Pay bills; update Quicken
* Fill tires on kiddie pushbike (including removing tires and hubcaps) (since that raised it nearly an inch off the ground, Z no longer fits on it – we’ll have to wait longer before he can ride)
* Find/cross-check adoption agency paperwork that we need to complete in conformity with prior submissions
* Order High Holiday tickets (yay rosh hashona!)
* Get my doctor’s office to refer me to a dermatologist for a lingering patenoogie
* Watch funny pet and soccer videos with Zach on YouTube
* Take the boy out for an hour at the playground
* On the way to the playground – visit two banks to buy him some US savings bonds with funds received for that purpose a long time ago; also visit Irish bakery to get two scones, a sausage roll, and six shortbread cookies, with a small/strong coffee of the highest quality
* On the way home from playground – extensive shopping at produce market
* Once home, put away produce and chop up a papaya that got crunched in transit
* Get Z to eat a significant portion of a healthy lunch
* Repair egg-dart jigsaw bracket insert for Z’s little mid-century table (ingeniously using an adjustable crescent wrench as a wood-vise to hold pieces of laminate in place as I re-glued them, and then re-using 60-year-old holes to reinsert brads.  YES that is what I said.)
* Tickle-wrestle Zach, who copiously drools on me with delight and glee
* Three mile run with Z in the jogstroller through GG park
* Two loads into and out of dishwasher
* Two sinkdrainers of handwashing
* Two point five loads of laundry (towels are still unfolded in the dryer)
* Read Z to sleep (with great progress to report on sleep disruption issues)
** BONUS: got to spend some time with the wife.

Today, the sun rose through orange haze – fires burn to the south, and the inlaws are expected this evening for a four-day-or-so visit.  I cannot say that my work here is done, but I can at least admit that I’ve done about as much of it as I can expect myself to accomplish under the circumstances.  Hey, labor day is over, wankers – get back to work!

Monday, September 03, 2007

drumhead

He really looked like a very normal dude, with a grey sweatshirt, understated blue jeans and clean white sneaks.  He was tall - six-plus, and big in the arms and wide across the belly; his big plain face was cleanshaven and unmarked and his hair was cut too short beneath his white ball cap to reveal any personality one way or the other.  He was white, in so many ways.  And at his feet sat a robustly-carved drum, a foot across the head and standing nearly a yard tall, a well-tamped patina glowing off its hide drumskin. 

He settles down with his incongruous drum at Montgomery and nestles it between his feet.  Before we reach Kearney he’s already starting to rub his fingers over it, tickling it to the rhythms of the street and the riders around him.  He is beginning to tap it, subconsciously, reflexively, before we reach the stop at Stockton, but he cuts himself off as he senses he’s becoming generally audible. 

For a moment, anyway.  His restraint leaves him almost instantly; within a few seconds his fingers are once again seeking out that smooth taut drumhead.  His thumb comes down with unintended vigor and a sharp report rings out in the cabin of the bus.  His hand stops moving, hovers uncertainly over the drum.  The bus stops at Union Square.  He grabs the drum and leaves without a glance behind him.  I don’t know if that was really his stop, but he clearly couldn’t sit on that bus one second longer.

And just to round things out, here’s a photo taken from my front window a few weeks ago.  Technically, I’m three floors up.  That water was geysering way higher than my roof.  Finest crystaline Sierra Nevada water a city would want to drink.  Excuse me while I spritz the sky....