January 2003 Archives

Do remind me to tell you about the drunken bacchanal I went to last weekend . . . drunk people, poetry and haggis. As soon as I get back from skiing tomorrow. I promise.

I have encountered a lot of weather, having lived in the Northeast my entire life, but I don't think that I have ever before encountered conditions where it was 8 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and foggy. As I drove down the road this morning, there was a low, thick fog in the stream valley, and more down by the river. Very odd. Not sure how that could have happened. Believe it or not, I have actual meteorologists in my employ, so I could have asked what the heck was going on. Perhaps I'll demand a memo.

Budget. Reorganization. Departures. Retirements. Transitions. No money. New program to supervise. Stress stress stress. Fourth-grader in tears over the state test. And a kick-ass high score on the Alcatraz level of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. Biggest issue is Hannah, who is feeling the pressure to perform on this stupid test. We've assured her that they're not really testing HER, they're testing the school, but unfortunately almost all of teaching in fourth grade is now about the test. The pressure is extremely high this year because last year our little neighborhood school scored best in the entire region, so there's tremendous anxiety about how it will fare this year. That's not supposed to be what this was all about. This is a terrible perversion of a legitimate state interest in ensuring children come out of school with an education. I'm no expert in educational matters, and I don't know how better to do this, but this is wrong. I've got a girl who is extremely bright, works hard and does very well in school bursting into tears over this stupid test. The current thinking is to yank her out of school this Friday for a day of hooky with Daddy. I think skiing may well be involved.

An overacting festival: Barbara Stanwyck in "Stella Dallas," followed by Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce." Both fantastic. By the way, Barbara Stanwyck was a serious hottie who lit up the screen in her day, probably most famously as the designing grifter in "The Lady Eve", but most seductively in "Ball of Fire," which presented Gary Cooper in a male archetype of the role now played by Rachael Leigh Cook or Julia Stiles: an ugly-duckling stick-in-the-mud until someone thinks to just take off those darned glasses, and then all is right with the world! Plus, we'll teach him some hep talk. Unfortunately, "Ball of Fire is hardly ever shown, so tonight it's "Stella Dallas." I'm gonna be glued to my Indo-board in front of the tube.

For those few who keep track of such things, yes, I am still getting quite a number of hits every week from people looking for information on glycerol ester of wood rosin, all because I mentioned that it was polluting my Powerade one lovely summer afternoon. And I get a LOT of hits on my genealogy site for the histories of Crown Point, Keene, North Elba, and Jay, some key counties in northern New York that figure in my family history. But the strangest hit I've had in a long time came today from someone who did a search for "duckhunting girls". It's true, I've used both words, but not together. Until now. The web is a weird thing.

Rebekah, listening along with us the other day to an Erasure song from twenty years ago, stops singing and asks, "Why would anyone want to break the chains of love, anyway?"

While it's still there, fans of Mr. Zevon should check out the article from yesterday's New York Times Magazine: In His Time of Dying. I'm not sure if registration is required; if you can't get it, e-mail me.

If there's anything that makes me feel 15 again, it's walking along a frozen river's edge. This was the Hudson, not the Mohawk of my youth, and I could hear the ice crack, threatening, as the tide lowered beneath it. Instead of using a tree branch to test the ice, I had very expensive trekking poles. The feeling of being out there on the edge of the frozen expanse, the crackling of the ice, the sound of the slate ice shattering under my poles and my snowshoes -- it was just the same as when we were kids growing up along (and, often, in) the Mohawk River. I would have loved to have been able to venture out there, but that would have been deadly -- tides and ice don't go together. So instead, I just stood and listened to the river.

When we were younger, the Mohawk froze solid, sometimes right down to the bottom, and it was very safe to walk out there. Other times it would be perfectly thick in the middle but sketchy on the edges, and after a day of playing out on the ice, skating for miles or playing hockey, we would try to step up to the riverbank and would plunge into the cold water. (That happened quite a bit, in fact, and I still feel the effects of frostbite in my toes.) We always carried big sticks out on the ice, or used our hockey sticks to chop at anything that looked questionable. Sometimes you wanted to break through with the stick so that at least your feet would hit something more solid below. The scariest adventures would come during the thaws, when there was perfectly thick ice but it would start to break up and pile up behind the Western Gateway Bridge. Then there would be water moving among the ice, and it would refreeze but there would remain fault lines in the ice that were hard to predict. Sometimes you'd put a foot through some thin ice, and you'd hit water that was sitting on top of more ice -- very slippery. But there was nothing like a day spent out on the ice, in a place that only exists for a few days each year, a place where no one else was. Sometimes it would just be miles of sheet ice like this picture, clear and skatable and beautiful; other times there would be gigantic blocks piled up, making ice caves and other dangerous attractions for 15-year-old boys.

So, Saturday afternoon was like that. Girls had a birthday party to go to, I invoked selfishness and went down to Schodack Island State Park to snowshoe. Did some vigorous work through deep snow as well as walking along the river's edge. There was deer sign everywhere, and I found some significant owl pellets (fur only, no bones -- must not have been done with that yet) and flushed the owl that had made them. The tremendous beat of its wings scared the hell out of me. Did about an hour and a half of hard hiking, snapped a few pictures, went on back home. Yesterday, nice skiing in super conditions, took the girls over on a trail that has never had enough snow to be open before, and that was a lot of fun, just a nice little jeep trail through the woods with perfectly fresh powder. I love watching them ski. Today, about 6" of new snow in the morning, plus it's cold again, currently a whopping 5 degrees.

I know, it's boring to keep on saying it, but this ain't Alaska, and we're not really set up for days and days spent around the 0 degree mark.The furnace is getting overworked, and the Hudson is now pretty much completely frozen, so the oil barges are stuck down at Rondout. We're supposed to climb up around 20 tomorrow, which will be a start. That said, I have no sympathy for people complaining about how cold the walk from the parking lot is when they're dressed in a summerweight jacket, no hat and blue jeans.

Googlism for cold:

cold is cold is cold??? cold is it in ithaca? cold is the evening breeze cold is not a cold cold is too cold? cold is here to stay cold is the sea cold is the antarctic? cold is not to be encouraged as a tournament theme cold is this cold is "cold"? cold is it ? cold is it outside? cold is used cold is it cold is too cold cold is the absence of heat cold is siberia? cold is the grave cold is key to a smooth bicycle ride cold is an infection of the upper respiratory tract cold is more than cold is it where your'e at? cold is a hard pill to swallow cold is bad news for belugas cold is cold??? it?s really a matter of perspective cold is still a big factor cold is not a cold by dr cold is the interior cold is it? hawaiians declare a two cold is here to stay temperatures will remain about 10 degrees below normal by kevin aldridge the cincinnati enquirer cold is cool? cold is winter cold is it? 60 degrees f californians put on their sweaters cold is this? cold is the absence of heat cold is everything in an alaskan winter cold is cool cold is the heart cold is it outside? mailing list cold is used here come the low tech stuff cold is both a network sniffer and a protocol analyzer cold is it? it's pretty chilly here cold is much better cold is cold? posted by cold is relative cold is creepin' in cold is a killer by saturn_169 cold is it outside cold is the grave by peter robinson cold is critical cold is a viral infection of the upper respiratory tract cold is more than a cold cold is it? it is so cold i saw a lawyer on the street the other cold is one of the most annoying cold is 'mech's best friend cold is less likely to get cancer? cold is it where you are?

Sometimes it's a shock to be in the middle of a conversation, a one-sided one at that, and find the other person has just wandered off. Physically or mentally. And you go on and on and eventually realize no one's listening at all. Sometimes you know you're going to lose the signal, and you can hear it disappear, but sometimes there's just no clue. Very disorienting.

It's 0.1 degrees, and I've got to drive a state vehicle to Cooperstown today. If there's no heat, I'm going to start a little fire on the floor. That's what Natty Bumppo would have done.

Thought I'd better Google that name to make sure of the two p's, and this brings me the distressing news that there's some character in Kentucky practicing as a "country lawyer" under the name Natty Bumppo. I wasn't really prepared to see a link that said, "Natty Bumppo, Attorney at Law." I'm providing no link to that mess. As it is, I'm going to get weird hits for the "leather stockings," I just know it.

It is bone-chillingly cold here, and if you've never lived in a cold clime and don't know what that means, or if you've moved away and forgotten, it means this: as you walk down the street, your nose hairs freeze. You become aware of the bones in your feet. It can actually hurt to breathe. Anything down to 20 degrees is just cold; below 20, it's really cold, and you constantly feel the heat being sucked from your body. Even inside, in a nicely insulated house, you feel the effect of constantly losing heat. Stepping outside, you are instantly aware of exactly where air can reach skin.

There is a particular sound that comes with this kind of below-zero cold, too. The ground is hard and your feet creak as they walk on it. Your jacket hardens. The sound of cars is muffled. There is a certain hush to this kind of cold. There is no wind and, ironically, it is brilliantly sunny, which is the only thing that makes it bearable. The snow cover is packed and hard, and the ice on the driveway is there for the duration.

I went for a snowshoe hike in the woods on Sunday . . . the quickest way to overheat in these temperatures is to snowshoe in full winter regalia. It wasn't long before my hat was off and my jacket open. Even in this cold, the snow was giving under my snowshoes, and in the deep woods it was a slog. There was a little streambed, and here and there, seen through holes in the snow, there was still water running underneath. There were crystals, gigantic crystals like ornamental snowflakes, in the streambed where little bits of water had frozen. It was intensely beautiful. And there wasn't a sound.

The creator of the Jackalope has died. I'm going to need a moment.

No idea what to do for supper last night; we've eaten everything in our repertoire, twice. Then polenta springs to mind. I make a wonderful polenta. I probably have the right cheeses, or at least enough cheeses, and I know I have cornmeal. What I do not have, I learn, is my polenta recipe, which came from a bag of Hodgson's Mills cornmeal. Best polenta recipe, hands-down, but I can't find it anywhere. Searched the web, and Hodgson's Mills is the last commercial entity on the planet without a website. There's a website for a company in Brooklyn that makes exactly ONE kind of refrigerator magnet (and a superstrong kind it is, too). There's a website for potted meat. But no website for Hodgson's Mills. And no other polenta recipe that quite looks like mine. Well, says I, I've made this a lot, I know everything but the measurements, so I'll wing it.

All I can say is, no matter how much water you think you need to add to cornmeal to get it to boil up, add some more. I ended up with a burnt mess (yes, several of the recipes extolled the virtues of double boilers, but I've never had to do that with my recipe). Separated out the burnt from the unburnt, added more water, went on. Cheese -- let's see, enough mozzarella for about half a layer, and then . . . no other hard cheese. None. Except: Swiss cheese slices. Desperate now. Into the food grinder they go. Oh, shit, I forgot to mix the jalapenos in with the cornmeal. Okay, add them as I'm layering. Temperature? Let's say 450, and let's guess somewhere between 12 and 18 minutes. In the end it came out fine, though, in fact it was quite tasty, but I think I need to find that recipe again.

Word of advice for those who find themselves with a heap of unused, boiled cornmeal: it will not serve as cornmeal mush for breakfast. Just trust me on this.

Note to Chimera fans: Yeah, sure, it's a great browser. But it won't load the Blogger homepage. Or a bunch of other stuff. I think if we had just outlawed free software, we'd probably have a workable web browser by now. Take away the profit motive, let Microsoft kill off everyone else, and we're stuck in permanent beta.

Two things: war and cats.

Listen, there's plenty about this administration that brings out the libertarian in me. Ashcroft, the Communications Decency Act, the Patriot Act . . . a free and secure society does not need these things. And I will admit that the relentless drumbeat against Iraq has lacked specificity -- we know they've done wrong things, but you'll just have to wait and see what they are. But here's the thing:

Good people fought long and hard to rid a scourge from this earth, many of them the same kinds of people who are protesting today. They went to every corner of the earth, worked with people of all races and languages, and to every one of them they promised one thing: "You will not die from smallpox. Your children will not die from smallpox. No one will die from smallpox." They did not qualify that promise by saying, "Unless some madman decides to use it as a weapon, and we decide that we need to talk about it until he unleashes it." War is awful and I don't want it, but we've been using the talking weapons against Iraq for many years now without much success (and with appeasers in this country decrying our inhumanity, because the lightweight sanctions we've imposed only hurt the innocent. From which the only conclusion possible is that we should do nothing, which is absurd.) I'm personally of the belief that anyone who is working to bring smallpox back to the world should not be allowed to live. Period. Whatever it takes to get to that point is what it takes. Threatening Iraq with a good talking-to isn't going to get us there.

Okay, now to tick off the other half of my readers. I've been scanning a lot of blogs lately, and many of them feature a fair amount of personal information about the blogger. That's nice, that's part of the point, and it's enjoyable. But I keep running across people who call their cats their "kids". Cats are wonderful, I love them, I wish my allergies allowed me to have one. Love dogs, too. Don't happen to believe you need to pick one over the other. But for people who think having pets is just like having children: get over yourself. It's not. This is why: I last had a cat when I was 15. It was a beautiful tortoiseshell, affectionate but independent, and it lived mostly outdoors. It was run over while playing in a pile of leaves, and it died. I was very upset for a while. Then I got over it. That's why cats are not kids.

Zoiks! I promise, I'll be nicer next time.

The odd thing about blogging is that you really do want people to read what you've written, even though you know it's truly not that interesting. But still . . . so now and then I try to promote the blog and link up to other things. Yesterday I linked up to Geourl, a sort of geographical locator (but not a mapper, quite) for blogs, and within hours I'd been looked up through it by about 10 new people. Well, shut my mouth!

Cold morning for ski lessons, and I think instead of blowing $25 on and hour and a half of skiing while the kids are in lessons, I'm gonna strap on my snowshoes and hike up the hill. Anything to keep warm. Plus, I've got those fancy Leki trekking poles I've barely gotten to use, so this would be a good chance. Not that I wouldn't like to ski again, but it's going to be unsunny, so the saving grace of a morning on the slopes in single digits will be gone. Snowshoes it is.

Right now, the kids are in the living room looking at things under a very nice microscope my mom gave Hannah for Christmas, the kind with a screen so they don't have to press their eyes up against a lens. Bekah: "Air! I want to look at air!" Tangerine strings and cranberries have been a great success so far.

I know, I know, but we've been intensely busy, and tired in the evenings. Do you have any idea how many strings of grape lights a determined woman can put on one 6-foot tree? Still, the takedown is a bit easier than the up-put. Some nasty things are finally getting thrown out (nothing precious or handmade, don't worry -- the clothespin reindeer will survive). Apparently, the music to do this to is off-kilter Elvis Costello, meaning the "Bespoke Songs" collection of odd covers, and Anne Sofie von Otter's collaboration. Most of it is usually too jazzy and way too down for me, but today it was perfect for putting away ornaments with brilliant sunshine streaming through the windows and heating up the room, sprays of dust coming off the tree as I moved the branches. And I think it's also the perfect music to put behind my iPhoto slide shows, so that's the next thing to work up (currently, it's Sarah McLachlan's "Building a Mystery") (for those keeping track).

Okay, okay, I know . . . enough with the Kelvin joke. But that's what makes it bearable, because it's -7 on the creaky old Fahrenheit scale (and don't get me started on Celsius).

Yesterday it got up into the low teens and was very sunny, a perfect day on the slopes, and I went to Mount Snow and had one of my best ski days ever. I got in nearly six hours on the slopes, conditions were fantastic, and there was hardly anyone there. I took on some terrain I hadn't tried before and really did nearly the whole mountain except the diamonds -- I need to try those with someone who knows them. Some twenty-something flew off the lift with the admonition "Go hard! Take chances!" I didn't get a chance to explain the No Injuries Policy® to him, but I took him up on the first part. I got in a little bit of the taking chances part when four o'clock was approaching and the sun was sinking behind the mountain, the light got so flat that it was impossible to read any terrain and I had to go on the "keep it between the trees" theory. Otherwise it was a day of fast, good turns, more boldness going over the big mounds, and only one fall when I skitched across some ice above a set of moguls that I quickly got out of. I was tired last night but not sore, and today my body feels fantastic. Nothing better in the world than hard exercise in cold air and sunshine.

Second in a series of books that I wouldn't have been likely to read: The Virgin of Bennington, by Kathleen Norris. (First in the series was Nick Tosches's "Trinities," an international mob drug novel.) Tripped on this one in the stacks, and the Bennington connection caught my eye, though it turns out to have almost nothing to do with Bennington, other than that she went to Bennington College, which figures for about half a chapter in the book. It's the memoirs of a poet who was in the midst of the New York poetry scene in the late '60s and early '70s. Unfortunately, it is written with the sensibilities of someone from an earlier time, and the structure skips around mercilessly. She drops little bombs but they barely go off because she hasn't given them any context or elaboration: "One would hardly think that the publication of a small book of verse could be so disruptive, but Falling Off turned my life inside out, and made such wreckage of the year 1971 that it seemed a good idea to retreat at Christmas." No further evidence of the wreckage is forthcoming, and then she tells us very little of use about her retreat. I made it 90 pages, now I think I'm done. You would think that someone who was there when Patti Smith fused poetry with rock 'n' roll would have something more to say than "I learned that Smith had developed a unique style, rock poetry half sung, half chanted to the accompaniment of an electric bass. She left her audience exhilarated, and I rode the subway home believing more than ever in the power of art to illuminate and transcend the ordinary." Whatever.

The ice breaker came through this morning to try to keep the river open. About an hour later, you couldn't tell. With the ice, the river is very high, so we may be headed for some flooding around here. The ice breaker is fun to watch -- it's not all that big, but it makes a hell of a wake and really churns up the river, breaking up the ice layer into pancake ice. But this morning it's cold enough that the pancake just came right back together and refroze. Why do we care? Heating oil comes by barge. That's why. We need it most when it's hardest to get, like right now.

Had hits on the blog from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia this morning. No guess as to why. Odd, though.

Maurice Gibb's death was overshadowed by Pete Townshend's arrest, but let's take a minute or two to think about the Bee Gees. Yes, I know, I was there, and it is important to hate them for disco. It may have happened without them, and it may not have. Hip-hop may or may not have happened without disco. Hard to say. But there was some other stuff there, too, in the years before disco, and some of what they did really stood out. One of my earliest albums was Bee Gees Gold, which pre-dated all the Saturday Night Fever stuff, and was mostly simple, interesting songs sung in falsetto harmony. In the days before Walkmans, grocery store stockboys had to memorize music they wanted stuck in their heads, or else The Carpenters and other, far more insidious stuff from the grocery store muzak would creep in and invade your brain. So, I had Bee Gees Gold memorized, in song order, and could play it over and over in my head as an early form of white noise to block out the muzak. I want to make this perfectly clear: You must block the muzak, at any cost. (Joe Jackson: "In the supermarket there is music while you work / It drives you crazy, sends you screaming for the door / Work there for a year or two and you can't get to like it / I don't work in supermarkets anymore").

In any event, I had long since rejected the Bee Gees, sold the vinyl, atoned for my disco sins, etc. But there was always a long, rambling, intensely '60s rock-n-roll Eric Burdon and the Animals cover of "To Love Somebody" that I deeply enjoyed (from their way-too-much acid days, a double album with a grand total of 8 songs). Then last year I heard the Bee Gees do a live, acoustic version of "To Love Somebody" on Howard Stern, and it just blew me away. Simple, direct, beautiful (unfortunately, haven't been able to find a copy of it). Made me rethink their songs and let one or two of them back into my head. I used to say that I loved defunct bands best because they couldn't disappoint you (they hadn't invented the permanent reunion tour yet then, although the Beach Boys were pioneering it) -- you knew their stuff, knew when they had gone bad, and you could just stay away from the dreck. The same, then for the Bee Gees -- I know their awful stuff (and really, none of that SNF stuff has any lasting merit except as background music for period movies), but there was some awfully good stuff that came before that.

Enough of that.

Three degrees at the airport (no, not the baggage conveyor reunion of a '70s soul-sound band), 7.9 degrees on the outside of my garage. For Christmas I got a nice new remote thermometer, ostensibly so I can dress properly for running without going downstairs to check the other outside thermometer. We'll see when spring comes whether this gets me out the door more or gives me more reason to lie abed. I tell myself that I'm willing to run down to about 25 degrees, but I'm a lot more likely to do that when the sun is shining than in the pitch black. Completely different experience, thermally and emotionally. Unfortunately, I missed two perfect days for running last week because things came up at work. In fact, I got held up on Thursday by a couple of attorneys who needed to go over some things, and I reluctantly gave up my run to get these things done. Then, once we were done and I was on to another meeting, I ran into one of them in the elevator bank, with her gym bag and her running shoes, on her way out the door. I cried foul. It did no good.

In any event, the upside of being trapped by circumstance into two car payments at once is that I have two vehicles guaranteed to start in any weather, so there's none of that glug-glug-sluggish grind stuff in the morning when you wonder whether you're going to have to run to catch the bus and then figure out what to do later.

The G4 is running again, and I've installed OS X onto the other disc, so if I want to play with betas in the future I can do it there. Haven't had a problem like that in a very long time . . . lots of software that just plain doesn't work, but nothing that killed the system. Should have read the message boards, like I usually do, before I installed Safari. Oh well -- live, reboot, and learn. Tonight I need to install the replacement Zip drive, which shouldn't take half an hour. But one never knows.

My profession of love for Apple's new Safari browser was premature. Is it fast? Oh, it's fast. Is it sharp? Oh, yes, it is gorgeous on the screen (though I could live without the brushed metal look, but pages draw beautifully). Does it automatically install downloads and clean up after itself? Oh, it does all that, all right.

It also frags your system . . . and that's if you're lucky. The unlucky ones are losing hard disk data. I was cocky . . . when I had none of the bad mojo that people were experiencing with the previous build, I went ahead and blindly installed the newer build, which Apple said would take care of the problems people were experiencing. Then, ran Safari once, and OS X, which is pretty damn crashproof, started crashing all over the place. And then it wouldn't restart. Beta?!! It's not even alpha! So, my evening has been spent rebuilding the system. Didn't lose anything other than some preferences, but it was a major annoyance much closer to a Windows experience than an Apple experience. I'll report back on Safari 2.0; until then, I'll put up with the slowness of Internet Explorer or the inadequacies of Chimera. Right now, I'm posting on the kids' iMac. No matter what system you have, it's almost necessary to have two these days in order to keep things running.

By the way: cold? Oh, yes, it's cold.

It's 9.7 degrees out. That's Kelvin, kids, so bundle up!

The news about Pete Townshend's arrest just makes me sick. No matter how much I try to separate the art from the artist, there are some things that will color my perceptions. Hell, Roger Daltry running an aerobics studio colored my perceptions, so this certainly will. It's mostly just sad. Went through this art/artist confusion just a couple of weeks ago when I bought a DVD of "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" for the kids. They already love Pee-Wee, have had tapes of the Playhouse show for years, and yet had never seen the movie. And the movie is incredibly funny. But it wasn't so long ago that he was arrested again, and in this instance, it's really hard to accept the space between art and artist. When someone who focuses on children turns out to have ulterior motives, that's sickening and dismaying, and normally I wouldn't have anything more to do with it. And I'm concerned that at some point they'll hear something about the man who played Pee-Wee, and it'll be a shock or scary to them that they can't trust this character they think is so funny. Not sure how to handle that just yet, but it seems like I need to talk with them pre-emptively.

Had I mentioned that we're measuring things with the Kelvin scale this morning?

The weekend whizzed by. It started early, sort of, because I had a fantastically frustrating conference call on some litigation on Friday. It was supposed to be the settlement call, but the litigants got greedy and I ended up storming out of the room, yelling “We’re done! The State of New York is done!” In retrospect, it was probably pretty funny, but it didn’t seem it at the time. Came back up to my office, got a couple more things out of the way, and then dramatically announced that I had to either leave or quit, so I was leaving. My exec dep very sweetly called me a few minutes later to make sure things were okay, which I appreciated. It’s pretty rare that I’m a drama queen; it was probably pretty alarming.

So, I got home before the kids and plopped myself down with Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. I was never much of a button-masher, so doing required combinations is just beyond me at this point, but I finally unlocked a second level so I can pick up a few more skills and go back to the previous level and beat some things. Great game. Then the girls wanted to go to the school’s drama club talent show in the evening, which started at 6:30 and went until, say, midnight. At least it felt that way. It was all very sweet -- most of the talents involved lipsynching or singing along to songs I really never needed to hear, the top hits of the day and a bunch of country tripe. It took a very long time. There was a very long intermission with popcorn and soda and all that stuff, and then back in for Act II as we’re approaching bedtime. Bekah was getting quite restless, and the guy sitting in front of us had a serious gastrointestinal issue going on. To put it mildly. Not something I’ve experienced in a public setting in a long time. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and we went on home to fight over getting ready for bed.

On Saturday, I had to take Hannah out to deal with the problem with her skis. We had a lovely lunch together at a little cafe in Glenville, just the two of us sitting and chatting and have a delightful time. She’s such a spectacular little creature, bright and lively and considerably smarter than I was at that age. It’s inconceivable that she’s going to be 10 years old in just a few weeks. Then we went to deal with the skis, which proved a frustration. The place we rented them from had nothing to offer us in return, and wasn’t helpful at all. The issue with them is fairly evident on snow, but not so much on carpet in the store. I know somebody who knows the owner, and I could get it taken care of that way, but it really bugs me to have to do that. In any event, they would have replaced them if they had something, but they didn’t, of course, so I had to decide what to do. I didn’t want her to lose the chance to improve her technique in a season that’s likely to be long, so I ended up going somewhere else and just buying her a simple ski package at a decent price that I believe will get her through next season as well. Frustrating, though. And by then it was snowing like crazy where we were, so I had to beg off meeting up with an old friend I had been looking forward to seeing, but I had spent half an hour driving through fairly blinding snow. It wasn’t accumulating at all, but you couldn’t see a thing. Of course, as soon as we crossed the river, there was nothing. Ah well, next time.

Yesterday, skiing at Bousquet. First time I’ve been cold -- the wind was just howling. But everything is open this year, and they’ve got so much snow they set up a little tunnel for the kids to ski through on the way down Drifter, which is pretty cool. I hit some of the diamonds early and had a good time. Diamonds at Bousquet are primarily just steep, not extraordinarily tricky, which is fine with me. Anywhere else I’d stay off the blacks, but on my home hill I can handle them. Then we went to a birthday party that started at a skating rink. When all that was over, I was just done. Kids to bed, a little TV, then me to bed. Still more than a little tired.

Two movies this weekend. “The Good Girl,” which I honestly forgot that I had seen in a theater, but which was well worth a second viewing. Jennifer Aniston isn’t likely to turn into one of our great actresses, but she’s crafted herself a clever career in little movies doing characters that aren’t just extensions of her “Friends” character, and she was very good in this. Tim Blake Nelson gives off a scary kind of common, backwoods evil. John C. Reilly is the straightforward schlub he usually is. Best line is when Jennifer asks the brooding rebel-wanna-be “Holden” why his parents call him “Tom”: “That’s my slave name.” Also saw “13 Conversations About One Thing,” the first movie in ages in which Alan Arkin is given something to do. That alone would have been worth the rental. It’s quite good, a nice little interweaving of lives in a New York that doesn’t look quite like the New York that’s usually in films, which made it interesting. The neighborhoods weren’t so familiar, the street scenes not the ones we’ve seen in so many other films. The settings alone gave it a slight edge. There was a sudden shift in the timeframe for one of the stories that surprised me at the end, when it turned out that its timeline had played out well in advance of the rest of the stories. Maybe there were other hints at that and I had missed them, but it caught me off guard. But very nice little bit of filmmaking.

Music: Jill Sobule, “Pink Pearl.” Why has it been two years since I listened to this? Ditto for Southern Culture on the Skids, “Dirt Track Date.” I got all the Christmas discs put away. Now if I could just find the energy to deal with the tree itself...

Current favorite lunch spot is a little space up on Maiden Lane called Dave's. At Dave's they know your name because that's how they take your order. You give them a number and your name, and they call you when it's ready. They know their regulars. The woman at the register is a tattooed hippie chick, nearly original vintage. Very nice. Wide variety of offerings, including the mystical Italian Burrito, #42. As you're standing waiting for your name to be called, you can look at the wall of photographs of Dave's family. The story, according to the notes on the wall, is that Dave didn't know he had a brother and had never met his mother until he was 49. Dozens of photographs of his old family and his newfound family, including a pic of Dave and his mom on which someone has drawn a replica of Dave's mustache on his mom in order to show the family resemblance. You won't find this at a restaurant with a registered trademark for a name.

Websites and blogs that are primarily collections of links were real exciting back in, say, 1995. Even though I look at a lot of stuff on the web, I shy away from linking stuff here; it's just not that interesting. However, with the caveat that the server is quite slow, I think I would be doing a disservice if I kept The Dondero High School Symphony Band and A Cappella Choir's versions of Sweet's "Fox on the Run" and Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" to myself. So, click here and be prepared to wait. It will be worth it. The site it's from provides a different obscure and very slow-loading MP3 each day. Also, over at AimeeMann.com, under movies, there's a delightful video for "Ghost World" I hadn't seen before.
Everyone I know is acting weird or way too cool they hang out by the pool so I just read a lot and ride my bike around the school 'Cause I'm bailing this town-or tearing it down-or probably more like hanging around I got caught up in "Almost Famous" last night, which was an even better movie than I had remembered, and I had remembered it as pretty damn good. That geeky rock-writer wannabe was me (and a million others like me). "I'm a journalist. I write for Creem magazine." Everyone in it shone. There are some very sweet moments in it all, but my favorite scene in the whole movie is the one with everyone on the bus singing along to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer". Now I'll have to hear that when I get home tonight.

Aimee Mann is coming to town and, more importantly, we have confirmed babysitting. Very exciting. I've been quite enamored of her since Magnolia and Bachelor No. 2, which I listened to around the same time a few years ago. Her latest, Lost in Space, is a little softer and more subtle, but there's no one else doing what she does. She's openly playing around in Burt Bacharach's sandbox, but with a non-optimistic twist. And her voice is like no other. I've never been able to see her perform, so this should be great. Her lyrics and music are entwined and create a crystalline imagery, and if I just look at the lyrics, it's hard to see exactly why. It's the full product that works so well. Can't wait!

Who knows what came over me. Thought it, said it, there you have it. I think the weird thing isn't that I'm having thoughts about the big Game Over, but that I went almost completely without them for so long. When I was young and sick and my nights were full of nightmares, that feeling was never far away. I saw a fair amount of death when I was young -- I remember being shocked when someone in college told me she'd never been to a funeral. That was just inconceivable to me. From the time I was 6 until I was 18, there was a fair procession of the dead -- grandfather, grandmother, uncle, friends' father, best friend since kindergarten, two friends who were brother and sister, and a mentor. And then, when I was 25, my father. So mortality wasn't really too far out of my thoughts for a long time. When Hannah was born, it was as if something had been lifted and I just didn't worry or think about it any more. But for a little while now, it's been creeping back into my thoughts. There have been a number of "untimely" deaths around, not really people I know but people I know of, some a little older than me, some a little younger, and it sets me to thinking. Carl Hiaasen's latest book features someone who is absolutely obsessed with the ages at which notable people died -- I'm not quite at that level, but I'll be looking at an old movie and it will occur to me that everyone in the movie has died, that I'm looking at images of people who no longer exist. That's the kind of thing that gets to me. Photographs of children from a century ago, children who have grown up and gotten old and died. Sometimes the not-knowing in their expressions is overwhelming. (Though, growing up when they did, many of them were probably already intimate with death.)

Bah. Enough death . . . bring me the head of Internet Explorer: Apple has a new browser, and it kicks ass. Fast? So fast.

For years now, I've been relatively free of the fear of death. It hasn't gripped me in the night, startled me in my daydreams, consumed me as I think of all those that have come before and all those I will leave behind. I used to carry that fear around with me all the time, and after my father died, it became almost an obsession. Pretty much since my first child was born, I have been free of that fear, which once was with me like my breathing.
Lately, that fear has been creeping back in. Not sure why. Not sure what it means. Could just be exhaustion. But every now and then, I'll just be suddenly gripped with the reality that all this is going to go on without me, for a lot longer than it went on with me, and for just a moment that thought will clutch my heart. [Now I'm wondering -- why is he The Grim Reaper? If he's harvesting, wouldn't he be The Grim Sower?]

As Booker T. said. (Well, he didn't really say it, since it was an instrumental, but you get the point.) I am backed up on e-mail (thanks, Peter, for the note, and I'm dying to answer your questions . . . perhaps tonight). Last night I had to fight with the Zip drive, and after much experimentation came to the same conclusion that I had started off with, that the drive is dead. Debated upgrading to a much bigger Zip drive, but the real need is just to be able to completely backup my hard drive from time to time. Drives are now so cheap that that's affordable, and much more likely to happen (and to be useful) than incremental backups of all the bits and pieces that appear on 80GB of computer. So, in order to get the old stuff off the old Zips, I'm off to eBay, where I can get a drive that will work for a while. (I have another external Zip drive, but the SCSI-to-USB interface that I would need will cost more than a replacement drive. Crazy.)

So, that took up last night. That and a trip to the library to pick up a book that was waiting for me, but of course I had forgotten my library card. I had flashes of old WWII "Is This Trip Necessary?" posters in my head on the way back. Sea level will rise, albeit imperceptibly, because I'm a moron. I don't mind if it happens for a purpose, mind you.

Lots of changes around here, very interesting how everybody's shuffling for the third term. Then I heard that a colleague in another state was getting a judgeship, and in searching for that story, found that California Governor Gray Davis went to his inaugural celebration in jeans. Let's take ALL the dignity out of government, shall we?

Sometimes the universe puts little hints out there that you need to hear something again, and a couple of little hints led me back to Joe Jackson's "Night and Day II", and Elvis's "When I Was Cruel," and the universe was right, it was time now to listen to those albums and finally appreciate them (I'm pretty patient with my music, and especially with Joe and Elvis, who owe me nothing).

Other times the universe is just f'ing with you, which is the only explanation for my having heard a miserable song by The Hooters twice in a week. There was never any explanation for their appeal or modest success, and the best I can say of them from the one time I was forced to see them live is that their mugging and self-satisfaction failed to ruin my mood for the unbelievably fantastic Squeeze show that followed. Sometimes you've gotta tell the universe to cut it out.

Found at a Mexican restaurant nearly in Tribeca:

we've already exceeded our seasonal average for snowfall -- we're up above 65". It's hard to complain about snow or sun (lack thereof) after having lived in Syracuse ("Where We Live Gray"), but now this is interfering with my lifestyle. You can't ski if you can't drive to the ski area...

The point at which I finally give in and surrender several cubic feet of my life to the 360-day storage/5-day use of a snowblower has finally come. I'm going to give enough cash to buy 1.5 Tony Hawk Signature iPods because I absolutely exhausted myself Saturday, digging out two feet of snow from the driveway, spent almost as much time yesterday clearing my nearly flat garage roof, and when I got to the mountain with the kids yesterday, I had to admit that I was far too tired to ski. Nothing ached (well, my neck, a little), nothing was sore, but I was just physically exhausted. At least I was smart enough to recognize it, in accordance with our strict "no injuries" policy. It was the first day of ski lessons, so organizing the kids took a while, anyway, and I didn't want to just wander off until I knew which group they were in and where they'd be. The instructors took their time and did a good job of separating the kids by ability and age, and Hannah was off to the main hill fairly quickly, but Bekah's group stayed on the bunny hill longer than I would have expected. Turns out Hannah's skis are bent, so I've gotta take them back to Goldstock's and get them replaced, and the instructor said she's ready for shaped skis anyway, so I'll try to get that done this week. Anyway, by the time the kids were off on their own, I was looking at about an hour and a quarter of skiing, and I just decided to sit up on the deck with coffee and breathe the cool air instead.
Amazes me how much skiers are like baseball fans who only come out when the team is winning. Bousquet was jammed yesterday, and lessons were far more full than they've been for the past two years. Admittedly, conditions last year sucked, but still -- even bad skiing is better than almost anything else you can be doing in the winter. I don't understand people who only ski when there's a couple of feet of new snow.

This much snow:

Oh, yeah. We've got snow. I'll have to put on the snowshoes just to get out of the garage door (and this might be a moment to keep in mind in the event that on some sunny summer home-improvement day, I'm wondering, "Well, why the heck couldn't we just let this thing open OUT?"). Pictures later.
Paper this morning (and by paper, I mean, "I read the Times-Union online," so there is no actual paper involved) said the snowiest winter on record here was '70-'71, when we got 112.5 inches. (In other words, what would be a light year for Syracuse, and an absolutely dry year on the Tug Hill.) We could get up around there this year, assuming this keeps up.
The annoying part of this, of course, is that I can't get out to ski if I can't get out of my driveway.
Pictures to come.

Got on an elevator today with a woman wearing a fur coat and a nice, subtle perfume, and the combined scents of fur and perfume in a small space made me suddenly flash on being a little kid in the hall closet, how I used to love to close myself in that dark space with the scent of fur and wool and my mother's stale perfume. I loved the feel of her fur coat, the texture and warmth it gave off. I can't remember now if it was real, but it came from D'Jimas Furs, which passed for a swanky furrier in upstate New York at the time. Fur has virtually disappeared from view now, but at the time, even a trucker's wife had a fur of some sort. And men wore hats. And nickels had bees on 'em.
Scent provokes strong memory reactions in me. Often, if I'm having a hard time remembering a particular place, I try to remember its smell, and then the visual memory follows. The easiest way for me to get a vivid image of my father is to remember how he smelled. Odd as it sounds, that was a combination of diesel exhaust, cigarettes, beer and maybe some slightly rotting lettuce. (He hauled produce, much of the time.) The diesel and cigarettes were the key elements. Hmmmm... and he died young, why? Still, that smells like Dad to me.

It's getting to be a lot like Syracuse around here. Okay, not really. In the 'Cuse, it snows a bit just about every day, and these big dump storms are less frequent. But overall, they get about 120-140 inches of snow a year, and we Albanians get 60-80. When people ask me what it was like to live in Syracuse (in the fireside chat of my mind), I tell them, "You ALWAYS had to brush snow off your car, and your feet were never dry." The cold, the wind, the 305 non-sunny days a year -- all of those I could deal with. But it drove me crazy to brush off the windshield, drive to do a five-minute errand, and have to brush off again. Just picking up the newspapers often required brushing off the windshield (I was driving a Renault with seriously weak heat, so it was rare that snow would just melt off the windshield). And between constant rain and constant snow, living a more urban, walk-around life than I live now, my feet were wet and cold all the time.
Just like they're going to be this weekend.

This has been bugging me for months, or perhaps years, but a couple of overly well-dressed, overly pleasant Jehovah's Witnesses showed up at my door this fall and set me off on a slow burn. When I was younger and stupider, I would actually try to engage these people and get them to understand the ridiculousness of their mission, which attempt was precisely as futile as their mission to bring me the word of the lord. Eventually, I understood this and learned to just say no. Through much experimentation, I have settled on, "I have my own religion and I'm not interested in yours, thank you" and firmly shutting the door. But if I were part of their religion, would I really want to be out signing up people who have not given life, death, and the existence of G(g)od more than a passing thought until the day someone shows up at their door in their convert-the-heathens clothes? Who would want to be part of such a church?
We are faithless. At least, I am. I was raised with a mix of Catholic and Methodist ideas, and despite quite a number of attempts, I never believed in any of it. It's a bit of a challenge to explain various religious issues and ideas to the girls when we don't have that simple base of comparison to rely on. We can't just say, "Well, the Jews believe x, but we believe y." The best approach I can take is just to inform them as best I can as questions come up, and know that someday they'll figure out what they believe on their own.
And I'm hoping to God they don't figure it out because some well-meaning half-wit comes knocking at their door...

Or damn close to it. After many months ("many" being measured in the dozens, at this point) of promises, my site with information on rollerblading paths in the Capital District and beyond is up and ready for the critics. Be gentle. I had a few hits on the page last week, and it ticked me off that I had never gotten that information up, and there isn't any other area resource for this info, so, here it is. Tucked in some links to other places I've skated, too. More to come, as they say.

I was right about The Hives. They do rock. The White Stripes do not. Dissent from this viewpoint will not be tolerated.

While trying to avoid the same commercials over and over during the "No Boundaries" marathon yesterday, I kept flipping over to VH1 Classic for snippets of old videos from the '70s and '80s that alternatively gave me a warm fuzzy (I mean, c'mon, A Flock of Seagulls' "Space Age Love Song" did not suck) or filled me with revulsion (any song even vaguely associated with the movie "Footloose," for example). Sometimes they cheated, showing a Meat Loaf Storytellers clip from a couple of years ago but plunking it down in the '70s show. Yes, he was singing a song from the '70s, I know. But really. Some elements of my musical purism remain, even though it's been years since I had the luxury of fading down the stereo instead of just turning it off.

At some point over the weekend, I also stumbled upon something that was hypnotic and terrifying. It was called "Brian Wilson Presents Pet Sounds Live," and featured odd, grainy black-and-white and primitive color footage of beach and surfing scenes overlain with what was apparently the Brian Wilson of today trying to sing his songs of 36 years ago. I know he's had a hard life, but there was really no excuse. I was afraid the kids would hear his geriatric version of "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and go running from the room. Judging by some of the reviews of this I just Googled up, others did not feel as I did. Those others would be wrong.

In addition to a visitor from Singapore who found the blog, I have now been Googled by someone who was searching the phrase "she's too tall". I made that remark in reference to my 6-year-old's major academic challenge, but it turns out to have been the title of a movie, and I'm hoping that's what someone was looking for. But having seen just a snippet of my site with those words in it, that brave soul decided to come on in and see what was going on. It warms the cockles, it does. I'd say it seems odd, but I do the same thing -- it's the side searches that are more interesting than what I was actually looking for. For a while, I mourned the loss of the library card catalogs, and not just because I loved the scent of oak and manila card stock, but because I often found things by accident that were more interesting than what I was actually looking for. In fact, my willingness to be so diverted may explain much of my academic career. But the ability to browse was powerful. For a long time, the computerized library catalogs that replaced the old cards were hyper-efficient, delivering pretty much only what you were looking for, and sometimes barely even that, and the delightful chance encounter was lost. In libraries with closed stacks, that effectively meant the end of browsing. But now there's the web, and Google, and the likelihood is that you'll find exactly what you're searching for, and you'll probably find something else interesting, too. Or at least I'm hoping that someone looking for information on a movie thinks the academic challenges of my first-grader are interesting. At least more interesting than a movie whose best-known stars were Corey Feldman and Brigitte Nielsen. You just know that's going to generate even more Googling....

To folks who have stumbled on this site and seem to actually be reading it over and over and over again, thanks. But fair warning: I don't post every day. Usually not even close. And some days I'll post 3 or 4 things. I lack the commitment and prolificness (prolificy? or just plain prolix?) of a Lileks. But what I lack in prolix, I make up in oversized digital pictures. Sometimes. Lee was still sick on New Year's Eve (is still sick, still, in fact), so no First Night for us. We had a family party at home -- Hannah and I made pizza, we watched Pee Wee's Big Adventure (first time the kids had seen it -- Rebekah, as usual, was terrified, then begged to see it again the next day), and then we had ice cream sundaes with homemade whipped cream. Homemade whipped cream rules (not that I would ever eat the stuff from a can). I got two new mixers for Christmas, as the old one, my mother's avocado hand-me-down from about 1970, had finally bitten the dust. I'm sure if I just put new brushes on the motor it would have been good as new, but the economy doesn't roll with 50-cent brushes and who has the time to tear down motors anymore? Anyway, a very pleasant New Year's Eve. Oddly, there were fireworks somewhere in town, and a big party up the street, so midnight was quite noisy for the first time I could recall. Kids slept right through it though. New Year's Day was supremely lazy. Should have done a ton of laundry but didn't. Mostly spent the day goofing around and watching snatches of the "No Boundaries" marathon on OLN. 2002 was a pretty good year, despite the difficulty of the first few months and all the WTC work. Lee got into skiing and had a good time, and started biking with the girls, too. Rebekah learned to ski and ride a bike, and suddenly blossomed in her reading. Hannah continues to blossom on her way to the angry-pre-teen years -- she got a 7-speed bike with hand brakes and can now ride along with me for miles, which is very cool. We saw the ocean at Chincoteague and boiled in Lake Ontario, hiked up the stairs at Whiteface, and oohed and aahed under the balloons at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. We saw ski jumping on the Fourth of July (2nd year in a row), camped out with friends, visited cemeteries and hiked around lakes. The girls were fabulous and incredibly smart in responding to Lee's accident. We kept emergency room visits down to two (about average, I think), but they were doozies -- anaphylactic shock and a broken arm. I ran a faster 5k and got my first new bike in 20 years, and love biking again. At work, I didn't get to travel much (bye-bye, Silver Preferred Frequent Flyer status), but I did a number of morning runs on the National Mall in DC, skated around the bay in San Diego, and enjoyed some lovely nights in New York. Also, I got a bill signed into law by a president, which still feels pretty cool. Changes at work, people leaving, uncertainty and tension and opportunity with our budget problems, so the next couple of months will be difficult, but that's what comes with being the man. Damn the man!