February 2003 Archives

Aimee Mann's sublime Humpty Dumpty is running through my head this morning: Say you were split, you were split into fragments And none of the pieces would talk to you Wouldn't you want to be who you had been Well baby I want that too So better take the keys and drive forever Staying won't put these futures back together All the perfect drugs and superheros Wouldn't be enough to bring me up to zero

This morning, for reasons that cannot be explained, I was subjected to considerable quantities of Neil Young on my radio, including some unbelievable noise from Woodstock. And then when I went down for breakfast, the jug of milk I picked up at the Safe Before Dark Convenience Store was from Yasgur Farms. They warned me about the flashbacks, but I just wouldn't listen. Total freak-out, man!

Ever forked up a giant mess of Dave's Italian Burrito and accidentally gotten a little bit of the aluminum foil it's wrapped in mixed in with the beans and rice, and then put it right up against a metal filling? I have. It's called the dielectric effect, when two metals of different conductivity come into contact. Don't try it at home.

Got home a little late, and everybody was already eating. Bekah asks what held me up and I said that a lot of people needed to talk to me. "Why did they have to talk to you?" "That's what I do, I talk to people all day." "When I was in your office, there was a lot of paper. And you work on the computer." "Yes, I talk and I answer e-mail." Very seriously, she says, "You talk and you write e-mail and that's how you make money? I don't think so!"

Barbara in 1956, 17 years old and looking for trouble. I've been scanning in my grandmothers' photo albums again. It's so hard to imagine what our parents were like when they were young, when they were kids. My mother was a kid when she married, 18 years old; my father was 21. I only get bits and pieces of what their lives were then; it's so hard to picture them as they were, without that parental authority. We grow up thinking our parents know what they're doing, but who in their 20s knows what they're doing? When they met, she worked the lunch counter at Wallace's Department Store, he parked cars in the store's tiny parking lot. She says that her mother tried to get them together. There's another picture of them both at my mother's 16th birthday party, so they knew each other for a while before they got married. But I don't have any real sense of what those early years of their marriage were like (I came along three years later). I don't know what they did, who their friends were; I don't even remember where they lived before they moved to Scotia, though when I was young my mother showed me the apartment building in Schenectady a few times. But even knowing that doesn't really tell me who they were. She was just a kid. What was she like? What was he like? I try to tell my kids about who we were and what we did before they came along. After all, we had been married 9 years before Hannah was born. I've shown them where I grew up (easy enough, it was Grandma Barbara's house until a couple of years ago), the school I went to, the river I played in, where we went to college, and all that. But it's still hard for them to believe there was a world before them: the other night Rebekah was looking at a line of First Night buttons on the bulletin board and saw one from 1992 and said, "Wait a minute! That's before Hannah was born!" Yes, we had a life before you little princesses came along.

Apparently, some class somewhere must have had an assignment on the Battle of Crown Point, because I just had the most hits I've ever had, and the vast majority were searches on that topic. This even beats out our big "Glycerol Ester of Wood Rosin Days" celebration, about which the less said the better. A quick message to all you little last-minute all-night cram session kids: It's called Paypal! Click into it. Fair's fair. Why, in my day, we had to bum a ride to the city library and beg on the streets for dimes for the copiers. I wore an onion on my belt, which was the fashion at the time....

Skiing: Gore, not bad, a little slushy and I was a little tired. Did a mess of diamonds, though the groves were more than I was up for. Movie: About a Boy. Good, not as good as the book, but good. Only film in memory where I felt like many of the deleted scenes should have been left in. Music: The Weakerthans, Left and Leaving. Canadian. Really good. Lines like "Rely a bit too heavily On alcohol and irony Get clobbered on by courtesy In love with love and lousy poetry" Book: Summerland, by Michael Chabon. His first foray into children's writing, but it maintains his honesty. For instance, the father of one of the characters is a drunken asshole. You don't see a lot of that in children's books, and you see plenty of it in life. I'm going on the assumption that he's going to skip the obligatory homosexual encounter in this book, though. (Fathers in children's books are either absent or buffoons. Mostly absent. Don't get me started.)

Lance Armstrong and his wife have apparently separated. This always seems to happen after the book or movie touting how excellent the marriage is (see Stern, Howard).

Of course, the day I finally blow off work to go skiing would be the day when things happen. I really didn't need to be involved in monitoring another smoke plume over New York City, though this one looks like a plain old-fashioned industrial accident. The other tragedy of the weekend, being in Rhode Island, doesn't involve me, but I can't believe that in this day and age 95 people can be killed by a fire in just minutes. My first reaction, sick as it was, was to be amazed that 95 people went to see a Great White concert. I mean, really. Turns out it was more than that. I can remember any number of times when, in a sober moment, I looked around a club and wondered how fast a dropped cigarette would bring the place down. In this case, at least, it seems like the doors weren't chained shut. As a safety strategy, chaining the doors shut hasn't been working too well, but people keep on trying it anyway.

It's 36 degrees and sunny, and things are melting at last. I would normally bitch about this because it's going to degrade ski conditions, but my driveway is as narrow as it can possibly be, and the snowpiles are as high as they can go, and one more storm and you'd see me out there with a propane torch and a hairdryer trying to move back the glacier. (Of course, any warmth and all this moisture has sent my allergies a-sailing.) Still may ski tomorrow afternoon. Let's see what conditions are like. Lee got the heater in the truck fixed (warranties are good things), so I feel like I can safely trek out into the wilds. Maybe I'll just take the whole damn day and go north. This week has been hugely stressful and my only solution is to carve. Tonight, Hannah for the first time gets to stay up to watch ALL of "Survivor." She loves that show. And Bekah a couple of weeks ago was playing a version of "No Boundaries" with her sister and her dolls. They get the outdoor adventure thing, which is hugely cool. When we went camping with another family this summer, Hannah carefully explained to her friend that we had all this equipment because "we are sporting enthusiasts," which in her careful speech sounded even funnier than it reads. No idea where she picked up that phrase. I was looking at a website last night for the Athens-to-Atlanta skate (38 or 86 miles) and thought, "I could do that." I know I could do 38, I've done nearly that on skates before (though not without leaving significant portions of my left calf on a Watervliet street). But of course, it's not quite as warm here in September as it is in Georgia. Still, it'd be nice to do... I'm actually insane. That much is becoming clear.

"A Taste of Honey." Not The Beatles' version, or even the Ventures' version, but the full-on '60s hokum Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass version. (Anybody else vaguely remember a short period of time in the '80s when Herb Alpert was declared cool because he was working with Janet Jackson, and suddenly he was everywhere, regaling us with True Tales of A&M Records and endlessly fascinating interviewers with the fact that there never was a group called The Tijuana Brass? Or was I just suffering a fever?) Egad. What's next?! "The Alleycat"?!! (Mr. Acker Bilk and Bent Fabric. God help me for knowing that.)
(Not only is Acker Bilk still touring, but he apparently was awarded an MBE. Those Brits will give one of those to anybody. I blame it on the bossa nova.)

The kind that stick to your brain. Why is it, when I have not heard it or anything remotely like it, that I have had The Mamas & The Papas' "Creeque Alley" stuck in my head all day? I'm not objecting, it's just weird. Blogger has been down every time I've tried it today (crushed by popularity since news of the sale to Google came out?), and I've still got that song stuck in my head. Maybe now it'll move to yours. "In a coffee house Sebastian sat And after every number they'd pass the hat McGuinn and McGuire just a-gettin' higher In L.A., you know where that's at And no one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass" C'mon, you know the words!

Andre Breton was born on this day in 1896. Happy fish! Or, as Zippy the Pinhead used to say, "If you can't say something nice, say something surreal!"

Scanning old photographs that belonged to my grandmother and great-grandmother. Most are just snapshots or studio poses, and not too many reveal all that much about what's going on in the world. But there is one very interesting photograph of a group of infantrymen in the Spanish-American War, thought to have been taken in the Philippines:

The amazing thing about scanning these old, faded images is that you can pull up details that you would never be able to make out with the naked eye. In the middle left of the photo, there are what appear to be cut paper decorations on the shelves, and a couple of advertisements stuck to the boards. One of them looked to be legible, so I zoomed in and found:

Off to Google, of course, where I learn that Imperial Granum was a pretty well-known sort of food. It appears that you added it to milk and that it was meant for babies and the infirm and was supposed to be highly digestible. None of the ads I found offer even a hint as to what it was, and unlike Postum (originally sold as a healthful alternative to giving your kids coffee in the morning -- so the Tweek family didn't come up with that on their own) and some others, it's pretty much forgotten today. I couldn't find the ad that appears on the wall of this Philippine bar, but I did find this:

Just below that ad in Harper's is an ad for wine laced with coca, which would have struck me as an excellent idea back in The Debauched Years, and it's hard to understand why it didn't catch on; I mean, just HOW addictive does something need to be?

Wonder if the boys in the fancy jackets had any of this stuff to mix in with their Imperial Granum in the mornings?

One of the things that I really love about skiing, right from the start when I took it up two years ago, is that when you are skiing, you're not doing anything else. You're not worrying about the laundry or the bills or whether that mole is getting bigger -- you're just skiing. You can't afford to be doing anything else. It presents a tremendous opportunity to focus. Well, the last couple of times I've gone skiing, I've learned that nothing enhances that focus quite like trees. Skiing through the trees, now that I have a fair idea of how to handle the bumps, is kick-ass, high-energy, intense focus fun. It keeps you in the moment. Basic rules: 1) look about three turns ahead; 2) keep both skis on the same side of any tree. That's it! The snow is magnificent for skiing today, but alas, I didn't partake. Did end up going up to Troy to get the kids at the end of the day, and the ride was tense. Luckily, there was hardly any traffic at all because of the holiday, or it would have been much worse. I'd like the people who excoriate those of us who use four-wheel-drive vehicles to line up just over there. Wait a minute while I get my bat...

So cold we actually bailed on skiing yesterday. We were going to go up north for an adult ski day, but it was 6 below as we got ready to head off and nobody was saying it was going to get warmer than 5 above (maybe it got to seven), so we bailed. Waste of a perfectly good day. Today it's still super cold, 5.9. Supposed to warm up later on, but then we're getting a couple inches of snow, and the girls are at a wizard camp up in Troy, so I need to be able to get them in the afternoon. So unless it warms up dramatically in the next two hours, no skiing today for me. It's a shame, because this snow will leave things sweet. Oh, well. Yesterday would have been a complete loss except that we finally got over to the show of Harry Benson photos of the Beatles at the Albany Institute of History and Art. I hadn't even been there since their expansion/rehabilitation, and it's very nice. They got rid of a lot of the jumbled feeling of a lot of art tucked into a bunch of tiny rooms, though they lost some of the treasures along the way. The mummies are much more prominently displayed, rather than slapped down in the basement. The old Dutch bedroom is gone, which is just as well -- the area is lousy with old Dutch bedrooms, and I've been terrified of curtained beds since a long-ago visit to the Institute when we were informed that the Dutch slept sitting up in case they died in their sleep, so they'd be facing their maker. I've never heard that again, but let me tell you that can make an impression on a third-grader. In any event, the Beatles photos were vastly more wonderful than I had hoped. Benson was with them in the early days, on the first American tour, during A Hard Day's Night, and a little through the later years. These photographs were full of the energy of those four lads, including a magnificent series of a hotel room pillow fight. He also had some great shots of them composing, and the best shot of fans I've ever seen, taken from inside the limousine. There was also a nice little collection of local Beatles memorabilia, including a permission slip some father wrote out on Columbia Heating Company note paper to allow his daughter to get out of school to take the bus to NYC to see The Beatles. Very touching. There was a Beatles Disk-Go-Case for 45s, and I had to explain to Hannah what a 45 was (she's seen them, but wouldn't have known their name). Hard to believe all that was nearly 40 years ago. There were some pictures of the Wings Over America tour from 1976. At the time, it seemed like the Beatles had been broken up forever, yet it had only been six years. Rebekah wants to go to Strawberry Fields the next time we're in New York.

You know, it's pretty hard to defend a government that actually tells people to go out and stock up on duct tape and plastic window wrap. F'chrissake . . . . It's nonsense like this that really makes it difficult on those of us who take this governing thing seriously.

Been too swamped to post (unlike Wil Wheaton, who's just letting the man get him down). I officially received control of another division today, which gives me about 300 more people whose out-of-state travel requests I will be denying. Had a farewell party for my counterpart, Susan, who is retiring, although we expect she'll be keeping her hand in on some particular projects. I have always respected her advice and cherished her friendship, and am not sure where I'll turn now that she's gone, though my immediate boss is also a great sounding board. All that love and respect we were showing didn't keep her farewell party from devolving into an arm-wrestling contest for her office, which has the best views in the entire building. It was a little unseemly, actually, but it's all part of my new attitude: cranky and unhelpful. I've been the nice guy for long enough. Time to channel my inner Wilfrid Brimley. Believe me, he's in there. It's very cold (again) (still), and is supposed to dip below zero again tonight. Agency ski day at our ski area is tomorrow, but I was saddled with an afternoon meeting that I really should use as an opportunity to learn about some things I've been ignoring for years, so the plan now is to run over to Jiminy first thing in the morning, ski my ass off for 3.5 hours, and run back to Albany in time for the meeting. Speaking of asses, got two weird hits today. First was from someone searching for the phrase "my ass", and this blog scores higher than you would expect, since I've only used the phrase once. Thrice, now. Second was for "erotic whipped cream photographs," which must have left someone disappointed when they found out I was talking about making whipped cream and reviewing a movie that had "erotic overtones" or some such thing. Had some more hits for "duckhunting" this week, too, and the endless march of people seeking information about our favorite drink additive continues.

At least, one person in the family got out of the house today, which would be me. Others are getting better. Didn't even get to say that I had a great ski day on Friday. Went with a friend and co-worker who's also a ski instructor, so I probably held him back some but the conditions were fantastic, just like a dream. It snowed before we got there and well into the afternoon, so things just stayed wonderful. Tackled a couple of diamonds, and he showed me how to take the bumps in one of the groves, which is fantastic fun once you know what you're doing and can avoid hitting the trees. Not hitting trees is a key part of grove skiing. Keeping both your skis on the same side of any given tree is also a key part. The rest of it was sweet powder, clear skies, and fun, fun, fun. Sis-in-law wants to come up and do adult ski this weekend, which I would love to do, though there's a certain amount of self-imposed guilt over taking a day away when Patient Wife has been home with sickies (and has been sick herself). I know. I've become a skiing asshole. That's a lot like a golf asshole, but we wear better clothes and participate in an actual sport.

Not sure who was the Typhoid Mary for this particular episode, but during the night every single one of us got sick with what is, at the least, strep. Hannah was vomiting all night, Bekah had the throat stuff, Lee has an ear infection, and I was intensely nauseated. Fun, fun, fun. There's a John Garfield movie on TCM tonight. If I can make it to the couch.

• Yes, she looks in person pretty much the same as she looks in videos -- lanky, stunning eyes, and a type of introspective presence. But she could rock out and she even cracked a smile now and then.
• She didn't even do "Ghost World" or "Red Vines," which seems hard to imagine, but she had so much good material it didn't matter. She did do "(The Other End of the) Telescope," with an audience member singing backup, and although she lost the words to the last verse, I was thrilled to hear her sing it, and surprised that so many other people seemed to want to hear it.
• I had just this week really started to get "Lost In Space," and her performances really drove it home. Incredible album.
• When calling out for songs people wanted to hear (Aimee and the rest of rock 'n' roll, please, let's cut out this obligatory encore nonsense and go the Ray Charles route: play 'til you're done, then leave), someone yelled out for "Free Bird." She said, "There's always some jackass who says 'Free Bird.'" She then explained that they didn't know "Free Bird", but they did know "Sweet Home Alabama," and proceeded to launch in to that, with the participation of the original jackass. A light moment, but not a song I ever really need to hear again. The whole time I was thinking of Zevon's line: "Sweet Home Alabama / Play that dead band's song / Turn those speakers up full blast / Play it all night long." Beats the hell out of having to hear "Free Bird."
• Duncan Sheik opened and did the impossible: he performed songs that I actually forgot as I was listening to them. Much preferable to hateful songs that stick with you, I know, but he was really a non-entity. Many in the audience disagreed, including a block of Duncan Sheik fans who appeared to have bought their seats together. He had a couple of major flubs as well and the stage presence of a bottlecap. I placed him in the top three worst opening acts I've seen, including The Brains (for The Kinks, Landmark Theatre, 1980) and The Hooters (for Squeeze, JB Scott's, maybe 1986?). He did, however, contribute nicely with a dead-on impression of Noel Gallagher, teaming up with Aimee on Oasis's "Wonderwall."
• Lots of people were "missing Matlock." Years ago, I was at some event where some old guy looked at his watch, proclaimed, "Jesus Christ! I'm missing 'Matlock'!" and raced off for home. Like whatever was on TV was more important than what he was doing in real life. Since then, we've said of the people who leave shows early that they're missing Matlock. This is the first show I can think of where there were a LOT of people MUCH younger than I am who were missing Matlock. (For the record, when we tore out of the Cracker show like a bolt of lightning this summer, it was not because we were missing Matlock, but because we really wanted to get on the road ahead of the drunken crowd. If you'd been there, you would have supported the decision.)
• As if we were actual adults, we stayed up AFTER the show and watched Saturday Night Live. And, it was funny. Or perhaps we were just very tired (witness an earlier assessment of "Dude, Where's My Car," for which I'm still apologizing). But it seemed funny for the first time in years.
• "Missing Matlock" would be a great name for a band. So would "Gumdrop Pentagons," which would take more explaining than I'm up for right now.

Mine, not so much. Listening to the latest, and many say the last, Johnny Cash album. "Personal Jesus"? In music, he invented the personal Jesus; somehow he conveys his faith without wielding it like a club. In his cover of The Beatles' "In My Life," he misses nearly as many notes as he hits, and damned if that doesn't work with this song. If this is what a dying man sounds like....

Is there anyone else who misses the vague sense of menace and mischief wrapped up in James Coburn's dangerous smile when he said, "Mastercard, I'm bored"?

Forgive me, I have a cold and I'm not getting much sleep.

Some loyal readers already know about this, and the rest of you truly won't care, but for those of us who spent countless nights pogoing to The Flashcubes in the Jabberwocky back on the cusp of the New Wave era, it can only be a pleasant shock to find that not only is Flashcubes frontman and songwriter Gary Frenay still on the scene, he has posted a webpage with the lyrics to all the old Flashcubes, Screen Test and other songs from way back when. We'll never throw up in the Jab again (at least not without ruining all the shiny new computers that are housed there now), but for just a second or two we can go back and remember when songs like "You're Not the Police" and "Wait Till Next Week" seemed to say what we needed to hear. My whole life I've waited to be as thrilled again as I was when the Flashcubes would close their set with "Money (That's What I Want)" and we would dance ourselves into a heated frenzy and then spill out into the chill Syracuse night, wired and happy.

If you knew the songs, here's the lyrics, sing along. There's even a newer page with pictures of the band reunited. Apparently, they contributed to a Raspberries tribute album. Wouldn't you think I would have known that?

The fine line between fair use and infringement gets crossed when a poem consists of a single word and a piece of punctuation. But I saw this poem by Gavin Ewart on Writer's Almanac this morning, and I liked it, so here it is:

The Lover Writes a One-Word Poem
You!

At the recent bacchanal/poetry reading, I was going to tell a long-winded, entirely fictional story of a tempestuous relationship on a cross-Canada expedition, which supposedly culminated in my epic poem, "I Wouldn't Fuck You If You Were the Last Girl in Saskatchewan," which reads, in its entirety: "I wouldn't fuck you if you were the last girl in Saskatchewan." At the last minute, I decided that the entire thing was a terrible idea and abandoned it. People are thanking me still.

Truly, the shocking thing is that it took this long for Phil Spector to snap and finally shoot someone.

Speaking of Phil Spector, sort of, now there is a Ramones tribute album. Honestly. With such luminaries as Kiss. Yes, I am curious as to what Tom Waits is going to do with "The Return of Jackie and Judy," and I'd like to hear how The Pretenders handle "Something to Believe In." But other than that -- Eddie Vedder? The Offspring? Rob Zombie? This is the best they could do? One of the great things about The Ramones was that every song was a Ramones song, even their covers. They just weren't songs that it was easy to imagine someone else covering. Unless you were a Ramone, you just weren't going to be able to bring what the song needed. There is no "interpretation" needed, no new nuance to be discovered in "Beat on the Brat". Please. If Joey weren't dead, he'd kick your asses.....

Yes, yes it is. So, Hannah's little tumble on the moguls run turns out to be a broken collarbone. Not badly broken, no setting required or anything like that, but she's out of gym for several weeks, will have to take it easy at ballet, and probably can't ski either.

She was having such a breakthrough day. One perfect little turn after another. Well, in a month, there'll still be plenty of skiing. I tried to tell her that every single racer she watched on OLN yesterday has broken his or her collarbone. Put her in the athletic sisterhood. I'm not sure she was buying it.

There's really nothing much I can say about Columbia that dozens of others haven't already said. Space has become so routine that we are hardly ever aware that the shuttle is even up there, which is dramatically different from the '60s, when I grew up and everything to do with space was headline news. Yes, I remember where I was when Challenger exploded, etc. In fact, the first inkling I had that anything was wrong came yesterday when I read a blog that made reference to where the writer was when Challenger exploded, but I didn't understand it had any relevance to a current event -- Challenger happened just a few days earlier in January.
But I can say this. Sean O'Keefe, the administrator of NASA, happens to have graduated from the same MPA program I came from, the Maxwell School. He graduated just a few years ahead of me, and came to speak to us at some point. He was then a rising star in the Navy bureaucracy. Personable, intelligent, highly respected. And today I wouldn't have his job for anything.

First, I broke my older daughter while we were playing hooky. The key to playing hooky, as anyone knows, is not to do something that will result in your being found out. It's a little hard to say you went to a funeral but show up for work the next day in a cast. Well, no cast for Hannah, but a seriously strained shoulder that will need additional attention tomorrow, cutting into yet another day of school. Oops.
Then last night we had a little incident with pieces of glass in my malted milkshake. Not big ones, not sharp ones, mostly, but pieces of glass nonetheless. Caught two in my mouth, as they seemed like particularly hard pieces of malt (not through the straw; I was spooning the remains). One went down. I thought. I wasn't sure. But by the time I got home, I was sure, there was definitely something caught in my throat. Excellent. Luckily, I've watched lots of TV movies about bulimia, so now I know how to have a chocolate shake and still keep the pounds off.
Then this morning, with only Rebekah in tow for skiing, we head off to Pittsfield, MA, to Bousquet Ski Area, where the girls have their weekly ski lessons. As we roll into Lebanon Center, the closest thing to a town between here and Pittsfield, there are flashing lights, firetrucks and a roadblock. I am summarily shunted down a lane-and-a-half road that was last paved by the Works Progress Administration (motto: "We Do Ruts Right"). I gamely follow this detour from Route 20 for a couple of miles until I lose faith that it is going to ever take me anywhere I want to go. So I find a wide spot and turn back. At the intersection, I ask the woman flagging traffic how I can get through to Pittsfield. This apparently is the most puzzling thing she's ever heard. She is standing on the main road between New York and Massachusetts, Route 20, the Boston Post Road. Just a little way down the road is a sign that says Pittsfield is a mere 10 miles away. But that anyone would want to use this now-closed road to get to Pittsfield is so confusing to her that she asks me my destination three times. She asks whether I don't have to go up over the mountain to get there. I allow as that's true, and that the only road over the mountain that I know is Route 20. This flusters her further. She cannot help. She directs me to the trooper parked a little way down the way. So I turn back onto Route 20, now pointed back the way I came, stop across from the trooper, and tell him I'm trying to get to Pittsfield, and I don't know how to go with Route 20 blocked. This conversation ensues: "Where are you trying to go?" "Pittsfield." "You're headed the wrong way." "I know. I hit the roadblock and then turned around. I don't know how far up the road is closed." "Where are ya coming from?" This is a pure cop question. They always need to know where you're coming from. And although it has nothing to do with where I'm going, I tell him because not telling him is only going to make this worse. "East Greenbush. I'm just trying to get to Pittsfield, but I don't know another way around." "Pittsfield?" Again, as if I were asking directions to Santa Monica. It's the only thing resembling a city in the area. It is right on the major route through the area, the very road across which we are having this conversation. It is TEN MILES AWAY. "Yes, Pittsfield." "Well, if you go out here and then make the right, won't that bring you back out?" "I don't know. I didn't know how far up the road is closed, and I don't know the back roads." "It'll bring you out by the Hess Station, right?" There's no point anymore in saying that I don't know. I just agree, spin the truck around, and try the detour again. Patience is rewarded, there IS a right turn (though most of the road had been going off in entirely the wrong direction), and then another, and when I pop out on Route 20, I am right in the middle of the blocked-off area. Which apparently gives me license to proceed, as I am waved on through and am off on my way. I have no idea what happened, and I don't care, but that's two times I have found myself somehow stuck in Lebanon Center, and that's two times too many, no matter how short the duration. (The last time was 1985, the Fuego had a dead alternator and a dead battery, and Lee and I whiled away an entire summer day sitting outside a garage in Lebanon Center waiting for our battery to get enough of a charge to chance a run back to the Capital District.)

Skiing was good but cold. I attacked the diamonds, including one I had never tried before. I figured out why. Even though I had a plan for it, and it was a straightforward run, midway through it was so steep that I just lost my ability to slow myself and had to buckle in and take the ride. Still alive, though! Bek did well, we took two early runs and one after lessons and then we were done. It was 35 degrees but damp and windy windy windy, so we were fairly freezing.

Minor violation of No Injuries Policy® reported

My day of hooky with my delightful fourth-grader turned out to be one of the greatest ski days ever. There was a substantial violation of our No Injuries Policy, I'm sorry to report, but I'll get to that. She had a choice of Gore, Mount Snow or Jiminy, and she chose Gore, which looked good to me because it was supposed to be warm for the first time in weeks (they'd actually closed much of it down because of cold) and there was supposed to be sun. We got out nice and early and after a while my normally silent backseat partner started getting chatty. Not much like her, but nice for a change. She was actually looking out the window and pointing out things that were familiar along the way. Normally her nose is in a book and the world passing by gets no notice.

We got to the mountain a little after 9. The parking lot was more full than I'd expected, but still not bad. The thermometer on the truck said 9 degrees, or about 20 degrees short of what we'd been promised. We just agreed that whenever we got cold we'd go inside for a while, that we had all day to cruise. But by the time we'd gotten booted up and bought our tickets and had a little carbo infusion (I now swear by Gu for an absolute energy rush), the sun was out and it was warming up and that was the last time we thought about the temperature. We ran a couple of nice easy runs, and Hannah got to do Cut-Off, which is just a little speed chute that ends in an uphill climb, so no matter how fast you go down it, as long as you keep your skis in line you're going to come out okay. We missed it the first time because they actually took out a gigantic powerline tower that had presented a fairly dangerous obstacle near the top of the trail, but without it I didn't know the way and we ended up on a different trail. Anyway, after the easy runs we took the gondola to the top and ran all over the other side of the mountain. The view was spectacular -- the sky was clear and you could see for hundreds of miles, and the clouds were set down in the valleys so it appeared the snowy peaks were emerging from a river of clouds. We were both having a breakthrough day, when everything just comes together. I'm trying to get better on the steeps, and had been challenged by making my transitions between turns quickly enough, and she is just getting into using her edges. But I had a real breakthrough in transitions yesterday, focusing on timing my pole plants and letting my hands lead my rhythm. Stuck to the intermediates because she's just getting used to the shaped skis, but she did manage one of the diamonds there last year and, more importantly, so did I. We had a blast up there, then descended to the main mountain, took a run down Sleeping Bear, which is narrow, fast and pretty. As she was going down, I was going to reprimand her for Daffy-Ducking with her poles, seemingly just slapping them back and forth on the snow, and then I looked at her feet and realized that she was really doing perfect pole plants that set her up for perfect little turns, one right after the other, small and precise, that kept her in great control as she whizzed down the fall line instead of traversing the entire trail. It was amazing. She said she had been watching the racers do it. Then back up and over to Cut-off again and down for lunch.

Got fed and took another run at Sleeping Bear, and on the way up decided that we would try the trail right under the lift, which was moguls but not real steep and not deeply cut. She went down them like a champ, and I hung behind, but at the very end of the run she was going a little too fast and leaned backward, started to fall and planted her pole, and down she went. I got down to her very quickly. She'd lost a ski and pole and was crying and said she was hurt in her shoulder. Of course, having watched her mother break her arm, that had to be running through her head, but she was tremendously brave. I thought we could get help faster if she could ski the rest of the way down to the lift and then ride back up to the top where the ski patrol was, and she was able to do that. She stayed calm and strong and she cried when she had to, but she was okay. Got her to the ski patrol, who bundled her up on a sled and slid her down to the nurse's station at the base. They really knew what they were doing and took tremendous care of her. Of course, we were done for the day, and she was pretty depressed, but she started to perk up on the ride back home, and where at first she had wanted to just go home, she eventually decided she still wanted to go out for dinner with me. So we did that, came home, iced her shoulder up some more and prepared to tell her mother about the violation of the no injuries policy. The first time I said that, it wasn't funny, but by the time she was ready for bed, she said it with a roll of her eyes, and we knew the worst of it was over.

Tonight, a date, of sorts. Dinner, and a party, though not, I believe, a drunken bacchanal. I'll get to that story, I promise.