September 2003 Archives

Never a Springsteen fan, not even a little bit. Some combination of the lyrics, the fist-pumping, the bandanna just don't do it for me. The music on the old stuff did, I will admit, rock. But it just wasn't for me. But I have now officially forgiven Bruce for all his references to Wendy, for "strap your hands 'cross my engine," even for that abominable "Born in the USA" (parodied so well by John Candy in "Canadian Bacon," singing the only part anyone knew, that stupid refrain, and fumbling to find any of the words in between). But I am willing to forgive all that for his incredible guitar work on Zevon's "Disorder in the House." He nails that song to the wall and gives it the edge that Warren's voice couldn't quite work up to.

In other music news, just got a new disc by Karen Savoca, Pete Heitzman, Greg Brown and Garnet Rogers. What I was able to listen to last night was excellent, but the point here is more the site I got it from, cdbaby.com, whose enthusiastic e-mail indicating that all of Portland, Oregon had turned out to wave bon voyage to my disc was refreshing. So was their offer to take my phone calls if I ever just needed to unload on someone. They serve the indie market, and break their genres up into useful subgenres. For folks, the subgenres include "angry," "like Ani," "like Joni," and other highly useful descriptors. Give 'em a whirl.

My decision to switch from not running in the mornings to not biking has finally paid off, as I accidentally got out of bed at 5:40 and went for a bike ride this morning. I was less than perfectly organized and it took me a while to get going. Never did find my heart rate monitor and my bike computer was locked in the truck, so I went on without. It was so dark that I decided it was best to snap on my lights and put them on "freakish strobe mode", which, in combination with an extremely reflective band around my ankle and a gigantic reflective vest, combined to create so much light bouncing off me that I was confusing satellites. But baby, I was visible. Went soft, befitting my lack of riding this weekend, but got in some good hills and then turned back. More tomorrow.

Courtesy Rob's amazing poem generator:

My pseudonym. I ever would have the and the Daily newspaper. It I would work I realize now My friends the fit Another day. But a great fuss about this? The future of the barnacles were at the history of my girls are among them.

Are you aware that we are currently losing 3 minutes of daylight each and every day?

When is our government going to do something about this?

Hannah is going en pointe. You cannot imagine the excitement associated with this. It's the holy grail of her girlhood. The teacher approved her to move up, the doctor approved her to move up, and so last night she finally got to get her toe shoes. There was a great fuss about it, which is only appropriate. Many shoes were tried, many were rejected. She wore a pair for a while, but her teacher wasn't satisfied with her fit. Another pair was tried, but they weren't the brand favored by the school's headmistress, which caused much nervousness until my daughter's feet were presented to Miss Madeline, and she declared the fit to be satisfactory. Success!

Ballet shoes always require some assembly -- the elastic and the ribbon do not come attached to the shoes. Miss Christine told Hannah that if she's old enough to go en pointe, she's old enough to sew her own shoes, and showed her how to do it.

I can't even deal with how big my girls are getting.

Being deposed for a lawsuit is like dental work, but without all the interesting things going on in your mouth and the rewarding feeling of pain. Three hours of pointed, stupid questions to which I could only answer "I don't know that." If it had still been International Talk Like a Pirate Day, it may have been a very different deposition, I can tell you that! A certain attorney would have been hoisted up the mizzen-mast, and then taken aft for a keel-hauling! (In reality, keel-hauling involved tying the offending citizen to a stout rope and dragging him underneath the ship, fore to aft, along the keel. The barnacles were sharp, me friends, the barnacles were sharp . . . )

Wow, did that suck. If you had any idea what I was talking about in that last entry, great. If not, I promise it won't happen again. Here's a more entertaining story from last weekend:

The editors of The Daily Orange put together a cute little book of highlights from the 100-year history of the paper. It was nicely formatted, and instead of reproducing the articles in facsimile, they simply reset them all in a common style, which worked very nicely, even though I'm a sucker for a parade of changing typestyles that are evocative of their decades. (Were I working on the book, I would have been compelled to show each and every nameplate the paper ever had -- several of which I had a hand in -- and this would be why the book would never ever have gotten done.) The book is divided, much like the paper, into news, sports, lifestyles, etc. (There was, probably wisely, no section for editorials, so my inexplicable rant about oppression and civil war in East Timor, prescient though it may have been, will still have to be enjoyed in its original format. One more example of the wisdom of the editors.) In the sports section appears the longest article in the entire book, the story of the excitement before the very first game in the Carrier Dome -- a long, rambling, incomprehensible string of invectives hurled at football fans, polyester clothing, and Ronald Reagan -- all under the byline of my pseudonym. (I had a theory at the time that I didn't want the effect of my serious work to be diluted by my comedy writing, so to the latter I applied a pseudonym I had been stamping on various slanders since high school. Yes, it seems very silly now, especially given its obvious resemblance to the name of a famous fictional satirical character. But let a 20-year-old have a theory and a pseudonym, and I don't think you can blame the 20-year-old for what happens next.)

So I have the strange honor of having by far the longest article in the book, even though it appears under a name that probably 3 people would still connect with me. I read the article, having completely forgotten about it over the years, and I realize now the value of the pseudonym. Perhaps, just perhaps, this all made some sort of sense way back when. It's just bizarre, disjointed and dated now. My desperate attempts to be Hunter S. Thompson were more successful, in a writing sense, in other articles; this is just a rant about nothing. Especially alongside articles that are extremely well-written and maintain their power years later. So, let's sing a song of praise for youthful arrogance, a shocking lack of editorial oversight, and secret identities that can protect us from embarrassment years after the damage is done.

Imagine or remember that there was a time in your life when everything was new, everything was possible, when you knew a lot but were learning more. A time when you had a little bit of talent and a little bit of experience, and you were thrown in with a huge assortment of people just your age or a little bit older who were so tremendously talented, had such promising futures, and who were willing and enthusiastic about mentoring the new kids among them. Imagine that in this diverse mix of young adults, in what could have been a battleground of egos, there had emerged a sense of the common good, of common allegiance to the joint effort, that all shared a goal and mission: to make The Daily Orange -- Syracuse University's independent student newspaper -- the best newspaper it could be. For two and a half years I flourished in that incredible environment, and for a long time that heady experience so overshadowed everything I would come to do that I had to put it in the back of my mind, had to push back and forget what an amazing experience it was so that my later circumstances wouldn't seem so intellectually bleak.

Now imagine that 25 years later, nearly all those people who were so important in shaping your skills, your experience, your very mindset, all came back together in one place to honor the institution you all were part of, an institution that only existed because these people cared enough to make it happen, an institution that helped to define the university community, on campus and well beyond. Many of those people I hadn't seen since they graduated, and since I went off on a different career track, I had no occasion to see or hear from more than a few of them.

That is what last weekend was like. Dozens of Daily Orange alumni braved the impending hurricane (a no-show in upstate New York, but a more serious concern for folks coming from the southeast) to return to our old stomping grounds, share our memories, talk a little about the past and the future of the paper, and to bask in the glow of being together again.

One idea I try to impart to my children is that they are among people they may know their entire lives. Part of the lesson is "be nice to other people," because your actions may haunt you in the future. But a bigger part of it is, "marvel at the web of people you will know." People will come in and out of your life and back in again, in totally unpredictable ways. And people you've shared an incredible, intense experience with will be with you, in some way or another, all your days. And when you see them again after 10 or 20 or 25 years, you can pick up right where you left off. It's the most wondrous thing.

For the longest time, those 2-1/2 years were the best years of my life, a time when I was at my best (in some ways, certainly not in others), surrounded by people who were at their best, all of us thrilled to be part of that experience (but of course we were also cynical '70s college students, so we could never have admitted it). I learned more about the craft of writing and editing at the DO than I ever would in my classes. Journalism school was a disappointment alongside the experience of putting out a daily newspaper. I expected I would work there throughout college. Honestly, I was so tied up in that world that when all my friends graduated -- most of them were juniors and seniors when I got there -- I felt a little bit adrift. I didn't fit in with the crowd that was coming along, and I decided to take a semester off, and the DO just came to an end for me.

But in the time I was there, I was a copy assistant (rim rat), layout assistant, news writer, special projects editor, assistant editorial page editor, and finally co-editorial page editor. I was also the news editor of the Summer Orange one year, and the editor in chief the next. I proofread and did pasteup ($5 and $15 a night, respectively), and sometimes I delivered the papers, too. When I left school I went on to do pasteup full time at the plant where the paper was printed, and thought about what I wanted to do with my life. As I started to ponder the realities of a life in journalism -- low pay, bad hours, little job security, high mobility -- I realized that it just wasn't for me. So I finished my degree and stayed on the production side of the business for a few years, before I realized I could put together the public service elements of journalism with a management career, right up the hill at the Maxwell School.

This weekend, I heard people say they'd spent their careers trying to recapture what they had at the Daily Orange. I know the feeling, because running a small typesetting business in my 20s was a far cry from the huge, collective noise that was the DO. (But I've been lucky, because lightning struck again for me, and at least twice more I've been on the most amazing teams, doing the best work I could imagine. So how blessed am I?)

To spend time with those people again, to get reacquainted with some friends I hadn't had in my life for a very long time, and to share some of our common victories and common losses, was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Think we could do it again in 10? I don't want to wait another 25 years.

Gotta be witty, and yet respectful. Gotta make it interesting to people who have no idea what I'm talking about, and yet worth a read for the people who were there. Gotta try to relate what this reunion meant to me without coming off like a sap.

This is gonna take another day.

But for just a taste, imagine if nearly all the people who had been incredibly important to you during a couple of critical years in your life were suddenly all in one place again, along with nearly all of the people who were important to them, and you were all in one place to honor the amazing institution that had brought you all together, an institution that only existed because of the people who showed up each day to make it work.

And then imagine there was an open bar . . . .

There just are no words for what the Daily Orange reunion this weekend was like. Well, there are, but I haven't been able to put them together yet. Stay tuned.

Arrrr! At least, sure as the sun sets over the yardarm, finally it be International Talk Like a Pirate Day! You don't even want to know what an uproar I've caused in my office. Perhaps it's the bright yellow bandanna (really a helmet liner, but piratey enough). Perhaps it's the lobster on my shoulder (me parrot took sick with a terrible case of the splathers, I tells 'em). Perhaps it's me spyglass. But I seem to be occasionin' more than me fair share of the old crooked-eye, sidelong glances what imply I may not be altogether altogether up in the crow's nest, if you catch me meanin'. But folks such as them be just ripe for keel-haulin', I says!

I am officially sick of getting up at 5 or 5:30 in the morning, blearily grooming myself, wearily dressing in the dark (and forgetting essential elements, like a watch, because I can't see them), and then catching the train to New York. Or the plane to DC. Enough, already. This is a young man's game, and the romance is gone. (Though I'd be excited to be going to the city, if I didn't have to turn right around for a fifth-grade open house. It's going to be wet down there by the end of the day, anyway.)

My excursion into higher education led, at last, to what was once a recurring dream: I had to go back to college to finish some coursework I never did in order to graduate. I'm told this is a fairly common theme, though in my case there are some particulars in the denouement of my undergraduate career that lend themselves to such night-foolery. (I graduated, don't worry; it's the actual year in which I accomplished this that remains somewhat fuzzy.) In this one, I was back in Syracuse, sharing an apartment on Crouse Avenue, above the old Red Barn. I was sharing it with several co-eds (though, as I told Lee the other day, co-eds as a concept is a completely different thing from real co-eds. Please try to understand the male mind). It was a Friday night and I was alone, but suddenly my high-school sweetheart appeared on the couch, up for a visit from DC. She had her two young sons in tow. We were going to go eat. I suggested Varsity pizza, but that didn't thrill her, so I tried to think of better restaurants in the area, all of which required a car. For reasons unclear to me, I did not have a car. But she had a rental. Luckily, I woke up before I could be subjected to having to drive an automatic, which in my world is equivalent to a nightmare.

Off to the city!

I'm thinking of doing my blog en français from now on. Unfortunately, that will limit my discussions to my nationalité, my profession, or my desires regarding petit déjeuner. By the way, pour petit déjeuner, je prends un croissant et un café.

On the other hand, readers may be relieved by this development.

Mold hates my eyes. The feeling is mutual.

Isabel is weakening. I'm personally pointed toward Syracuse this weekend, so rain will be no surprise, but there's some tension over whether there will be Girl Scout camping in the Adirondacks this weekend. I dragged out my hoary old "went to Scout Island in a storm with a tent with no floor and nothing to eat or drink but orange soda and the boat with the food never made it and we had nothing but orange soda to eat or drink all night and the next morning" story. I may have to embellish it some, as I'm certain it was pre-poptops, and we probably had to puncture the cans with trusty, rusty scout knives.

To the city tomorrow, wearin' my new testifyin' shoes.

Everyone who wrote in with (or even thought of) "duck tape" as the proper goose-repair mechanism, give yourselves a no-prize. A really tiny one, though, please. I mean, really... Plus, I fall on the "duct" side of that debate, so don't even get me started.

Hannah made a beautiful little goose out of foam core last week. Part of it broke, and she needed to fix it. But, as she explained, "You can't fix a Canadian goose with Scotch tape!"

I couldn't be more proud.

In order to pack any more things into this weekend, I mean. Too much to do. Where to begin?

Big wedding yesterday, nice but not overboard formal to-do. I'm trying to figure out if there's some kind of moratorium or cooling-off period before it's cool to mention that the Gov was at the reception. Kinda expected he would be, but it was cool of him to come. Of course, it's always very important at a wedding not to upstage the bride, but that's kinda hard to do when you're the Governor. Lots of people wanted their picture taken with him. It was very sweet. Anyway, the wedding was lovely -- this priest let the wedding party sit down during the readings, which I thought was very progressive and practical, but it takes away some of the endurance aspects of being in the wedding itself, tottering on heels unable to breathe for an hour, unaware that if you take about two steps back you'll fall into the first pew. Reception also lovely, lots of people I knew and was able to converse with about things other than work. But that and ferrying the kids to grandma's took up the entire day, and in the evening all we could do was eat chocolate and watch episodes of Buffy.

Today, back-to-back Nutcracker auditions. Bekah went for and got her second year as a clown. Lee took that shift. There's nowhere for parents to sit, so we pray for good weather so we can all congregate out on the sidewalk in one of the iffier neighborhoods in Albany. While they did that, Hannah and I did a couple of grocery runs. I just can't say enough good things about fresh-killed free range chicken, by the way. But I don't normally shop on Sunday mornings -- my favorite time is usually 8 or 9 at night -- so I really didn't fully appreciate the madhouse that is the Hannaford on a Sunday morning. We got what we needed and got the hell out. Then, I was going to go for a bike ride while Hannah had her auditions, but at the last minute she got nervous and wanted someone to stay there and wait for her. Sudden shifting of gears (well, not literally, obviously), grab a charged iPod and my French texts -- Lee, who had not had such foresight for herself, thoughtfully gave me a folding chair to take with), and off we go, she to wrack up her nerves worrying about getting a part, me to sit in the clouds/rain/sun/breeze (this day had it all, baby!). In the end, it was all worth it -- Bekah got the clown part, and Hannah moved all the way up to Party Child. You cannot imagine how important that is in the Nutcracker hierarchy. It's second only to Clara.

Then when we got back, wife gave me a well-intentioned shove out the door for my previously aborted bike ride. It was raining more than a little bit when I started, and I figured I'd do about an hour and take it easy. I lie to myself like that ALL THE TIME. I bombed the hills of Schodack for two hours and came home pretty strong, though I did pick a flatter route back. It rained for most of the ride, and I have really never been wetter, but it was a warm rain, I had on my wrap-arounds so water wasn't getting in my eyes, and I hadn't had a ride in more than a week, so I was going for it, baby. Kicked ass, did 30 miles in 2 hours, and now I can barely climb the stairs.

Got Ed Burke's book on long distance cycle training. I'm thinking I may stop not running in the mornings, and not ride my bike instead. Wish me luck with that. Seriously, I've been both unmotivated, unhealthy, and unable to get enough sleep to roll out of bed at 5:10 like the old days and run for an hour. It's a shame, because the cardio benefits can't be beat, and I can eat like a horse when I'm doing it, but this year I just can't get there. I DO think I can get on my bike at the drop of a hat, even if it's just to spin around the lake for 40 minutes or so. I've gotta get something going on, or this season will really have been something of a loss. I've done a lot of bicycling, but not in any organized way, and I've done just about nothing else.

Three smells predominated during my ride this afternoon:

• Buffalo (really, the smell from the buffalo farm reached quite a few miles further than usual)
• Dead possums and other road kill
• Dryer sheets

The first two are obnoxious, but the smell of dryer sheets really makes me want to gag.

When I said the other day that I hoped Elvis was healthy, I thought for a second or two about whether I should say anything about Johnny Cash. Glad I didn't. Now he's gone, too.

If you haven't seen the video for "Hurt" that everybody's talking about, check it out at markromanek.com. It's intense.

This is the first tragic anniversary (Memorial Day, D-Day, Hiroshima, Nagasaki) that has ever had any true meaning to me. This is a hard one, and I'm frankly not up to the task of reliving what we went through two years ago today. My first thoughts then were of the people I had, friends, family and co-workers, who might be in danger, and my first actions were to find them and try to get them to a safe place. We had fewer people than usual in New York that day, but quite a few in DC, including some across the street from the Pentagon. We didn't know where "safe" would be at the time, but we tried to help them to get home to their families, and started setting up the response team. Dozens of people volunteered to go to Ground Zero to work on the response. It was grim and heavy and important. It was like carrying a casket.

My story was mostly 150 miles away, though. If you want to know closer stories, look at the Voices site.

I should refine that. In fact, the best cool summer night driving fast with the windows open on dark roads and the sound turned so high your car vibrates album ever: Chris Isaak's "Forever Blue." The simple production, the depth of his voice, the sweetness of the guitar, the dark and open sound -- pure heaven. And it is not possible to play it loud enough. And "Graduation Day?" Best melancholy movin' on it's all over song ever.

(Soon I will be the J.D. Power of music - every song a winner in its own category!)

ça va, ça va. If I hadn't mentioned it already, I am finally following through on my lifelong desire to learn French. There was some problem with scheduling or something in ninth grade, and despite my absolute certainty that all the cute girls were taking French, I was stuck in German. It's a fine language, they're wonderful people, and I think the Jews are pretty much over all that, right? Well, I'll grant that it's a simple language, fairly easy and nearly rigid in its adherence to rules (hmmm... the culture doesn't fall far from the linguistic tree?). But it isn't French, which when spoken sounds like birds. Love it, wish I could speak it, wish I could understand it. And usually, along about December when cabin fever is setting in, I think about taking a class, but it always requires that I have taken the fall semester section, which I have never done. So, a few weeks ago, I suddenly realized that schools were registering and I had to procure French lessons. I was closed out of Hudson Valley Community College -- apparently some kind of hotbed of francophonie -- and the closer colleges didn't have anything I wanted or was willing to spend money on. But strangely enough, Schenectady County Community College -- which in my younger, crueller days, I will admit, I scorned with derision, and saddled with such monikers as "Second Chance Community College," "College High," and "Van Curler Tech" -- good old SCCC came through for me. This school was started when the Hotel Van Curler, once Schenectady's premiere hotel (though, truly, not that grand compared to other upstate city hotels), closed, and the college was hurriedly slapped into the old hotel building shortly thereafter. It wasn't much different some 10 years later, when a close friend took classes there while waiting for his true academic calling. I hadn't before encountered a college with lockers (though in fairness, I hadn't encountered all that many colleges) (and as a commuting student years later, I hated that there were no lockers to be had at SU).

Mon dieu! Is this going anywhere?! Wrap it up!

So, I'm taking French class at SCCC. There, was that so hard to get out? The campus is kinda growed up, there's a broad mix of students, there's hardly any of the old hotel building left (but what there is is still kinda thrown together), and it's not the worst place in the world to spend a few hours once a week conjugating verbs and mangling "heureux". So, eventually I'll be able to cross this one off my list of lifelong dreams. I'm not sure I'm ever going to get around to the cello (though if French had fallen through completely I was going to go with guitar lessons -- I used to pick and strum miserably, but a lesson couldn't hurt). And I think I'm going to have to reconcile my rock-climbing dream with the fact that I get terrified when I'm more than 6 feet off the ground. But we'll see....

Le roof, c'est fini! No idea what the French word for roof is. But it'll come to me. And I'd need the plural, because in fact two roofs are done, garage and porch. Rolled on the former, shingles on the latter. Big fat hairy pain in the ass, but one that is now done. A little more caulking and a small patch to the actual house roof (oh, yes, it's leaking!) and this roof nonsense is all done. Which is a good thing, because there's a serious shortage of good roof songs to put on a CD. Okay, there's Parliament's "Give Up The Funk (Tear the Roof Off The Sucker)", and the Bloodhound Gang's terrific riff on that, "Fire Water Burn." There are 107 bad jazz tunes involving some combination of "tin," "roof," and "blues," and while I love nearly all forms of music I will chance alienating readers by allowing as I just don't get jazz, and I especially don't get it when they call something the blues and it's just not, it's jazz. And there are an equal number of covers of "Up On The Roof," but I can't get excited about any of them.

So, my roof CD was a shortish one. But one of the upsides of long, laborious home improvement projects is that I get to play my construction CDs. There are some discs I pretty much only play during painting and the like. Tom Petty falls into that category, and a couple of soundtracks. The Heads album, which was the Talking Heads without David Byrne -- it doesn't suck, but it's not any good, either. The "Private Parts" soundtrack. All music best suited for construction work.

Yes, I could explain the title. I had to cut a lot of shingles. I used the factory-perfect edges of other shingles to guide my unerring hand in making perfect straight cuts. But the shingles were hot in the sun, oh so hot! And as I burned my fingers over and over, I thought, "Hot asphalt is the Devil's straight edge!"

Hmm, that would make me Lucifer. Yeah, that fits.

Speaking of people who understood the Devil's straight edge, by now everyone knows that Warren Zevon died on Sunday. His death seemed to bring the media recognition that his life and career never quite did; I don't know if that's good or not. He seemed happy with his career, and he was able to put out album after album despite a complete lack of radio or TV support. It's irksome that he's getting all this attention now, though, when a little bit of media support might have brought his music to more people when he was alive. Or perhaps he was just a niche player, and I'm in his niche. Like everyone, of course, I knew "Werewolves of London" and "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" when they came out, and was impressed with someone who could invest such wit in such good songs. But I didn't pay him much more attention, until about seven or eight years ago when I picked up "Learning to Flinch," a live CD that had uneven production values, a high price (then) and an incredible set of performances. From then on I was hooked. And while his dark, sardonic stuff is in a class by itself, he infuses his sweeter stuff with an openness and honesty that I think can only come from someone who spends time on the dark side. And he made me love a Stevie Winwood song that I hated in its original form, "Back in the High Life." Zevon's version can bring tears to the eyes.

John and George, Joey Ramone, Zevon . . . all gone. I just hope Elvis is healthy.

Also gone unnoticed because I've been among the roofing is that the Vuelta a Espana began on Saturday. Haven't been able to see any of it, as OLN is only playing it during the day (hey, guys, enough with the bull riding already!), but I hear that Alessandro Petacchi took a stage, making him only the third rider to win stages in the Tour de France, the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta in the same year. Pretty impressive. He sprints like the wind.

• Wasps are capable of making lots of nests in the same location, over and over.
• Lots of them.
• Never turn your back to the drop.
• Take all time estimates and double them.
• The last roofer did NOT skimp on the nails.
• Not everything that casts a shadow across the sun is a wasp or a hornet.
• But most things are.
• It is much hotter on a roof.
• Especially when you're putting on the flashing.
• My forearms have never hurt so much.
• A heavier hammer, say 16 oz. can batter thumb and forefinger much more effectively than a lighter model.
• People who have never said a word to you in their lives feel compelled to call out to you when you're working on a roof.
• So does the old man with the dogs, and he's hard to get rid of.
• Goop will take most of that tar off your leg. But not all of it.

Nor is it leaking. At least not the garage roof. The porch roof needs a little more work (such as, say, shingles). Double marathon of roofing this weekend. Ripping up nails takes forever (and they don't pound down so nicely when there's tar underneath them, so they have to be ripped up). Only one bit of rotten wood to replace on the porch, which is a miracle, but it's the piece that's directly over the hidden hornet's nest. Much insecticide. I'm pretty light on the pesticides, but when it comes to hornets and wasps, it's the 20-foot range Instant Spray of Death. I need to re-spray this morning and then with any luck I can get that board replaced this evening and get started on the shingles. Arrgh!

I said this earlier this evening with regard to an ill-conceived music video featuring Starship (how exactly did they go from "White Rabbit" and "Today" to "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now"? How?! I demand to know!) singing a bad song from an even worse movie, "Mannequin." But in fact it can be applied to pretty much my entire week, at least the waking hours spent outside my home:

No dipstick is long enough to measure the depth of the suckage.

Pressures are in millibars and winds are in knots. That is all.

Today and yesterday, all the standard searches for wood rosin were swamped, swamped I tell you, by some of the most bizarre search requests I have ever seen. They included:

• Apex in downtown Schenectady (Hey, if you remember it, share the love!)
• Imperial granum
• Hincapie shower (I swear, George, I never showed those pictures to a soul!)
• Manhattan ployes
• bumper cars montreal
• naked duckhunting girls

Tomorrow night, I start French class. My goal is to learn how to say "naked duckhunting girls" en francais. Wish me luck.

This Labor Day weekend has been all about getting things done around the house, things that should have been done over the summer, but it was hot and I was sick and stuff just didn't get done. Catch up time. Nearly there, really, on Bekah's room. Gotta frame the closet, put up the drywall (ceiling's going to be a bear), strip the trim and repaint it. We have this beautiful 8-inch trim, but it's all covered with layers and layers of paint. Replacing it would be expensive, but I don't want to lose it, either. It's just clear pine. I don't know if I could get it down to stainable levels, but it would look nice stained dark instead of painted.

Yesterday I got out on the bike and pounded out 30 miles. Well, I pounded about 22 miles, and then I begged and whined and pleaded for the power to get home for the last 8. I had gone out hard but thinking I'd come home inside of an hour. My body was struggling a little on the first few hills. Then I started to feel fantastic, and just started winding around the roads of Schodack at high speed. Weren't many cars, and there were quite a few other bikes out. Temp was just around 73 or so, and the sun was out, so it was just perfect for a bike ride. Then I started to pay for having stood up on the pedals on the uphills, and I began thinking about the flattest route home (there isn't one). Had to walk up from the lake, but I usually do after a long ride, because that hill is brutal. Great day.

Today, rainy and dull, and I've gotta frame that closet. Beats last year's Labor Day, though, when we were all involved in the shock of the broken arm. Hope not to do that again.

Hey! "Lance Around the Clock" on OLN! Don't miss it!