November 2003 Archives

Forgive, not very writey these days. Could be the total physical exhaustion. Could be the constant imbalance of humours, or whatever it is that is causing my stomach to reject pretty much everything I eat. It could also be that three reunions is one too many. After the extreme enjoyability of The Daily Orange reunion, another high school reunion would have an awful lot to live up to. In any event, I was within an inch of bagging this one, but Reynolds was going, and she was the one with the whooping cough, so I got off my ass and went. As is usual with these things, there's always someone there I'd really like to spend more time talking to, but it doesn't come together, and I promise to get together sometime -- that could even happen; I've been getting better about follow-through. But there was a good crowd, about a third of the class, and a bunch of people I always like to see and talk to, a few people I haven't seen since high school that I was delighted to see again, and plenty of new gossip (well, new to me) since a good chunk of the class is still around town and everybody back home knows everybody else's business. (It's odd, it's only about 25 miles away, but I've run across very few people from Scotia during my career in Albany -- everybody's from right around Albany or someplace completely far away, but very few people are from Scotia.) It was a good time, and the food didn't even kill me.

As noted this summer, this was the 25th year reunion. Sometimes it's hard to believe. What the hell have I been doing for 25 years?

Note to social function DJs: if everyone has retreated to the corners of the room so that they can try to talk (which is the real point of a reunion), you may want to turn it the f down. I'm just saying . . .

This weekend? Restful and uneventful. I was terribly lazy yesterday, and I don't see a shirt getting ironed tonight. Borrowed a bunch of movies from the library, with the best of intentions (just like that French homework I'm supposed to have done last week), but the only one we got to was a very worn VHS tape of "Ghostbusters," which struck me as just as funny as ever. The others, I am sure, will go back unwatched.

HEY!! I got the buzz out of my stereo! (I feel like a Waitresses song.) I'd had to abandon the grand project of putting my vinyl on CD because there was a huge, enormous, high-volume buzz sitting underneath everything I recorded, and for the longest time I couldn't figure out what was causing it. I had added a multi-component switch to the AUX channel, so that the iPod and the MiniDisc and the DVD player, etc., could all be plugged in and I wouldn't have to keep pulling all the wires everytime I wanted to change a component. Very clever, right? Well, the switch was the culprit, so now I leave it unplugged with I'm playing vinyl and have to plug it in when I want to hear anything else. But it's a solution!

• Little girls who dress up like pilgrims and Indians for Thanksgiving.
• The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which I love even more now that I've seen it live (somebody needs to produce a webcam feed so you can just watch the parade as it passes, and not keep cutting to celebrity interviews and listening to Katie Couric deliver lame jokes from the teleprompter.)
• Bright sunny T-giving morning, warm and in the '50s.
• A nice little 20-mile bike ride to Mom's for Thanksgiving. My sag wagon brought me a change of clothes. Just as I was leaving, the sky clouded up considerably, but the ride was still nice. Went out some roads that I would ONLY ever try on Thanksgiving, when there is no traffic whatsoever. Any other day, I'd be taking my life in my hands. One just doesn't bike anywhere near Crossgates Mall. Just 20 miles, and very flat miles at that, over to Rotterdam.

Other than the bike ride, yesterday was, appropriately, a day of sloth. Today there's some cleaning to be done, and tonight I have a high school reunion. 25 years. This will cap the Year of Reunions -- we had an informal reunion gathering in the summer, followed by the Daily Orange Reunion (100th anniversary celebration). Three in a year is enough. This should be fun, but I've been so drained by work that I really didn't have any desire to do this; if Reynolds weren't going, I wouldn't have bothered, but I haven't seen her in ages, and I simply must.

In my house this weekend, you would not have been out of place had you been walking around singing:

Comment allez-vous çe soir? Je suis comme-çi, comme-ça Yes, a penguin taught me French back in Antarctica

Don't know what's up with my dreams lately. Just dreamed that I got DQ'd from the local Race for the Cure 5K (which I didn't even run this year) because my chip showed that I had crossed the line at the 5 minute mark, and I had gotten a little lost at the end of the race and took a wrong turn (so it looked like I had just hung around the finish line for the whole race and crossed when I felt like it). I got into a big argument with one of the organizers and pointed out that I raised a whole mess of money for a different race I do, which really didn't help to prove my point or endear me to anybody, although he was willing to listen if I promised to pull in as much for his race as I did for the other. Then I got mad and stalked off, and woke up with a little twinge in my foot going off like an alarm.

Yesterday was one of those glorious days when life is really worth getting up for. It was sunny and got warmish (51 degrees), and I was able to get in a morning bike ride. I opted for the bike path in Niskayuna because I had to be over in that part of the world for a little Christmas shopping anyway, and I didn't feel like dealing with Saturday traffic on the roads of Guilderland. So the bike path it was. Brand new parking lot at the Nisky train station, and permanent toilets are under construction, which is huge news -- no more port-o-lets! Rode at a decent pace to Aqueduct, jumped off the path and crossed the river and rode up into Alplaus for old times' sake. When we were teens, Alplaus was one of our destination rides, probably about 7 or 8 miles from home, a good ride along quiet roads (then - not now), and there was a general store to buy drinks, and a very good little bike shop combined with the local post office. The bike shop is gone, but the post office is still there. Pretty little town, one we looked at seriously when we were looking for a house, but just too damned far from downtown Albany and no quick way to get to anywhere. (I am compelled, against a demonstrated lack of interest on anyone's part, to mention that Alplaus means "place of the eels" in Dutch. I could tell you why . . . ) Spun around, trudged back up the leafy hill and on back to Nisky. Remembered why I almost never seriously ride the bike path anymore: dogs, leashed or not, and the clueless people walking them. I make better speed on the open road, stop signs and all, than I do on the bike path where I have to keep slowing down to negotiate an opening among the confused who can't seem to figure out to let me pass on their left, and their dogs, who are usually straining a leash, like a garotte for unwary cyclists, across the path.

Today? Perhaps just as beautiful!

Run! Big light in sky! Run!!

Oh, wait, that's the sun. I remember it, vaguely... It used to be up there all the time.

I mean, I don't think I've been this taken with a band since I fell into Elvis Costello. (Okay, maybe Dar Williams, maybe Aimee Mann.) But look at this -- haven't you lived this? It's from "Reconstruction Site":

And I'm broke, like a bad joke Somebody’s uncle told at a wedding reception in 1972 Where a little boy under a table with cake in his hair Stared at the grown-up feet as they danced and swayed And his father laughed and talked on the long ride home And his mother laughed and talked on the long ride home And he thought about how everyone dies someday And when tomorrow gets here, where will yesterday be And fell asleep in his brand new winter coat

Remember sleeping in your winter coat? How deliciously over-hot it was? Waking up dehydrated and dying for a Coke? Remember pretending to be asleep in the backseat, or maybe really being asleep but just awake enough to listen to what your parents were saying, awake enough to peer at the dashboard lights from time to time, to look out the window and squint at the streetlamps, squeezing your eyes to make the rays spread farther from the lamps?

I just dreamed that Hugh Hefner had opened up a bike path locally. It was a nice path through rolling hills along a river. He charged by weight, and I got into an argument with him because he wanted to charge me for the weight of a backpack I hadn't taken with me on the ride. He was using an ancient truck scale that had been left behind on the property, something of overkill for weighing people and bikes, and the whole thing was a little pricey.

That is all.

Off to NYC. So much city, I have to go there every week, apparently. You would think that would be fun, but the way the day works, by the time I get there and get done what I have to get done, all I feel is the pressure to be back home. A month or so ago I made an effort to see an old friend and had a great time, but since then I've reverted to the old "down and back" mentality. Of course part of that is that it's no longer warm and pleasant to wander through Gotham, which makes all the difference.

Realized the last time I was down that the renovations at 270 Broadway, a once-nasty state office tower, were complete and that, to my dismay but not surprise, Ellen's Stardust Café had not returned to its former space. The City Hall area isn't exactly overloaded with restaurants, and Ellen's was open from very early till fairly late. It was always a good place to meet up with other people before a meeting, and it was a big place that didn't much care if you lingered over your coffee and toasted bagel. Breakfast came quick, but supper was slow because it was mostly for people who had nowhere else to be (other than us public servants grabbing a bite before an evening meeting). The bathrooms required a journey out into the main building and down several long, desolate hallways. Best of all, because Ellen herself had been a Miss Subway back in the '40s or '50s, the walls were lined with old Miss Subway placards from an old MTA campaign promoting the subway system (guess I'll need to go deeper into Google to find something on this campaign . . . all I come up with right now are an interview with Marv Albert's attorney, a song that may have been sung by Cher, and some blogger who misses working at a Subway sandwich shop. Draw your own conclusions). There's another Ellen's somewhere up in midtown, but it's a flashy, touristy place. This was tired old New York, and while I didn't love it, I do miss it.

Congress robbed me of my weekend, or at least the House-Senate conference that released the Energy Bill over the weekend did, because I had to read it. Plus negotiating another piece of nonsense (unsuccessfully, as has been the case lately) took a chunk out of the weekend. But we managed to get in two movie events. We let the girls watch "Spiderman" with us on Friday night. I had feared the whole thing would just be too violent for Bekah, but that wasn't a problem. We were all bawling on the couch when Uncle Ben died, however (and since the movie came out until forever, every time I stand in front of the New York Public Library on the Fifth Avenue side, I think, "This is where Uncle Ben died"). Next morning the girls were up bright and early, inventing their own superheroes. Then on Saturday night, we went to this year's Warren Miller movie, which is a huge event that psyches us up for skiing. Incredibly, it's his 54th annual ski movie. It was great, as always, and hardly marred at all by the persistent swooping of at least two bats in the grand old Palace Theatre. Most people convinced themselves they were birds. I can delude myself, too, but only up to a point. Now I'm dying to hit the slopes. Or bike. Or do anything but lie around like the schlub I've been. Got in a run on Saturday, it was too cold and windy to bike. I was going to run this morning, but I woke up about two hours ago, overheated and fairly dehydrated, and never got back to sleep, and my body isn't saying "run" right this minute. Excuses....

Is the French thing annoying yet?

Wind? No, thanks. Got some.

Seriously, it's a good thing the leaves are nearly all off (a condition called "leaf off," something that makes those of us who sometimes order aerial photography very excited. Around these parts, you gotta hit the window between "leaf on" and "snow cover" in order to get any useful images.)

I got so far from my point there was no getting back. But if it's so windy that both Jon Stewart and Colin Quinn felt it worth mentioning on their shows, then you've got such wind that has caught the attention of Comedy Central, and that's something.

I'm just going to stop now.

No, I didn't do this. I don't know if it's right. But you can now translate chunks of text or even webpages, free, at Google's translator. My personal favorite oddity: it's a tie between "une quantité considérable de Karen Savoca" and "Damnez-vous, arbres de érable!" Alors, maintenant:

Le jour des vétérans, part et musique Je suis assez sûr ils ai placé l'Armistice sachant qu'il aurait lieu au sujet du dernier jour où les doughboys pourraient obtenir un certain bien ratissant dedans. C'est toujours notre dernier projectile. Les arrêts de ville reprenant part bientôt, et nous obtiendrons cognés avec la neige d'ici peu de toute façon. J'essaye de ne pas répéter le désastre de la pelouse d'année dernière (le bras cassé de la lie, aucuns rakers disponibles, toute cette substance). Sorti et a fait des heures d'un couple de ratisser dur ce matin jusqu'à ce que la pluie ait juste obtenu d'être trop, mais avec n'importe quelle chance nous pouvons emballer vers le haut des autres couples des sacs avant la collecte. Soixante sacs n'est pas peu commun notre petite cour minuscule. Damnez-vous, arbres de érable! Mon iPod semble être dans un certain genre d'humeur. Le mode de battage continue à pousser le petit pâté Smith, Warren Zevon, Lucy Kaplansky, Dar Williams, et une quantité considérable de Karen Savoca. La substance foncée, seulement. La musique la plus légère que j'ai entendue que ce matin était les ruches, et ce n'est pas aussi léger. C'est une bonne chose, bien que, parce qu'autrement j'entendrais rarement le petit pâté Smith -- trop foncé et plodding pour obtenir par un album entier à moins que je sois vraiment dans une humeur moi-même, et alors je ne l'apprécie pas, wallow juste de I dans lui.

I'm pretty sure they set the Armistice knowing it would be about the last day the doughboys could get some good raking in. It's always our last shot. The town stops picking up leaves soon, and we'll get socked with snow before long anyway. I'm trying not to repeat last year's lawn disaster (Lee's broken arm, no rakers available, all that stuff). Got out and did a couple hours of hard raking this morning until the rain just got to be too much, but with any luck we can pack up another couple of bags before the pickup. Sixty bags is not unusual for our tiny little yard. Damn you, maple trees!

My iPod seems to be in some kind of a mood. Shuffle mode keeps pushing Patty Smith, Warren Zevon, Lucy Kaplansky, Dar Williams, and a fair amount of Karen Savoca. The dark stuff, solely. The lightest music I heard this morning was The Hives, and that ain't so light. This is a good thing, though, because otherwise I would rarely hear Patty Smith -- too dark and plodding to get through an entire album unless I'm really in a mood myself, and then I don't enjoy it, I just wallow in it.

They Might Be Giants rocked. Best free show ever (well, okay, maybe the Psychedelic Furs was better, but that was about 21 years ago). How about, best free show accompanying a book signing held in a former Talbot's store ever? Oh, anyway, they rocked, and the girls had a great time. They did NOT just focus on the songs accompanying their new book, either. Did highlights from throughout their career.

"Memento" -- interesting, odd. Sort of the unreliable narrator thing with a new twist. Hard to think of Carrie-Anne Moss as evil and manipulative, which is why I'd be in trouble if I were the guy in the movie. Those eyes would just do me in.

Saturday night, we watched a double bill of "A Mighty Wind" and "Waiting for Guffman". Guffman was the first of Christopher Guest's touching little trilogy -- hilarious, but you really start to feel for these people and their little dreams and wishes and quirks. "A Mighty Wind" was more sensitive than the others (still hilarious, though). Eugene Levy's Mitch, and Mickey's devotion to him (played with brilliance by Catherine O'Hara) was the real centerpiece of the movie, and although the sendups of folk stereotypes are marvelous, you can't help feeling for poor Mitch, who didn't make it out of the '60s unscathed. (Odd piece of detail -- Mitch arrives by bus at the Albany, NY bus station. It's not the Albany bus station, and from the sun and architecture looks more like New Mexico. But someone went to the effort to put an actual Times Union newspaper box out in front). I think "Best in Show" is the best of the three mockumentaries, but there were some stunning moments in "A Mighty Wind."

Speaking of stunning moments, Stephen Colbert on The Daily Show last night, speaking of the Prince Charles scandal of which no one seems to be allowed to speak, peeled a banana and suddenly, for lack of better description, went down on it. On camera. And I was thankful for this shocking moment, because it got his earlier bizarre hand gestures out of my head.

Elvis's "North" - beautiful. But Mac users beware: the bonus online track isn't even available for us to TRY to download. Damn the man!

I have been to quite a few concerts in my life -- all styles, all sizes, all venues. I've been to shows in domed stadiums, grand theaters, small clubs, outdoors, tiny dives. But I have never, never waited in a line to get tickets. That's just not something I do. If I need to be in a certain place at a certain time to even have a chance of going to the show, I'm really just not that interested. (And usually that's going to mean it's a stadium show, which suck without exception anyway.)

But today, we're going to go over to the unlikely venue of The Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza and get in line in hopes of being among the first 200 people to get tickets to a 2 o'clock show by They Might Be Giants. The girls are totally psyched. I mean stoked. (Gotta keep the lingo current.) They're playing in support of their new book and CD, Bed, Bed, Bed.

We all run around with bits of TMBG songs in our heads all day long. And if they run out of tickets? They'll say, "Excuse me NO! Pardon me NO! No means no means no means no."

It is, according to the little weather box on my computer, 24.1 degrees out. I was unaware the box had snowflake symbols. It does.

My children have been keeping a secret from me: there's an entire "Boomerang" channel now. Boomerang had been a show on Cartoon Network that played old cartoons like Top Cat in order to enlighten me to the fact that things that seemed hip when I was four may not have been so hip. But they also play some good old stuff, and now it's an entire channel, which just sucked me in last night just as I was ready to go to bed. Turns out most things I say in my life are based on a single cartoon, the name of which I cannot find just now, the one where Yosemite Sam builds his cabin atop Bugs's rabbit hole. "Playin' possum fer 22 years!" We call up the stairs, "Oh, Haannsy! Breakfast is reeaaddy!" And when Hannah was little and we would watch that cartoon, I would then take a little plastic hammer and try to hammer down the carpet, just like Yosemite Sam. She thoughts it was hilarious. And just the other day, Hannah, out of nowhere, said, "Mmmiiice," just like Sam.

Unable to find the energy to write. Where have I been? Why, New York, of course! Does a five-hour commute become tiring? Of course not . . . But I got to have a brisk fall lunch in Bryant Park, listening to a middle-aged Hispanic woman and a 20-something white boy give each other their romantic histories. Co-workers, not prospective lovers, I think. It's a fascinating city.

There are some movies that just stand up years past their time, even when just about everything they reference is completely out of date. "The Apartment" is one of those. It's set in a world that's hardly even recognizable (starting with the complete lack of sexual harassment lawsuits, and moving through an inconceivably drunken office Christmas party), but it's still warm, funny, touching. Fred MacMurray is a marvelously self-involved cad, Jack Lemmon is the guy who goes along to get along, and Shirley MacLaine is unbelievably fetching as the elevator girl who always falls for the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Best line: "I guess that's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise."

• At some point, several years ago, I went through a very brief period of listening to Lenny Kravitz. Please explain why this would be.
  

• I had Hannah with me at the grocery store last week. Upon leaving, I was thrilled to notice that the new carts have, once again, a bar across the back that allows an intrepid soul to ride the cart down the hill in the parking lot. Should I have shown my 10-year-old how this works?
  

• I found my missing copy of "The Champion." It was way in the back of the drawer. Am I blind?

Some progress has been made against the forces of entropy, but very little. The garage has been restored so that it can nearly hold a car, if I just move a few more things out of the way. The bikes are hung up, the stray lumber is on the lumber pile, camping gear is mostly where it belongs, summer tools are back in the corner and rakes and snowshovels are front and center. The refrigerator now works (well, as much as it ever did -- it's still loud as hell, and I know it's going to break again as soon as this warranty is up). The dishwasher has a leak that no repairman seems able to replicate, despite the fact that every time we run it it spews water onto the kitchen floor. Perhaps we're using different definitions of "leak." We can get no one to even come and give us an estimate on drywalling Rebekah's room, which means I'm going to run out of patience and start it myself, as the risk of destroying my already injured wrist, but what is one to do? I had promised her she could be in by Christmas. AND we aren't having luck in the roof department, either. Found a substantial leak in the attic, did what could be done from inside to seal it (realizing that I would probably just be moving the point at which the water enters the house). For average rains, it doesn't even leak, but when it pours, it pours, and it pours right down where I want to put new drywall, so I'd prefer to fix that problem up front, ya know?

I just want to say, this is one white man in government who doesn't have to have his staff explain "mojo" to him. Although I'll admit, the first version of "Got My Mojo Workin'" to get stuck in my head today wasn't Muddy's, it was Manfred Mann's.

I said I was white!

The other night, Rebekah was exhausted, prone to tears, just tired out of her mind. She's brushing her teeth before bed, and we're all upstairs milling about, getting things ready for bedtime. And probably because I had just seen an ad for a new Simpsons game on Playstation 2, I was singing "I am evil Homer! I am evil Homer!" (This is not unusual.) Rebekah, in a totally tired deadpan, says, "Give me the net. I'll get him."

We all just about wet ourselves laughing. She forgot it was funny and decided to get offended by our laughter. Still, that was SO funny....

Did you know that they've started up "Trick or Treat for UNICEF" again? I didn't. Nobody else did. But Hannah did. When I was a kid, they gave us a little orange milk carton, and just about every kid in the school went out right after school on Halloween and collected pennies in the carton. Mostly we got pennies. Not that they weren't worth more than they are today, but they were still just pennies. Plus, with all the kids from the neighborhood school out collecting (we did it BEFORE the actual trick or treating), the haul wasn't usually impressive. Maybe somebody dropped in a dime or even a quarter every now and then.

Well, they're doing it again. Hannah went out last night with new orange boxes that look like disposable cameras and with the very noble intention of not asking for candy, just for UNICEF money. But then she gave in and got candy, too. But every house, save one, gave her some money (and most were as surprised to hear of UNICEF again as I was). Many gave loose coins, which I thought was in the spirit of the thing, but many gave dollars, and in the end, I think she raised about $14 million dollars just going two blocks around our house. Not bad. And Rebekah even memorized "United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund."

We used to take our milk cartons back to school, and never really knew how much we'd collected. Now we're to take them to a Coinstar machine and enter the UNICEF code 5555 to donate. If you walk by a Coinstar machine, drop them a dime or two.