Well, the Sink Hole that Ate My Yard has settled down. The consensus among the usual suspects is that none of them are to blame, and I think they're right. One opinion, that there may once have been a septic tank there, seemed absurd, but poking and prodding revealed a couple of concrete blocks way down at the bottom of the hole, so the possibility of a previous structure cannot be ruled out. It's a hard time of year to get dirt delivered but I did get some over here this morning and then spent a hardly hour or so pitching very wet topsoil down into a very deep hole. The joys of homeownership. Arrgh.
October 2008 Archives
Is it a sign of the apocalypse when a giant hole opens up in your yard? Or is it just a promotional gimmick for Ghostbusters III? If the latter, I wasn't advised. It turns out it's pretty hard to get anyone excited over a giant hole in the yard – the town was quick to check it out, but it wasn't by the water line and hadn't swallowed the road, so they went on their way. I knew it was near the gas line, but as it hadn't yet exploded, that detail wasn't too interesting to my gas provider. Once I confirmed that I could see bare gas pipe in the hole and called back with that information, I got a little bit more attention, but they still didn't know quite what to do. After pulling some teeth, I got them to commit to looking at it. Someday.
So, if you're walking around my yard, watch your step!
And not just a little bit.
It's a commonplace that the weather changes quickly around here – completely one thing one day, completely another the next. So, Friday was coldish (45) and sunny and I had the nicest cold-weather ride I can remember; yesterday was 20 degrees warmer, vastly wetter, and just miserable. Mushrooms and mold everywhere, though a good day for digging a new garden. On the plus side, I made an excellent squash soup.
The weekends are now a blur of Nutcracker rehearsals, random yardwork, and old movies on the DVR. With a stored assortment of black and white horror classics like "Cat People" and "I Walked with a Zombie" courtesy of TCM, the only thing we could agree to watch last night was "D.O.A.," what with its "soft in the belly" and its "luminous toxin poisoning" and its desperately needy Paula. Still a fun romp, but the "reporting your own murder" angle seems a little thin now.
Glad I didn't go to my grave wondering about this one, which has been driving me crazy (on an every-now-and-then basis) for nigh onto 30 years. A long, long time ago, back in the dark ages when the only way to see movies was to go to a theater, our university had some great film series. Among them was a series of old black and white film from the '30s and '40s, not all of them classics by any means, often shown with cartoons and a Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy serial, as they were intended to be shown. And at one of these showings my already long-suffering wife-to-be and I saw an odd little film that, as memory served, featured some occultish elements, a sort of mystical little shop, and an eerie performance by Edward G. Robinson, often talking into a mirror. And for years and years I waited to see this movie somewhere again, if only to remember its title and what it was all about, but to no avail. Then, as IMDB became available, I would periodically scrounge through Robinson's credits, but not find anything that quite fit the bill. I knew it wasn't "Brother Orchid," which we saw in that series as well, and the description of "Larceny Inc." didn't quite fit, though it did have a non-mystical luggage shop and a non-eerie Robinson performance, as we recently learned. But I still couldn't uncover it.
Then a couple of weeks ago, as I was going through boxes of nonsense that should have been purged decades ago, I came across an odd piece of ephemera, the University Union Cinemas schedule for Spring, 1979. And on it was a title I didn't recognize (and which these days would suggest a different kind of film entirely): "Flesh and Fantasy." Another trip to IMDB, and sure enough – Found it! It turns out to have been a trio of loosely connected stories in a single film, and I had conflated the Edward G. Robinson part, a man who is told by a palmreader that he will commit a murder, with a segment that actually featured Bob Cummings (almost the anti-Robinson) and the shop of a mysterious mask maker.
With that, I've solved two major movie mysteries in 2008 (the other being the matter of the morocco endpapers), which ought to be some kind of good sign.
As they say, the frost is on the pumpkin and pretty much everything else. Three straight mornings of cold, hard frost that dampens the enthusiasm for things like bicycle riding. Take temps below 55, add a 20mph headwind to whatever else is blowing around out there, and it's not just the pumpkin that gets frosted. The sun gives little relief, and below 55 I can't get by without tights, and even then I need a warming embrocation to get going and keep the knees from freezing. Belgium Knee Warmers recommends an embrocation from Mad Alchemy, which I'm dying to try because I'm a little nervous about the stuff I'm currently using. There's got to be something better than methyl salicylate.
The miles also suffer, both because I'm just not able to push myself to be that uncomfortable for more than a couple of hours, and because opportunities tend to come when I'm around the city, which means stop-and-start urban riding, rough roads, lots of traffic and other things that just slow the whole ride down. But that's just the nature of autumn riding – you just do what you can when you can. For the last couple of years, I've managed to ride in every month but one (though whether it's January or February has varied by when the thaw comes), but that doesn't mean I make any serious miles.
Currently trying to psyche myself up to get out there this afternoon, but the current temp of 41 degrees isn't exactly inspiring me to stuff myself into tights and freeze my toes off.
It's good to remember from time to time, as actresses/health experts get us worked up into a lather over micrograms of thimerosal and BPA-leaching water bottles, that people used to be killed by molasses. So maybe things ain't so bad.
Trying to keep up the ongoing purge of the absolutely unnecessary, the inexplicably kept, the useless detritus of the past that seems to stick like glue -- I'm throwing away things I swear I've thrown away three or four times before. Now of course we have the modern advantage of being able to scan some of those things, old pieces of ephemera tucked into notebooks and drawers just as reminders of things we once did or the people we once were, and I'm perfectly satisfied with a digital facsimile as the original meets the fate it should have met 25 years ago. But there are still some problematic items.
Cassettes, for example. From the time I bought my first cassette tape, I was addicted to the creation of tapes. (Now people call them mix tapes, but at the time, it was just a given that if I was making a tape it wasn't simply a copy of an entire album or a single artist.) I still have some of my earlier efforts, barely preserved on the cheapest tape available at the time, though most of those have long since been tossed, broken and unplayable. There was a time when making a tape was almost a stress reflex, something I did as a way of avoiding whatever it was I was supposed to be doing (usually schoolwork). I made dozens and dozens of these during my college years and into my twenties, usually cuing off whatever latest and greatest finds I had made at Desert Shore, my most reliable used record source. Once I had my hands on some graphics gear, even the creation of the covers became an obsession. And I still have nearly all of them, and a tape deck to play them on.
But of course in the age of iTunes and digital music, even though I will get up every twenty minutes to flip over an LP, I almost never pop a cassette in the deck. The sound quality was substandard from the start, and hasn't gotten better over thousands of plays. So I thought maybe I could gather up the bulk of them and consign them to history. But first, at least make a copy of the covers so I could remember what was on them, maybe even duplicate a few on CD. But as I looked at the playlists, I realized that I had very little of this music digitally -- almost all of it is still locked up on my LPs. If I toss these tapes that WERE my musical base for my 20s and 30s, tapes whose song order is indelibly locked in our memories, I may never really get them back. And there's all this fun music that I just haven't heard in years.
So, ummm, the tapes are staying. Another victory for clutter. (But I am digitizing a few of them, anyway -- hang the sound quality: I don't have the rest of my life to recreate these things the way I used to.)
A couple of weeks ago there was just nothing I wanted to hear on Sirius, so I started scanning around and found the Blues channel. Rebekah asked, with surprise, "You like the blues?!" Damn right I like the blues – I've just been so busy ensuring my kids have a proper grounding in the essentials of rock 'n' roll, to the point they can spontaneously sing every single word of "Tombstone Blues," that I've forgotten to expose them to any more of the blues than they get from repeated watchings of "The Blues Brothers." But yes, there was a time when it was all blues, all the time in our house – huge quantities of John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, "Gatemouth" Brown, the incredible John Hammond, and more. In fact, we refer to 1991 as The Year of Buddy Guy, the year this solid bluesman who had been playing for 30 years became something of an overnight sensation and was suddenly playing, it seemed, everywhere.
So, her question and seeing Buddy's amazing performance in "Shine A Light" suddenly brought the blues back, and I'm busy ripping my blues CDs onto the computer and making room on the iPod. (I once played absolutely nothing but Small Faces for about a month, prompting a roommate to confide that she had really preferred my Left Banke period.) When I get into something, I get into it deep. so it may be before long that the family is looking back with longing at my intense Joe Cocker phase from early this summer. I'm just sayin'.
There's little sweeter than a perfect autumn day like today for a nice 60K ride -- just warm enough to stay comfortable in shorts (with an expected amount of sleeve-up, sleeve-down sort of stuff), sunny and beautiful. Many of the leaves are down, and the color is kinda all over the place. There's more roadkill than I've seen all summer, which seems odd, but maybe the possums and porcupines are depressed about the bear market. (There was also a dead squirrel in our yard the other day, spread-eagle, not a mark on him save the little x's over his eyes.) My new Crank Brothers Quattro pedals are excellent – easy to clip in, big stable base for power transfer, and especially efficient on the climbs. I couldn't go the way I had wanted because of some last minute roadwork – it's the time of year when everybody's rushing to finish things before the asphalt plants close – so I went off to the north and was just as happy running the fresh pavement on Snake Hill Road. Very nice.
Wish you'd been there instead of slaving the beautiful day away? Then click, just click:
Two very weird incidents from the past month or so that I've held off on talking about because I don't know what they mean, but then on top of this continuing Obama/Osama nonsense, the latest of which comes from my own home county, I thought I just had to put them out there.
First incident – as a bike rider, runner, or anyone who does any form of sport in public knows, there are LOTS of people who are hostile to the very idea that you are exercising. It angers them. It'd be hard to say why, but even when you're nowhere near their path of travel, drivers and passengers will go out of their way to scream, honk, throw things at you, threaten you with their cars. Being fit or getting fit seems to piss these cretins off, and a quick glance is usually enough to see why. So I'm used to being yelled at. But I admit even cynical old me was taken aback about a month ago when a beat-up old car with two lunkheads pulled slowly past me as I was climbing a hill and one of them leaned out and yelled the "N" word at me. For one thing, I'm as white as can be, and even with my bike tan I'm not what you would call passing. For another, I'm just amazed that in this day and age, the first thing that comes out of some lunkhead's mouth when he wants to spew hate is a racial epithet that doesn't even apply – I mean, how fucked up does your head have to be that the "N" word is at the top of your list to shout at someone? I expect to be called "gay" because I'm on a bike – I don't know why, but it's standard – but I've never before been called that.
Then, last week as I was taking a bump up Washington Avenue past the downtown SUNY campus, a carload of jerkoffs (that's a technical term, I'm just trying to describe them as accurately as possible) drove past and the driver leaned out his window and screamed at me, "Obama sucks!" Again, I'm confused – did he, too, think I was black and that therefore I must care about his opinion about Sen. Obama? Or did he assume that because I was on a bike, I must be gay, and that being gay, I must be in favor of Sen. Obama, and again was in need of his opinion? Too deep a thinker for me to figure out, I guess.
And today, I couldn't be more proud of my home county, which managed to send out absentee ballots with "Osama" on the Democratic line. Listen, I worked in a print shop, and I know how this nonsense happens – some joker commits a dumb joke to type and it doesn't get fixed before press time, which is why that kind of behavior is unacceptable in a print shop. Really unforgivable.
A sample of BBC news stories that came across the Sirius this morning:
- Asian markets implode. Even China is starting to feel impacts.
- Two advocates of ethical suicide fight with each other over their ideas on how and whether you should kill yourself.
- Hey, the American stock markets aren't feeling any too perky, either. The newsreader actually asks, "What will it take to satisfy these people?"
Time to find a kitten, quick.
No, not that kind. But it's worthy of note that today my teenaged daughter, gifted as her generation is with the magical texting fingers (as our generation was with the magical remote-control fingers), received a letter from an out-of-town friend. A letter. Handwritten, on paper, in an envelope, with a stamp. (Lickin' it old-school, you might say.) I'm thinking about offering it to the Smithsonian as the last teenage letter in captivity.
I was even thinking about letters not too long ago, listening to Joe Cocker belt out his version of "The Letter," made more famous by the Box Tops, and thinking of other songs that we still hear but which must make absolutely no sense to my children except as historical curiosities: "Western Union," "Please Mr. Postman," even "Memphis Tennessee," requiring as it did the intervention of an operator in order to place a long distance call. (Must seem as odd to them as "Daisy, Daisy" did to us -- not just the bicycle made for two, but the need for a stylish carriage.)
Me, I've been busily tossing away a stash of my own teenage letters that somehow survived a hundred previous purges and have been hiding away in the attic. They're not taking up any space, except in my psyche, but it's just time for them to go. Of course, that requires one final read before they can be shredded, which means one more visit to whoever it is that I was back when I was 15, 16, 17 and more and the universe was expanding, when I was making new friends in far-off places and we were all so clever and literate. The old practice of referring to previous missives renders about half the letters unintelligible, and references to people and places I no longer remember finishes the job. I have letters from people whose names I barely remember, and from people I don't remember in any way, shape or form. I have letters that intimate that I was in places I don't remember having been, doing things I don't recall having done. So this is how the memory goes, slowly, and things that once were so important they were committed to paper now cannot be recalled, even with written evidence to jog the memory. So it goes.
It's not possible to explain to a non-parent how much of a parent's life involves schlepping your beloved children somewhere. Our entire week’s schedule is dictated by ballet classes, and what I do while I'm waiting is dictated by the time of the class, how long it lasts, and the weather. If I've got an hour and a half or two hours, there's usually time to sneak in a bike ride, though the good routes from downtown Albany are very limited (and don't include Fuller Road, the narrow, busy, potholed danger of which is only accentuated by the ghost bike that has appeared there recently &ndash and yet there's no other way to get from the Western/Washington part of the world to the Albany-Shaker Road part of the world). I've been wanting to take one of the canoes down of an evening before the sun gets any more shy, and missed a beautiful chance last night, when the water was calm and the sun warm. Other times, I park at the riverfront and read a book, which works until it gets too cold or dark. Then I'll end up parking myself inside the ballet school &ndash the absolute last resort, because the conversations of the ballet moms make concentration on a text (or, indeed, rational thought) impossible.
And that's just the routine. There are the special events, too, back and forth to the library, the high school, and, currently, the roller rink, where ALL the teens decided to go tonight, and which is way too far away for me to bother going back home while she gets up to whatever teens these days get up to. (I take extreme pleasure from embarrassing her, Frances McDormand in "Almost Famous"-style, by reminding her loudly, "Don't take drugs!") Therefore, this post is live from the Panera, where the wi-fi is free and my decaf I didn't really want anyway is getting cold.
So it occurs to me that my mother and father did this schlepping, too &ndash and lots of it. I probably needed a ride across the river three or four times a week (it's really not an accident I set up my adult life to echo my childhood, with a river to cross; I missed being near rivers when I lived in Syracuse) &ndash this or that Explorers meeting, some sort of study session at the city library (which nearly always devolved into a rambling shopping expedition to the Two Guys Department Store across the street). As teens, we were vastly more self-propelled than my kids are &ndash just the nature of the towns we live in &ndash but there was still a vast amount of schlepping. So I think I owe someone a thank you, because you need to be schlepped to be a successful teen &ndash friend’s houses, dances, roller rinks, bowling alleys, wherever it is that teens suddenly decide they have to be. So, thanks for the schlep, Mom.
Yeah, like my mom has a computer. Hopefully it's the thought that counts.
October 3, and we've had to turn the heat on. There have been earlier years and later years, and it's not like it'll be in regular use, but last night's cold snap down to 40 and the cold drizzle is just sucking all the remaining warmth out of the earth, and there's no choice but to fire up the furnace. Plus, I'd rather do it for the first time when I can open the windows and let the ducts air out -- it tends to blow a little dust the first day, though nothing like the old oil burner did. I'd had dreams the last couple of weeks of getting the canoe back on the river one last time before the season was out, but that remains to be seen. Besides, I've got some sexy new bike pedals -- Crank Brothers Quattros -- that are begging to be ridden. Haven't dialed them in yet, but I'm liking the bigger platform, the surround on the cleats that let you walk almost normally, so I can't wait to put some miles on them.
Because I'm into cycling, and because I have no other known sports interests to chat with people about, everybody asks me what I think about Lance Armstrong coming out of retirement. I'm a little bit torn. Listen, Lance is a legend, and he's the legend who attracted the kind of media attention that got me and a lot of other people interested in bike racing. He did a huge amount for the sport, and he did a huge amount for cancer -- and now that every cause has its own colored bracelet and Lance mostly makes headlines for dating young blondes, that effort probably needs a boost.
And I would like to see him ride under the new testing protocols -- I want to believe that he raced clean, but I've been fooled before, and with so many of the top riders of his era having been caught cheating, it's hard to know what to think anymore.
On the other hand, cycling has moved on. Lots of old dopers have retired out (and caused the collapse of entire teams along the way). There are some brilliant, and hopefully clean, young riders out there, and I've never seen a more exciting Tour de France than this year's. If the teams proving their commitment to clean continue to gain sponsors, while the doping teams continue to implode, I think that's the shakeup that cycling needs. (So do most other pro sports, which are just pretending they don't have a doping problem. Baseball's attempts at doping control are ridiculous.) It really seems, even though only a few years have passed, that Lance belongs to another era.
But Lance is a Star. The new riders deserve their day in the sun, and it would be nice if the media could focus on some of them (including Kristen Armstrong, no relation, who has finally been recognized with some commercial endorsements, at least) instead of on Lance -- but that's not how it works. He's the only cyclist 99% of Americans can name, and therefore his attempted comeback is both a Big Thing Indeed and, like it or not, good for attention to the sport. I think Versus, the only TV channel covering road cycling at all, has presented more races this season than ever before,and Lance Armstrong has always been a profitable name for them to flog. If along the way people notice some of the other bright young Americans like Dave Zabriskie or Christian Van de Velde, and maybe learn to love the sport, that's good too.
So, it is what it is. He'll find a team, and then we'll see how those legs do after a few years off.
Because I'm into cycling, and because I have no other known sports interests to chat with people about, everybody asks me what I think about Lance Armstrong coming out of retirement. I'm a little bit torn. Listen, Lance is a legend, and he's the legend who attracted the kind of media attention that got me and a lot of other people interested in bike racing. He did a huge amount for the sport, and he did a huge amount for cancer -- and now that every cause has its own colored bracelet and Lance mostly makes headlines for dating young blondes, that effort probably needs a boost.
And I would like to see him ride under the new testing protocols -- I want to believe that he raced clean, but I've been fooled before, and with so many of the top riders of his era having been caught cheating, it's hard to know what to think anymore.
On the other hand, cycling has moved on. Lots of old dopers have retired out (and caused the collapse of entire teams along the way). There are some brilliant, and hopefully clean, young riders out there, and I've never seen a more exciting Tour de France than this year's. If the teams proving their commitment to clean continue to gain sponsors, while the doping teams continue to implode, I think that's the shakeup that cycling needs. (So do most other pro sports, which are just pretending they don't have a doping problem. Baseball's attempts at doping control are ridiculous.) It really seems, even though only a few years have passed, that Lance belongs to another era.
But Lance is a Star. The new riders deserve their day in the sun, and it would be nice if the media could focus on some of them (including Kristen Armstrong, no relation, who has finally been recognized with some commercial endorsements, at least) instead of on Lance -- but that's not how it works. He's the only cyclist 99% of Americans can name, and therefore his attempted comeback is both a Big Thing Indeed and, like it or not, good for attention to the sport. I think Versus, the only TV channel covering road cycling at all, has presented more races this season than ever before,and Lance Armstrong has always been a profitable name for them to flog. If along the way people notice some of the other bright young Americans like Dave Zabriskie or Christian Van de Velde, and maybe learn to love the sport, that's good too.
So, it is what it is. He'll find a team, and then we'll see how those legs do after a few years off.
Hershey's Candy Corn Kisses: Epic Fail. First, I bought them for my sister's birthday, knowing full well she hates candy corn but thinking they were nothing more than Hershey's Kisses in a candy corn wrapper. As in, funny. Not as in, putting a taste in your mouth that time cannot erase. I also hate candy corn, and yet I eat it, for such is the duality of existence. Once we found out these were not simple low-rent chocolates in a colorful disguise, I was obliged to try one. Not since the incident of the "circus peanuts" have I had a taste so vile, so unwanted, so unforgettable in my mouth. Now I am obliged to apologize twice to my sister, both for giving her something that isn't what I thought it was and for giving her something that will poison her, and then a third time for giving her something she now has no way to get rid of, because no person in good conscience would feed these even to Halloween beggars. Thanks for ruining my familial relationship, Hershey's. And for the love of whatever you people worship down in Pennsylvania, do not EVER make those things again. It's not funny.
