Category: Life

Back in the olden days of the early 1990s, I used to spend a lot of time and a lot of my disposable income at the local Mainstream Records because I could walk to it and because I could afford a couple of cheap audiocassettes for our weekend late night cruising expeditions. I gathered a reputation for finding old hits–old being from the middle 1980s–for us to ride to nowhere while learning to sing along. Back in those days, they offered cassette singles that featured, instead of a current song and a piece of filler from the album or a soundtrack, two hits by the same artist. On one of those excursions, I found “Electric Blue” by Icehouse, the best Australian band whose name was not just letters ever. The back side featured “Crazy”, which was pretty much all of their hits on one single since the paean to Australia required of all Australian bands who chart in the United States by an actual Australian law “Great Southern Land” sort of killed their charting in the United States.

The Mainstream Records only had one in stock, and I snapped it up to share with Deb and Chris in the comfort of Chris’s old Cutlass Sierra. Of course, by “old,” I mean it was only as old as the songs, but when you’re <20, there's a lot of things that are "old." During our rides through the Wisconsin dark, I convinced Deb I was singing to her, and she thought I sounded an awful lot like Iva Davies although in retrospect, of course I know I did not. So when an employee came along with the stone tablets that they used for ordering in those days, children, and noticed that Icehouse had sold, Mainstream ordered another copy. When that other copy arrived, I bought it immediately, and by immediately, I mean within a day or so of its shelving. As I said, I spent a lot of time there. I probably gave that copy directly to Deb. So when the Mainstream employee came along the next time with the tablet and chisel, he or she noticed that Icehouse had sold out, again. So they hammered a bigger number into the stone. Within short order, two copies of the Icehouse single arrived. Of course, I bought them immediately as well. One for Chris and one for my brother. Perfect! Then the Mainstream employee came along and thought he was seeing some revival of Icehouse or some strange musical fad blip, but this proactive Mainstream employee ordered four copies.

Which sat on the Mainstream shelf probably until the record store went out of business in the middle 1990s. They had no way of knowing that I was only a small-time taste maker and that the sudden surge in Icehouse’s popularity in the northwest corner of Milwaukee was very limited in scope indeed.

I would like to have arm-wrestled Robert Heinein and lost.

If you don’t understand that sentiment, you don’t understand what it means to have heroes.

I noticed pretty quickly that the Directv piped in music changed today from SiriusXM to SonicTap.

On one hand, as a SiriusXM investor, I’m saddened by the news since this indicates I am probably going to lose the last sleeve from the shirt I’ve been losing in that investment (I should have sold when they signed Stern and the stock zoomed to like $17 a share briefly).

On the other hand, SonicTap will probably have playlists that include more than only 24 hours of songs for each music channel, unlike SiriusXM. Even if not, I can hope it is at least a different 24 hours of songs to give me enough novelty to get through the week.

On the third, mutant hand, I can take pride that I am probably one of a mutant handful of people attentive enough to notice the change.

So I received a free gift print from Ducks Unlimited to induce me to renew or as a reward for renewing. I don’t know which, or maybe it’s both, since I received another one in the mail a week later.

In most cases, I throw these things into the recycling right away, I put them aside and wait until a later time when I’m cleaning up years later to put them into the recycling, or I throw them into a box for a yard sale and then, after the yard sale passes and they don’t sell, I throw them into the recycling bin.

This time, though, I took the reward and framed it for my children’s rooms, since their larger rooms have blank wall space these days:

Those pictures will hang on the boys’ bedroom walls until they’re old enough to replace them with something more to their tastes. Some days, in the far future, they might come across one of them in a box and recollect it fondly, wondering why they had duck hunting pictures in their rooms when their father wasn’t a duck hunter (assuming, probably safely, that I don’t become one between now and then).

Maybe they’ll know that I joined Ducks Unlimited after my father passed away to keep his contributions alive and so I could order the camouflaged hats that I leave on my father’s grave in lieu of flowers. Maybe I won’t get the chance to tell them that. Maybe they’ll only have the mystery.

One of the most evocative things about living in the country, at least for a guy who was pretty much a city boy up until the end of September 2009, are the animal sounds you hear in the nighttime that you cannot identify.

I recognize the sounds of the horses, cattle, chickens, and donkeys from the barns and fields. I know a number of bird cries from crows to hawks to whatever it is that seems to call Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy. But sometimes I hear things I don’t recognize, and most of the time I hear them at night.

The first night I spent in the house, I reached it after watching the movers load the truck in St. Louis and an afternoon drive down to Springfield. I led my wife to it so she could see it a second time–she’d seen it just once, when we initially looked at it, and I was the one present for all inspections thereafter. So we walked through the empty house together so she could see what we’d wrought, and as I walked her into the near-complete blackness to her truck, I heard something just outside the circle of the porch light.

I’d like to describe it for you, but I find it hard to characterize it. Given the height, it was coming from the trees, so I expect it was a nocturnal bird, perhaps one of those screeching birds. But it might have been a vacationing Jersey Devil for all I know. I didn’t, and that’s what made me uncomfortable.

Then, Saturday morning at 4am, my wife and I were awakened by a high, canine packish sound from outside. Sometimes, the wind whistling around our skylight can make sounds like low children moans or whistle like a maelstrom. The sound didn’t come from the skylight. I looked out a couple windows to try to catch sight of the source, to see if it was a pack of wild dogs or, heaven forfend, actual wolves.

As an aside, when I lived in Jefferson County, we had a pack of wild dogs that roamed the valley in which we lived. They were lost and abandoned pet dogs, so there was a mixture of mutts, none of which topped 80 pounds. It’s hard to be scared of a bunch of feral Yorkies, but one could be in a bit of trouble if a bunch of 80 pound and smaller dogs take you on.

I didn’t see what was wandering outside our house on Saturday morning. I’m uncomfortable in my ignorance. And believe you me, I sweep my eyes from side to side as I drag my garbage cart forty yards down my driveway into the blackness and wonder what lies out there that I don’t know about.

Imagination and ignorance makes life exciting!

So I pull into a regular gas station of mine, swipe my new American Express Card, start filling the SUV full of boys with 87 ‘tane, and start washing salt off of the windows. Why the windows are salty here in Springfield, where most places didn’t treat nor plow the 6 inches of snow we got around Christmas, I don’t grok. But that’s not the head scratcher.

After I finish with the back window and then the front window, less of a priority because it has better internal salt removal systems, I figure that the half tank’s worth of pumping should be done. The pump is not actively forcing fuel into my vehicle, and its internal mechanisms have shut it off at five cents’ worth of gas. .021 gallons, if you’re wondering.

I figure the seal between the pump nozzle and the tank has triggered. My pickup truck has a faulty seal here so that I have to pump gas by hand at slower than the lowest automatic notch or it will trigger the nozzle shut off. So I’m familiar with the vagaries of these systems. But when I depress the nozzle trigger, it does not pump at all.

So I wonder, is the gas station’s tank empty? Or has it stopped because that’s all my credit card authorized me? I push the help button that should intercom to the cashier inside to ask him what was going on.

No response. I’d have gone in, but that would have required unloading a pair of boisterons (the physics term for energetic male children) to ask a 30 second question or to leave them for 30 seconds unattended in a car, which is felony child endangerment in 21st century America.

So I instead replace the nozzle, take my receipt for five cents, and swipe my credit card again. This time, the pump says that it cannot accommodate credit card swipes at this time. The gas station attendant hasn’t replied yet, so I take my nickel of gasoline and leave.

Wondering, of course, what happened. Credit card problem? Computer problem? Or some problem with my newish credit card, perhaps a fraud alert. Maybe there’s an APB out for me in Battlefield, Missouri, even as we speak as they search for the three desperadoes in a vehicle that’s safely hidden in a garage.

Whatever else it is, it give me something to think about and to ruminate upon all afternoon.

When I’m turning left like a bouncy-strided NASCAR driver on the track in the local YMCA, I’m not one to steal a glimpse of the women in their workout clothes. Not that I would admit on a blog my wife reads from time to time, anyway. One thing turns my head every time, though: a metal door marked YMCA Staff Only opened to reveal the workshop within.

Beyond that door lies more than a janitorial closet, although certain supplies are stashed within for easy access on the second floor. In addition to those supplies, the shelves contain various and sundry implements to perform the most basic of repairs throughout the facility and upon some of the machines within. Then my long limbs carry me beyond the doorway.

There’s something about a professional workshop that triggers a certain wistfulness within me. Upon each professional’s bench, implements and tools relevant to the job at hand lie within reach according to a logic and preference to the guy doing the job. He’s got the screwdrivers arranged as he uses them and the lead mallet on a shelf where he can grab it on his way to the end of the printing press to pound the empty paper roll from its roller. When I see the workspace, I can almost see myself doing the job, and in that moment, I slightly transcend myself.

I don’t get that sense in an office environment. If you’ve seen one cubicle, you’ve seen them all. Most of the customization from one job to another involves a different desktop wallpaper and set of applications installed upon a computer. A different set of binders on the bookshelf, if any. A different set of photographs or cutesy individual touches.

But workbenches, they have different tools and different things. I’ve worked enough different non-office environments that my different workspaces had a variety of implements. My produce back room had machete-like blades for splitting watermelon, knives for trimming ears of corn, Styrofoam trays for packaging product, and a toolbox containing numbers and signs for pricing. My art store shipping and receiving station had a tape gun for closing boxes, sundry pens for counting products, and trays for packing lists. My print shop workbench contained two bottles of highly caustic cleaners, numerous cans of differently colored soy-based ink, screwdrivers for adjusting wheels and for unlocking plates, and the aforementioned lead mallet along with a poem hanging on the file cabinet for me to memorize for my open mic nights.

Maybe my fascination with workbenches stems from my desire for a lost youth where I worked these jobs and marched ever higher in positions and placements until I broke the barrier into business casual and a career. Maybe I long for those olden days when I made something or moved some physical things every day.

Or, just maybe, they continue to trip my imagination in ways that office-based careers and their environments cannot.

This weekend, I did something atypical for me. I did something nice for a stranger, offering to help a fellow out when I could have done nothing. As I normally do.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m a very charitable person in an abstract way. My wife and I give something like 8% of our income to charities, more actually since a lot of those gifts are in goods that we undervalue so the IRS doesn’t make us explain why we claimed $60 for a children’s accessory that sells for $120. We’ve even endowed a freakin’ scholarship by our mid-thirties. But that’s not direct person-to-person nice.

There are people in this world who stop their cars when they see someone pulled over to the side of the road with a flat tire or something. I’m the sort of guy who passes without a glance. But that sort of conflicts with my internal characterization of myself as some sort of hardboiled stoic hero. I mean, I have the hardboiled bit and the stoic bit down, but I’ve been lacking in the heroic.

So we’re sitting in a McDonalds, and this large man comes walking through, asking all of the patrons if they drive a silver car since the car is parked too close to his car for him to get in. We finish eating, and this guy is sitting in the passenger door of a Miata parked next to us. He’s way over to the left of the parking spot, so he can’t get into the car until the silver car moves.

So I offered to back the Miata out so he could get in. He accepted, pleased to discover I could drive a manual transmission. I squeezed in, threw it into reverse, revved it high as one (me) is wont to do with an unfamiliar stick, and pulled it back enough so he could get in.

It took me three minutes to help this guy out instead of letting him sit in the cold until someone moved his or her car. But it made me feel good. Not only did I help the guy out, but I got over my inhibition to helping someone out. And I got a lifetime of wondering why a guy that big was driving a Mazda Miata in the first place.

Verizon Wireless e-mails less than 24 hours apart:

I’d better act now before the price increases again.

I have a Videocassette Recorder hooked up to my television even in 2010, and I pick old videocassettes up for a quarter at garage sales and whatnot. You can only find older films on videocassette these days, but I don’t mind. Putting the film into a media device that will actually caress the medium instead of bombing it with amplified light makes one nostalgic. Nostalgic enough to use “caress the medium” instead of tangling the tape.

Please keep me from going too deeply into the you have to savor the experience of the entirety sort of riff. I don’t don a special jacket or pour cognac to watch a film. But sometimes the experience can throw you back in surprising ways.

Tonight I watched The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear. I’m not sure if I’d ever seen the whole thing before, as the plot hadn’t stuck with me. So I put in the videocassette and was transported to different places. Not by the magic of Hollywood, but by my own experiences and memories.

The first coming attraction on this Paramount tape was for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. “I just watched that,” I thought. Well, not just. I watched it as part of a proto-bachelor weekend marathon. It was January 2007, and I was painting bedrooms in the house to accommodate my forthcoming son. My mother came in the morning to help me tape, I painted in the afternoons, and at night I watched the Star Trek films in order. January 2007 was a long, long time ago, but watching the videocassette (of course) Star Trek films didn’t seem like long ago at all.

Then the videocassette offered a preview of Regarding Henry. Harrison Ford had a pretty unlined face once. I saw the film on cable, once, at least part of it. This didn’t do much for me.

Finally, the last “coming attraction” was an advertisement for buying used videocassettes at the video store. Once, and you might not remember this, children, movies came out on videocassettes a couple months after the theatrical run closed. However, these initial offerings of videocassettes were priced for the video store, who would then rent it to you. The rental store price was something like $90, so typically for a couple months the movie was only available at video stores. After a set amount of time, the price dropped to the consumer price and you could buy a movie for $20-30.

Digression time: I once bought a copy of The Adventures of Milo and Otis for a girl at the rental price, a week’s wages almost for me. I had to special order it at Suncoast because they didn’t stock movies at the video store price. Obviously, it didn’t work out with the girl, and now that I have children, I have bought a copy of the videocassette for them. Which means I’ve paid an average price of $45.12 for these video cassettes. End digression.

So Paramount threw a sop to video stores by putting an actual commercial on the video to encourage its viewers to make their videocassette purchases of the excess rental stock at video stores. My goodness, I realize you can still buy used videocassettes at rental venues, but this is one dated commercial. One almost expects to see Pepsis and jets.

And then into the film. It’s set in the George H.W. Bush era. For those of you who cannot recollect the plot, like me in a week, it deals with Bush seeking the advice of a scientist to help determine the nation’s energy policy. Knowing that the scientist will espouse fluorescent light bulbs and solar and wind power, Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Nuclear kidnap the fellow and replace him with a stand-in who will direct the government to, I don’t know, drill baby drill or something.

You know what? In 1991, that might have been funny. The bad guys were obvious caricatures, and the proposals espoused by the right-thinking people in a slapstick film weren’t the law of the land. But now that we’re 19 years later and we’ve got low flush toilets to go with the established media conventional wisdom that the people who work in the profitable segments of the energy industry are these caricatures, it just isn’t funny.

But the political considerations and the plot of the film aside, simply watching the videocassette takes me back to a number of places and times beyond the content of the film. I don’t get that with fresh DVDs—won’t until 2025 at the earliest—and not from things I record digitally. But then I am an old schooler, someone who looks for that nostalgic kick in everything.

Almost seven years since I started the Web log, and I’ve finally moved it to WordPress.

Do you know how long I’ve been on Blogger/Blogspot? I paid $100 to Blogspot back in the day to host my blog without banner ads on the top. I posted using Blogger before Blogger recognized the concept of a post title, so many of my old posts just have the title as a line of bold text.

I posted 5000 posts on Blogspot. I’ve imported them, and they’ve come out to be a little short of that. For some reason, the first three months of the blog are missing. I’ll have to see what’s up with it.

I’m also still on the default theme as I try to figure out what I want to do with it. I’ll add a blogroll and some ads and whatnot later in the day, even as I try to work my way through 5000 (!) posts to add categories, correct links, and whatnot.

Wish me luck, and thanks for hanging around.

Things act according to their natures. The scorpion and the frog. Anyone familiar with these could have foreseen this:

One of the biggest challenges to ending the foreclosure crisis is this: A surprising number of homeowners who get their monthly payments reduced fall behind again within a year.

When borrowers get into financial trouble, lenders have several ways to help. They can offer grace periods, longer repayment schedules, lower interest rates or reduced balances.

Sadly, the problem does not seem to be merely a 20% difference in loan amounts.

Unless the people and their circumstances change, too, the problem of not having enough to pay the mortgage will continue.

I have shared triumphs like this:

And finally, after months of cajoling and correcting, I seem to have made a convert! I just edited a draft document in which the writer used the serial comma consistently throughout! Also, another one is halfway there — he seems to get the general concept, but is confused about the placement of the final comma in relation to the “and” — he writes, “thing, thing and, thing” instead of “thing, thing, and thing.” But at least now I can tell how many items he intended to list, so that’s an improvement.

I beat that into enough designers that they do it correctly, years later and in different positions. And if only one of them passes the lesson on, I’m totally reaping the Amway benefits of knowledge-spreading.

(Link seen on Dustbury.)

So this afternoon, I went into my workroom, the utility room in the finished basement, to get some supplies for an outdoor project. And I heard this strange rattling coming from the water heater or the furnace.

So I got closer, and I isolated the rattle to the water heater. Crap, I thought, I don’t know who to call when I have problems with a water heater. It’s true, I have a furnace guy, an electrical guy, and a drain guy, and I know who to look for in the white pages if I need concrete work or plumbing. But water heaters? Crikey, I don’t know who to call.

The rattling was accompanied, sometimes, by a weird trill. Almost bird like. I assumed I was hearing something else.

So I grabbed my supplies and did my outdoor chore. While outside, I heard the bird trilling that I’d heard in the basement. I didn’t hear the rattling.

When I got downstairs, I put away my gear and heard the rattling again. I moved close to the water heater to listen closely. Then, I heard the rattling and the trilling with the same locus. Essentially, the duct leading to the chimney.

Why….

I went outside and moved until I was in front of the neighbor’s house. There, upon my roof, upon my chimney, sat the neighborhood woodpecker, a recent immigrant whose better-thought-out knocking I’d heard upon trees in mornings and early afternoons for recent days. He trilled, and then he drummed upon the metal cover on my chimney, as though to challenge the other birds in the area.

Or perhaps just to make me wonder and to fret just a bit.