Quick sad moment

Was just 'forking around, and saw on the "track reviews" section that there was a Dinosaur Jr. tune to be read about/listened to.

Found myself saying "Hey, when does that new disc come out, anyway?"

Then realized that it's out, I own it, I ripped it, and I've only listened to it a handful of times. Like the handful of times that I listen to most things these days.

Did enjoy some Replacements while grilling the other night. Real grist for red red meat. Westerburgers: it's what's for dinner.

Been going nuts with the RJD2 instrumental and mix stuff, too. Fa fa fa fa fun.

John Hughes

I'm more saddened by the outpouring of grief over John Hughes's death than I am by the actual fact of the passing of John Hughes.

Though I think I may have killed him with telepathy, as earlier this week I was randomly ruminating on just how untrue to life his movies were as I began to consider writing my memoirs....

Lost weak end

Another weekend mainly spent working after too little productivity during the week. Blech. Light at end of tunnel on this big project, at least. This year we had three months to do what we crammed into seven weeks last year. Yet it always makes for a big rush at the end. More than a decade ago a partner at the consulting firm I used to work at wryly observed that "all projects expand to fill the entire allotted time frame" or some such. Dude was right, even if he was into copping cheap highs off of nicotine gum.

So sadly, the admittance pass I had printed out back on 31 January for a lecture and tour out at Fermilab on Sunday afternoon went unused. But since I had coordinated the post-tour dinner and drinking plans I had to drag my sorry ass out to Warrenville, IL, to hit the Two Brothers Tap House. I've liked their beers and the story of how the two brothers were so taken by all the delish beers they tried while traipsing about Europe that they decided to open their own brewery, and wanted to see where it all came from.

Get in the car, fire up the iPod and...iTunes has struck again! I wanted the majesty of Perfect from Now On to wash over me whilst I zipped along Rt. 56, but for some reason iTunes had reordered the tracks. (It does this to me on occasion; I'm sure it's probably a feature rather than a bug, perhaps part of a "Listen Different" campaign that I missed out on.) While I wouldn't care in most instances, PFNO is one of those rare albums that was actually thoughtfully put together and works as a big old rockasaurus maximus that cannot be excerpted or reordered. Damn damn damn, somehow ended up listening to the Cars instead. And realized that Karen O. really wants to be Ric O. Her vocal hiccups, explained. Cars sounded mighty good in my car; "Touch and Go" is such a brilliant mixture of new wave paranoia and rockabilly-infused riffs and rhythms and one of my favorite guitar solos ever.

Even with a Google map and GPS, I managed to pass right by the Tap House. How, you ask? Because I was looking for a standalone building that resembled some sort of pub/restaurant, not a giant white industrial building whose sole signage was found on the small fleet of delivery trucks. Figured things out, parked, entered and sat down at the bar with a tasty Ebel's Weiss and waited on le crew.

Willem and Em were first of the gang to arrive, and we grabbed a table outside while I had my first-ever taste of the Domaine DuPage French Country Ale. Unusual setup for a beer garden type thang, as we were surrounded on all sides by building and parking lot pavement. But there, in the distance, were trees, so the long focus it was.

But I was distracted by thoughts of the deck and the duck, both back home. Part of me wanted to be sipping beers on my deck, which we had "refreshed" this weekend. Gone is the odd wall that once cut it off from the rest of the yard. Despite the bit of privacy it provided from the neighbors to the rear I never liked it, since it almost made for a room unto itself in the great outdoors, which felt wrong here in the age of open floor plans. It also bugged me that it blocked all views into the yard after dark, when the skunks and raccoons and foxes come out to play.

Foxes? In a very mature, built-up suburban neighborhood? Ah yes indeed; there was one in the driveway Saturday night. A most depressing sight it was, actually, as it was there to steal the duck's eggs.

Duck eggs? Yes, the previous weekend I found that a duck was nesting next to our driveway, just beneath one of the lower-level windows. Why the duck chose the only regularly trafficked side of our house for her nest I'll never know, but she was all but invisible among the piles of composting leaves and smattering of tulips. I figured the rat bastard raccoons who constantly try to snack on my tasty trash and compost would take her out at first opportunity, but every morning for a solid week I was pleasantly surprised to look out there and still see her sitting on her nest. She even made it through a very loud Saturday, when a carpenter spent a full day sawing and hammering and otherwise building a new railing and bench to replace the hated deck wall.

But Saturday night just before 11 pm I heard a most distressed duck beating her wings, and rushed to look out the door to see what had her in such a fowl mood. I was stopped from opening the screen door by the sight of a fox a mere 10 feet away. I grabbed a flashlight and shined it in its eyes and kept shaking the screen door in hopes of scaring it away, but the damn fox just disappeared behind the hedge row, then emerged a minute later sauntering down the driveway and across the street to dine on an egg.

Mother Duck was on the front lawn quacking up a storm; I managed to anthropomorphize her noises into screams, of course, and I couldn't bloody well blame her for being so upset. Two more times the fox and I engaged in the same game of noise, light and eluding, with me wishing for a firearm for the first time in my life. And then I gave up, knowing that there was no way to protect a wild bird for the three remaining weeks of brooding, let alone guarding her and the hatchlings afterwards. 

It's silly that I got so wrapped up in it and freaked to see real live nature happening before my very eyes, but there it is. (As a post-script, Mother Duck did not become the fox's dinner, at least that night. She was hanging out on our front lawn the next evening.)

So I think I got about half of the duck tale across to Willem and Em before the rest of our party, Big Frank, his friend Fred and said friend's 10-year-old son, arrived all tingly from the scientific goodness of the supercollider. Frank was clean-shaven for the first time in a decade or more and looked about as cherubic as a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Irishman of nearly 40 years can look. Also, though he's much fitter than his father was at the same age, he was still showing signs of impending big face.

The talk was all over the place, as will happen with interesting new folk in the midst. The lad kept asking amusing questions -- whose idea was it to have me be the guy who tries to explain what a free radical is? And why did I have to be the only non-techie among the grownups? I opted for a Prairie Path Golden Ale, and ultimately rounded things out with another Weiss, which prompted the young 'un to ask why my beer was all cloudy. Ah, the wonders of yeast!

The food was decent, even though they screwed up two of our orders. Darn tasty pulled pork sammich, actually. 

Too soon the gathering was over, as all others present had to return to the far-off city while I only had to trek a dozen miles along the country road that had brought me there. And back to the salt mines to toil some more, which is what I should be doing now.

It's Easter, but there's nary a beagle nor a bunny to be found

The best part so far of this Easter Sunday was when the Jewish guy who lives across the street from my parents called out a "Happy Easter!" to me. I started to yell back "Thanks for murdering our Messiah," but thought better of it. (Okay, I never thought that at all. Except as potential comedy. With an emphasis on the "potential." Hi yo!)

Living and dying are easy; comedy is hard. Saw a Facebook thing last night asking me to name my five favorite comedians. After Bill Hicks, David Cross and Patton Oswalt this task became difficult. I threw out Bobcat Goldthwait (ca. 1987) as one, and then wussed out and went with Bill Maher as number five, though anyone who saw the most recent episode of Real Time -- you know, the one where he suddenly became Charlie Rose via half-hour interviews of Ron Howard and Gore Vidal -- may question whether he's actually a comedian. Get back to the panels, Bill -- tired as the talking points may be, they're still your bread and butter, especially when you mix up the panelists to include as many non-politicos as possible.

Did a quick run up to Kenosha yesterday for our Holy Saturday. I had joked the week previous about doing so at the end of a client meeting off of Lake-Cook Road, as I was already halfway there and low on my Wisconsin brews. The wife and I loaded up the car with six cases of beers one can't buy in Illinois (two of them destined for bluestem, so it's not like we're complete alchies), then hit the Cheese Castle and the Big Star Drive-In because it ain't every dat that you can get someone to walk out to your car with your food while you listen to White Sox baseball on the radio. I told the wife that I think this may be the year I don't do any fireworks on the 4th o' July, but she was rightfully skeptical.

I've tried two new (to me) New Glarus brews this afternoon, the Black Wheat and the Stone Soup. With summer on the way I never would've bought the Black Wheat ("Rich and chewy this bottle conditioned weiss is bursting with Midwestern wheat, oats, rye and finished by malted barley") were it not for the raves that the kid working at our liquor depot gave it -- it's certainly a fine brew, but not one I want to spend my spring and summer with. If it wasn't a mere 50 degrees out here on the deck where I type (my nose, it is cold), I might've dumped it entirely. The Stone Soup warrants further investigation; tasty stuff at first blush, and I may regret only having the six pack of it that I borryed from bluestem's requested two cases.

Funny thing at the liquor depot: a local was frantically quizzing the beer expert as to why they didn't have any New Belgium Beers (including "Flat Tire," as her dude derisively referred to their flagship brew, which I myself have labeled "the official beer of yupster hipster hepster dads," a club I'm not a member of quite yet). His explanation was that they're a hard brand to do business with so his store does not, though I would've been happy to have met her halfway for a New Glarus-New Belgium swap. I probably would've even been the winner, even.

We've been blessed this spring with a cadre of cardinals -- or two omnipresent males and a female, anyway. The boys have been fighting something fierce over the girl. Why is it that female cardinals always look like they're smiling? Tried to get some pix of the cardinals the other day but the zoom on my camera phone just wasn't up to the task. It's almost like I should use the real camera every now and then.

Do I dare crack a fourth beer on my empty stomach? That'll pretty much guarantee a nap, or at least a few hours of uselessness. Do I put the work I should do for tomorrow off until then? Oh the ambiguity of process when the deadlines be nebulous. I could put the hours of uselessness into watching more Deadwood, I suppose. Or finish Transporter 3, since I hate to leave myself not knowing how a trilogy concludes.

White Sox 3-3 through the first week of the season. Seems about right, what with the handful of good players balanced by some serious holes. I root root root for the home team, but try to stay realistic about it all.

Was I cracking on New Belgium not too long ago? The Mothership Wit I'm now enjoying says that I shouldn't. A damn fine brew; like most that I prefer the wife would no doubt say that it's "too banana."

How hard is it to get a thing right?

If you recall this post, you may not be surprised that the billing for our new mobile phones got completely bollocksed up. 

They managed to charge us for our new unlimited data and texting plans, but also hit us with per-use data charges as well. Neat trick that overcharged us by more than $160 (not sure of the exact amount due to the taxes, fees, tariffs, bloodletting, etc.).

*sigh*

What omen is this?

Scene seen out the home office window on a Monday morn....

The daylight, it is saved!

So, happy clock-changing day to you all. Here in the GCMA there has been little daylight to save this weekend, what with near-nonstop rains that frequently reached deluge level keeping the sun at bay. I'm ever so grateful that the homestead appears to have avoided taking on any water once more -- despite the repairs we made after the Great Flood of October 2006 we are ever wary of letting water in.

The kitchen skylight apparently has the tiniest of leaks, but it only seems to let water in when it snows or something. We've never actually seen any water come in through it, but there are several brownish drips indicating that something has come in around the seal. Should probably have this looked into.

Our backyard is puddling some, though not nearly so much as the disgusting mudpatch the next-door neighbors have for a backyard. Yes, the sight below is the view out the window of my home office and into the neighbor's yard, at least when I'm standing up. (Seated at my desk, I don't have to see any of it. Mercifully.)

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Lacking any skills of our own, we are on the verge of spending a heaping chunk of change on a significant landscaping project out front.  Take the old homestead down a notch from eyesore to fair-to-middlin' in the looks area. Our house is almost comically of a certain time, and that time has most certainly passed.

.

We'll be removing the left side of the stone circle seen in the shot above, as well as the crappy brickwork along the drive -- there's some significant sink-age going on below the brick, an ongoing problem that at least one previous owner of this property has tried and failed to correct, just as our own efforts to do so have.  We'll go with a little more grass, and a little less of a tripping hazard. Also to be removed is every bit of shrubbery shown, to be replaced with things like boxwoods, cranesbills, hostas and other delights. And a Fox Valley River Birch, even.

Slow-ish weekend around the old homestead. We did dinner with my older sis and her two kids last night. Dragged them back here for some family movie night, unaware when we asked them over that they couldn't stay for much more than an hour due to a planned rendezvous with the sis's beau. Made the most of it by acting on a whim and throwing Waiting for Guffman on, in part because it's such a short movie -- fast-forwarded through the two not-entirely-family-friendly bits while wondering how the film got an R rating. Was happy that the fam got most of the jokes, though the highlight for them was Eugene Levy's lazy eye and bad beard upon the discovery of Blaine, MO. 

This was probably the wrong morning to sleep in, what with the lost hour and the need to get up and make myself presentable for a rare client in-person tomorrow morning. The clients are making me a bit nervous in general -- even with a diverse portfolio and all, losing any of their business would require me to make some spending cuts and hustle hard for new business. Things best thought about, planned against but not dwelled on, I suppose....

The wonders of consolidated conglomerates

It's not the newest of news, but this is a bit of a stomach turner....

As my "how to teach English composition to disinterested freshman" prof told us back in the day, everyone has a boss except the scribe -- s/he is the boss. Except now, scribe = publisher that is subservient to the interests of other parts of the business, making the CEO of the parent company the real scribe. Or something.

Something's gone wrong again

Oy, what a week. Not one but two very unpleasant experiences with customer service reps as, once more, things well outside my span of control went and got bollocksed up right and good.

#1 -- Verse the first, here comes the curse
I routinely pay the mortgage early. Anywhere from three to four weeks early, even. Helps avoid any unpleasantness, I figure. And gives me a slight cushion if I ever hit a cashflow issue or something. Like, if a client is late paying me and I pay it two weeks later than I usually do, it will still be paid a week or more early. Good habit to be in, especially when there's no interest to be made on the lucre anyway, right?

So, per usual I paid the mortgage early this month -- set things up so that the money would move from my checking account to the mortgage February 6. (Same bank for both accounts.)

On the 10th, I see online that the money is gone from my checking but it hasn't been applied to my mortgage. Specifically, the extra 30-something bucks we pay toward the principal has been applied, but the rest of the payment hasn't. It doesn't show up anywhere. Hmmmm. Odd. And it shows that I owe a payment March 1, even though that's what I just sent. Weird.

So I call. And learn that they just did an analysis of our escrow, and decided that we're going to be way short or something. (Yes, we're dumb. We escrow both our homeowners insurance and our property taxes. Again, since there's no interest to be made these days it doesn't matter, but it's kind of a Romper Room way to do things, really.) And as a result, the March 1 payment will be higher than usual unless we make up the escrow shortage in a lump sum, and didn't you get our letter about this whole matter? (We didn't. It hadn't arrived yet, after all. Fucknits.)

"So, what can I do?" I ask. And am told that when we get the letter, the best option is to mail in a check for the escrow shortage. Then, magically, my suspended payment will go through.

"Can't I pay it online?" I ask. Nope. Gotta be a check.

"Okay," I say. And am told "Thank you for using Global Mega Bank, and remember, you can always do your banking at globalmegabank.com."

"Look here," I sez. "I know you're just reading off a computer screen, but that's bullshit. Clearly I cannot do all of my banking on your website, idiot. Think before you speak; that isn't something someone who has just been told they have to send in a check wants to hear. Because it just isn't true. Moron."

Apologies follow. Him first, then me. "Look, I know you're just stuck in a stupid system that doesn't work right and all, but you're the one who isn't being very helpful. Still, you're just doing your job, and I apologize." And call is done.

So of course, I then proceeded to go into the transfer funds section of the bank's website, saw that it would let me transfer funds specifically to the escrow account. So I went ahead and did the transfer.

Next day, the escrow credit shows up, but the sizeable chunk of missing change is still floating around somewhere. So I call in again, and this time get someone with a brain. She determines that my issue can and will be taken care of, spends some time putting me on hold while taking care of it, and ultimately tells me that in a week's time everything will be processed, and my account will show the March 1 payment as having gone through. Which is weird -- I mean, why will this take a week to process when they already have my money? -- but whatever. If they screw it up, I still have a week to resolve the mess before the payment is due, and keep my wondrous FICO score intact. Yay. Idiots.

#2 -- Second verse, annoying similar to the first
So, yesterday the wife and I decided that the time had come to get new mobile phones. We had last upgraded on Super Bowl Sunday two years ago, so clearly two years had passed and our old contract was expired. 

She needed to get a smart phone for work, and my piece o' crap was suffering from a cracked preview screen, a back panel that came off every time I looked at it funny and a three-hour battery life. Yep, time to go to the old mobile technology center and get new phones.

During a scouting expedition the weekend before the wife learned that the location we had used previously for our mobile technology needs had switched its allegiance from our provider to another. So we went to a new location closer to our house that was affiliated with our telecomms provider.

Spent a half hour or so looking through the selection before I decided to be a copycat and get the exact same type of smart phone that the wife had chosen. After rebates, they're 50 bucks each -- it's good to be a late adopter. (Nevermind the massive increase in our monthly bills the data and texting charges will bring.) And since we're buying the same phones, it'll be easier to swap chargers and other accessories. We talked to a sales guy, and he grabbed the phones from the stockroom and sat down to to set us up.

And then comes the inevitable snafu. Because, yaknow, my life is an endless succession of difficulties that lie well outside of my span of control. Difficulties not caused by poor pitiful me, who just wants to get along. What's the problem? He says that the computer indicates that we upgraded in November 2007, and the soonest we are eligible for a "free" upgrade is in late July.

That's not correct, I tell him. I remember exactly when we bought these phones, and where we bought them. It was Super Bowl Sunday, the Bears were in it, and we were hosting a few folk that evening but decided to get new phones that afternoon. It was a cold and sunny day, and I still had the old car, even.

Well, that's not what the records say, we're told. There's nothing I can do about this without any proof of what you say. Do you still have the receipt?

I doubt it, but we'll go home and check. But this just feels wrong, because I know we're right. I feel like we should get some bonus when we prove that you're wrong, because you are. But whatever.

Came home. I'd pitched the old box and paperwork earlier this year during one of my rare home office cleanings. I mean, why would I need an old receipt in our era of flawless electronic record keeping? The best evidence that I could muster was an online credit card statement from 2007 showing that we had spent several hundred dollars at the cellular location that was no longer affiliated with our provider on February 4, 2007, aka the day the Colts beat the Bears and made us cry in our Old Style fan cans. Also? The wife had a picture from that day on her phone of me at the mobile technology center.

I call the guy at our new location, tell him what little proof we have. He says he'll see what he can do and call us back Monday.

So we're getting antsy. Wife wants to call our provider and yell at them. I didn't see the point. Instead, I called the location where we had bought our phones in 2007 and asked the guy if he still had records of purchases from the former affiliate. He asked me for my info, and moments later gave me a yessirree I do. I asked him to print out two copies, and we'd be in to pick them up ASAP.

Drove over feeling a mild rage. Why was I muling around town when the kid who'd denied us hadn't thought to make the call we'd just made? He could've done so, gotten the paperwork faxed over, and we never would've had to waste an extra hour and a half and half a gallon of gas.

We got the receipt and drove it over to Sir Deny-a-Lot. He seemed shocked. Because, you know, white collar criminals like the blonde and I are always trying to pull a fast one. Um, yeah. Told ya so, I said. I'll see what I can do, he sez. Stops playing around with his online role-playing game after a few minutes, even.

He spends an hour on the phone. Faxes the receipt somewhere downstate, not once but twice. Makes all kinds of noise on and off the phone. Not my fault, he sez. The other guys must've held onto the order for 10 months before sending it in to corporate, he claims. Nothing like this has ever happened in all of recorded human history, we're told.

"I don't care what happened," I say. "I only care about getting it resolved."

"Excuses stuff complications blah blah blah," he says. "Not our fault."

"I don't care," I say. "I solve problems Monday through Friday. Today, it's your job to solve them."

All kinds of chat and business. God, this whole process is annoying as fuck. He finally determines that he'll have to have us pay an early exception ugrade fee, but it will be refunded on our phone bill. Such a grand favor he's doing us.

"Great," I say. "So we give you a ton of money today, but we get a refund on our phone bill and a Visa cash card for the other rebates. What ever happened to just giving customers the actual price upfront and having them get the savings then and there?"

Honest to Gawd, he goes into some odd Jedi explanation of how this process empowers the customer, as the Visa cash cards can be used almost anywhere, while giving the discount today would just mean we're spending the money at the mobile communications store. Wha? I mean, wha? We're already spending the money there. A boatload. Nearly 500 bucks in total. Most of which we'll get back. Eventually.

Also honest to Gawd, it took two hours during this second visit to get our damn phones. The kid actually asks us at some point how our day is going -- how do you think when we're spending our whole Valentine's Day with you? Stupid stupid stupid. 

Also? Late in the game we think to ask whether the device will synch to the wife's Mac as well as my PC, and we're told the disc included in the box is software for the PC but we can go to the mobile service provider's website to get the Mac software. (This, of course, has turned out to be a lie. Guess a device running Windows Mobile likes to interface with Windows machines. I'm sure there's a hack out there somewhere that will let the wife get it going, but really, why the lie?)

So we arrived mad the second time around, and left madder. Treated like lying cheater criminals when we didn't do a damn thing wrong just because some stupid salesperson stood by his programming instead of, yaknow, thinking. Something went wrong again; story of my life. Please, institutions of America, let me solve your problems in order to continue paying you my damn money.

Your silent face

Wow, almost two months of history unrecorded on this blog. What will my biographers do?

So, yeah. Christmas in the semitropics was an interesting experience. Missed the fam somewhat, but the wife's happiness became my happiness. She hates the winter something fierce, and my only regret is that we escaped it too soon, only to be met with a Hellacious January upon our return. But as long as I have the career that I have and the clients that I currently have, a Christmas escape is my only real opportunity to get away for an actual full week or two. This is not a complaint -- I love doing what I do for a living, and whom I do it for and with.

It's a cliche, I know, but I liked driving the 1,300 miles each way down to Sanibel. Planes are a cheat. They leave me feeling dislocated. Besides, had we flown then we would've needed a rental car instead of the one that we know and love (hybrids RULE on nice flat islands), and we wouldn't have been able to visit bourbon distilleries, smokehouses and giant shops devoted to pecans. Or brought half of the states of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky home with us.

The getting home felt a little odd. We were only gone 10 days, but everything here seemed so still. And grey. I enjoyed a week or so off but didn't take advantage of the time. And getting back into the work routine felt like genuine work -- things to be done, not things I wanted to do. I almost felt like I had to learn to write again at some point; words came slowly, and rarely in the right order. 

New Year's Eve was fun. We did dinner at a friend of the wife's, a table of eight or so. Vegetarian pasta, hardly the firm base a man needs on drinkie night. But wife wasn't feeling so good anyway so we didn't stay all that long at the second, more fun party a block or so from Blago's house. Got to bring in the new year with a lot of folk I care about, and that was the important thing. And the Chandon brut was surprisingly good; could be a new stable. 'cuz I'm all Noel Coward like that, after all.

No idea what else we did in January. Hunkered down and tried not to freeze, mainly. You know it's cold out when you don't want to shower for fear that washing away two days' worth of crud and bodily oils will remove a layer of insulation. Oh yes, we hosted a nice dinner party the first weekend of the month. The wife outdid herself in the kitchen, as she'll do. I brought out eight dfferent bourbons toward the end of the eve to do some tasting. Booker's with a splash of water was the clear winner; naturally, it was the most expensive bottle. 126 proof out of the bottle; that splash definitely helps. The Eagle Rare Reserve was a bit meaner than anticipated; I need to explore that bottle more in coming weeks. Elijah Craig yeller was probably the best value, though tasting anything again after the Booker's made for a letdown. Woodford Reserve didn't impress me at all, while the Knob proved to be nice over ice as always. Wild Turkey, I need to explore you more as well. As for Evan Williams black -- it's cute that Esquire just named you the best value-priced liquor around and all, but I'm just not that into you.

And now, crikey, it's halfway through February! We hosted a few friends for the Super Bowl and I whipped up a ton of low-effort goodies. My chicken wings were a bit of a letdown -- bird itself was great, but the sauce just didn't adhere at all. Crockpots full of Italian beef and cocktail wienies in BBQ sauce were hits, and I topped off some premade pizza crusts that tasted good but came out granite hard -- just cutting the things was a battle, and made me miss the giant, Klingon-sword-style pizza cutter that was used at the Pizza Hut that I worked at for a few weeks way back when.

Highlight of this past weekend was seeing my good friend Won't for a few hours -- the boy had a secret mission out to the Fox Valley to attend to, then swung by here on the way back to the city. We went to my local brewpub for burgers and a few good beers and a lot of good talk. He's always been one of the nicest people I've known, and the happy place that he's currently in is very well-deserved. We both agreed that the mellowing effect of age is a good thing -- we humans are just like bourbon, I reckon.

And now, back to the salt mines. The first quarter is always the busiest time of year for me, but I'll try to check in more frequently here....

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The test

Obama's election was just one in a series of hurdles; here's where we begin to find out just how post-racial the U S of A truly is. Or how much the other 40-whatever percent is, anyway.

The announcement -- late on a Friday afternoon -- is very Bush administration-ish, like they're trying to bury the news once again.

Developing...

My own personal SAD...

...is manifesting itself through much too much indifference toward the blog.

But at present I'm finding it hard enough to get the words out for the clients. So for youse in the free section, the random blurb on facebook it probably going to be it.

What's that? You're not on facebook?? I thought I was the sole remaining holdout!!!

Here be important historical record

As Q-Tip once said, "1-2 oh my god...."

Hello blogness my old friend....

So it appears that I consider this here blog to be work, as attention to it -- but not yours, my half-dozen fellow denizens of this mystic circle of webbage -- ceased to be paid when I embarked upon vacation (aka "the day the billing stopped") a good two and a half weeks ago. So now I've a mild backlog of tales to tell, or at least some sort of recap of our trip to Florida, our New Year's Eve and the small soiree we hosted Saturday night. Details forthcoming over the next year, promises I....

Possibly maybe

Not that a 10-day absence of posts on this blog would actually be noticeable, but there may be one ahead. Wife and I and Wonder Car begin our trek down south tomorrow. Destination? Sanibel. At long last, it's our honeymoon just in time to mark our third anniversary! (The particulars around the matrimonial ceremony are available here for the curiously unfamiliar.)

While I like to think that fun in the sun will keep me far away from the interwebs, the twin realities of vacationing during the shortest days of the year and the fact that wife sleeps twice as much as husband means that I may have stuff to share here.

When you're this broke, Rod, clinging to your job for each day's wages really isn't going to help

Wow -- in addition to being a corrupt scumbag, Blago also appears to be incredibly bad at money management.

Keep it cool

I think this may be my favorite Christmas tune

I do. Sometimes. Occasionally. Now and then.

Do you?

One week later, we can blog about Thanksgiving

The wife and I hosted Thanksgiving for the first time ever this year. My aunt and uncle used to always host the holiday while my parents had dibs on Christmas Day, but with the aunt and uncle's retirement and move down to the desert state there was a void on the schedule that we were more than happy to fill.

Visions of genuinely good food danced through our heads when we volunteered. A buttery, moist bird. Another meat that wasn't turkey. Quality sides. Etc.

There were 14 of us in total, ranging from the two-year-old nephew to grandpa, who turned 95 back in September. Since our dining room table is more about form than function (oh, I exaggerate -- but mother is scandalized that it doesn't accommodate leaves), I had to set up an additional banquet table in the crook of the "L" that is our living room-dining room. All were comfy; all was good.

In general things went well, foodwise. Of note....

• Apparently, just because you order a fresh turkey doesn't mean it won't be partially frozen. I picked the 15-pound bird up 10 am last Wednesday and put it in the fridge. Around 5, the wife takes it out, cuts the wrapping and yells up to me that the turkey is, in fact, frozen. So I called the butcher shoppe, and they were all "Yeah, the turkeys are chilled. The smaller ones tend to freeze. You shoulda left it out on the counter all day; it woulda been thawed by now." Big help. They were already closed but still there cleaning up, so I drove over and verified that, in fact, every fresh turkey they had left was just as icy. The manager was quite apologetic and even offered to refund my full purchase amount and let me keep the turkey, but I feel dicky doing that kind of thing (I mean, the turkey was still usable and I wasn't going to do any better elsewhere at that hour), so I scaled back and accepted his offer of a bottle of wine of my choice (went with a $19 bottle of shiraz, which was like getting half off on the bird). He said next year he'll make sure the staff warns everyone that they may need to thaw their turkey; wife was okay with putting it under running water for an hour or so.
• Despite all that, turkey turned out great. The wife declined the brine on the advice of Bon Appetit, and instead did a heavy salt-and-herb rub that she then rinsed off prior to cooking. (Gives the flavor of the brine without taking up nearly as much space as a bucketful of bird.) She also roasted it upside down to maximize the juiciness of the white meat, slathered it with butter inside and out, kept chicken stock in the pan and basted every half hour or so. Best turkey I've ever had; kudos to my dad for carving. Not sure which sight was more awe-inspring: seeing my 95-year-old grandpa take down both wings or my undersized 13-year-old nephew eat an entire leg.
• The beef tenderloin was the awesome. I got the charcoal chimney going, then tied the five-pound roast up and rubbed it down with some crushed garlic, smoked paprika, cumin, sea salt, black pepper and olive oil. Made a bed of coals on the far side of the Weber kettle, charred the roast on all four sides and then set it on the side of the grill away from the coals to roast. Worried that the coals weren't quite hot enough to get the 500-degree temp I needed, so I dropped a few chunks of hickory wood onto the charcoal. About a half hour later the tenderloin reached 120 degrees in the middle and it was off the grill and into some foil to keep cooking for half an hour before slicing. Wife says it's the best thing I've ever grilled.
• Sides all turned out well -- mom brought regular cranberries and an orange cranberry dish as well as coffee-can bread, MIL did stuffing the day before, wife made whole-wheat rolls, green beans, mashed potatoes, corn, and both light and dark gravies. Pumpkin and Hoosier Hills pies and ice cream for dessert. Rocktastic!

Despite our upfront trepidation, we ultimately realized that putting Thanksgiving together is a breeze compared to all of the work we do for the two barbecues (one for friends, one for family) that we host each summer....

Delish

Yum.

Can't hardly wait!

Cool feature over on Metromix that I never noticed before: "The Countdown," which gives the skinny on places that will be opening soon.

I had no idea that Tiny Lounge had closed, but here it is reopening about a mile from its old haunts! Nearly three years after closing, Trader Vic's is coming back in a new location. And, more importantly, The Meatloaf Bakery is opening at last!

For you luckies in Chicago, I have nothing but envy. I've sampled most of the wares that the Bakery will be offering, and it's good good stuff. (The owner is a friend and former boss of mine -- we went to a tasting this past summer.) Comfort food in whimsical form -- who can resist? There's even a meatless version!

Exciting, exciting stuff. I can't wait to surprise Cynthia and her crew with a drop-in sometime this winter!

A disturbing trend

For someone who likes to think of himself as a musical shark that must keep moving forward lest he drown, I've been buying way too many reissues and older albums that I missed out on the first time around as of late.

Or maybe the problem is that I'm listening to this older stuff more than the new new new wave, since a quick count on my WMP tells me that I've bought 37 brand-spankin'-new releases in 2008, while my brain insists that I can't possibly have bought more than a dozen reissues and back catalog titles this year.

Maybe the problem is that every reissue seems to be a double-disc set that takes up a lot of real estate on my list views and track counts?

Or maybe it's that I listen to more NPR and sports talk radio than music in an attempt to break up the solitary days of the house-bound worker with some actual human voices, thus depleting my music-listening time in general and making me gravitate more toward the familiar when I do in fact make that conscious decision to play music?

Dang paradoxes. With either an MP3 player, wireless music player or computer in just about every room of the house, I seem to avoid music in my old age. And now that I've discovered the poker game on my Zune, there'll be even less music....

Like Snakes on a Plane, the title sums it all up pretty well

Okay, except for the parts where the least of the Baldwins is involved. And a bunch of crazy spring-loaded traps, which can actually act better than the Baldwin in question.

So much for that post-racial society

Writing on Slate, Timothy "Only Racist Crackers Can Stop Obama" Noah whizzes all over the 53 percent of us currently living in Feel Good, USA, by reminding us that (drum roll, please) McCain won the white vote.

Sez me...so what? As Noah rightly notes, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the white vote in the last 40-something years.

But unless Pat Buchanan's wettest dreams come true and we deport all immigrants of color and put all other non-whites behind bars, the white vote will become less and less relevant in America with each passing year.

When he's in kneejerk liberal mode, Timothy Noah makes my brain hurt.

Now THAT is a sight!

Sure, you may have gone out and bought an extra copy or two of your local and/or national newspapers of choice.

And maybe you saw some of the foreign newspapers on the TV news or online.

But are you ready for hundreds of front pages from around the world with the "Obama wins!" headline?

Rip Van Rose

Has the world stood still between Guns 'n Roses albums?

Apparently not!

This is the first time in my life that I feel like we've elected a human being rather than a caricature.

What an event.

What a man.

What an acceptance speech.

What elation!

V-A Day is here!

Tired. So tired.

Set the auxiliary alarm clock for 5:30 am last night in hopes of hitting the polling place at 6 am with the wife, who has an 8 am meeting at work downtown every Tuesday morn.

Which meant that I woke up at 4:30, since I never turned this particular clock back an hour over the weekend. Ooops. After sort of correcting the time in the dark, it was back to sleep until 5:40.

A splash of water on the face, a minute or two wrestling the contact lenses into my dry, tired eyes, a few articles of clothing, and it was out to the garage to pull out the car to drive us to the polling place.

Once again we scratched our heads upon seeing that the church across the street from us was once again being used as a polling place but not for the likes of us who live 100 yards from its doors. No, we had to drive nearly a mile.

Very full parking lot. Longish line at 6:02 in the morn. But it moved quickly enough. With ten "booths" in place, we were out in about 25 minutes. The machine that took my optiscan form told me that I was voter number 56 on the day.

Helpful factor in getting us in and out quickly: no longer living in Cook County, we didn't have the fate of 100 judges in our hands. Matter of fact, there were only about 15 offices to vote on, and five or so of them saw Republicans running unopposed. Plus that dopey vote to cast against holding a state constitutional convention.

I went straight Dem, unsurprisingly. The only one that will probably take will be for the big guy up top. I believe our congresswoman -- a member of the Class of '94, that group that vowed to do its work and head home after two terms -- will win, but at least this time the Dem opposition wasn't a pro-life pander bear.

And now, I feel pretty good. Obama should win. We're gonna do well in Congress, though the Dems almost certainly will not capture 60 seats in the Senate. So divided we will remain. Tons of work to do. The tiny optimist inside me says we're gonna get it done.

Energized! So energized!!

And an era ends

Studs Terkel has passed away at age 96.

Damn. He kept producing right up 'til the end, pretty much, riding the CTA buses between downtown and Uptown regularly until a few short years ago. We should all keep going the way he did.

The deaths of the famous rarely get to me, but this one does. Terkel was just such a great piece of living history.

I had the pleasure of seeing him "perform" twice. Once was at a reading of Mike Royko pieces -- can't remember which one he read, just remembered thinking how cool it was to be in a smallish courtyard in Printers Row while Terkel and an odd assemblage of Chicago celebs (also including Sammy from the Billy Goat Tavern and newsman Lester Holt, as well as one of Royko's sons) each read a favorite Royko column or two.

The other time was even neater, an event at the Chicago Cultural Center seven or eight years ago where Roger Ebert interviewed Studs and the two of them talked film and took questions from the audience. A night of warm fuzzies in the presence of two Chicago greats. In some small sense, I suppose, Ebert is the heir to Terkels' throne -- a great lefty Chicago writer who continues to do great work despite years of health problems. (Here's Ebert's tribute to Terkel.)

On the positive side, you have to figure those assigned the task of writing Terkels' obits had filed them some years ago. :(

Palin's "spiritual warfare" in action?

Thanks, Hate Campaign '08! (Formerly McCain-Palin for President.)

Reckon the Barracuda gave one of her cutsie nods or winks when she heard about the plot?

Mad about those men (and women!)

Still the best of the many pro-Obama tunes

A brief appreciation of Billmon and a call to continued vigilance

It's hard to believe here on the eve of the election of a pretty darn liberal president, but just a few years ago these United States of America were flirting with -- in some corners, embracing -- a form of fascism.

Dissent was all but outlawed. People were fired for failing to fall in with the party line. Those who spoke of the possibility of a peaceful response were accused of forming some kind of Fifth Column. Hysteria was the rule of the day. The U.S. had taken a black eye, and by golly someone was going to pay.

But there were voices out in the wilderness, cautious voices of reason that said "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe the rush to wars isn't such a good idea. Maybe there's a hidden agenda at work here."

One of those voices toiled anonymously from his blog, the Whiskey Bar. He went by the tag of Billmon. If you missed him, you can read his wiki entry here. If you read him then, you started missing him when he hung it up a few years back.

Happily, Billmon is back, sadly relegated to the role of a Daily Kos diarist when he could have it so much better. He remains clear of thought, and full of the right kind of ire toward the right targets on the right.

Billmon recently posted a fine piece on how, once again, the GOP is finding that the source of all of this nation's current problems is -- you guessed it -- the poor and the disenfranchised and those who would seek to help them:

With the prospect of a bone-crushing election defeat staring them full in the face, the diehard rump of the conservative movement is already busy fashioning a narrative to explain the dissolution of its world -- the one that Ronald Reagan built and that George W. Bush (with an assist from Wall Street) has thoroughly trashed.

And the emerging story line appears to be, roughly, that ACORN did it.

Given the underlying proclivities of the modern conservative movement (Sarah Palin division) we should have understood that sooner or later it would come to something as absurd as this. Failed authoritarian movements needs scapegoats the way fecal coliform bacteria need a steady supply of raw sewage, and this one has a lot of failures that need explaining.

The remarkable thing, of course, is the right's effort to make the ACORN boogie man do double duty: responsible not only for the looming "theft" of American democracy (per John McCain) but also for bringing the US and global financial system to its knees (per any number of conservative quacks economists and cranks pundits).

You have to admit: That's a damned impressive revolutionary track record for an obscure group of community organizers operating on a shoestring budget. I mean, who needs the Red Army when you've got ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act?

Billmon reminds me once again that winning this presidential election needs to be the beginning of something new, not an end. It's not enough to assume power and make the marginal changes that government can make; we need to continue to expose the fraud being perpetuated by the 20 percent or so of this nation's populace that is either disingenous or just plain dumb enough to buy into and/or parrot this type of narrative.

Who's with me?

RescueTime

I just read about a cool new productivity tool called RescueTime. So I clicked over to the site, thought to myself "That seems like something I could use," and bookmarked the site to do so later.

Definitely later.

A-Ha uh huh lol

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