Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I’m an accountant, really an accounting software consultant, but I don’t “practice tax” in the sense of holding myself out as a tax return preparer or, God forbid, consultant on tax strategy.  But I’m sort of collateral damage in the tax wars to the extent that my software clients need to file, and I inevitably end up helping them assemble the information their CPAs require, and that’s what’s taken up a lot of my time the last couple of weeks - it’s been sorta busy.

We had sort of a truncated weekend, as I flew off for Milwaukee Sunday afternoon.  We just hung out together and didn’t do anything really special.  Saturday night, we joined our son for pizza and brews at a cozy neighborhood pub where he’s found some weekend employment, then returned home to veg in front of my laptop watching the last three episodes of Lost that I downloaded from iTunes. 

I even got to spend part of Sunday at home, since my flight didn’t leave until 3:30.  That’s unusual, as it seems I’m always hooking up with some 6:30 am flight and getting up in the middle of the night to get to the airport.  Of course, the afternoon flight headed east meant I landed in Milwaukee at 11:30 and didn’t get to sleep until around 2am.  Monday I was surprisingly alert, but at one point in the afternoon I set a query running, put my head down for a bit, and was dead to the world for an indeterminate period of time.

I got out for a decent run last night (hooray for daylight savings time), puzzled my way through a weight workout on the universal gym here at the hotel, and should have been tired enough to slurp up 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.  Instead, I was wide awake at 5.  I read the Seattle papers online, then forced myself to doze fitfully for another hour or so.  Payback will surely come later, as we have a “strategic planning” session today with a lot of powerpoint calisthenics and collaborative exercises, things that work on me like Demorol.

Sorry for the mundane crap post, but not much excitement in this corner lately.

My new digital camera, the Canon S2 IS, can take videos of pretty good quality and record sound in stereo. After seeing the cool videos that the Bums posted the other day, I decided I might try to fool around with a clip or two that I’ve taken. They used a program called iMovie to edit and compress their clips, and I Googled to see if a version was available for Windows. It’s not. Instead, I discovered that I already had an editing program on my computer, Windows Movie Maker.

Great. Another way to waste time on the internets. Here’s my first experiment, just to test the concept.

The resident climber-people were off pursuing their sport today, so I grabbed my camera and a book and hiked down to the University of Washington campus just for a change of scenery. Turns out that this weekend the cherry blossoms on the Quad were out in abundance, and I lucked into a covey of photographs.

The trees were transplanted there in 1964 to make way for a freeway project, and their blossoming has become a much-anticipated event. The Quad was festively packed with sightseers. Oddly, the preponderance of the celebrants were Asian. Not so oddly, I guess, almost all of us brandished cameras. You can view a CherryCam here from the UW’s website.

I really like the contrast of the dark, sinuous, venerable trunks against the newborn blossoms. Age speaking to youth. Apparently these trees are nearing the end of their natural lives, and there is a project in place to replace them. It will take decades, however, for the trunks to achieve the same gnarled character.

Click any picture to enlarge.

From there, I wandered down to the Montlake Cut, the passageway between Lake Union and Lake Washington, plopped down on an ergonomically-shaped rock and read from Henry James’ The American while weekend boaters promenaded past.

On the walk home, I couldn’t help documenting this self-fulfilling sobriquet:

Of all the dire harbingers of civilization’s end, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend that sent chills through me.  Entitled When Life Begins at 5: A New Wake-Up Call, it describes a trend wherein Americans are getting up ever earlier (I’d link to the article, but it’s subscription-only).

By a wide variety of indicators, from electricity usage to water consumption, more U.S. households are starting their days before dawn. In the last six years, PJM Interconnection, which supplies electricity to more than 50 million people in 13 states, saw its largest uptick in usage between the hours of 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., while in Atlanta, Southern Co.’s peak winter electricity usage shifted to 7 a.m. from 8 a.m. in 2003. Aqua America, a water supplier for 13 states, has seen everything from toilets to washing machines starting up earlier: The company’s booster pumps now kick into gear at 5:30 a.m. in Philadelphia instead of 6 a.m., providing 20% additional water pressure to meet higher demand.

I can see how the utility companies might be able to detect the shift in usage patterns.  I’m curious to know how the water company knows whether I’m flushing a toilet, using a washing machine or giving my pet gorilla a high colonic enema (which he prefers in the evening, so I guess it’s moot).

The reason I regard this as a dire trend is because it moves in the opposite direction of my personal body rhythms: I’m a late-to-bed, late-to-rise person, and this is just the sort of shift in the cosmos that moves me into Darwin’s crosshairs.  I’ve never been able to go to bed much before midnight and, though I’m not oblivious to the charms of rosy-fingered dawn, the concept to me is more of a geoplanetary theory than something humanly observable.

According to the article, many folks are rising earlier in response to traffic conditions in their areas, so that they can engage their morning commutes at less-congested times.  As a Seattle resident, I can understand why one would make an extraordinary effort to avoid the mind-numbing gridlock that afflicts our area from at least 7 - 9 every morning.  But, as with the sunrise, the possibility of unfettered commutes at 5:30 am is a merely theoretical concept.  I find that the same off-peak dividend is available at 10 am and, since I run my own business, I simply never make appointments outside the house before then.

Others, however, have made the 5 am bugle call a lifestyle choice, a way to cordon off an hour or two of quality personal time.  I guess “quality” is open to a wide swath of interpretation.  Here are a few examples:

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  Videogame designer Frank Rogan used many techniques to train his body to ease into 6 a.m., the only time he can steal for himself. He’s experimented with a “dawn simulator” alarm clock that gradually illuminates the bedroom, searched for wake-up tips on the Internet and even forced himself to go to the gym, which he was appalled to find packed at 6 a.m.  “It’s like these people are a different species,” says Mr. Rogan.

I would be more likely to go with the “Saturday Simulator” alarm clock.  I’m totally down with his anthropological assessment, however.

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  Getting up earlier comes fairly easy to Chris Oberbeck — it’s his family that sometimes balks. The private-equity investor in Greenwich, Conn., says that between his 11 p.m. conference calls to India and an ever-buzzing BlackBerry, dawn is “the only shot we’ve got.” Among the new morning activities he’s lined up: family birthday parties with waffles instead of cake. But with four boys to drag out of bed, Mr. Oberbeck says rebellion is inevitable

The guy with the dawn birthday parties will be dead long before the first son reaches puberty.  There are 4 chances a year to catch Dad from behind with a red-hot waffle iron.  Even in the unlikely event of a conviction, juvie only lasts until you’re 18.

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  In Phoenix, Skydive Arizona has seen a spike in prework parachuting. “These are Type-A personalities — doctors, lawyers,” says jump coordinator Betsy Barnhouse. “Once they face their mortality in the morning, they can just walk through their day.”

I’ve always felt that the afternoon coffee break was the perfect time for a dive, a way to get a little kick-start after the pilot and I have overindulged in martini at lunch.  I would just feel awful knowing that I’d pulled EMS, the NTSB and a reconstructive mortician out of bed at that ungodly hour.  I used to disdain people who said that they hit the ground running in the morning as either liars or freaks.  Now, that’s not even good enough - in Phoenix, at least, you’ve got to hit the ground screaming.

Now, don’t misinterpret the fact that I’m writing this at 3:30 am to mean that I’m getting with this program.  My sleep pattern for the last year or more has been donut-like - with a hole in the middle somewhere between 2am and 4.  I’ll be blissfully asleep again by the time these early-birds are up and about.  They can have all the worms they want.

If any of you who correspond with Mrs. Perils find from time to time that her prose gets a little hairy, here’s the likely explanation.  We have two cats, brothers, who are 11 years old.  In the picture is Rico, named, for no good reason, after Rico Suave of 15-minute MTV fame.  He’ll sit like that, keeping his counsel for the most part, resisting the urge to edit what he sees on the screen.  His brother, Simba, is a little too ADHD and feral to spend much time on a lap, or in the house, for that matter.  He hangs out where he can quickly dive under the front porch if his worst fears are realized.  Which occurs about every 10 minutes.

Here they are in a rare moment of fraternal truce.

Except I’m not that old and I’m not that dead.

The story is about a P-I photographer who had a remarkable 50-year career with the paper.  There’s a photo gallery included in the story that provides a fascinating perspective on Seattle growing up.

The Supreme Court has upheld a Mississippi law banning the sale of sex toys, which it defines as “any device used primarily for stimulation of human genitalia”. 

The ordinance divides Mississippians.

Although it’s probably safe to say it doesn’t cleave them.

“I think it’s a good law,” said Paula N_____, 50, of Vicksburg. “I think (sex toy use) leads to pornography and that leads to our children being exploited. I think a lot of it is perverted, anyway.”

Those inductive gymnastics leave my head spinning, but I probably haven’t studied this as closely as Ms. N_____.  This syntax, interestingly, leaves a subset of the sex toy experience that Ms. N_____ thinks might not be “perverted”.  Faith-based subcontract investigators working for the Mississippi attorney general are seeking to interview Ms. N_____.

The law specifically exempts automatic assault weapons;  we can probably infer that electric drills are also exempt if the purchaser can provide evidence of an ongoing construction project, and the part of the drill normally referred to as “chuck” is renamed to something non-gender-specific.  Similarly, vacuum cleaners and attachments will only be sold to customers whose residences have dust-bunny concentrations within EPA guidelines.

Coincidentally, sales of this toy have skyrocketed at ToysRUs.  Bentonville, Arkansas-based Walmart quickly pulled it from the shelves.

I just heard for the first time today the term “Graduates of Iraq” applied to terrorists who cut their teeth in post-invasion Iraq and have traveled elsewhere (in this case, Amman) to blow something up.  Maybe GW Bush will be remembered as the “education president” after all.

Sunday, the last day of winter, came up just gorgeous, if a little cool.  Our son recently came into a great opportunity to rent a cabin with a climbing buddy in Index, WA, within walking distance of one of the finer climbing walls in the state.   So, let me get this straight in my head.  My kid, living with me and partially employed, has vacation property and I don’t?  I don’t blame him - it’s a sweet deal. 

He called from there Sunday morning and said it would be a great day for us to come up.  Mrs. Perils, afraid that he’d dragoon her into climbing on routes that would kick her ass, demurred with the palliative “this sounds like a great father-son outing”.  I’m thinking that he really wanted to go climbing and enlist Mrs. Perils as his belay slave, but when he saw that I’d arrived alone, sans climbing gear, it seemed that he was secretly relieved that he wouldn’t be climbing.  We agreed on some hiking plans, and headed out.

If you recall, I lost my Canon S300 digital camera last summer during a trip to Index to hang with Andrew and Mrs. Perils while they rock-climbed.  I didn’t grieve for the camera so much as I did some spectacular photo ops I had that day that disappeared with the camera.  I got the opportunity to revisit them Sunday, as we took the same hike that I did last summer. 

Clicky-click to enlarge any of these:

Here’s the little pied a terre.  It looks to be about 100 years old, but with new wiring.  The floor cants palpably, and doorways are parallelograms instead of rectangles (and I know that a rectangle is a parallelogram, but this isn’t College Quiz Bowl).

At the top of our hike, looking east towards Stevens Pass, the town of Index below.  The strange shadow is there because this photo is a stitch of two different snapshots.

I set the 10-second timer and backed cautiously up to the precipice.  Got seated just in time.

Mount Index.

Ya seen one snow-covered peak, ya seen ‘em all, right?  It’s my privilege to test your patience.

Index Creek, as sunset reddens the peaks in the background.

I’m nearly half Irish, mostly, if not entirely, on my Dad’s side.  Not a lot of the Old Sod sticks to me, however.  My last name, the one I share with a venerable morning talk show and quiz show host, is apparently native to County Mayo, but that line of folks left no trail, either written or by artifact, of their journey.  (The quiz show host is a vociferous Notre Dame fan, and cannot possibly be related to us.)  We can trace back to my great-great grandfather on that side, who began a 5-generation run in northwestern Ohio.  None of them, to my knowledge, was more than a perfunctorily observant Irishman.  They weren’t even Catholic anymore - something about one of them disliking burning incense in the house.  Works for me.

On my paternal grandmother’s side, the Irish strain worked on railroads, and at some point one or more of them became convinced that working indoors in one place was safer, warmer and more likely to get you laid than pounding spikes and sleeping in tents.  They got jobs in a Union Pacific shop in Omaha and settled there.  Eventually one of their daughters ended up in Waukegan married to a German fellow and became my great-grandparents.  They either kept, or were able to obtain, a parish birth record of one Cornelius Hogan in County Cork, and this is the most definitive claim I have to origins on the Emerald Isle.

My Mom’s side is almost, if not entirely, free of the Irish taint, being mostly German, English and Scotch-Irish (who aren’t “Irish” in the conventional understanding, but instead are Scots whom the English transplanted to Ulster in hopes of improving the indigenous genetic stock).

So, St. Patrick’s Day gets a resounding “meh!” from me, for the most part.  I don’t drink any more than any other day, seldom wear green and definitely don’t wear silly hats.  Dinner was chile colorado with a tasty margarita.