Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I was shopping on Craigslist for a replacement computer for Mrs. Perils (which I procured - more about that later), when I came across this ad.  I’m not sure whether $489,000 is a record for a Craigslist listing or not:

PhotoSharing / PhotoBlogging Site for sale! $489,000
http://___________
2551 members
34088 photos
and growing everyday

This is a fully developed Photo Sharing | Photo Blogging | Social Networking site that is feature rich and ready to be taken to the next level. With the superstar success of sites like YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, & Fotolog, _________ has a lot of similar features and is a great entry level to this market - especially when it comes to the ubiquity of digital cameras and the hot trend in online communities.

It is a SQL VB.Net development with great architecture and superior coding practices. All subscription payments are fully integrated with PayPal. The site is configured to display banner advertisements, we currently are not running ads.

The site is operated on a newer and very upgraded Dell server. Hardware and software are included in the sales price.

For a list of site features and membership prices (feel free to sign up and road test all the member functions): 
_________ is located in Santa Barbara, California.

Dang.  If I hadn’t opted for the wireless mouse and keyboard on Mrs. Perils’ machine, I’d have had just enough in my PayPal account to cover this purchase.  By Tuesday, I’d be flying in Google’s Boeing 767 corporate jet on my way to Mountain View to cash in on my billion-dollar payday, cuz they’d surely buy me instead of competing with me.  Now, it looks like my conservative instincts have screwed me.  I just never wanted to carry more than half a million in the PayPal account at one time - I’m all about limiting my exposure to identity theft.

I’m sure someone will have snapped it up by Monday.

Just as we get a break in our social life (someone has actually invited us to dinner), the weather threatens to nix it. We’re goin’ anyway. Film now, news at 11.>/p>

And here’s little video of snow falling in the yard, threatening to cover our garden sphinx, who is demurely covering the breasts she flaunts exuberantly in the spring. Behind the sweet little soundtrack (from the Winter Light album by the 70s group Oregon), you can hear the swish and gurgle of the snow falling, and melting.

Click to play video (4.1 mb)

Rip Van Winkle here. I’ll quickly recap last weekend and move on to current events.  That was a very satisfying victory over UM.  It’s hard to believe how many points were scored by both teams (81) against what were considered a couple of the top defenses in the country.  Well, I certainly don’t want to have to play them again in the National championship game, and, with USC’s win over ND, it looks likely we’ll be trying to burst the Trojans’….bubble in January.

The weekend at my brother’s was relaxing and convivial.  I think it’s remarkable that we end up seeing each other 3-4 times a year, living as far apart as we do, and that we’ve grown to like each other as we have.  The weather pitched in again this year - highs during the day were 65 - 70F, although it got very chilly at night.  For that, we had the fire pit, and some finely crafted beers from our Atlanta contingent.

One sort of flawed strategy that could have doomed the entire day if the sports gods had been paying the least bit of attention: my youngest brother, 10 years my junior and a fellow OSU marching band alum, goaded me into bringing my trumpet down.  This wasn’t a trivial request, since it meant schlepping it once again through the Seattle and Detroit airports (as I did in September to play in the alumni band game) as carry-on luggage, since I would be loath to check it as baggage.  On Saturday afternoon, leading up to game time, we dragged them out.  If you’re strong of stomach, or deaf, here’s a short film clip of our endeavor.  Please keep in mind that the moment captured here is literally the first time the horn has touched my lips since Labor Day weekend:

Click any picture on the page to enlarge

Click to play video (3 mb)

Despite the inauspicious start, it was a great party.  We had 3 TVs hooked up to my brother’s satellite dish, so that no matter which way you had to turn to either grab a beer or open one, you wouldn’t miss any of the game action.  Even when it was causing looks of concern:

With the game in hand, we got down to real business.  My Charleston brother and sister-in-law had significantly widened and improved the fire pit in his field, and we roasted 80 pounds of oysters and boiled/grilled lobsters that another guest had sent.

These 3 seem to have been caught, Pompeii-like, in the midst of some Roman bit of dissolution:

After dinner, we stoked the fire against the icy November tendrils of air

Until not even our scintillating conversation could hold everyone’s interest.

Just so you don’t think that all we did was drink beer, gorge ourselves on unfortunate shellfish, and watch football, we got out for several nice walks around my brother’s ‘hood, a mixture of farms and rural residences.  One disappointment down by my brother’s pond was the no-show by his (now pet) largemouth bass, Shamu. Apparently the fish in his pond have entered a period of inactivity, and they didn’t even surface when food pellets were scattered.

As much as I love ‘em, it’s always good to get back home to Seattle.  I always try to sit on the right side of my Seattle-bound flights, just in case we make a “bad-weather” approach from the north, and I can get the “money shot” view of downtown and, every now and then, my neighborhood as we descend.  Reliably, for this time of year and especially for this wettest of Novembers, we turned for the airport just a couple miles north of the house. 

Greenlake

My ‘hood

Lake Union

Downtown Seattle

I’m at my brother’s place in Charleston, SC - here with my brothers, their wives and my mom to again roast oysters and watch the Ohio State-Michigan game, something we seem to be making a tradition. Here’s my post on last year’s meetup. It seems the game has taken on mythical qualities this year, as OSU is ranked #1 and Michigan #2, and ESPN is flogging it 24/7. Adding to the mix of hype and over-exposure was the death yesterday of former long-time Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, a day after he’d spoken to the team. Bo and Woody Hayes were chiefly responsible for “branding” the rivalry, spending most of the 70s throwing lightning bolts back and forth at each other and devising all manner of psychological ploys to get their teams ready for the game. Hayes used to slit the stitches on his baseball cap so that he could rip it to pieces at a strategic point in practice. Against that backdrop, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Bo has staged his passing, and they’ll resurrect him in the locker room at halftime.
The timing of Bo’s death also couldn’t have been worse for this Columbus punk-rock band called The Dead Schembechlers. They’ve been trading on an arch and clever parody of the animus of the rivalry, and had a major on-campus performance scheduled for Friday night. They announced yesterday that it would be their last performance under that name, and they’re donating the proceeds to a charity of the Schembechler family’s choosing.
Well, kickoff’s only 5 hours away now, and I’ve got to get my game face on. I’m sure I’ll have some photos to share later.

Flying home from Milwaukee tonight, but not before my sense of humor wins yet another convert:

Well, that was satisfying but, oddly, I didn’t feel a surge of euphoria, didn’t feel compelled to gloat and go all Terrell Owens.  Maybe it’s because I’m working this week in Milwaukee and, although the state tends to have a blue tinge, the folks I’m around here pretty much don’t, so it would have been a lonely little party.

I remember, though, working with another client group the Wednesday morning after the 2004 election, the sadness weighing on my chest like pleurisy, and having to sit through their smug smiling and repeating, “It’s a great day in America!”  And I had a target-rich environment here, where a fragment of a phone conversation wafted out of someone’s office Tuesday, “..where are we going to move if Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker of the House?”  Although he was joking, it was oddly reminiscent of the pouting from the left in 2004 about moving to Canada.

However, we’ve done no more with this election than stop a careening 18-wheeler by bumping it fortuitously into one of those runaway truck lanes we get every two years, having badly missed the last three.  We’re stopped, but we’ve all got whiplash and the cargo has lost much of its merchantability.  This respite may be exceedingly brief if we don’t act, before the insurance adjustors, creditors and auctioneers show up, to articulate an alternate reality, one that can inspire those who changed their voting patterns in disgust or protest to participate in a new business plan.

In order to accomplish this, we need a plan, first of all.  As I was considering this, I remembered what I thought was a great manifesto for how to rebuild trust and confidence in a progressive agenda penned by Rob at Emphasis Added in the ashes of the 2004 election.  In that post, he doesn’t simply splutter rage at the Bush administration - he outlines the shortcomings, some of them systemic and perhaps intractable, in previous periods of liberal ascendancy, and begins to suggest how they may be ameliorated.  The following excerpt makes a terrific overall mission statement to build on:

So what is the liberal agenda? Briefly stated, it’s the belief in the affirmative power of government to provide for the common good, in the rights of all Americans to participate fully in society, in cultural expression, and in international cooperation as a way of solving conflicts, with force as a last resort. I firmly believe that the march toward fulfillment of this agenda and America’s embrace of these ideals from 1933-1980, and again during the Clinton years, contributed directly to America’s rise to global prominence.

While I think it’s hard to connect the dots between Carter and Clinton without at least mentioning the Reagan years, I’ll leave it for a different discussion.  We need to patiently deconstruct the straw men that people have been trained to fear in a progressive vision, and find ways to articulate it and execute it.  There’s a lot of work to do, and not a lot of time to lose in happy-dancing.

OK, the cat’s partially out of the bag - I’ve been two-timing you.  I’m sort of dabbling with a reader blog on the Seattle P-I with my neighborhood as a nominal topic.  You can find it here - I put a new post up last night.  I’m not sure how far I’ll carry on with it, but the idea sort of interested me, and we do so much dorking around in our neighborhood that I don’t think non-Seattle people find meaningful or interesting.  I want you to know that it’s only a flirtation and that I’ll always return to you.  I’m sure that’s a comfort.

I’ll be back tonight with an election day post if I can stomach the results.

I wrote the following for another project, and thought I’d inflict it on you guys.  As a point of information, we live, if you’re loose with your definitions, in a Seattle neighborhood called Wallingford.

I’m not sure what made me think of this 30-some-year-old anecdote - possibly from watching the phenomenon lately in Wallingford of demolishing modest houses, replacing them with lot-devouring mega-residences and hanging 7-figure price tags on them, and knowing that the following bit of Wallingfordiana is not likely to be repeated.

We first rented, then purchased our house in 1975. Built in 1906, it had been in use as a rental for at least 5, and perhaps 10, years, and had suffered the amateur ministrations of absentee landlords, their brothers-in-law and, perhaps, tenants with the desire (but not the technical skills) to improve their fleeting sojourn there. It was, in a word, ramshackle, but it sat on what passes in Wallingford for a double lot, a feature we kids from the flat and ample platting of small-town Ohio thought valuable.

Until we tried to mow it. We didn’t own a lawn mower as tenants, so we rented one from Handy Andy when the sporadic impulse to play groundskeeper overtook us. What we found, on closer inspection, was that the luxurious sheaves of quack grass bursting forth in the fecundity of our first Seattle spring sprang from an unruly expanse of clumpy sod that the mower simply could not negotiate. Back to Handy Andy I went to rent a lawn roller, which I laboriously pushed over the turf with little effect except to rattle my bones.

The lawn’s condition was the result of a startingly industrious farming effort by a group of former tenants who apparently had made of the property something of a commune. Our landlady had hinted briefly at the endeavor when showing us the house, excoriating them for planting a plague of blackberries, and concluding, “They were nice kids, I think…just lazy and ignorant.” We felt the sting on our own pseudo-hippie spirits, but maintained a diplomatic silence.

A neighbor, B., later filled us in on more details of the “commune”, filtered through his own combination of perspective and, probably, wishful thinking. He was a large, amiable guy from Oklahoma, rumored to have played some football there, and the combination of his large frame, sizeable gut and two small, yappy dogs always tickled us. He would periodically come out onto his front porch, barefoot, in jeans and shirtless, clear his throat and launch a loud, Okie “hawk-TEWWWW” expectoration off the rail - prefatory to ineffectually admonishing his dogs when they yapped energetically, but at a safe distance, at friend and foe alike passing on the sidewalk.

B. said that our hippie commune predecessors had dug up the entire back and side yards and planted a variety of crops. To his consternation, they’d fertilized it with a mountain of wet chicken manure that he claimed stood as high as our garage when they’d imported it. He asserted that there’d never been flies in the neighborhood before that seminal act of counterculture agriculture. With each over-the-fence conversation, the census of naked hippies who inhabited this utopia multiplied, and B. hinted with what sounded more like envy than admonition at the unrestrained pursuit of free love.

For a long time, these terse anecdotes, and the word “Valimar” in Druidesque script carved into the gate of a fence, were the only remnants of our hippie forbears. Then, a few years ago, a guy showed up at the door, said he used to live there during that time, and asked to look around. My wife was there (I wasn’t), and to her he seemed nostalgic, maybe a little rueful, and told her a little about their sojourn there. He recalled helping to carve “Valimar” in the fence, and also cleared up a lingering mystery: Our kitchen retains the ceramic tile floor that was there when we bought the house, and there has always been this big chip - a divot, actually - in the center of the floor. The guy said that, during an argument, his girlfriend had launched some substantial piece of kitchenware at him, and his nimbleness in dodging it was our floor’s misfortune.

I have long since replaced the rickety old fence and its Middle Earth moniker. I also churned up the yard and laid new sod down about 25 years ago, only to have the vigorous native quack grass quickly displace it, although I’m now able to mow it when I’m so moved. B.’s college girlfriend suddenly re-entered his life, and they moved off to less fly-blown - and probably more affordable - climes.  And for years now, we’ve had a most excellent vegetable garden in the back, probably owing to that roof-high load of Nixon-era chicken manure. And not all that many flies, really.

October 31 is sort of a triple-fright date.  It means Halloween, of course.  It also means property taxes are due.  And it’s also the last day we season-procrastinators can straight-facedly say it’s still summer.  So, I’ll just out with it - summer’s over.  It’s downright cold here, hovering around 30F.  We’ve started turning on the heat, which means closing the door to the upstairs and grievously inconveniencing the cat in his peregrinations from foodbowl to papyrus plant (where he chooses to obtain his drinking water these days) downstairs, to butt-warming down comforter on one of the beds upstairs. We all have to make sacrifices.

In spite of these manifold privations, we managed to score a double-dose of social life Saturday night.  We went out for dinner with a neighbor couple who were taking a break from enforcing a middle-schooler’s homework weekend.  As we arrived home, another neighbor couple was just emerging onto the street in hilarious costume, on their way to a party.  They asked us if we’d like to join them.  If they thought they were safe in issuing the invitation due to our apparent lack of costume, they were wrong - we rustled through our closet, which normally yields stuff we’re looking for only grudgingly, and in 10 minutes had passable costumes on.

Attendant to the party was a rather elaborate haunted-house with several chambers, the last of which was a blood-spattered, body-part-strewn abattoir manned by a clown-butcher who was deep-frying what he averred were “fingers”. He served them in the house later as “spring rolls”. We ate them cheerfully, and said nothing to the other guests.

How was your fright-night?

I did another sojourn in eastern Washington this week, spending Wed - Fri in Othello, a small town in the dry-land farming country about 200 miles from Seattle.  Other than working, it was a pretty uneventful three days.  One amusing anecdote - The motel I where I stay in town used to have kitchenette-type rooms with sinks, ovens and fridges, and they had a sign just off the lobby requesting that guests not clean game in their rooms (the area around Othello is a big bird-hunting area).  I always thought that this was a quaint throwback to less sophisticated times.  The motel has since been remodeled, and the kitchenettes are gone, along with the sign.  However, it’s hunting season over there now, and one night I noticed an old guy in the hall going from the laundry room to his room, carrying a plastic bag of some raw-poultry-looking mass, with a long feather sticking out of the opening.  Sure enough, he’d bagged a pheasant that day, and was headed to his room with his prize (there are still fridges in the rooms).

As with my trip the week before, the drive was visually fascinating.  The first dusting of new snow appeared on the upper peaks of the Cascades - here’s a range including Mt. Stuart:

Click any picture to enlarge

Here’s the Columbia River just where I-90 crosses it at Vantage.  It’s startling to see such abundant water butted right up against such arid land, with virtually no transition:

On the drive home Friday night, I saw this picket fence of huge wind turbines on the bluffs above Vantage and the Columbia.  There’s a short film of them below, and you can see their almost languid rotation, like a cartwheeling cheer squad for Team Renewable Energy.

Windmill Farm Click to play (2.3 mb)