Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I emerged from the sports bar Saturday afternoon to brilliant sunshine, and the dark-spot-xray feeling of guilt and dread borne by all men who slink out of a bar in broad daylight. Except I was feeling guilty for expending one of the last precious summer days inside, instead of outside frenetically recreating. Here’s what I saw as I exited:

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Ace up my sleeve: I had bussed to the sports bar with the idea that my route home might include a walk up Queen Anne Hill and down to Fremont, where they were hosting the Oktoberfest.
I called Mrs. Perils and offered to meet her there, and started walking. I passed through the Seattle Center, the site of the 1962 World’s Fair:

As I waited for her in Fremont, I took in the sights:

These confections, called Shishkaberries, put me in mind of Middle Earth sex toys:

As I passed this booth, I heard the woman saying, “And if you miss any more payments, we’ll extract this one, and this one, and so on. You should get your credit situation straightened out pronto, or you’ll never straighten your spine again.”

Once Mrs. Perils arrived, we decided that we really didn’t want to spend $20 apiece to sample beers - we’re just not really big beer drinkers, and the band that started playing didn’t really grab us. Instead, we left the Oktoberfest and ambled up to an old favorite, El Camino, and enjoyed excellent margaritas and happy-hour appetizers for about the same cost.

And walked home just as the sun was setting.

On Saturday, my Buckeyes played Penn State, a worthy opponent and one of the “big” games of the year. I decided I wanted company in either my misery or ecstasy, so I bussed down to the sports bar near the Seattle Center where our alumni club was meeting to view the game.
While I’d stop short of calling our particular distemper a “religion”, I’ll note that the following two photos are the closest I’ve come to viewing stained glass from the inside in several decades.

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You might think these guys are taking afternoon tea, handicapping the candidates for the Man Booker prize, except…

OSU sealed its victory in a tough contest with two interception returns for touchdowns in the fourth quarter. The following video was made during the celebration after the second of these:

OSU Fans Celebrate Interception vs. Penn State - Click to play (2.9 mb)
Also in the room, and in some places at the next table, were members of the Penn State alumni club. Remarkably, there was no woofing or trash talk between the groups (although plenty of vociferous cheering). Below, their fans break camp as, onscreen, their young quarterback wanders disconsolately to the locker room after the game.

On to Iowa City for a prime-time night game this Saturday.

I was confident enough Saturday that my Buckeyes wouldn’t need me to defeat Cincinnati that I joined a group of folks for a kayak outing on Budd Inlet near Olympia.  I haven’t done very much paddling in the south Puget Sound, so I signed up.

We met at a pretty little bay called Boston Harbor to launch

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While I waited for others to arrive, I partook of a tasty crop of blackberries growing along the shore. Of course, the plumpest, sweetest ones were sequestered in the depths of a thicket of thorns that even grizzlies would hesitate to plunge into.  But, man, they were tasty, ripened to the tipping point between mature fruit and blackberry liqueur.   There’s always a little sadness associated with the taste, as it signals the end of summer.

The trip started out in sunshine and nearly flat water, so smooth at times that our unperturbed reflections sailed along beneath our hulls.

(editor’s note: The photos above were taken with my Canon S3 IS, a 6 megapixel with a 12x optical zoom.  It just rocks.  The following photos were taken with my Canon S300, as I have a waterproof case for it.  I’m chafing a bit at the quality, as well as the zoom limitations.  Canon doesn’t make a waterproof case for the S3 IS, but there are some expensive workarounds that I have eschewed in the name of thrift.  Until now.  Watch this space…)

Just before lunch, however, a rain squall passed over, and we scrambled to raft up and help each other retrieve raingear that each of us had brought, but buried deep in cargo hatches because we were certain we wouldn’t need it.  Once we had completed the task of half-disrobing, donning raingear and re-fitting with lifejackets and sprayskirts, it inevitably stopped raining.  In case you’re wondering, the woman below is sporting the quintessential spring/fall northwest outdoor look - full-on raingear to ward off the deluge just passed, and sunglasses to cope with the Saharan sun that swiftly follows it. 

A raft full of mergansers, fresh from a session with their punk hairdressers, was oblivious to the squall and the need to prepare for it.

I’m a sucker for clever boat names.  Couldn’t pass this one up:

As we returned to Boston Harbor Marina, the sun broke through a suckerhole and highlighted the ships, masts and cottages on the shore.

And, BTW, OSU 37, Cincinnati 7.  Bring on State Penn!

When I got home from work Thursday night, Mrs. Perils met me on the front porch and suggested the very thing I’d been thinking as I was driving - oozing fitfully, rather - across the 520 bridge: “Ya wanna walk somewhere for a bite?”  The “walk somewhere” was the easy part, we almost never drive for food or beverages.  The hard part is always “where?”

We made our typical non-decision - we chose a general direction and distance to start walking and deferred the choice of the actual venue.  In this case, the direction and distance was Fremont - southwest, about 2 miles one way.  We actually had two places in mind - a Mexican place called El Camino, and a place featuring crepes called Le Bouchee.  As we passed the creperie, we saw that there were tables empty, and steered ourselves in.

It was definitely the right choice.  Mrs. Perils had a goat cheese & chicken crepe, and I had a salmon & caper.  We don’t usually do dessert, but the special this night was fig and honey creme brulee.  We remember discussing it with the waitress, but when it arrived at the table neither of us actually remembered ordering it.  So what.  It was superb.

OK, here’s an experience I haven’t had in a restaurant before: a couple was sitting at the next table, and the guy had this Wine For Dummies book with him, and was referencing it as he prepared to order.  When his wine was delivered, I was dying to see what he’d ordered, but I couldn’t get a good enough bead on the label.  Either he was tremendously insecure about his ability to select an amiable wine for a fairly down-scale dinner (crepes?), or he was actually trying to learn.  Either he deserves kudos for the effort, or he needs an intervention.  God knows I’ve given up the “instruct” part of “instruct and delight” when it comes to wine.  I can never remember what I drank.  The “delight” part I’ve got down.

The best part of the evening, though, was due to the restaurant’s supplying butcher-paper table coverings and colored pencils at each table.  The minute we walked in, Mrs. Perils was skulking among the other tables snapping up colors she wanted.   As we dined, she proceeded to spin out this creation:

I didn’t press too hard about why, out of all of God’s bounty, she chose a Venus’ Flytrap for her subject. 

One thing I’ve kind of glossed over from last week is my foray into hostile terrain - the Arcadia Bluffs golf course in Manistee, Michigan.  That’s not my Buckeye paranoia talking - the “hostile terrain” I’m referring to isn’t Michigan, it’s the golf course.  And it’s not at all certain in which direction the hostilities are canted: my artless hacking may be far more deleterious to the manicured climes of a well-designed golf course than its inexorable psychological corrosiveness could be on my delicate sentience.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As I related earlier, I followed my OSU band reunion weekend with a visit to my client in Milwaukee.  And as he did two years ago, my client invited a group of us who work with the business in various capacities to board the corporate plane for a junket to an out-of-the-ordinary golf course.  Now, it’s sort of extraordinary that they invite me along at all, as I golf about as often as Britney Spears gives birth.  No, actually, not quite that often.  In fact, the last time I had golfed was on that trip to Mackinac Island two years ago.  But it beats working, so I buckle my seatbelt and ask no questions.

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Once I get onto a course, I have an enjoyable time.  I think this is mostly because I have pretty low expectations.  My family didn’t golf when I was growing up (my dad scoffed, “golf is the only game where you hit a ball and have to chase it yourself”), and I never took it up as a young adult, so I have absolutely no context against which to measure any potential disappointment in my occasional outings.
There was a heavy mist hanging in the air when we arrived, and the grass was dew-laden.  I later learned that our pilot had loaded extra fuel in case we had to wave off our landing in Manistee, and although we have state-of-the-art avionics on board, we indeed came close to not having the required visibility to land at this airport.

When I saw that the Arcadia course was on the shore of Lake Michigan, I envisioned a sort of Venetian venue wherein I’d be better off in a kayak than a golf cart, since most of my play would surely be aquatic rather than land-based.   This course, however, was wickedly arrayed among moguls of scenic dune and sawgrass.  The following are taken from the tee area of two representative holes.  The idea is that your ball will magically plop onto that little oasis of manicured green fairway and avoid being swallowed by what we quickly began branding as “moonscape” of grass and sand.  The tee shot on the left must cross a deep ravine and travel a pretty fair distance.  Perversely, I was the only one of our foursome to land on the green.  I was shunned for most of the next three holes.

As I’ve said elsewhere, no matter how tortured my game is, once or twice in a round steel and flesh will cease their clangorous struggle for a second, and I’ll somehow just smack the snot out of the ball.  I’ll stand there gaping at the ball in flight with more wonder than if it was an alien spacecraft.  And it’s like a hit on a crack pipe - my spirit will soar and my body will vibrate with endorfins, and for just a brief moment I’ll think, “Damn!  I could get good at this!”  Just as suddenly, the high is over and I resume my bereft travail.

“Undressing the ball” I think they called it.  Our pilot, who wasn’t playing, snapped this photo, perhaps not realizing how much at risk he was even at that angle.  It would have been a long bus ride back to Milwaukee.  Yeah, I’m wearing sandals.  And, yeah, I’m hitting a 2-iron off the tee.  Sue me.

Here’s the best line of sportswriting I’ve seen this football season, and it doesn’t even involve the Buckeyes.  Anyone who’s travelled in the southeast and seen South Carolina fans preening in their “Cocks”-wear will get a kick out of this entry from the excellent college football blog Every Day Should Be Saturday.  Background: the Gamecocks’ quarterback was arrested about 2 am Wednesday morning after a fight at a training table tavern, and was suspended by coach Steve Spurrier.  EDSBS put it this way:

Spurrier has given this Cock the yank and will start true freshman Chris Smelley for the forseeable future. (article)

Yank a Cock and the result is Smelley?  Get Chris Sperman on the line.

(Sorry if I brought you here for Ohio State stuff and you stumbled onto this.  Hopefully you’re down there enjoying the multimedia and never got here.)

Well, I almost don’t want to say anything on this 5th anniversary of 9-1-1.  I didn’t lose anyone on 9-1-1, nor did I know anyone who did.  I was affected in a pretty direct way, however, as I was working out of town when the attacks occurred on that sunny fall Tuesday.  I watch very little television, even when I’m on the road in a hotel room, so I arrived at my client’s office ignorant of the unfolding events.  As other employees arrived, the story of the first tower bombing was pieced together, and a TV was set up in the lunchroom just in time to learn of the second.

From the moment of impact, I felt unremitting anger and an unabashed desire for revenge.  On a more practical level, I had a ticket to fly that Friday night, first to Detroit to visit my parents, then home to Seattle on Sunday.  As flights were cancelled and the skies fell eerily silent, I wondered what my options would be.  Hijacking my rental car and a 3-day drive to Seattle was one of the possibilities.

As it turned out, flights resumed on that Friday and I boarded my scheduled flight with a mixture of gravity and ebullience, with the attitude that I was going to live my American life and let no one intimidate me into fearful scurrying.  It was also the fastest way out of town, and it was already paid for.

I felt temporarily avenged upon the routing of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  They were repressive, anachronistic and had provided gleeful hospitality to all manner of Islamic terrorists.  The fact that they were a sovereign government, and not our prime-target terrorist organization, didn’t really bother me all that much at the time.  I probably didn’t make as much of a distinction between renegade Islamic elements and its more institutional/political forms because I simply don’t think religion should be involved in government in the first place.  I’ll never be nostalgic for the Taliban.

The confusion of targets inherent in the Afghan effort, however satisfying the outcome, laid the groundwork for the drumbeat towards the Iraq invasion and the evolution of 9-1-1 from a national touchstone to a politically calculated wedge.  Toppling sovereign nations, instead of the more difficult and less politically useful task of adopting an adroit global strategy, was now legitimized as the signature tactic to “fight terrorism”, and I believed from the start that this confusion vis a vis Iraq was perpetrated purposefully in order to advance other political and economic goals by an administration of hapless miners that had lucked into the mother lode.

So, at five years’ remove from that sobering Tuesday morning, the wedge has worked: I feel as disconnected from the co-opted sentimentalism and maudlin displays as I might from a quaint hero’s holiday celebrated in some far-off land.  I felt it viscerally at the time, and feel the utmost sympathy for those who lost people.  I’m also under no illusion that there is not a large group of people that has chosen me for an enemy.  But 9-1-1 is simply not mine anymore.

From Columbus, we headed north on Sunday to spend the afternoon at my mom’s place near Toledo.  Then we drove up to Detroit to watch the Tigers play the Angels (wherever they’re from;  the ticket said, “LA Angels of Anaheim”).  We grew up following the Tigers in the 50s and 60s, cheering for the likes of Norm Cash, Rocky Colavito, Al Kaline, Bill Freehan, Mickey Lolich, Willie Horton and Denny McClain, the apotheosis of which was the 1968 World Series victory.  So the Tigers game Sunday was a sort-of nostalgia trip.  Except the Tigers no longer play at Tiger Stadium - they now occupy a combination ballpark and theme park called Comerica Park.

The park affords wide-open views of downtown Detroit, and on this gorgeous night it was pretty sweet:

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When I was working in Detroit for a short period in the late 70s, the Renaissance Center was the beachhead around which the city was to be revitalized, and had just opened to much fanfare.  It’s been through more hands than a B-movie starlet since then.  Its construction was spearheaded by Henry Ford II, and when I was there, Ford occupied much of the office space, and I think the building bore the Ford logo.  I was surprised to see the GM logo on the building Sunday, but I now learn that GM bought the center a while ago and has put $500 million into its renovation.

No irony here!

Tiger manager Jim Leyland went to my high school and was 4 or 5 years ahead of me.  A star athlete, he went by the name “Jimbo”.  I believe I was in the 8th grade, chubby, struggling socially and with poor academic work habits, when my math teacher started calling me “Philbo”.  I disliked it then, but only later realized what a mean sort of taunt it was.  Of course, it stuck with me throughout high school, but it faded in significance as I found my place a little, and I even had a little fun with it.

But it’s not about me, it’s about the job Leyland has done with the Tigers this year in what amounts to a homecoming (Detroit is about 45 miles from our home town).  I haven’t really been a fan of any baseball team since the late 60s, but September will be an interesting month for the Tigers, and I’ll follow along with more interest than I might have.

On a sad note, I must report the loss of a highly-valued companion during the course of this trip. On the way back to Perrysburg after the game, a couple of us implored our designated driver to navigate with alacrity to a comfort station. Once parked, in my haste to be comforted, I apparently kicked my Canon S2-IS out of the van. Upon returning, the serenity of my comfort was curtailed when they told me someone had backed over the camera. It was toasted, but the memory chip was still good, which is why I can post these pictures.

Later in the week, in Milwaukee, I was shopping for a replacement, and saw that bestbuy.com was within $5 of the lowest mail-order price, and that I could pick up my new Canon S3 IS from a local store that very day.  You’ll see its work soon enough.

Last weekend flew by, and I hardly spent any time online. I see that certain criminal elements failed to heed my offer of amnesty, and that summer is still missing and about to grace milk bottles coast to coast.
I’m in the midst of a whacked-out travel itinerary that, after flying home to Seattle from Detroit yesterday (Monday) afternoon, now has me on a morning flight today (Tuesday) back to Milwaukee for a mixture of work, a board meeting and (gulp) golf. More about that in another post. I had made my reservation for the band reunion quite a while ago. Then my client scheduled a board meeting this week, and changing my original itinerary to SEA-DTW-MKE-SEA was just about the same cost as the two round trips I’m embarked on now and, to tell the truth, I was happy for the evening home even though it means more flight time. Also on the plus side, I get a couple thousand more miles toward 2007 elite status should Northwest Airlines survive.
The band reunion was a bit hectic, as usual, but once again a lot of fun. To recap for the handful of you who aren’t my relatives, parole officers or court-appointed psychological evaluators, I was in the marching band when I attended Ohio State, and thus am allowed to participate in the alumni band reunion held each year at an early-season football game. Between 600 and 700 of us attend this event each year to renew acquaintances, and to play and march in both the pregame and halftime shows. In order to present a show that we won’t be ashamed of, we are very busy Friday night and Saturday morning rehearsing.
Friday night, we have a sit-down music rehearsal where we play through all the show music and review our formation charts. It’s interesting how quickly we start sounding reasonably good. It helps that there’s a core group in Columbus that plays together all year. (But don’t you have to wonder at a local culture that wants fight songs played at weddings and funerals?) Here are a couple of videos from the rehearsal:

Buckeye Battle Cry Click to play (5.3 mb)

Carmen Ohio Click to play (6.0 mb)

Saturday morning, we have to be in our seats for a final census about 7 hours before kickoff. This kills us on days when we have the usual 12:30 kickoff, as that translates to a 5 am start time. This year, however, ABC made our game a 3:30 pm regional telecast, so we got a reprieve to 8 am. That’s still early, considering that we’ve usually stayed out late Friday night catching up with each other. The Saturday schedule is as follows:

• Music rehearsal 8 am - 10:30
• Outside for marching/playing rehearsal until 12:30
• Quick lunch, then assemble in St. John Arena, the old basketball venue, for Skull Session, an open-to-the-public dress rehearsal at 1:30
• Form up & head to the stadium for the pregame show.

You can get an idea of the range of ages at the reunion from the photo below, taken at our outdoor rehearsal. Just from my personal perspective, there were no women in the band when I was in it. And, with regard to the fellow pictured, there’s a haunting, understated eloquence in the “42, 46-48″ on his jacket, and all that is implied in the caesura of that comma:

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While the alumni band members straggle and saunter from the end of one run-through to the next, the student band arrives for its rehearsal with us in style:

Click to play (8.5 mb)

Two very dramatic moments occur during the Skull Session rehearsal/performance. One is a fairly recent addition to the ritual. In an attempt to acquaint the players with the myriad components of what makes a football Saturday at Ohio Stadium, Jim Tressel has been walking the team through the Skull Session and having one of the captains give a short speech. The arena is always full, and the crowd always appreciative. The second is when the varsity band enters the arena to an up-tempo cadence. Since the crowd is laden with band parents, siblings and SOs, the response is deafening:

Team Entrance Click to play (8.8 mb)

OSUMB Entrance Click to play (7.2 mb)

Somewhere in this sea of red, we’re supposed to form up and march to the stadium.

After our pregame show, we had to wait on the sidelines for the flagraising and the playing of the national anthem. During the anthem, I noticed this group of women doing some arcane dance routine. I asked one of my bandmates what they were doing, and he said, “They’re doing signing. For the deaf…and for the dumb (referring to me).”

The following series of pics were taken by someone (thanks, Mark!) sitting in the stands. I picked out the photos that had me in them, and you can follow the arrows to find me.

Damn! We’ve got “diagonals”! That means our vertical and horizontal spacing is spot-on.



Gotta love that halftime score!

I don’t know which of you guys stole summer, but when I went to check my calendar today, it was gone.  I won’t ask any questions if you return it by midnight.  If you don’t, I’m comin’ after you with both feet.

I’m in Columbus now, in preparation for our alumni band performance at Ohio Stadium tomorrow.  I flew overnight to Detroit on Wednesday night, and met up with my brother & SIL at my mom’s houseThursday.  We drove to Columbus today. 

We have a music rehearsal tonight, and tomorrow we’ll go outside with our charts and grope our way around a practice field to prepare our show.  Fortunately, they keep things really simple formation-wise, so it only takes a couple of hours to polish it up.  The complicated stuff, the entrance to the stadium and the Script Ohio drill, we already know from our shared tribal memory.  By this evening, I’ll be glad for the time I’ve spent down in the basement trying to toughen my lips up a little. 

OK, off with my horn and my camera, and perhaps I’ll have a little video for you tonight.  In case you’ve never seen Script Ohio performed, you can watch a video of it here.  It’s about 20 megabytes, so don’t try it with dialup.