Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

“Bush Seeks to Put Humans On Mars”

        What? We’ve run out of room at Guantanamo already?

We had a once-every-4-years-or-so snow day here in Seattle.  Most of the city simply shut down, and people were skiing, sledding or simply cavorting through the streets like grade-schoolers.

We walked around soaking up the festive atmosphere and taking pictures.

Gasworks Park - there were more people on the hill waiting to sled than I’ve seen in most lift lines

Folks were using anything they could find to sled with - a river kayak, a “pay-or-die” sign from a parking lot, and a set of sofa cushions.  Others used cafeteria trays and laundry baskets.

In the Fremont neighborhood, Lenin rides again, with an evergreen garland around his brow

In our yard, our garden sphinx hides her discomfort in a cozy drift

Perfect ending: My machiatto and my wife’s mocha provide the preliminary for a WWF smackdown over a “shared” chocolate espresso torte at Still Life in Fremont coffeeshop.

I bet I was higher than any of you when 2004 arrived.  You can go ahead and submit pictures, mpegs, mp3 files of keenings and ecstatic animal gruntings, but you’ll still lose.  I was at 35,000 feet, on my way from Seattle to Detroit for an unplanned visit to Toledo.

My mom had caught the flu while visiting one of my brothers over Christmas, and after returning home Tuesday was having trouble breathing.  Wednesday morning, my brother in Atlanta called and told me she’d been taken to a hospital, put on a ventilator and was in an ICU in serious condition.  He and I discussed the situation, called a couple of my parents’ close friends still living, and still living in town, speculated about how Dad would react and how he’d be able to get back & forth to the hospital…it became clear that we were playing a little game of conversational chicken about, ultimately, which one of us would pack up and head to Toledo.  I finally caved, having a more flexible schedule and a sizeable bank of Northwest Airlines miles, and made a reservation for the Wednesday night redeye to Detroit.

My plane pierced the 2004 veil somewhere over Montana.  I slept little, if at all, and landed in Detroit at the ridiculous hour of 5 am, the beneficiaries of strong east-bound jet streams.  I juiced up on espressos, called the hospital for visiting times and decided to stop in there before heading to my parents’ house, since my Dad seldom rises before noon.

When I first espied my mom in the ICU, she looked just awful, hardly recognizable - asleep, white as a sheet, vent tube stuck down her throat.  I started recalibrating my expectations about her chances.  A nurse woke her up, and she was very startled to see me (a good sign).  In a few seconds she realized she wasn’t dead and stuck in some version of hell where she couldn’t talk or cry for help and I was the only person at her bedside, and determined that…she was alive and nonetheless stuck in that version of hell.

Our “conversation” exposed just how thin my narrative powers are (you, gentle readers, already knew), since she couldn’t talk or write and I had to extemporaneously fill the awkward silence with whatever non-parent-dying prattle that I could extract from my sleep-deprived brain.  Now and then she would raise her hand and try to form letters in the air, which I had no hope of translating, and to get her to quit I’d launch into some further lame crap.  My battery finally wore out and I told her I’d bring my dad back later, and left.

(this has a happy ending - I’ll get to it!)

Leah wrote a couple days ago about downloading a ton of Christmas music from iTunes, and it got me thinking that I haven’t yet played my favorite Christmas music.  It’s a compilation of old English carols transcribed for men’s choir by, for the most part, Gustav Holst (composer of The Planets).  I usually play it while we’re decorating the tree, trying my wife’s patience and making her anxious that it’s too arcane and weird for our son’s taste, causing him to split.  So, this year, I didn’t play it, and we listened instead to what KEXP was playing Christmas Eve.  This music ran a pretty wide gamut, much of it involving Santa Clauses that were either drunk, misbehaving or both. 

There was one set, however, that really grabbed me.  It was a treatment of the Nutcracker Suite by Duke Ellington, and it was one of the most musically complex things I’ve heard in a while.  It’s part of an album called Three Suites, from about 1960.  I was impressed enough that I ordered it from Amazon as soon as it was over.

I’ll get to the Holst sometime before the tree comes down.  I’ve been known to listen to it in August.

Test post.

This one’s for Paul Hinrichs.  (go there now to horn in on the Christmas dinner he’s preparing).  Our Buckeyes are going to the Fiesta Bowl again this year, albeit not to play for the national championship again. 

It’s been a sort of half-throttle week since I got home from Milwaukee Friday night.  I had done little or no shopping, I was groggy from almost a month’s worth of travel, and got caught up in the malaise that the dampness and early darkness of the Pacific Northwest solstice.  Plus, I had a lot of work to do Monday and Tuesday, so there just wasn’t much time to get “into the season”.  I made a half-hearted sortie down to the University district Saturday, but ended up spending most of the afternoon drinking espresso and reading my new copy of Shroud (see panel at left).

I finally sucked it up yesterday afternoon and drove up to the Northgate mall in a last desperate attempt to at least get everyone SOMETHING to unwrap.   I was mostly successful, but I usually do a much better job.

My wife bought a tree last week at the Greenlake Elementary school’s treelot, and it sat in a bucket on the front porch until last night.  Christmas isn’t a religious holiday at our house, as none of us is a believer at this point, but we’ve accumulated over 30 years’ worth of ornaments, and I enjoy the ceremony of taking them out each year, discussing their origins, and hanging them.  We even retrieve and save each year the tinsel we first bought 20 years ago at Toys ‘R Us.  The purple ornament at right was presented to me on my first Christmas.  You can still make out the ‘1949′ on it.

Everyone have a great holiday week and enjoy your own traditions and the people you share them with.

This contraption has graced the top of our trees for at least 25 years (my wife will correct any rounding errors).  It’s from an old dime store in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District.  I believe it commemorates Chinese new year.  The pinwheels used to spin festively, but too many packings and unpackings have flattened them and rendered their joints arthritic.  Still, over the years it’s made odd trees look good and good trees look better.

I’ve noticed an interesting little marketing trend in the last week or so.  Purveyors of the kinds of things you can spend your Cafeteria/Flexible Spending Plan money on - eyeglasses, chiropractors, pain clinics - are advertising to folks who are approaching the end of the year and still have unspent money in their plan banks.  It’s actually sort of clever, they’ve found this untapped little bundle of money to pitch for.

For those not familiar with these things, some employers sponsor Cafeteria plans in which employees can have money withheld from paychecks in order to pay for health-related expenses not covered by their health insurance, such as deductibles, eyeglasses, orthodonture, etc.  The amounts withheld reduce the employee’s federal taxable income.  However, any amount unspent at the end of the year reverts to the employer, and the employee loses out.  It behooves participants to plan carefully, adjust their withholding when plans change, and try to come up a bit short at year-end.

If you have money left over, I guess you have to consider whether your employer is a more worthy recipient of the unspent funds than some quasi-quack importuning you with unwanted procedures or paraphernalia.

I get googled fairly regularly on the topic of the Dell Inspiron Wandering Touchpad Cursor, which I wrote about last spring, so I thought I’d add an update.  This seems to be something that happens fairly regularly with this model of laptop - the cursor starts migrating across the screen by itself, and often heads off into a corner and you can’t coax it back.

Turns out this is a hardware flaw and is fixed by having a circuit board replaced under the wrist rests.  Dell support will have you reinstall drivers and do all kinds of software calisthenics, but in the end you need a visit from a tech.

I bring this up because I just had to have mine replaced again.  I had it fixed in the spring and it was fine for a few months, but the little bugger started its peregrinations again in September.  I only have 40 or so days left on my 3-year warranty (ALWAYS purchase these warranties from Dell.  I’ve had this cursor thing fixed twice, and had my screen replaced once, too).  I’m not really that rough on my laptop, but I do carry it with me everywhere, and I guess that’s just a hazard of laptop ownership.