Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

(Edited to incorporate the excellent cartoon from my graphic arts department, which also handles all the laundry duties at Chez Perils.  We’re a “flat organization” here.  Only in terms of hierarchy, I hasten to add.)

I consider myself an aggressive computer user, but this article has got me thinking that I have a woeful lack of imagination.  I would never have thought of connecting my washer and dryer to my computer network.  In fact, I put forth a certain amount of effort to ensure that these entities don’t encounter one another.  For instance, I try never to leave my laptop in my pants pocket when I throw them in the laundry basket. 

The biggest risk is the fact that the washer and dryer are located upstairs and immediately above my computer center.  Inevitably, within the purview of geologic time, water will at some point cascade through the ceiling and drench what’s turning out to be my life’s work.  With any luck, I’ll either be on the road and have my laptop with me and only Mrs. Perils’ computer and/or life will be at risk, or I’ll be in the house and able to, after tossing one of the cats in to be sure that there’s no electrical hazard, rescue the computer gear.

But all that’s off the subject, which is dealing with arcana of laundry-doing that have never heretofore entered my consciousness:

The system, dubbed Laundry Time, connects a washer and dryer to a wireless home network to deliver notifications to TV screens, PC monitors or cell phones about the status of a laundry load.  It also goes further, to let people control the washer and dryer from a distance — pressing a button on the TV remote control, for example, to keep the dryer going a few extra minutes. 

“Instead of being enslaved to the washer and dryer, you can allow yourself to be able to do things,” said Tim Woods, vice president of ecosystem development for the Internet Home Alliance, the group behind the project. “You’re coming home from the grocery store, and you get a notification from the dryer that says it’s about to complete — would you like to go into fluff cycle so not everything is wrinkled when you get home?”

Color me an unregenerate primitive male, but I’m much more likely to be coming home from a tavern and wondering how to spirit my soiled underthings into the laundry than I am ever to worry about the most advantageous moment to initiate a fluff cycle. 

The other impediment to our entering the brave new world of the Internet Home Alliance is the age of nearly every appliance in the house.  The washer and dryer, for instance, were here when we bought the house in 1975.  They’re from Penney’s and, yes, they’re avocado green.  The stove and fridge were purchased before our major remodel in 1981.  The furnace came with the house as well.  Somehow, I have a suspicion that I won’t find USB 2.0 ports on any of these devices. 

On the plus side, as long as I’m more wrinkled than my clothes, no one will really notice.

I saw my opthalmologist last week, and he said my left eye is now free of the inflammation I had from my bout with shingles.  My head can still itch like crazy, but I think that’s dissipating, or I’m just tired of it, or something. 

Also, the scale at the gym has been my friend since I returned from Ashland.  Sunday’s weigh-in came in at 146 3/4.  It was a treat to be able to move that large weight on the scale from the “150″ notch down to the “100″ notch.  It’s been about 5 years since I’ve been able to do that.  If I can, I’ll level off at 145, count my stretch marks and see how I feel.  There must be abs in there somewhere.

The weather was terrific here over the weekend, sunny with highs in the mid-70s.  I feel for you guys sweltering in the high 90s - I’m due to join you next week when I head for Milwaukee.

Saturday, though, I met up with some folks from a Yahoo paddling group in Anacortes, about 70 miles north of Seattle, and we did a 6-7 mile trip circumnavigating a couple of mostly uninhabited islands, Allan and Burrows.  It was a real swell day to be on the water.

That’s me on the left, in my sorta-new Gore-Tex drysuit.

A few more photos from the trip here.  I took both of my cameras - my old Canon S300 because I have a waterproof case and can use it from the cockpit, my new S2 IS because it gets jealous when I leave it and pees in the corners.  This trip, though, my waterproof case took to fogging and taking unintentional “art” shots that weren’t much use.  We went around a group of rocks, Williamson Rocks, that is a nature preserve.  There we saw bunches of harbor seals, plus assorted sea birds.

One of the islands, Allan Island, is owned by Paul Allen, and is for sale for $19.5 million.  I’d buy it, but I don’t want to tie my money up in more real estate, although this is more “liquid” than most.

We helped a neighbor and friend celebrate her continued superannuation last night with a chocolate cake courtesy of Mrs. Perils.  After the cake was presented and candles extinguished, our neighbor told a story about one of her favorite/memorable birthdays, and then thought it would be great fun if each of us around the table should share a story as well.  She had made the mistake, however, of inviting people who knew her in college in the 70s, and some stories were divulged that, shall we say, shed an entirely different light on our formerly sweet and demure acquaintance.

I’ll spare her by not going into any details, other than to say that the heretofore unknown (to me) parlor game “strip dreidl” came up.  To my further puzzlement, she’s not Jewish.

I wanted something a little more ostentatious than a simple hyperlink to signal that I am presenting a video snippet.  I happen to have on staff a talented cartoonist, and I asked Mrs. Perils to sketch me something that I could scan and use as an icon.  Here’s the result:

I cropped it down, fumbled a bit with html and finally got it inserted in a post below just for practice, so now you’ll be forewarned when I’m trying to abuse your bandwidth.

On the “shingles” front, I’ve got my left eye back pretty much, and my forehead no longer looks like something someone forgot at the back of the refrigerator.  I’m left with infernal itching that is sometimes so intense it makes my head vibrate, and makes drifting off to sleep difficult.  But it’s on its way out, and I think the only lasting damage will be its whisper in the ear re: mortality.  As I told a young friend of mine in Ashland, it’s my first Old Man disease.

On a positive note, the diet has been working.  Before I left for Ashland, I weighed just under 152 (down from 160), and I got a lot of exercise down there (Edit: “down there” refers to Ashland, and nothing anatomical. /Edit).  I’ll weigh in on the official scale for this endeavor at the gym tomorrow.

Thanks for listening, and, no, you can’t bill my insurance company.

We flew home from Medford yesterday, and I’m still sorting through my photos and thoughts of the past week.
Ashland has a nifty little park, Lithia Park, with a pleasant little creek crashing through it. The park itself is about a mile long, and beyond it you can hike up into Forest Service land and the town’s watershed. On the Fourth, we did about 8 miles roundtrip, hiking through the park, into the forest and back, arriving in time to get cleaned up for the evening presentation of King John. There was enough Sturm and Drang in the play that we never heard anything of the town’s fireworks display. I promise I’ll talk a bit about King John and the other plays in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, here’s a video depicting a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds Mrs. Perils and I encountered on our Independence Day jaunt. (It’s on Youtube):

Video! Click to play Sights & Sounds of the Fourth
My mom will stay with us here in Seattle until Tuesday, the weather’s terrific and I’m going to squire her around town a bit. Today, she and I parked down by the Pike Place Market, walked through it and down to the Washington state ferry dock. We caught a ferry to Winslow on Bainbridge Island just to sightsee. It was awfully pretty:

(Click to enlarge)

Mount Baker to the north…

…and Mount Rainier to the south.

Our son turned 25 last Saturday. We met up with him briefly Friday down here in Ashland. He’d come down here a few days before with some friends, and couldn’t tarry with us because he had to be back at work, or meet up with a girl, or some such parent-neglecting obligation.
He and I at some point were in a grocery store here, pondering over something, and a young woman walked by and raked her eyes across us - him with intent, me by unhappy accident - and he turned to me and said, “This place is out of control.” Nice try, kid. I admit to feeling a pang of both loss and pride at that moment. While it had been 20 years or so since I’d had that particular experience, I was filled with happiness for my kid. Although he feigned dismissiveness, I couldn’t have given him a better birthday present if I’d emptied my bank account.

Diary of Anne Frank
I had never read the diary nor have I seen a film or play based on it, although I knew the basic facts, so I’m not a very trustworthy commentator on this production. A quick history of the diarie(s):

• a version was published in English in 1952 which had been edited by Anne’s father Otto Frank. He had cut passages in order to protect the memory of others involved, and had also been advised to excise parts dealing with Anne’s emerging sexuality that the publishers felt would not be well-received by conservatives
• a play version by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett was produced in 1955, and a movie based on the play came out in 1959
• the veracity of the diaries was attacked by Holocaust deniers, and partially in response to this the unabridged diaries were published in 1995
• check here for more details

The play that we saw here in Ashland is a re-write done in the mid-90s by Wendy Kesselman. Many felt that the original play “bowdlerized” the diaries by keeping Anne a pre-pubescent, and removing most of the participants’ Jewishness in favor of a heartwarming story of a young girl. Paradoxically, this may have been the only way that the story could thrust memory of the Holocaust into the consciousness of an America obsessed with McCarthyism and post-war prosperity and, on those terms, it worked.
Kesselman was apparently contractually constrained to incorporate most of the original play’s language, but was able to add a Hanukkah celebration, some of Anne’s post-puberty feelings and some of the less-noble behavior and sentiments among the eight of them that holed up for 2 years together in very limited space. So, I’m not sure what we’re left with in the play. The playright, and the actors, are circumscribed both by the original diaries and by the 50s-era (mis)interpretations of them. What I take away, in the end, is a reminder of the monstrous social and political constructs that men are capable of promulgating and executing, and an enduring admiration for the writing talent and perseverence of the author of the diaries. It certainly trivializes any angst I might feel about not feeling inspired to do a blog entry. And, I’m drawn now to reading the diaries themselves. In fact, what touched me most about this Ashland production was when Anne’s father appeared at the end, revisiting The Annex after surviving the war. He held up the diary and said, “All that remains.” as Anne’s script is projected over the entire set.

Winter’s Tale
This is the third time I’ve seen The Winter’s Tale here at Ashland. There are some wonderful scenes in the play, especially in the second half.
The basic plot is:

• The king of Sicilia, Leontes, is entertaining his boyhood best friend, the king of Bohemia, Polixenes. Observing what everyone else deems innocuous wordplay between his wife, Hermione, and Polixenes, Leontes develops a precipitous and intense jealousy, and orders his closest retainer to poison Polixenes. The retainer, taken aback at Leontes’ distemper, warns Polixenes and they both flee Sicilia. Havoc ensues as Leontes accuses his queen of adultery, his son and only heir somehow dies, Hermione dies of some kind of apoplexy, he orders that his baby daughter, whom he suspects of being the issue of Hermione and Polixenes, be borne to a remote seashore and there abandoned. He is left alone, bitter, confused and bereft.
• Meanwhile, in Bohemia, a shepherd and his son come upon the (now) foundling daughter, and the shepherd adopts her (enticed by a wad of gold secreted in the bundle). Years later, Polixenes’ son is found to be visiting in the country with a shepherd’s daughter of unusually regal bearing. His father finds out, comes to the country in disguise to see what’s up, yadda yadda. You can read the details at Wikipedia.

The switch to the country scene, and the human scale it offers in contrast to the machinations of the court, is a homage or invocation of the pastoral commonplace celebrated memorably by Philip Sydney, and reminds me of the transition found in As You Like It when everyone cavorts off to the forest of Arden.
My problems with the play (as it’s written, not necessarily how it’s performed) have been:

• I’ve had trouble buying into the sudden jealousy of Leontes. This production, however, sold me, and I think it was due to a powerful performance by the actor playing Leontes. I was as riveted to the first half of this production as I was delighted by the second half.
• The statue scene at the end seems a little ghoulish, and definitely over-long. I’m not sure that, at the height of a reconciliation and celebration, I would choose to hie me and my guests off to a wax museum to visit the likeness of my ex.

I loved the sheep-shearing party in this production, as it incorporated a very affecting dance sequence.
Not sure I need to see this a fourth time for a while, but I’m glad I saw this one.