Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Change so far in 2009 is a little loose, maybe, but doesn’t appear to be on the spare side.

One change very close to home is new ownership at our gym, the former Anderson’s Greenlake Nautilus, now called American Athlete at Greenlake .  We’ve belonged to this club since about 1985, and we each drop in about every second day to work through a progression of Nautilus machines.  We don’t do anything else there - yoga, spinning, stairmasters, etc, because it’s just close enough that we’d be ashamed to drive there, and far enough (about 2 miles from the house) that we get adequate aerobic work running down there and back.

The place has been under the same ownership for about 20 of those years, and the atmosphere has been laid-back, congenial and probably not as profitable as the “pump-shop” gyms that push all kinds of extras at you.  No juice bar, no social scene (it’s been a fairly mature crowd, 30 and up), perfect for our purposes.  We’d just signed up, and prepaid for, two more years just before the sale.

The new owners are a pair of guys probably early- to mid-thirties.  They’ve made some changes already, including firing all of the employees that we’d befriended over the years, and have plans for lots more.  I’m all for having the place make enough money to survive, and I don’t really think anything they do will affect my routine that much unless they tear out all the Nautilus machines, fill the place with free-weight stations and rip your shirt off and spray you with baby oil as you enter.

It already seems like the clientele has trended younger (not really a bad thing, especially if one has retained his eyesight).  The new owners are affable enough, but one can’t but harbor more than a grain of doubt that Gen-X’ers want to be involved in an activity that extends the lives of Boomers beyond the short end of the actuarial calculations that promise their long-sought liberation from us.

Which brings me to a broader and less anecdotal revelation of change: according to an article last week, it appears that we Boomers are over on the national scene as well:

To a number of social analysts, historians, bloggers and ordinary Americans, Jan. 20 will symbolize the passing of an entire generation: the baby boomer years.

…it’s a sense that a cultural era is ending, one dominated by the boomers, many of whom came of age in the ’60s and experienced the bitter divisions caused by the Vietnam War and the protests against it, the civil rights struggle, social change, sexual freedoms, and more.

Those experiences, the theory goes, led boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, to become deeply motivated by ideology and mired in decades-old conflicts. And Obama? He’s an example of a new pragmatism: idealistic but realistic, post-partisan, unthreatened by dissent, eager and able to come up with new ways to solve problems.

I’ve often chafed at the idea that our generation has been fired by a defining ideology and sense of mission.  We’ve been living on the echoes of a couple of years of testosterone-fueled wildings on college campuses, when, in actuality, we donned suits and hit the corporate ladders in the 80s with shockingly malleable ethics, just now reaching their culmination on Wall Street.  Yeah, baby, them is us.

We changed the world with the crushing weight of our demographics.  It took the cover of Gen-X insouciance to finally get us permission to wear jeans to work, ferchrissakes.

Still, it’s a shock to realize that the generation that was going to live forever is over, that Clinton and Bush the Lesser are the only shots we’ll get.

And yet one more big change has been visited on us in this young year.  The newspaper that carried the article referenced above, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has been put up for sale by the Hearst corporation.  The “for sale” sign is merely a formality required by the Joint Operating Agreement under which it has operated for the last 30 years.  They expect to shutter the paper at the end of the offer period.

This will be something like an eviction from a living room of consciousness for us.  We’ve subscribed to the paper almost from the day we moved here in 1974, the thunk of it hitting our porch every morning very often our first sensory experience.  We’re so inured to the susurrus of their reporters and columnists whispering in our ears that its cessation on whatever day they cease publishing will be deafening - people like cartoonist and essayist David Horsey, sports columnist Art Thiel, political columnist and resident curmudgeon Joel Connelly, even sports court jester Jim Moore.

As I write, it occurs to me that the mere fact that I can link to the paper at will, and you can read any of it without taking your credit card out of your wallet, is one of the big reasons they’re going under in the first place.

The other paper in town, the Republican-leaning Seattle Times, is also in a world of financial hurt, and will probably not absorb any of these journalists.  They will probably have to begin new careers if they want to stay in town, and their voices will be lost to us unless they find an online outlet (perhaps even a lowly blog!).

We’ll most likely subscribe to the Times simply because my 91-year-old MIL, who lives with us, so enjoys lingering over a printed newspaper while eating breakfast.  I long ago switched to the internet for almost all of my newspaper reading.  Just call me “assassin”.

As you might can see, I selected a new Wordpress theme.  It’s variable-width, so most monitors will display a lot more text than my old theme.  It’s easier to work with and pretty clean-looking.  I didn’t want anything too gloppy and graphicky, as I put enough junk in here myself.  Still have to find a way to embed a photo in the header, but you were probably tired of the old one anyway.

I also upgraded to a newer version of Wordpress on Saturday.  It didn’t work quite right, and everything I did made it worse, right up to the point where the blog just disappeared.  The collective wailing from hip cafes across the country was heart-rending, so I spent a lot of the day Saturday learning how to use my web host’s Backup and Restore utility.  That’s one of the advantages of not having posted for a week - nothing was lost on the restore.

I only made one New Year’s resolution this year, thought it’d give me a better shot at keeping it, and that was to write a blog entry every day.  I’m beginning to think I suck at New Year’s resolutions.

I’ve been pecking away at E. Annie Proulx’s collection of Wyoming short stories, Close Range, and finally finished it over the weekend.  The last story in this collection is Brokeback Mountain, from which the film was made.  I don’t have much basis for determining whether her characters in these stories ring true or if they tend toward caricature.  I haven’t spent that much time hanging out in ranchland cafes.  In some cases, I think she intended to caricature; in others, including Brokeback, they’re more carefully crafted and nuanced.  She keeps a chilly distance from virtually all her characters.  She’s not their buddy, and I remarked at one point that I didn’t think any of her characters got out of her stories alive.

I do have enough visual knowledge of the West to know that she’s got a wonderful talent for describing the landscape:

 You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country–indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky–provokes a spiritual shudder.

I’ve been there, and she takes me vividly back.  I also liked this description of a sunrise up on Brokeback:

Dawn came glassy orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the smoke from Ennis’s breakfast fire.  The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-long shadows and the rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite.

She may not be sympathetic to her characters, but she’s clearly taken with the country.  I see she’s published two further collections of Wyoming stories, and I’ll have to put them in the queue.  That one that already stretches to the time when I’ll be too blind and addled to read them.

I saw the very tail end of the Brokeback Mountain film in my hotel room last month, and really want to see the whole thing now that I’m finished with the story.  Also intriguing: Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) was involved in the screenplay.

Happy New Year to everyone!  Just a quick post to let you know that we made it out of 2008 reasonably unscathed, setting charges behind us in the tunnel so that neither it nor its 7 predecessors could follow us.

When I last posted, we really didn’t have any invitations in-house, but a kind neighbor (not a Perils reader) subsequently invited us to an early nosh-and-sip, so your anguish for us was in vain.  Thanks, anyway, though!

Today we trekked over to University Village, a mall-kind of place on the other side of the University of Washington from us, to the Barnes & Noble there to unburden ourselves of most of a Christmas gift card.  While we were checking out, Mrs. Perils pointed the cruelty, probably intentional, of the juxtaposition of these two display tables:

Hope your holidays were joyous!

I know what you guys are up to.  I have *zero* invitations to New Year’s Eve parties, and I know you want me to start feeling depressed and bereft and friendless and just uncool.

And I would, if I didn’t know what you were up to.  But it’s gone on long enough.  It’s frickin’ December 30 at 9:00 Pacific.  Time to drop the ruse and get the goddamn invitations in here, so I can decide whom to honor with our presence, and whom to disappoint.

Now.  Scratch your ass later.

Our lines are open…

It warmed up quite a bit last night and today, and most of the accumulated snow has melted.  As of yesterday (Friday) afternoon, however, we were still getting flurries, and Mrs. Perils and I set out for a slushy walk around the ‘hood and down to Fremont to run some errands.

As we were crossing a busy intersection near our house, I espied a cell phone embedded in a pile of slush in the middle of the street.  I opened it up, thinking it was probably toast, but it sprang to life an displayed this (Click any photo to enlarge):

After the initial Pavlovian blanch, I recovered my holiday sense of benevolence and equanimity, and paged through the speed dial list looking for likely contacts who might be able to point me to the owner.  “Padre” and “Madre” were at the top of the list, and I managed to get in touch with the owner’s dad.  They (dad and 14-ish daughter) came by the house after we finished our snow slog and claimed the phone.  We kidded a bit about the OSU-Michigan thing, we’re all adults here, right?

But if it had rung while we were out walking, and started playing The Victors, I’d've chucked it off the Aurora Bridge without a shred of remorse.

Other curiosities encountered in our peregrination - just a few feet from the intersection where I found the phone was this tableau:

Buses have been running erratically, and I guess someone was worried about missing an episode of Days of our Lives.

Then, we stopped into Chocolati to see if they had gotten a shipment of gift certificate cards (I had tried to buy one for Mrs. Perils on Wednesday, but the snow had delayed a delivery of the plastic cards), and I was tickled to see this offering:

Just next door, at the Bottleworks beer boutique, was this sign:

Down in Fremont, the dour and purposeful Comrade Lenin had gotten a partial makeover:

We stopped at Mad Pizza for a bite of lunch before heading back up the hill.  Inside the shop, they were playing Mary Poppins on a flat-screen video with the sound off.  Their sound system instead was playing some sort of driving techno dance mix.  Eerily, the chimney sweeps’ dance number on the screen meshed almost perfectly with the techno beats:

On the walk back up the hill, we met a long-time friend and walked a few blocks with her, catching up on perhaps 5 or 10 years worth of news.  She was wearing Yaktrax Walkers, little grippy matrix things that you slip over your shoes, that would have been very welcome on the several walks in this stuff that we’ve taken.

A delightful Christmas and extended holiday season to you all.  Snuggle up, stay warm and safe.

Here are perhaps my favorite carols. The first is a combination of two Gustav Holst arrangements, This have I Done For My True Love and Lullay, My Liking:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/HolstCarols.mp3 | leftbg=0xFF0033 | rightbg=0×00CC33]

and a powerful rendition of Carol of the Bells by the Ohio State Marching Band:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/CarolOfTheBells.mp3]

Once upon a time, we used to send Christmas cards that we designed ourselves.  Mrs. Perils is is a terrific cartoonist, and she would do colored pen drawings and we’d go off to a print shop to have them color-Xeroxed.

I’m not sure what year this is from, but it seems apropos for this year of economic disarray (click to enlarge):

“Losses of this magnitude can hardly be explained away by the increased cost of reindeer food, Mr. Claus”

Optional soundtrack - “Snowfall” by Claude Thornhill.  It’s been playing in my head since Saturday, and a commenter tweaked me about it today:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/01 Snowfall Theme.mp3]

It seems that everyone across the country is having some form of extraordinary weather, and you’re probably sick of checking your blog lists and reading the same rapturous bleatings. So, I’m just going to cut to the chase and post photos of our Great Seattle Snowstorm of 2008.  Perhaps, soon, the blogosphere will cease resembling the Weather Channel.

The snow started in earnest Saturday evening, and Mrs. Perils and I walked up to the Santa Fe Cafe for a dessert margarita (Click any photo to enlarge):

After a morning respite, it began snowing again, and we walked down to Green Lake and around our neighborhood:

The tree in the photo below, right is, according to Mrs. Perils, called a corkscrew hazel:

Here’s Chez Perils from across the street:

And here’s the scene in our side yard:

One individual in our household you wouldn’t have found outside the house for the last 5 days is Mr. Rico:

I woke up to this sight this morning at my Milwaukee hotel.  The one I checked out of because I have a flight to Seattle this evening:

And the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had this cheery tidbit:

The sixth storm of this trying winter season proved today that the first five were mere practice. Nearly a foot of snow blown by wind gusts topping 30 mph stopped flights at Mitchell International Airport, stymied motorists and Milwaukee County Transit buses and shut down businesses and government operations.

And even if I get to depart MKE tonight, I’ll be flying into this in Seattle:

The weather’s just warming up for weekend blast

Forecasters say wind, heavy snow to hit again — hard

By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

OK, now get ready for a real winter blast expected this weekend bringing much heavier snowfall with dangerous winds and possibly even freezing rain followed by the potential for avalanches in the mountains.

“It’s going to be a real mess,” said Brad Colman, director and chief meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Seattle. “It’s a much more dangerous storm because of the wind element. … I think we will have power issues.”

So, I’m biding my time here at my client’s office, where hardly anyone showed up this morning, and those who did are mostly going from office to office describing their commutes.

As much as I’ve flown in the northern tier over the past 10 years, I’ve never been stranded anywhere, not even the week of 911.  But I think there’s a high probability that I’ll be bunking out either in Milwaukee or Minneapolis tonight.  Then who knows what will happen as everyone tries to reschedule into the teeth of the holiday travel season.  I think it might be wise to transfer some of my dainties from my checked luggage to my carry-on pack.

Update

I admit I spent way too much of my client’s time this afternoon obsessively refreshing my NWA flight status screen, trying to determine how my fate thread was unraveling from the spindle of the confluence of airframe vs. atmospherics.  As the day evolved and the Milwaukee airport stayed closed, more and more of the scheduled flights started to post “Canceled” or “Delayed”, but my 6:05 pm departure remained miraculously “On Time”.  I presumed that this was simply because Northwest had not been able to think, and cancel, that far ahead yet.

Turns out that I was just lucky in my scheduling.  When I arrived at the airport, there were two classes of Northwest customers:  Those whose reservations were still “alive” - i.e. not canceled, and whose connections had not been mangled,  and those who were fucked and not likely to get un-fucked real soon.

This photo shows (not really starkly) how this divide worked down in the Black Hole of NWA Calcutta:

Those directly behind me were in a short line to check bags for flights that were still on schedule; those to the rear were the tip of a line that snaked around the cramped ticketing area, waiting for agents to patch their lives back together.  As I checked my bags, I felt like a resident of a miraculously intact building in a city that had been carpet-bombed.

After I checked in, I discovered that I could catch a seat on an even earlier Minneapolis flight and, reader, I grabbed it as if it was the landing strut of the last helicopter leaving Saigon.  Under those circumstances, when you see an actual plane actually loading actual passengers, you can’t turn it down.

And, yes, just to prove that injustice can still be propagated in these post-bailout times, I was upgraded on both legs.  Boo-Yeah!

Season’s greetings from our family’s winter compound, where I spent the weekend!

Well, here I am now in frigid Milwaukee, where I woke up to 0F this morning, and after the short jaunt from the hotel entrance to my rental car, you could have used my frozen-solid eyeballs to cool your beverage this evening.

Not that it’s that much better back in Seattle, where their lows are in the ‘teens.  (I can sympathize - many of my lows were in my teens as well.)  I think that once it drops below 40F, however, the misery is only a matter of degree.

In the bonus round this afternoon, it snowed about 2″, and I may have to go out later and tromp around in it.

Meanwhile, I’m having a chicken wrap and a chardonnay in the hotel bar.  This hotel seems to have a long-term arrangement with several black religious organizations, and there are often conferences in the meeting rooms adjacent to the bar attended by folks who are something of an anachronism, from a west coast point of view, dressed to the nines and very mannered.

Their meetings are spirited, and their exclamations occasionally punctuate the Stevie Ray Vaughn and Lynyrd Skynyrd bar soundtrack.

As they adjourn and walk past the bar to their cars, the husbands lag behind the wives just a beat, and cast fugitive, wistful glances in our direction.

(Well, the glances are definitely fugitive;  the “wistful” may be a projection)