Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

If you read any other Puget Sound bloggers, you are probably all “get over it” about our gvetching about the cold spring we’ve had. And you probably already know how things took some strange lurches over the last week. Last Saturday, we awoke to a sunny day on which the temperature climbed to almost 80F, and the warmth lingered into the night.

Mrs. Perils and I donned t-shirts and sandals(!) for a stroll down to Gasworks Park. There, we found legions of squinting Seattlites lolling languidly about the park and forgetting, momentarily, about pedestrians who have died of hypothermia waiting for walk lights at major arterials.

If you enlarge the photo on the lower right, you’ll notice an interesting piece of picnic technology that probably has nothing to do with grilling brats or burgers.

Afterwards, we ambled down to Fremont for margaritas and dinner at El Camino.

We only got one day of this bliss - Sunday reverted to rain and mid-50ish temperatures And the week got steadily colder, culminating in this scene Friday evening - against a backdrop of cherry blossoms, hail pellets rain down on our humble “appurtenant structure” and cascade off the roof like packing peanuts.

The hail turned to snow and persisted for an hour or two. Of course, this hell broke loose just as I was beginning my run down to the gym for a workout that I desperately needed. Below left is our Japanese maple gamely trying to develop buds. On the right are the foolish “early adopter” flowers, which would have been better served waiting for Spring 2008, Service Pack 1.

Apparently fed up with the wintry recidivism in our yard, the dude above was using that renowned mollusk ingenuity to make his escape. Apparently unfamiliar with the alphabet, he was trying to become H-cargo, when his biological imperative should have driven him to seek a Saab, Saturn of Subaru to cleave to. (Didn’t something similar happen in one of the Aliens movies?)

On this morning, however, he would have endured the equivalent of the Oregon Trail, a dizzying commute across the 520 bridge to Redmond. I thought it might be interesting to see if his adhesive grip could withstand the centripetal force of the wheel’s rotation for the 20 miles of freeway driving. On many 520 commutes, in fact, he’d get there faster by jumping off and using his own form of locomotion.

Instead, I pulled him off and tossed him into the moist, inviting parking strip before I drove away.  (No snails were harmed in the production of this blog post).

I’ve finished my work week in Milwaukee, and am hanging in the Minneapolis airport awaiting my 9:20pm flight home to Seattle, which has been delayed to 11:10 due to “awaiting connecting passengers”.  WTF?  Has anyone ever delayed an outbound flight to make sure my sweet ass is seated and comfortable?

Turns out we’re waiting for 60 passengers from Washington, DC.  Strange to have so many from one flight from one destination.  Either it’s a political juggernaut that has lost its ability to charter private jets, or it’s a bunch of kids junketing to see how our civic life is conducted.

I remember when I was in grade school, we sold seeds and worked in the cafeteria as 5th-graders in order to accumulate money for a 6th-grade trip to Washington, DC.  We traveled by train, and stayed in a hotel - I have no idea where.  I remember Mt. Vernon, George Washington’s estate, and visiting the monuments.  I also remember the poor beleaguered principal coming to the room I shared with 2 other guys to try to get us to give up our card game and go to sleep.

We’ll see who these DC folks are in an hour or so.

Meantime, I finished reading Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux this week, and got a start on How To Read And Why by the venerable (and cranky) Harold Bloom.

Have a good weekend!  See you on the other side.

Working in Milwaukee this week, where blogging inspiration goes to die. However, I resurface just long enough to regale you with the following error message from Microsoft Access, which assaulted me as I was trying to save a report form I’d spent an hour or so on:

If they had any imagination, they’d have little animated mushroom clouds billowing in the margins. At least give me my money’s worth of entertainment.

OK, let’s see if I remember everything I did.

Last weekend, I responded to a thread in a kayaking maillist I subscribe to proposing a “mileage” (as opposed to a “crashing-into-rocks-propelled-by-ocean-surf” or a “how-much-time-can-you-spend-upside-down-in-40-degree-water”) paddling excursion. I mean, I can see the attraction of kayak-surfing, and I recognize the value of being able to capsize and right yourself before you turn into an iceberg, and I’ll at least force myself to be able to do the latter, hopefully sometime this spring. But when I contemplate a day on the water, I’m really visualizing a waterborne substitute for the running that I seldom do any more (owing to chronically sore ankles), enhanced by a little scenery.

So, the appeal of the “mileage” advertisement was its promise of a good workout and the best chance of avoiding immersion. We planned to launch from a pocket beach just south of the Edmonds ferry terminal and paddle south for a few miles, hoping to catch the tail end of the ebb current on the way back.

Continuing this week’s “weather” theme, I encountered wind-driven snow showers on my drive north on I-5 to the launch point, engendering thoughts of how to convincingly plead mechanical failure or unlooked-for physical infirmity. Failing that, I arrived at the launch point and met up with my companion. We arranged our gear, struggled into our Goretex dry suits and heaved to.

The expanded horizon of Puget Sound gave us a ringside seat for the weather gymnastics that have rolled through the area of late: brilliant sunshine, apocalyptic clouds, rain squalls scurrying like jaywalkers across the water (Click any photo to enlarge):

My companion had a vhf radio (which I should really acquire if I’m going to do more Sound crossings), and periodically appeared transfixed by the chatter between the Coast Guard and various aquatic actors - ferry boats, kayaks, container ships. We were intrigued by the fact that no one seemed to be in contact with the container ship in the upper left photo (just to the right of the red kayak). A few minutes after this photo, the container ship disappeared behind a curtain of rain, and we wondered if all other stakeholders were aware of its presence and speed. He eventually checked in. I’m sure there are protocols that we simple scullers are oblivious to.

As promised, we had a gratifying ebb current behind us on the way back. We paddled for an hour and a half south, covering about 4.5 miles, and the return trip took almost exactly an hour. Back at the launch point, the sun broke out, and men and birds alike basked in its beneficence:

All told, a sweet early-season calisthenic. I will, in a week or so, assay the task of learning how to eskimo-roll under various conditions. I owe it to the people who allow me to paddle with them to be able to not only rescue myself (I can do that now, by wet-exiting my boat and climbing back in), but to do so as efficiently as possible, so as not to inconvenience, and endanger, them as well as myself.

But Sunday, I just wanted exercise and a day on the water.

According to my web host, they’re going to be doing a MySQL upgrade tonight, and service will be (even more) sporadic, if not non-existent, between 9pm PDT - 1AM.  The way things have been working the last couple of weeks, they can’t make it worse.  Hope to see you tomorrow.

Spring has been lurching into the northwest this year like a Tourette’s ballerina, in the inconstant element of air, anyway. The more reliable Earth, however, is pushing it inexorably forth. Mrs. Perils (and I along with her) is often drawn to a remarkable property a few blocks from the house that harbors a barely-manicured yard under a canopy of large trees. She is particularly drawn, at this time of year, to these lilies:

Our local atmospheric vagaries are also no match for the celestial inertia of the Big Bang, and despite April snow flurries, sunset comes incrementally later each day. One of these days we’ll awake, blinking, to the prospect of a 70-degree day that is the progeny of a 35-degree night, and only then (choose to) notice that the lawn has needed mowing for a month.

My mom wrote me last week to remind me of a couple of other Easter anecdotes emblazoned in our tribal memory:

I think that was the Easter that L____ was really crawling around pretty well.  As we were sleepimg in, he found the basket that we had hidden behind a chair.  We woke up to find him knawing away at a chocolate rabbit in front of the furnace register and half of it had melted over the Dr Dentons he had on.   He was a really happy baby.

Do you remember the time you and L____ were coloring Easter eggs with B__ and S__ and while the parents weren’t watching you grabbed more eggs out of the fridge and colored them when you ran out of the ones we had given you.  Unfortunately they had not been boiled we didn’t find that out until L____ H_____ (a friend of theirs who was visiting) cracked one on his head.

I had heard about the first incident, but it must have been the Easter of the New Orleans trip because I don’t remember seeing it and, believe me, a brother remembers stuff like that for later use.  Thanks, mom, for being my first guest-blogger!

I started reading Paul Theroux’s Hotel Honolulu over the weekend, and I just have to share this quote:

To please me, he tried to be funny, but that could be tedious, especially the formulaic jokes he told in order to define himself, or just to shock…A boss’s comedy is always an employee’s hardship.

I have a new sympathy for everyone who ever worked for me.

I haven’t died, at least not in the sense where you could present a certificate and collect on my life insurance.

I’ve paid way too much attention to the NCAA basketball tournament over the last 4 days, especially for someone whose team didn’t make the cut. But, hey, we’re a high seed in the NIT!

We don’t really “do” Easter here, with no kid to bribe with candy baskets and no religious attachments to spur us to more adult observation. A festive rite for the arrival of spring might be appropriate in some years, but Easter is upon us so early this year that we’re just not feelin’ it yet, especially after the run in the icy rain today down to the gym and back.

But as we were sitting at dinner, I recollected, as much for my mother-in-law’s benefit as anything, a couple of Easters past that stood out.

The first occurred when I was probably 5 years old, spring of 1955. For reasons that, as I look back, I can’t fathom, my grandparents took me off my parents’ hands for a trip (by car, of course, in those days) from our Ohio home to Gulfport, MS and New Orleans. In retrospect, it was probably to keep me from killing my new baby brother in his crib, but no one’s ever admitted to this. Anyway, the trip lasted at least 2 weeks, and, since we knew that it would encompass Easter, there was the ticklish problem of whether the Easter bunny was sufficiently omniscient to pay a visit to an absentee. To be safe, we decided that I should color a batch of Easter eggs before I left, and leave them, along with a note as to my general travel plans, for the Easter Bunny to find.

Easter morning arrived in a motel room somewhere in Mississippi. I think my grandparents had damped down my expectations, and when I awoke, I saw no evidence anywhere in the room to disabuse me of my pessimism. When my grandparents woke up, I believe we were discussing the situation when my grandfather frowned, lifted his blanket and pulled out one of the eggs I had colored. This ignited a frenzied hunt around the room, and before we headed off for a rural church service, I had my eggs and a basket of candy. I’m sure the eggs were quietly disposed of, having traveled for three or four un-air-conditioned days down the blue highways that were the principal routes back then.

The second recollection was probably five years later. We were fairly frequent church-goers back then, but my dad only went on special days, about twice a year. When he did go, he hated for anyone to see him or engage in any chit-chat. As I remember, we would come as late as we could and exit by a side door so the minister had no chance to peer at him in puzzlement as our unaccustomed companion. (In his defense, he engaged in a lifelong battle with agoraphobia.)

On this particular Easter, we kids had been dropped off for Sunday School, and then our parents had met us and, to avoid unnecessary scrutiny, we’d scurried upstairs to the balcony, which was darker than the main chapel and had only a few rows of seats. On this particular Easter, we had received small Easter baskets during Sunday School, stocked with little eggs or jelly beans or something, and we had them with us up in the balcony, a balcony constructed of wood with a sloping floor to better accommodate sight lines. At some very quiet part of the service, probably when everyone had their eyes closed for a silent prayer or reflection, my brother’s basket disgorged its contents, and the hard little morsels rolled like holy thunder down the floor, under the seats of the rows in front of us until they were arrested either by people’s feet or by the front wall of the balcony.

Of course, every eye with an angle was fixed on us, downstairs and upstairs, and I’m not sure my dad ever recovered from the mortification. I don’t remember if we sat out the service, or left immediately, but I’m fairly sure there was the Devil to pay.

I’m about 1 1/2 here - it’s ca Easter, 1951.