Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Flying certainly got more interesting last weekend. Especially since I fly through the Minneapolis airport, I was obsessively aware of other guys’ feet in the restroom due to the recent elucidation of an intricate set of politico-sexual signals of which I was heretofore blissfully ignorant. Actually, I’m only half-informed. I know that, if a guy in the next stall moves his foot toward me, taps it and makes a hand-signal under the divider, it means he’s receptive to talk of promoting property rights and the Federal Marriage Amendment; but what if I’m in the mood to talk about troop withdrawals and a national health care program? How do I discern when broaching these topics would be acceptable?

It’s all moot anyway - I always use the women’s rest room when I’m in MSP. OK, not just there.

When I’m homeward-bound, and at the gate for my Seattle flights, I’m amazed that, for as often as I fly, I almost never see anyone I know. Last Monday was an exception. At some point, the gate agent called my name, and that alerted a sometime commenter hereabouts, Mr. Miss Piggy Lunchbox, of my presence. We first met him at a Drinking Liberally gathering. He’s a musical encyclopedia, and when he comments it’s usually to gently correct me after I’ve made some fatuous and ill-informed musical observation. We only had time for a brief conversation before boarding.

OK, the whole purpose of this post, at one week’s remove, is to present these photographs of Seattle as we approached SeaTac. The last of the evening light was having some really cool effects, even through the opacity of an airliner window (click to enlarge):

The first three are of the Seattle skyline as we approached. The fourth is looking east to along the 520 bridge, past Bill Gates’ house and Bellevue to the Cascades in the far distance.

Due to the 4-day weekend I took over Labor Day, plus working in Milwaukee the week before, my shortened work week in Seattle last week was just nuts. There was probably time to post, but I never felt like I really had permission to be in front of my computer and not working. (Shut up. Spider Solitaire is working).

So, I’d like to nudge the Wayback Machine back to last weekend, mostly just to share some photos. As I mentioned, we left Columbus on Sunday and headed north to Perrysburg, where we grew up and our mom still lives. Our journey there took us through the town of Findlay, famous for being the site of the Perils’ nuptials back when dinosaurs stalked the earth. Nowadays, it seems to have a distinctive municipal flavor (Click any photo to enlarge):

(Thanks to my SIL for pointing out this scene as we were stopping for gas)

We did the same thing last year, and went up to Detroit to see the Tigers play at Comerica Park. Since the Tigers were playing out of town this year, my youngest brother hatched a plan to go to downtown Toledo to see the Mud Hens play in their new ballpark. It seemed like an amiable way to spend the evening, and a lovely evening it was. Those of you who watched M*A*S*H might remember that Klinger was from Toledo, and regularly mentioned both the Mud Hens and Tony Packo’s Hungarian cafe.

Every venue must have its rabid fans. One between-innings interlude introduced us to this truly entertaining variety of fandom:

Here’s a couple of group shots. On the left, me, my mom and one of my SILs; On the right, middle brother, youngest brother and me.

As the night wore on, Fifth Third Field imperceptibly became Third Fifth Field. Here, my youngest brother is quite full of himself for being the impresario of a lovely evening:

I had a post drafted on Friday and it got swallowed, and then events of the weekend overtook me. To fast-forward a bit, I finished my week working in Milwaukee on Thursday and departed Friday morning for Columbus, there to meet up with my mom, my brothers and their wives, and to play and march once again with my Ohio State alumni band at the OSU-Youngstown State game. Not exactly a scintillating matchup, but don’t ask a Michigan fan today about whether it’s beneath a Big Ten team to play a Division II school.

Didn’t really have much chance to post after Friday morning because the entire weekend was a whirlwind of activity:

• Friday evening - music rehearsal, then dinner with family (and perhaps a martini too far)
• Saturday morning - marching and playing rehearsal at 6 am, which I managed to attend despite the emotional roller-coaster of oversleeping, a missed ride with my brother and an exculpatory taxi ride to the stadium.
• Gametime at noon, in glorious, maybe just a little too glorious, sunshine; marching in an exhilarating pregame and halftime show and, because we scored early and often, playing my lips to swollen exhaustion in the stands
• Gala dinner Saturday night with La Famiglia at an Italian restaurant
• Sunday morning drive up to my mom’s house in Perrysburg
• Hustle to downtown Toledo Sunday evening for a Mud Hens baseball doubleheader, followed by fireworks
• Up early Monday (on schedule) to catch a ride to Detroit Metro airport and, at 8 days’ remove, my flight home to Seattle, from which I’m posting.

In my pre-dawn meltdown on Saturday, I neglected to grab my camera, so I have no photos from the ball game. If you peruse last year’s entries, you’ll get the essence of the experience, as nothing happened this year that was that much different. One thing - so many of us alumni (about 650) engage in this orgy of nostalgia that they have to run a lottery to assign the 384 Script Ohio spots. Since I was in it last year, I had a fairly slim chance of engaging in that sacrosanct alphabetic euphoria this year and, indeed, it would have required some sort of natural disaster that Ohio is particularly unsuited for (hurricane, earthquake, tsunami) for me to acquire a spot. Still, I got to march and play in all the other formations, and it’s still a thrill to risk my neck muscles looking up at the vertiginous terraces of 105,000 adoring Buckeye fans.

As I intimated, our opponent was the Youngstown State Penguins (yep - almost as endearing a mascot as the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs), a Division II school. For a team like Ohio State, it’s kind of like playing your little brother’s soccer team. You’re supposed to beat them badly, then feel either magnanimity or remorse, depending on the seriousness of the injuries inflicted. That’s how it worked Saturday for Ohio State, but the same scenario worked out a little differently for Michigan in its game in the Big House with Appalachian State. As our game ended, we had some intimation that Michigan was behind sometime in the 3rd quarter, but that they’d caught up and gone ahead in the fourth.

As my brother and I packed up our instruments and strolled away from the stadium, we passed through vast parking lots dotted with what are usually the dying embers of tailgate parties, burning here and there like Druid bonfires observing an inscrutable ritual. Saturday, however, there seemed to be an electric telepathy surging among them, causing simultaneous shouts to erupt across the vast heath of Buckeyedom.

We pilgrims happened upon one of these clusters to find its rustic denizens huddled under a tent and glued to a satellite-fed plasma vision of pain and anxiety beamed in from Ann Arbor. We set down our furze faggots and watched as, in an unbelievable 3 minutes of football, Michigan went ahead by 1 point, Appalachian State bamboozled the Wolverine defense and rashly kicked a go-ahead field goal with 30 seconds left when they could have asphyxiated the clock, then allowed Michigan to get within field goal range with 6 seconds left. With redemption in hand, Michigan had its chip-shot field goal blocked, and ended up losing the game.

Lots of my Buckeye correspondents are engaging in an unseemly orgy of schadenfreude. For my part, I revere the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry and always want it to be a clash of Titanic proportions - I always root for Michigan against other opponents. In more contemporary locution, Michigan’s our bitch. We may require any amount of groveling humiliation of her ourselves, but everyone else is advised to keep their grimy mitts off her.

OK, I know that most of you who suffer through these pages have either a disinterest in, or an aversion to, football and, except for a couple of Mr. Hyde hours on fall Saturday afternoons, I’m right there with you. I promise that these environs will continue to be dominated by Dr. Jekyll. Just don’t turn your back.

A couple of us were startled a bit ago when we tried to dial up a familiar website and our browsers returned the following (Click to enlarge):

I wonder how much they’d pay me to get it back if I bought it. Our browsers may have some redirecting spyware going on; or, some poor miscreant at The Borg forgot to renew the domain name. Would suck to be him, methinks.

UPDATE: - While entertaining, this was ultimately a problem at my client’s ISP, and the Microsoft domain remains unsullied.

President Bush, center, is presented with a Seattle Seahawks football jersey by quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, right, and running back Mack Strong during a fundraiser for Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., and the Washington State Republican Party on Monday, Aug. 27, 2007, in Bellevue, Wash. (AP Photo/Ken Lambert, Pool) (Ken Lambert)

AP

I don’t really follow the Seahawks that closely, but I’m thinking that this year, their opponent’s speedrusher is going to be my favorite player each week.

I’ve had a crazy week putting out fires and buttoning up projects in preparation for my week in Milwaukee next week. One last loose end was to stop in at my bakery client’s to get their info ready for the 9/15 corporate tax filing deadline. Everybody should have a bakery client (click any photo to enlarge):

The cake on the right has a sort of tiramisu layer with fresh strawberries embedded, then a layer of chocolate cake on either side, topped with chocolate buttercream frosting. I got a taste of it when the decorator gave me a cup with pieces of the side trimmings. I was drafted to help load the wedding cake on the right into a van, from whence it was whisked off to a happy nuptial somewhere. At first, I thought the lopsidedness was due to the heat and my inadequate ferrying technique from the cooler, but I was told that it was designed that way.

I’ve worked with this business since 1984 as a consultant, CPA, VP-Finance, and back now to a consultant. They have a nice little mail order business here.

They probably won’t be able to send the above cakes via mailorder, but there are a lot of other delightful pastries that do very well via second-day air. I suggest the kringle, which is a puff-pastry filled - and I mean filled - with almond paste. If you’ve had those flattened things in the midwest that they call “kringle” and think you like them, you’re in for a real treat with Larsen’s. </shill>

I remember one night about 15 years ago when someone was delivering a 5-tier wedding cake - chocolate cake, mocha buttercream frosting, each tier topped with a poured chocolate layer - and the weld on the cakestand broke on the way to the wedding venue. This poor devil came back to the bakery, opened the back of his van, and the floor and walls were just covered in chocolate mess. While we were tempted to grab spoons and just eat out of his van as if it were an ice cream carton, the wedding had to be covered. All the decorators had gone home, but we found a wedding cake in the cooler that was the same size (though a lot plainer and, well, just white), and that cake was whisked off to the panicky, but caterer. They were happy to get it.

So, almost all of my fires are banked, and now I’m cooling my heels at SeaTac waiting for a redeye flight to Minneapolis. I pushed my client to let me work Sunday - Thursday, because I’m flying to Columbus on Friday to once again play with my Ohio State Marching Band alumni. More on that tomorrow.

Last week, I received the following from my web hosting service:

In an effort to improve MySQL performance on our hosting platform, on the morning of August 20, we will be upgrading the following database servers from MySQL 4.1 to MySQL 5:

Your database is hosted on one of these servers and, as a result, Monday morning there should be approximately 15 minutes during which your database will not be accessible–at this time, we’ll be copying and upgrading your database to run using MySQL 5.

MySQL 5 better handles the many simultaneous requests our new database servers receive. The upgrade should therefore enable your site to take fuller advantage of the improved hardware we’ve added in the past couple months. We’re expecting that this upgrade to MySQL 5 will help to resolve any intermittent MySQL issues you’ve been experiencing.

Since Monday (at least), however, the site seems extremely balky and slow. If you wander in now and then, have you noticed this, too? It seemed like things had improved since the last episode, and I decided not to look around for another host. Now, I might start looking again if the “improvements” introduced this week seem permanent.

Very uninspired lately and, especially this week, listless. As in, barely able to complete a sentence or remember all the words to “Daisy”. I have to leave for Milwaukee Saturday night, and have a mountain of work work to accomplish before I leave. When I come home, it will be September, and I’m kind of resenting being jilted by August, who’s spent the month out playing while I’m earning a living.

Tangentially related to that, the following came across my desk this morning:

Again, we deeply regret any inconvenience the errors in our scanning process have caused you, and we greatly appreciate your assistance in helping us resolve this matter. If you have any questions, you may call us at 1-800-829-0115.

Source: IRS Stakeholder Liaison’s Office

“Stakeholder”. Heh. When did the Vampire’s Guild establish diplomatic relations with Buffy?

(Actually, I’ve never had a problem with the IRS that wasn’t self-inflicted, and even then I find them courteous and helpful, as long as I am as well. That makes this post eminently qualified for the category below.)

I love this:

A big drop in the cost of gasoline in July contributed to the smallest rise in consumer prices in eight months while industrial output posted a solid gain. (Seattle P-I)

When energy, housing and food prices were climbing meteorically earlier in the year, we were encouraged to ignore that and concentrate on “core inflation”, or the ISNB (Index of Shit Nobody Buys) - that market basket of key economic indicators that includes:

• asbestos baby rattles
• Knox gelatin
• industrial floor sweeping compound
• Ronco monocle repair kit
• American-made automobiles

Meanwhile, the cost of stuff people can’t avoid buying:

• health insurance
• heating fuels (sure, it might be cheap in July, but check it out in January)
• repairs to American-made automobiles that brothers-in-law give you when they buy a new Camry
• that little peep-show down on First Avenue

rises relentlessly. Granted, houses might be cheap soon, but you’ll have to pay cash, and U.S. currency might not cut it.

Well, this morning I am the personification of the title of this blog. I had an espresso after dinner and I now find myself, at 2:45 AM, to be extremely alert. I should probably be working - it’d be my best work in a week, likely. Let’s keep this between us, ok? Because if Mrs. Perils finds out, she won’t let me make coffee again after dinner. Just for this post, I’m using a secret font that I’ve set the browsers on her computer to render as a butterfly love-making, which will distract her.

We’re playing host for a few days to a young woman from Australia. She’s the daughter of someone we met in our online book club, and is exploring the western states before heading east for a year of university study in Virginia. Her visit literally started off with a bang. She arrived Saturday evening and we took her out for a bite of sushi, followed by a stroll down the hill to Gasworks Park. I can hear my flatland relatives groaning already, as they recognize that activity as the start of what they not-so-fondly call “Camp Ph*lbin”, but it gets better.

As luck and/or the groveling money grubbiness of the Parks Department would have it, the park was the scene of a huge extravaganza of a private party, complete with a temporary band shell, substantial fenced-off area (where we usually meander on our evening walks to the park), gospel choir, off-duty-cop motorcycle escort and, lastly, an enormous barge on Lake Union which they used to launch a fireworks display.

That’s why I had gently nudged us down there, and we stood around for awhile waiting for the display and watching rich people nosh on rich-people food. Mrs. Perils started to get jumpy and, indeed, it seemed silly to arrange our evening around someone else’s entertainment schedule, so we started to leave. Just then, the fireworks began, and I have to say it was one of the best I’ve seen, short, but no blank spaces and refreshingly devoid of patriotic hoopla. Here’s a short video from the P-I. I inexplicably didn’t have my camera along.

While I’d get a kick out of hauling our guest around on hikes and kayak trips and beach walks and all the other stuff that elicits a collective shudder from my relatives, she seems to have picked out an agenda from friends’ advice and Lonely Planet, and I think it’s her first really independent away-from-home experience, and she wants to do her own navigation. Our place is pretty ideally located for that. Yesterday, she caught a bus to downtown and did the Underground Seattle Tour and wandered up to Capitol Hill and Volunteer Park, and seemed very pleased. We’ll just sit back and be B&B operators.

OK, still very alert here even though you’re probably stifling yawns or already snoring unattractively. I’ll show mercy on you and go play Spider Solitaire or something until sleep finds me.