sunday surprise

if this were a survival situation, i'd be in deep trouble. because things are happening around me that i'm not entirely aware of.

for example, i was sitting here this morning, tapping at the computer, and i glanced out the window. there it was. the big, old japanese maple in front of our house was totally leafed out.

when did this happen? and what else happened while i was sitting here?

thankfully this is not a survival situation, it's an arboreal situation. a surreal arboreal situation, if you will. but still. when the foliage status of large, nearby trees escape notice, it's time for concern.

in his book stumbling on happiness, daniel gilbert describes the difference between experiencing an event and being aware of it. his example is of distractedly reading and rereading the same paragraph without consciously assimilating the words.

in his book stumbling on happiness, daniel gilbert describes the difference between experiencing an event and being aware of it. his example is of distractedly reading and rereading the same paragraph without consciously assimilating the words.

yes, like that. but when refocused on the paragraph, we become aware that we have, indeed, already experienced it. maybe several times.

me, i drive to and from work 10 times a week, in a soporific stupor. this is, in fact, a survival situation, yet the experience rarely rises to the level of awareness. similarly, it's fortunate the japanese maple in our front yard is not, say, a mountain lion, else i'd be experiencing death. or a maiming i wouldn't soon forget.

the takeaway here seems to be that there's a lot going on, all the time, and even the most innocuous confluence of events might be a threat to our wellbeing. it's the butterfly effect gone wild, for example, when the invention of the wheel and the invention of the shoe can lead to the invention of heelys, wheeled shoes that currently threaten the wellbeing of my children.

our only consolation is that the reverse may also be true. that even the most obnoxious confluence of events (say, the ill-starred coupling of george h.w. and barbara bush), may lead to a better world. eventually. a long time from now.

we can only hope we're here to see these eventualities as they unfurl, and that we do more than just experience them. because once in a while survival demands we rise above blissful unawareness and notice there's a mountain lion, wearing heelys, in our favorite tree.

saturday soap opera

decked out in her purple uniform, our daughter looks like a real little leaguer. and when she gets hit by consecutive line drives at shortstop, she reacts like a little leaguer.

she cries.

"why do they have to hit it to me every time?"

in little league, "the ready position" doesn't really mean anyone is ready. hands on knees, eyes toward home plate, and the hit! whack! oooh, that's gotta hurt.

mind you, our daughter is a tough chick. she's not given to tears over scrapes and bumps. we taught her long ago to pop up and keep going. and she does. most of the time.

but back-to-back line drives are more than anyone should have to absorb. even so, after half an inning she had recovered sufficiently to go out and get a couple base hits.

that was last saturday.

today she's ready to go again, looking cute as she wants to be in her color-coded jersey, socks and hat. the hat's got a big M on it, for magnolia. just like all the other hats.

"a.g., do you know what to do if the ball is hit to you today?"

"try to catch it, i guess."

my girl.

the cascadia aesthetic

the waters of the pacific northwest are cold. even in the heat of the summer, such as it is, puget sound and the waters to the north, past the queen charlotte islands, stay bone-chilling cold.

the occasional fantasy of 85-degree water is moderated by the reality that our corner of paradise would be overrun by folks who know and care little about quiet, solitude and a few square miles free of fast-food opportunities.

no, better to sit and be still, looking out over the clear, cold surface, or walk along its edge, picking your way between tidal pools and driftwood, up onto rocks where the tide presses inland. carrying some strong, steamy coffee, perhaps, on a misty morning.

within 7 minutes of our house is a rocky beach where it's possible to walk, completely alone, within sight of downtown seattle. harbor seals sometimes swim just offshore, popping up their heads to take a look around, then diving under again. closer to home, a nesting pair of bald eagles occasionally perch in the trees above our house. they're a marvel of survivability; an anachronistic, metaphoric, hopeful phoenix.

the san juan islands lie not too far to the north. pitch a tent in san juan county park, and you can paddle your kayak to the next sandy beach, encountering an extravagance of animal and plant life along the way. wild turkeys, bald eagles, ferrets. giant pacific octopii, clouds of migrating salmon, harbor seals, dahl’s porpoises and the resident pods of killer whales. occasionally, migrating humpback and gray whales will venture through.

the san juans are remnants of an ancient continental terrane known as wrangellia. tens of millions of years ago wrangellia was a continent in search of a home. it wandered the pacific basin, like a drunk bouncing around an unfamiliar pub, before careening into the north american pacific coast. the collision was not widely noted at the time, but it did form a mountain range of some note, approximately where alaska, vancouver island, and the san juans are today.

geologic evidence of those mountains suggests they were quite spectacular. towering over today’s rockies, putting the alps to shame. and yet somehow, despite their magnificence, they still fell victim to time and gravity. the wrangellia range withered and shrank, until the highest peaks barely showed their noses above the glacial waters that rose to subsume them.

millions of years later those waters are clear, cold and deep. and inviting, just the same.

the outlaw tree

"This here's Miss Bonnie Parker. I'm Clyde Barrow. We rob banks."

when you flout the law the way my wife and i do, it's just a matter of time before the cops show up.

mind you, i didn't want to flout the law. my wife made me do it. i protested, vociferously. but in the end her will was done. we became scofflaws.

the jackhammer we brandished in the commission of our crime will not help our case. it was a bosch brute, and it busted up the concrete in front of our house like butter going through a knife. there may have been some operator error involved.

but at the end of the day -- a very long day -- the deed was done. we vandalized the hell out of that concrete, moved it out of the way, dug into the dirt below...and planted a tree.

at one point our gladys kravitz neighbor sent her husband over to see just what we thought we were doing. we're making some room in front of this telephone pole to plant a tree, my wife said.

that's when the inquisition-by-proxy began. did we have permission? did the city say this was allowable? won't the tree get up into the lines? isn't the concrete holding up the pole?

my wife lied like a hardened criminal. oh, yeah, we called the city and they were fine with our little plan. they even gave us a list of trees to consider. cornelian cherry trees are particularly good in locations like ours. it's all good, and don't worry about it one bit, mr. kravitz. run along now, so we can finish before the storm rolls in.

my wife is an accomplished liar. i believed her, and i knew she was lying. the cops, however, may not be convinced so easily.

i fully expect them to roll up one of these days. they'll be cool at first, because we live in a nice neighborood and seem like nice people. on the surface.

but it won't take long for them to figure out that we flouted the law. we broke up 4 square feet of city concrete, planted a tree, and put down some shredded hardwood mulch. these are the facts, and they are not in dispute.

Bonnie Parker: What would you do if some miracle happened and we could walk out of here tomorrow morning and start all over again clean? No record and nobody after us, huh?

Clyde Barrow: Well, uh, I guess I'd do it all different. First off, I wouldn't live in the same state where we pull our jobs.

me? i intend to plead insanity. i was driven to dig by my scofflaw wife.

will it work? only a fool would hope.

i fully expect that one day we'll both hang from our outlaw tree.

maybe baseball

This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains. Think about that for a while.

the movie "bull durham" wasn't about parenting. it was about sex.

but quite often there's a correlation between sex and parenthood.

it's true. you could look it up.

i've been a parent for going on nine years. despite the insistence of some, parenthood is not always a jar of chocolate chip cookies. sometimes it's more like a pot of pickled beets. good for you, perhaps, but they leave an awful taste in your mouth.

i digress.

my son is playing baseball. for the first time. i mean, really, he's totally baseball-naive. because i'm a bad parent.

i played baseball for many, many years. sometimes well. i played until my junior year in college, in fact. at that point shoulder tendinitis and marginal talent combined to turn me into a spectator.

despite all that baseball experience, i never cajoled my son onto the field. didn't even try. we urged him into other activities, of course. karate, swimming, gymnastics, indoor climbing. he's quite good at all of them.

but no baseball. what kind of father doesn't encourage his son to play baseball, for gawdsake? that's what fathers and sons do, isn't it? go down to the local park, bat and gloves in hand, and learn some fundamentals?

nope. never happened. until this year. suddenly we're playing catch-up as much as we're playing catch.

the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.

turns out the boy has some baseball skills. he fields ground balls smoothly, and throws hard to first. he swings the bat and makes contact. he smiles at me, and i smile back. i tell him, "nice job," and "stay with it," and "just make contact." and he does, most of the time. when he's not turning his hat sideways, and digging in the dirt with his new cleats.

if it were important, i could teach the boy a lot about baseball. i could teach him things about the game that i never knew until long after i stopped playing. i could, maybe, help him appreciate being in the zone, the feeling that no matter what the pitcher offers up, you're going to hit it a long way the other direction.

if it were important.

baseball is simple. life is complicated. there's so much to learn.

and so little time.

Walt Whitman once said, "I see great things in baseball. It's our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us." You could look it up.

* * * * *

update: game one in the boy's baseball career is in the books. game-time conditions were wet and cold, with temps in the low 40s. but the boy still wouldn't wear his coat in the dugout.

his line was one hit in three at-bats, several pitches hit foul, one pop-up almost caught, one knee abrasion from sliding into first on a ground ball.

his team won, 7-4. it was magnificent.

i'm born again

it's in me.

the kool-aid, i mean. i have drunk deeply, and i proclaim to you that i believe in the bush administration.

my faith is strong. yea verily, it is born again (okay, for the first time), because condi asks it of me.

"be patient," she beseeches me. "for the sacrifice is worth it."

most importantly, sister condi insists, "we will start to know relatively soon whether the Iraqis are living up to their obligations."

how soon is soon? according to our great leader, "...the Baghdad security plan is still in its early stages and success will take months, not days or weeks."

okay, that doesn't seem particularly soonish.

but to whom much is given, much is expected. i don't know how this fabulous dogma applies here, but i like the sound of it.

y'all believe me, right? that i'm all born again in the church of george?

is anybody buying this?

sigh. yeah, me neither.

i guess i don't have whatever "it" is that enables such magnificent leaps of delusion...

it just ain't in me.

you're with us or you're with the asteroids

About 20,000 asteroids and comets orbiting close to our planet could deliver blows ranging from destroying cities to ending all life.

this is a funny, funny story. well, not the destroying cities part. or that "ending all life" thing. those would be bad. often i'm fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing, but there seems to be very little ambiguity in this case.

no, the funny part is, our government doesn't have a billion dollars to spare for tracking killer asteroids. as one rocket scientist put it, “Should one nation, the United States, be responsible for the entire planet?”

William Ailor of the Aerospace Corporation, a not-for-profit Air Force research group that sponsored the planetary defense conference, said the problem of finding killer asteroids could be solved more easily if more countries were involved. Interest is growing, he said, noting that the European Space Agency is considering a mission called Don Quijote to test ways to deflect an asteroid.

don quixote, as some might innocently observe, was disparaged for tilting at windmills. that analogy segueways into the existence of an actual industry devoted to tracking and deflecting imminent meteor strikes. they even have their own trade show:

The objective of the conference is to develop a white paper that assesses the current state of our ability to discover and track near-Earth objects (NEOs—objects that could possibly impact Earth) and our ability to successfully deflect a threatening object should one be detected.

and there, literally, is the money quote. it will be significantly more challenging to deflect a "threatening object" if it is detected only after striking the earth. it'll probably cost more, too.

but that is SOP for our "we hate government" government. global warming? no such thing. hurricane katrina? never heard of it. some schmoe in the middle east with a slingshot? here's $100 billion for a fun-filled year of wanton slaughter. yay, government!

meanwhile, there's an asteroid out there with the name of every earth inhabitant on it. can we detect it and deflect it? we don't know, because the price is just too high to find out.

Building a dedicated observatory for finding and tracking hazardous bodies and launching a spacecraft to observe the space around Earth would cost more than $1 billion that the agency does not have.

this plea is not addressed to republicans, who don't believe in science anyway. note to democrats: peel off a billion dollar bill and get busy...quick.

more than a feeling

"We've just lost the nicest guy in rock and roll."

that's all it says now on the official boston website.

because brad delp, lead singer of the 70s band, died today.

i used to think boston's music was pretty cool. i tried to sing along with delp, because as a kid i had some pretty good range. he went way past me into the stratosphere with those high notes. that's why he got the big money.

i had a girlfriend at the time who could really hit the high notes. make of that what you will. i'd sit there and listen, rapt, as her voice climbed, higher, higher...then we'd kiss a lot.

word was, back in the day, that delp was a relentless perfectionist. he'd mix and remix the band's tracks until they met his standards. his perfectionism allegedly kept the band from releasing new material, more material, any material. which i thought was a shame, as i recall. they had a couple more successful releases, but it always seemed like there shoulda been more.

in the summer of '78, i think it was, i played on a pretty good baseball team. we were state champions or some such thing. it seemed like a big deal at the time. on the way to games, a buddy of mine and i used to listen to an 8-track of boston's first album. it became kind of a soundtrack to the season, and it still brings back warm, summertime memories.

i used to think boston's music was aging well. then came the day i noticed, "damn, this music gets a lot of airtime."

now when i hear it, it'll seem like something's missing. something that was important to me, a long time ago.

* * * * *

update: turns out delp wasn't the stickler for detail in the band. that was guitarist and cofounder tom scholz. the band's first album sold 17 million copies, still the most-ever for a debut.

quart of blood technique

"I'm a karate man, see! And a karate man bruises on the inside!"

i couldn't look.

after our last karate tournament disaster, the prospect of another trauma was too much to contemplate.

so as my son began his kata routine, i cleverly looked on from behind the bleachers.

rewind: our children participated in a karate tournament in portland last weekend. it was their first since an ill-fated tournament in victoria, bc -- and for good reason. competition is one thing...masochism is something else entirely.

in canada, one child did well, the other had a come-apart. not his fault, really. the pool-related concussion may have been a factor. nevertheless, looking ahead to portland we were ambivalent. hesitant. angst-ridden. but after much training (theirs) and considerable compartmentalizing (ours), we geeked up for another go.

our pregame left nothing to chance. the drive down was uneventful, but there was a scary moment checking into the hotel. the boy wears heelies as a major mode of transportation, and nearly totalled himself in the lobby. he walked in stocking feet to the room.

the obligatory trip to the pool was prefaced with unambiguous warnings and open threats. another concussion would be considered grounds for abandonment. running was a capital offense. actually touching the water was a game-time decision.

eerily, nothing bad occurred.

later, we went to dinner with a bunch of families from the dojo. the adults drank. the children, after ignoring the real food, ate ice cream. excellent training regimen. we returned to the hotel and yelled at the children to go to sleep.

after a long, nonrestful night, we awoke late. too late to enjoy breakfast, given that the service in the hotel restaurant was slow. no, that's not fair to slow people. service was nonexistent. we ended up taking everything to go. tip was not generous.

we approached the the tournament venue with fear and loathing. surely mt. hood would erupt and the columbia river would boil, flooding us with poached salmon. these things, we felt, would be preferable to entering the gym.

the children insisted.

where's my mouthguard? where's my chest protector? where's my fist pads? where's my group? children expect answers to these questions. parents who don't have a long history with karate tournaments are slow to provide answers.

eventually, inevitably, inexorably, the time for the boy to perform his kata drew nigh. beneath the stands, i sweated and became nauseated. the girl, meanwhile, commenced sparring. she is always the smallest girl in the ring, with the least fear. she swings from her heels and occasionally scores a point. she won a bronze medal.

the boy entered the ring. previously he had decided to do teno kata, because he knew it the best. instead he launched into heian nidan...and nailed it. where he was confident, i was breathless. where he was precise, i was still nauseated. at the end, he suppressed a smile. i suppressed a sob.

karate parents bleed on the inside. it's a good thing, too. the mess would've been epic.

i am garlic

don't come any closer.

i reek of garlic. i exude garlic. i have a phd in eau de garlique.

i am garlic.

last night we had take-out from the mediterranean kitchen on queen anne. dear lord, the garlic.

chicken shawerma. chicken shish tawook. hummus. salad with dressing made almost entirely of garlic...and a few spices.

my wife and i loved this restaurant, back in the day. but when we moved back to the area, it was gone. we assumed it had gone out of business. turns out it moved three blocks east, and has been doing just fine, thank you.

this morning, everything in the refrigerator is infused with garlic. the kitchen is awash in garlic. we are immersed in garlic.

thankfully, it's heart-healthy. in that case, our hearts will continue beating long after we're gone. people will see our freakish, still-beating hearts and say, "they must've eaten at mediterranean kitchen."

tonight: leftovers.

(but right now i need to go shave my tongue.)

"hell no, we won't go..."

everything old is new again.

the '60s have come back around, complete with a divisive war, a dissenting congress, and a despicable president.

instead of fading away, echoes of time past get louder.

the '60s got ugly. assassinations and riots and kent state, all symptoms of a sick nation at war with itself. and it can happen again. it is happening again. because we never really healed from--or learned from--the last time.

how big a leap is it from spying on americans to firing on them? nixon had no compunctions in that regard. would dick cheney hesitate for a moment to order troops to fire on unarmed civilians? he'd probably pick up a rifle himself.

take a look at the four dead at kent state...


real subversives, huh? a clear and present danger to the ohio national guard and the nixon administration. no wonder they had to be killed.

flash forward to 2007...the bush administration is taking on water from all sides. in overwhelming numbers, the american people oppose bush policy at home and abroad. there is a distinct whiff of desperation in presidential press conferences. along with the suggestion that opposition is fine, so long as it doesn't attempt to halt administration activities.

the pieces are in place for another great, self-inflicted wound. a whole series of them. to go along with those of the past six years.

surely we won't go there again. or maybe it's inevitable.

just me tv

i have an overactive imagination.

so when i see a washington state ferry wrecked and burning in elliott bay, it's a small leap for me to picture myself and my family in the scene.

understand, this ferry was a computer-generated image on a tv screen. it was a scene out of someone else's imagination in a show called 'grey's anatomy.' and as conscious as i am of manipulative plotlines and dialogue, i still got swept up in this one.

the faux ferry had collided with a container ship, and carnage was everywhere at our familiar ferry terminal. people were bleeding, dying, covered with tarps. a badly injured woman called for her young son. a little girl wandered amidst the chaos, speechless, looking for someone to help her. that was the part that about pushed me over. too close to home.

it could've been anywhere, i suppose. images of crying, injured children elicit a visceral response, whether they're in baghdad, new orleans or on a soundstage in seattle. i imagine most people silently transport themselves into such situations, and feel the pain of the moment.

this is true, isn't it? don't most people identify with and personlize the dramatic and the traumatic?

or are we all just abstractions? are people in iraq just radical islamists, folks on the gulf coast just poverty-stricken negroes, people in san francisco just liberal queers?

the answers to these questions are fairly important. if a person is nothing more than a caricature, they're much easier to ignore. or to kill.

or so i would imagine.

gardicil your children?

big pharma is coming for your children.

and if they can't peddle their drugs to you directly, they'll force them on you through your local government.

don't be afraid. be angry.

Merck & Co. is helping bankroll efforts to pass state laws requiring girls as young as 11 or 12 to receive the drugmaker's new vaccine against the sexually transmitted cervical-cancer virus.

Gardasil, approved by the federal government in June, protects girls and women against strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, that are responsible for most cases of cervical cancer. A government advisory panel has recommended that all girls get the shots at 11 and 12, before they are likely to be sexually active.

note the careful choice of words. "protects" girls and women from cancer. gardicil is a warm, fuzzy protector. that's nice, isn't it?

it's probably not even worth mentioning that merck stands to make billions of dollars if its drug is declared mandatory by the government. the folks at merck aren't motivated by money, after all. they only want to help.

the thing is, though, that gardicil the wonder drug was just fda-approved in june of '06, and no one really knows what the long-term side-effects might be for pre-pubescent girls. did the company run exhaustive pediatric clinical trials on this product? it did not. it ran a small-sample bridging study that may or may not demonstrate safety in peds.

it's entirely possible that gardicil will guard (isn't that clever?) 11 and 12 year-old girls from cervical cancer. or, like more than a few "fda-approved" drugs recently, it might come back to haunt them. vioxx, anyone? the fda, in the thrall of big pharma billions, is no longer worthy of trust in such matters.

shoot, even the governor of texas is on the merck payroll...

Bypassing the Legislature altogether, Republican Gov. Rick Perry issued an order Friday making Texas the first state to require that schoolgirls get
vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

By employing an executive order, Perry sidestepped opposition in the Legislature from conservatives and parents' rights groups who fear such a requirement would condone premarital sex and interfere with the way Texans raise their children.

Beginning in September 2008, girls entering the sixth grade - meaning, generally, girls ages 11 and 12 - will have to receive Gardasil, Merck & Co.'s new vaccine against strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV.

Perry, a conservative Christian who opposes abortion and stem-cell research using embryonic cells, counts on the religious right for his political base. But he has said the cervical cancer vaccine is no different from the one that protects children against polio.

interesting. the governor is a mouth-breathing, anti-science wacko. he's against the very idea of "women's health," but he's all for the new drug from the global conglomerate drug company. does that seem inconsistent to anyone? how much money do you think changed hands there?

my wife and i work in healthcare. she runs global pharma trials, and i...well, i create funny little ads for some of those products. so we both know a little about the drug approval process. how it doesn't always work the way it's supposed to. how sometimes people get hurt by fda-approved products.

do we trust the fda to unfailingly protect patients and the public? do we trust pharma companies about anything? no. make that, "hell no." especially where the health of our children is concerned.

see, we have a daughter. and we're not about to have her pumped full of any drug wantonly pimped by merck and the u.s. government, just because they say so.

cervical cancer is a serious disease. in teens and adults, we hope gardicil is effective in preventing it 1000% of the time.

but the day we're told our daughter must participate in what amounts to a huge government experiment is the day we start the revolution.

i mean, the day she goes back to private school.

arnold?

i can't reconcile these images.

my brain won't make the leap. it walks right up to the edge, looks into the abyss, then turns and runs back to the fog. my brain is such a girly-man sometimes.

arnold schwarzenegger, hollywood's baddest-ever action star, looks like his terminator warranty expired. a while ago. and now he's stuck lugging around all kinds of artificial parts: heart valves, a hip, cables and screws in his leg, and who know what all else.

in fairness, these days arnold is governor of california, the 7th largest economy in the world. it's possible his day-to-day responsibilities occasionally may take precedence over his once-rigorous workout schedule. but still...does he have to look so human?

just 20 years ago arnold looked like this...


"If it bleeds, we can kill it."

that was one bad man...and he was 6 years younger than i am now. the takeaway? if it can happen to arnold it can happen to anyone.

but maybe there's some wiggle room here. it's possible his current condition is the result of years of steroid abuse and raucous living. that his body is saying, "payback...this time it's for real."

in contrast, my substance abuse consists of a couple cookies after dinner and the glass of red wine i'm working on. i consider both to be therapeutic.

so maybe, with luck and a couple strategic advances in medical technology, when i'm 60 i can look not-a-day-over 52.

i'm talking theoretically here, so i'd ask for some latitude. thank you.

in a world where some seek to reshape the future by changing the present...is it asking too much for a role model to set the bar somewhere above average? no. it is not.

i worked out today. i'll try to work out at least one day this weekend. and not because i want to be an action hero (though that'd be nice).

partly, i just don't want my warranty to expire. mostly, because i like the red wine. and the cookies.

wwmlkd?

monday was the martin luther king federal holiday.

it passed, as it usually does any more, without much fuss. perfunctory retrospectives, speculation on what he'd think of thus-and-such, angst over our collective malaise.

the conventional wisdom is that king was a great man, a passionate voice at a critical time, an inspiration to millions. despite that, it's understood that today he'd be excoriated, marginalized by the industrial christian right.

lenin said religion is the opiate of the masses. maybe, back in the day. now, though, television serves that role. we have become sedate, lethargic, indifferent. we stand by idly as a low-IQ underachiever dumbs us all down.

what would king do about it? he'd organize, and rally and march. he'd sit with cindy sheehan in the halls of congress, and demonstrate in front of the white house. he'd work tirelessly in new orleans and demand attention be paid to the city's ongoing tragedy.

but he's gone, and his day has become just another monday. an empty gesture. business as usual.

i doubt dr. king would care about the holiday. but i bet he'd care deeply that the principles of his life's work have been so casually discarded.

you're gonna like the way you look...*

* i guarantee it.

the party is heating up in the green zone. and this week, after a long (long) wait, george bush appears ready to throw some more flammable things on the fire.

Bush told more than a dozen senators Friday that he would settle on [escalation] only if the Iraqi government offered certain guarantees, according to senators who attended the meeting.

guarantees from the iraqi government. what do you suppose those are worth? say, for example, that the iraqi government guaranteed the sun would come up tomorrow...wouldn'tcha immediately go out and buy some flashlights?

in one of its last and most ironic (or is it iconic) acts, the 109th congress set aside $20 million to celebrate the u.s. victory in iraq and afghanistan.

sounds like fun, doesn't it? wonder what they'll be serving...

doggone...

i miss my dogs.

i know this because occasionally i get all mushy thinking about them. this unwelcome occurrence doesn't even have the decency to announce its arrival. it sneaks up on me and covers me with emotional goo.

yuck. frickin' emotions.

a couple days ago, in the park with the children, another family came along with a golden retriever puppy. she was amazingly well-behaved and affectionate and endearing. and i immediately flashed back to my dogs. how they were different, how they were the same.

the pup leaned up against my legs and insisted on a good scritching, just like my dogs...

stop it. go away, good dog. i have no time for you or your puppy kisses or your happy grin or your big ol' goofy paws.

later i was driving along, minding my business, listening to a cd in my car...and stumbled across this lyric...

I've tried so hard to tell myself that you're gone
But though you're still with me
I've been alone all along

boom. thinking about my dogs again. frickin' song lyrics. why do they have to annoy me so. no more songs for me. from now on this a song-free zone. i can't hear you, la la la la...

so anyway, it's occurring to me that i might entertain the idea of another dog. some day. i don't know why.

frick. frickin' dogs.

why do they have to stay with me this way?

reconfiguring

we're in the throes of remodeling our life.

which is to say, in this instance, that our living room now features a fireplace. with a new tv above it. kinda like the picture here, except totally different.

imagine our space without the cut stone surround. or the corner placement. or the knotty pine paneling. or the naughty movie on the tv (as far as you know).

aside from that, it's identical. squint a little...you can see it, right?

anyway, it's an HD tv, and it's mesmerizing. almost like watching real life, except in HD. in high definition you can see things onscreen that you've never seen onscreen before. some of which you could probably do without. unruly nose hairs. scars. makeup. it's like getting right up in somebody's grill with a magnifing glass. sometimes up-close is just too close. sometimes aura and mystique can't stand too much scrutiny.

anyway, we weren't going to get caught up in the whole huge flat screen tv thing. we were quite happy with our 10-year-old-school 32-inch model. the picture quality was perfectly fine, and it was way paid-for. but with the installation of the fireplace it was either go with the flat screen or go sans tv in the living room.

and while our viewing commitment has diminished over the years (we only went dvd last christmas), we weren't prepared to cut it off entirely. so we went flat, we went big, and we went lcd.

it's all relative, i know. we have a 40-inch display, which is much smaller than some in-home family theater multiplex cineramas. but it holds a dominant position up there above the fireplace, and damn if it doesn't get your attention. if you pay attention to such things. if only the available programming was as HQ as the HD.

ah, well.

our ongoing, big-picture, life reconfiguration continues. we can't wait to see what happens next.

blame it on bing

colorado will be having a white christmas.

probably a white new year, too. meanwhile, our seattle christmas just went south.

it was all gonna be so perfect.

my parents were flying in from denver for the holidays. the children were going to be doted on and spoiled with grandparent presents. my wife and i were taking time off from work, and we had sly plans to take advantage of some free babysitting.

win. win.

notice: perfect plan cancelled on account of blizzard.

as of today, colorado is closed. no driving to the airport, no holiday flights, no more fun of any kind. and the forecast for tomorrow doesn't look much better. so flights are stacking up, everything is booked for days, and no one's going anywhere any time soon.

my mom is beside herself. my dad is beside my mom. my family is beside our new gas fireplace, upon which stockings are hung with care.

the weather channel just filled those stockings with coal.

humbug.

could be worse. could be raining. wait...it is raining. and thousands in the puget sound region are still without power after our 10-year storm of 6 days ago. this on the heels of a major snow event in november.

thank god global warming is just a hoax. no telling how crazy things might be if it were real.

so, here we are. the guest room is set up, the fridge is stocked, and we have several bottles of cloyingly sweet white wine for my mom. who's gonna drink this stuff now?

we're dreaming of a dry christmas.

bugger off, bing.

woof

well, come on over here baby
'bout to gimme a heart attack
wanna wrap my lovin arms
around the small of your back
yeah, I'm gonna pull you, pull you, pull you
pull you right up close to me

--don henley

company christmas party last night.

the guys, predictably, wore suits and ties.

the women made more of an effort.

one, kinda like this...



career-limiting move, or brilliant stratagem?