Now personally, I hates me some Oscars. I may or may not take some of my movie-viewing cues from what people I’ve never met in my life have to say about a given flick, but I have zero tolerance for the pimp and circumstance of Hollywood award shows. Overcelebrated people gathering together to further overcelebrate themselves—huzzah!

But even with fewer than half a dozen Oscar ceremonies under my belt, this little scrap of genius, sent to me today by Shawn, seemed to me to hit it right on the mark. View and enjoy.

Heh.
Serious bonus points to those who can translate my words into the actual title of this post.

There may even be a booby prize but I’ve used that one once.

Anyway….

I’m working five days a week which cuts into my blogging time especially since I’m currently working swings (11 a – 7 p) which seriously sucks, but at least allows me to walk in the mornings (some days when I can get myself motivated) and also get a soak in the hot tub.
What it does NOT do is allow me to do things like -oh- go to Costco during the week which means that our Costco runs are limited to *shudder* weekends, or get laundry done in the evenings. Or get any afternoon gardening done, or do the bills in the afternoons, or, or, or.
I am not sure how two people working full time are supposed to maintain a house when both are working five days a week and still have any time on the weekends to do things like interact with friends and family, or do such things like RELAX. I may be spoiled, but I’ve always considered the way Andrew and I live our lives as a fairly organized interaction, but I can NOT figure out this schedule at all. My weekends seem to be a rush of activity and then it’s Monday again. Maybe those of you who haven’t had my odd schedule can comment, but how do you do this?
And it’s gonna get worse. I mean, granted I’m only working swings every other month and it IS coming up on spring and the days are going to be long enough that I can get out in the evenings and get some garden work done at least, but….
It’s coming up on spring and the amount of garden work is going to triple, quadruple, octuple. Even with the garden weekends that Susan and I have planned over the next two months or so, the garden is going to run me over. I’m thinking seriously about taking prep courses so I can sit for my ABVP boards either this winter or next spring, and, whatever sort of weird loon that I am, I’ve signed up to walk again. Anyone wanna come with me this September? I’ve got a hairy lot of walking to do between now and then. Maybe I can get some of my ABVP texts on disc so I can iPod them while I’m walking.

So back to the aforementioned condiment.
The clematis is in full bloom. The hyacinths are popping and the daffodils are up. The lillies are poking their noses up out of the ground, my brainless peonies are almost grown out of their cloches so if they freeze their silly little tips off it’s their own damn fault. Nuccio’s Pearl is in full bloom, and as soon as my pelleted peat pots are fully expanded I’ll have peas started in John Coldframe which Susan and I, in our first garden frenzy of the spring, got put together last weekend.
Andrew came up with a vicious cold last weekend and spent much of his time snerfling and/or up to the eyebrows in Advil Cold & Sinus, taking a major break on Saturday to help Shawn take about a thousand photos of Anastasia and I dissecting Anastasia’s first frog in the driveway. She’s got this upcoming school science fair thingie so I volunteered to talk her through the test frog so that she can be *really impressive* with the second frog for the actual fair. Kid’s got talent, I can tell you that. And a fantastic sense of delight at the inner workings of living (or formerly living) things. I was grossed out by some of it, but Anastasia thought it was pure D cool. She didn’t even mind the smell, which she described as “It smells kind of like pudding!” (really, REALLY don’t want to know what her mother is feeding her if a formaldehyde frog smells like pudding to her, but regardless). I’ll post photos at some point.
The other cool thing that’s been happening ’round here is that Andrew has taken up with a local charity and is refurbishing semi-obsolete computers. I’ll let him fill in the details, but he is absolutely thrilled with being able to take what most people see as dusty junk and have it be a thrill for someone.

No further condiments at this point, I’ve got to get this cat off my lap and go shower so I can get to work.
Weird damn shifts. Mother chocolating economy, get better dammit. I want a third doctor back at my practice so I can have an off day during the week to get my chores done like a normal person.

I meant to post this yesterday, but I have been running a serious sleep deficit for the last week or so and only caught up Saturday by sleeping until two o’clock in the afternoon, by which point I was in no mood to do anything but watch TV and grunt.

For my birthday this year, Mat & Shannon bought us tickets to the Friday night Jonathan Coulton concert at The Moore Theater, which was an absolute blast. We took the train from the Tukwila Park-N-Ride into Westlake Center, which was an easy walk from both the theater and the Steelhead Diner, where we had a nosh before the concert. If you’ve never been (we hadn’t either), let me fervently recommend the Steelhead. They serve a wide variety of elevated diner grub, with lots of seafood and vegetarian choices in addition to classy upsells of old favorites. Margaret and I both had the Wagyu burger, Matt had the catfish and Shannon had potato latkes and a plate of roasted broccoli. Four people, appetizers, beer, entrees, one dessert and coffee for just over a hundred bucks, in downtown Seattle, canyoudigit. We’d go there again in a heartbeat, any time we were in the area.

And by gum, we plan to be in the area more often. I simply cannot describe for you how much of a rail whore I have become. I hate driving in downtown. Hate. HATE. Driving. In downtown. 1st Avenue South is like some sort of grim death march for much of the day. And while there are a multitude of highways, byways and myways one may use to get into the area, once you’re there you’re still….well, there. You still have to crawl along the clogged thoroughfares. You still have to deal with the throngs of tourists who treat the crosswalks as their own personal pedestrian footbridge. And you still, God help you, have to find a place to park. Instead, for about half the cost of parking downtown, Margaret and I were able to park for free at the Tukwila station and ride round-trip into the heart of downtown, well within walking distance of a dizzying array of shops, restaurants, museums, theaters (both movie and live), the Pike Place Market, and just about anything else we might care to pursue in the metropolitan area. And trains run until nearly one in the morning….which is way later than I’m running these days, lemmetellyou.

So after a leisurely dinner, we meandered up to the Moore and got there in plenty of time to see the opening band, Paul and Storm, who naturally opened with their song about being the opening band entitled “Opening Band“. They were hysterical, and the crowd ate them up like so many Pepperoni Hot Pockets.

Both of these bands represent a wonderful trend in indie music, namely the ascension of nerd rock. Sure, nerds have had their place in music since time immemorial, probably all the way back to the point where the rest of the tribe decided to feed the one guy who could knock old water buffalo skulls together in an esthetically pleasing way. But it seems as though the Information Age has been particularly kind to the musical nerd. From the advent of synthesizers and sequencers (allowing for the creation of the 256-piece one-man band) to the rapid evolution of the home recording studio and the rise of the Internet as the ultimate distribution channel, ghost white, pencil-necked AV wonks have profited from their appropriation of the means of production as much or more than any other musical genre. And since so many of us in that demographic long ago learned to shield ourselves behind a fecund and self-deprecating sense of humor, it’s not at all surprising that nerd rock tends to be hilarious.

Margaret and I were absolutely enchanted with the performance, and looked upon the audience of fellow travelers with something akin to affection. The overwhelming preponderance of suspenders, scruffy facial hair, and bellies overspilling waistbands was strangely charming….at least, it was strangely charming once we came to our senses and went up into the largely vacant balcony seats, away from the enormous sweaty man who sat next to us singing along off-tempo and out of key with every song. When Paul and Storm performed—no shit—a tribute song to the inventor of the chicken nugget, they suggested that it would not be inappropriate for folks to hold up their lighters—or, for those who had iPhones, to hold their phones aloft with the Virtual Zippo app running. And holy crap, you would not believe the number of iPhones that shot into the air. And those rarefied few who did not yet have the Zippo app feverishly scrambled to download it from Apple’s store before the chorus. Sometimes my fellow tribespeople can give me a minor case of the creeps; seriously, these were nerds whom I wanted to beat up and take lunch money from.

Jonathan Coulton played for about two hours, both by himself and with accompaniment from Paul and Storm, and local ukulele artist Molly Lewis, who also played a couple of her own songs. All of them seemed to have great fun performing (believe me, you have not heard “Mr. Fancy Pants” until you’ve heard it live, with Coulton pounding out crazy Gene Krupa riffs on a hand-held drum controller hooked to his laptop), and God knows they couldn’t have asked for a more enthusiastic audience. All in all, a wonderful, fun-filled evening.

Picked this up from Kotaku this morning (kinda not safe for work, in that way that only Japanese pop culture can seem to manage):

I’m generally not a fan of Kirsten Dunst; the last film I liked her in was Interview With The Vampire. However, the sheer moxie it took to prance around the Akihabara District in a Takashi Murakami-designed sailor suit singing The Vapors’ “Turning Japanese” is enough to make me reconsider. And the tiny skirt doesn’t hurt either.

One of the things I really love about this video is that it’s kind of hard to tell which people in it are actual paid extras and which are just—ahem—normal citizens going about their day.

Actually, anything that keeps The Vapors in the public gestalt is all right by me. Even if their fame derives chiefly from possibly the worst song in their repertoire. Give me “Bunkers”, “Trains”, “Isolated Case” or “Magnets” any day….

On a related topic, I’m glad I don’t use tags on my blog; I shudder to think what I would put this particular entry under.

EDIT: reworked the video so it shows. Up yours, YouTube! My version looks better anyway.

It’s not even quite March, but I think it’s spring. Witness 60 degrees and sunny all weekend.

Witness my dumbass peonies popping their brainless little heads out of the ground

Spring or no, there’s just not a lot happening garden wise at this point. I can’t really plant anything besides shrubbery (all out of space) because it’ll freeze off. It may be nice and sunny during the day, but it’s still February at night. I’ve put cloches over the more delicate half of the clematis and over the dumbass peonies.
The remaining crocuses are in full bloom, though, so are the pieris japonica.

I’ve always loved pieris japonica. The scent is just one more of those signals that says “HEY! WINTER’S ALMOST OVER!”
And, on the subject of spring and gardening weather, for those who hadn’t heard yesterday February 20, 2010 was Northern Hemisphere Hoodie Hoo Day.

The clematis is just aching to pop into bloom. I really wish it wouldn’t yet. We’ve certainly got hummingbirds that would appreciate it, but it’s still too dang cold out for any sort of pollinator and if it’s going to bloom I’d prefer it if there were some purpose behind it.

There’s really not much other garden news to report at this point. My Nuccio’s pearl camelia is almost in bloom.

He seems to have settled into his new spot quite nicely.

Susan and I made an epic order from Territorial yesterday. In fits of optimism we ordered a whole bunch of peas, beans, and cucumbers, also three different varieties of melons that we have great hopes for because of this…..
Doesn’t seem like much now, but when I finish the painting and get all the pieces knocked together that is going to be (do NOT blame me for the name, Andrew came up with it) John Coldframe.
When we had our windows washed last fall the window washer saw that there was a good deal of dried paint on what he assumed was the glass panel that is covering the stained glass window above our front door.
Except it’s not a glass panel, it’s a plexiglass panel and when the window washer tried to scrape the paint off with steel wool it completely scarred up the surface of the plexi. It’s not so much use now for covering a decorative piece of stained glass, but it IS nice and translucent and so now that the window washer has paid to have the stained glass window covered over with a new transparent piece of plexi, there’s this translucent piece just sitting there and…….
Dad and I spent much of yesterday cutting out and putting the pieces together. I primed and painted the bits today and, as I said, all I need is one more sunny day when I can put on the second coat of paint then bang the pieces into a rhombus (more or less) and I’ll have a wonderful little mini-greenhouse in which to baby plants.
Having had some success with cantaloupes last year, I have great hopes for watermelons this year. WHEE! It’s spring!

It starts out kinda slow, but…. Well, there’s some good geeky laughs involved.

I just had to share with my geeky friends.

There is a slight problem with order #XXXXXX, which was delivered to my wife’s office today.

The flowers that shipped were the correct ones, and they arrived in good condition. However, the card that accompanied them was supposed to read,

You are the best, the very best, the absolutely best thing that has ever happened or will ever happen to me. I love you with all my heart, my brain, plus my liver and most of both kidneys. My pancreas, I’m afraid, is a bust.

-Andrew

As is shown in the confirmation email I received. Instead, the card shat shipped with my order read,

Happy Valentine’s Day! I love you, Pam!

-Andrew

You people are damn lucky my wife has a sense of humor, but not as lucky as I am.

Andrew Lenzer

I’m hardcore.
Portrait of Margaret’s weekend.

I took Friday off from work so I could go to the Flower and Garden Show. For — golly — ten or twelve years now I have spent at least one day each spring wandering around getting flower drunk (like punch drunk only smells better), purchasing plants and garden geegaws and talking gardening with EVERYONE.
So Susan and I had made a date to spend Friday indulging our garden fantasies. I was excited because we weren’t sure that there was going to be a flower and garden show this year, the previous owners of the franchise were planning on closing it up if they couldn’t sell the franchise by a certain date last year, and also because this year I WOULDN’T HAVE TO PARK.
I like downtown Seattle. I enjoy wandering around and people watching, and I love shopping at Pike Place. But, with a passion beyond reason, I loathe driving downtown. Crowded, congested, slow, expensive, lots and lots and lots of people that I’m terrified of running over. I make exceptions of course, and I do know many sneaky back routes and sneaky parking garages, but it’s still a nuisance. This year, however, there’s Central Link.
Andrew and I came back from our trip to Washington D.C. in the summer of 2000 as hard core light rail whores. For the last 3 or 4 years we’ve been drooling watching the light rail track get closer and closer and closer. The Tukwilla light rail station opened in July. The Sea Tac station opened in December. I hadn’t realized that the only parking that is associated with the Sea Tac Link station is actually airport parking so my plan for Friday was actually a little modified in that I had to drive to the Tukwilla station to get the train, but enh! It’s only another mile or so.
Hop in the car, drive to the station, get the ticket, plug in the i-Pod and whoosh! Train came, I plopped into a seat, pulled out my Territorial Seeds catalogue, dialed up The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s 1812, and fifteen minutes later I was downtown. Two block walk and I was there. It was fast, quiet, and I didn’t have to park. It’s been at least 20 years since it’s been easy to get downtown.

Susan and I, and eventually Susan’s mother in law, spent eight hours futzing around, smelling, and trying really hard to not purchase absolutely everything we were enchanted with. Susan and I are really bad at restraining each other when we’re enchanted with plants.
I didn’t by a lot of plants. Really.
At least not a lot for me. I only ended up with two peony plants (which I didn’t need), three new lily sets (which I really didn’t need), and well, only seven new dahlia sets which, since a lot of my dahlias have frozen in the last couple of years I…. needed…. Yeah! I really needed them!

Like I said, Susan and I are bad at restraining ourselves and each other.

Another relatively surreal train trip, it’ll take a long time for me to get used to how EASY the train is, and I was home.
Home with plants that needed to be planted.
Home with plants that needed to be planted facing a weekend of mild temperatures and little daytime precipitation.
Heaven.

Saturday we got up and listened to our Saturday morning KUOW lineup which is so hardwired into our brains that it’s almost impossible for us to start a weekend without it. We didn’t really have anything planned for Saturday except that I knew I had to get laundry done and Andrew had to go out to Computer Sonics, a chore that I find as unappealing as Andrew finds garden work. We try to spend most of our weekend time together, especially now that I’m working 5 days a week, but where I find gardening to be a dreamily blissful task that I could do (and have done) for days at a time, Andrew dislikes it. Andrew, of course, is endlessly fascinated in most computer stores and since he does a lot of work with Computer Sonics, he knows most of their staff and can spend what I consider to be an extreme amount of time talking electronics with them. While we try to spend most of our weekend time together, we also try to avoid subjecting the other to our individual obsessive passions. So the fact that I wanted to garden and he had some computer chores to do worked out quite nicely.

Enter the planting. The pruning. The weeding, the raking, the watering….. it was a GREAT garden day.
If for no other reason than I found that I actually do have a few crocuses left.
I planted probably 200 crocus bulbs in the fall of 2008. What I didn’t realize was that squirrels love crocuses. I mean they LOVE crocuses. I spent much of last spring watching my crocuses poke up and then rapidly disappear in a chorus of teeny little squirrel crunches. Every time I’d have one that was JUST ABOUT to bloom one or another squirrel would find it and I’d be out another one.
This year I gave up and planted some of the umpty million grape hyacinth bulbs that have been multiplying in the back yard. Squirrels DON’T like hyacinth bulbs and they are pretty, but I miss the crocuses. There’s something very spring about crocus. So digging around in the mulch, raking up dead leaves and tidying in general, I was tickled to find these secret crocuses. *I* didn’t plant them there, behind a rock and at the base of a very large rhododendron. I assume that the squirrels must have transplanted them for me, but they also seem to have forgotten where the bulbs are. I may end up with a few after all.

And I meant to do this last year, but never got around to it. I’ll try to take weekly photos of the front garden and post them as the garden develops throughout the spring and summer. I am so effin’ SMUG about that garden.

I admit, it’s not so much to look at right now, but I’m creating an information base here. The bulbs are coming up and the Pieris japonica is in bloom. Most everything else has leaf buds, but the clematis, enthusiast that it is, has flower buds already.

I had to post this photo too, even though it’s not technically in the garden. This is the Nuccio’s Pearl Camelia which is filling a spot along the east side of the driveway that was created when one of the rhododendron bushes died. He’s just a baby as yet (obviously), but he’s covered with buds.

And when he’s in bloom, he’ll look like this:

Yup.
I’m hardcore.
Come on over. In a couple of weeks the hyacinths will be in bloom and we can get flower drunk together.

My friend Mike sent me a link to this, which is just hysterical: a parody piece of columnist Walt Mossberg interviewing Steve Jobs about the iPad. Includes NSFW language.

I have not been a true Mac fanboy for many years, despite my having worked with and on their products since 1988. My philosophy goes something like this: if you are new to computing, if you are afraid of viruses and spyware and what to do about them, if you are not a rabid gamer and/or do not play all your games on a console, you’d do well to get a Mac. The more or less seamless user experience and piss-elegant hardware design is a winning combination. Alternatively, anyone who has a more-than-basic knowledge of the workings of computers and operating systems, who knows how to bring up the Task Manager and Google any processes that look fishy, who wants to play the widest possible range of computer games, and/or would rather shell out half the clams for a top-of-the-line workstation, is probably better off with a PC. There it is, in a nutshell. Somewhere in between these polar extremes lies the realm of Linux, CP/M, the BeOS and the venerable propeller-heads who cook their own operating systems.

All that having been said, the iPad looks to me like the most ridiculous waste of time, money and R&D Apple has undertaken since—geez, the eMate? Actually, I take that back: for its time, the eMate was far more revolutionary than the iPad, which at its heart is just a crippled iPhone with a thyroid condition. It’s a proprietary e-book reader with a double-amputee Web browser tacked onto it. For 500 bucks.

I’ll admit, I like the idea of Apple getting into the electronic book market. Any competition in this arena is going to be good for the consumer. And maybe Apple will do a better job of representing the interests of both authors/publishers and the public than has often been the case with other companies. Probably not, but just the fact that there’s another hat in the ring can’t hurt. And there’s that aforementioned elegance of piss they’re known for; in terms of human engineering, the iPad comes pretty close to the state of the art in this sort of e-reader, with color, WiFi and Internet capability. It just needs to either get a lot cheaper or a lot more capable before I’d do anything but laugh at the prospect of plonking down 500 bucks for this thing. This coming from the guy who spent 450 dollars on a GPS-enabled Windows Mobile PDA about a year before the GPS-enabled WM smartphones came into their own. Let’s just say I’ve learned my lesson….hopefully.

So someone give me a nudge when the iPad comes down to $299, and I’ll take another look.

We spent a good chunk of this weekend re-watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy on DVD. The theatrical cuts won’t be available on Blu-Ray until later this year, and according to a well-placed source (our friend Ed who is somehow wired into the movie scene by any number of invisible-yet-Trans-Alaskan-Pipeline-thick conduits of pure informational flow), the extended cuts won’t be out until after Parat 1 of The Hobbit hits the silver screen sometime in 2011. So it seemed like a good time to give our new TV a chance to really stretch its legs and steep ourselves in fantasy for a weekend.

I had forgotten how much of a workout those films can be. In addition to the fact that the extended DVD versions of each film weigh in at somewhere between three and five geological epochs’ duration, they can also be more than a little wearing emotionally. Unless you are the type of person who is immune to manipulation of one’s feelings through the medium of the moving picture, The Lord of The Rings is something of a roller-coaster ride, at times leaving the viewer awash in alternating waves of exhilaration, sadness and joy.

But this time through, I became aware of another feeling imparted by the trilogy; a sense of my own essential banality.

This should hardly come as a shock, seeing as how a good five percent of my waking life is spent looking at the people around me and finding myself wanting by comparison. I don’t make as much money as her; I have nowhere near the coding skills as him; I don’t have his acumen with languages or her talent with a paintbrush; I weigh three times what he does, yet my boobs aren’t nearly as shapely as hers. There’s basically no end to it. So why should it surprise me that I also compare myself to characters in fiction, wholly artificial beings crafted on practically a mitochondrial level to be inhumanly strong, courageous and noble, and find myself envying them for the very qualities that put them out of just about anyone’s reach?

In case you’re wondering, of course I understand the pure folly of this. Beyond the simple waste of energy represented by such musings, there’s the fact that these people represent a totally idealized distillation of their less distinguished historical analogues. (I’m speaking here primarily of the icon of the Knight or the Soldier, rather than, say, wizards or wood elves; I may while away some unseemly portion of my existence wishing I possessed qualities I do not, but those qualities at least graze the surface of that which might possibly be achieved. I don’t count my inability to ward off Balrogs or teach trees to speak among my many failings. Instead of pining for those particular skills, I left my parents’ house, married someone and have regular sexual intercourse.)

The idea of comparing oneself to “the knights of yore” has any number of pitfalls. First of all, it’s like comparing a horse-drawn cart with a loaded Ford F-250 Super Duty Crew Cab. Neither exists in a vacuum, and both have their advantages and their drawbacks. A pickup truck owner might long for the simplicity represented by the horse and cart, free of the infrastructure of petrochemicals, mechanics, spare parts and insurance bills. On the other hand, a farmer living in any century save the last might cheerfully trade his eldest son for the chance to hook his plow to the tow hitch on that Ford for a planting season or two….particularly if it came with on-command 4WD. The point being, things—including human things—tend to work best in their own environment, and my environment happens to include Asynchronous DSL and hot and cold running lattes.

Secondly, romanticizing the past is a sucker’s game. In addition to overlooking the “romance” of pestilence, starvation, primeval medicine and a life span less than half that of  modern First World humans, the concept of “ye parfait and genteel knight” was probably as much a product of fiction then as it is now. I don’t really have the knowledge of history to back this up, but I rather suspect that the warrior class of just about any civilization of bygone eras was built on as much a foundation of oppression, rape and wanton cruelty as any other factor….as cosmically distant from the mythos of Aragorn or Eomer as a Harlequin Romance is from a porn film.

The more I think about it, the more I think that looking back on the days of the Knight Errant through rose-tinted spectacles is like one of those conservative types who look back fondly on the 1950’s while forgetting things like polio and lynchings.

So my unhelpful tendency to compare myself to these “people” and find myself wanting is tempered by my very real understanding that I would in all likelihood not trade places with them—if indeed such a place existed—for love, money or fair-trade coffee. All of which I have in sufficient quantities right now anyway. I’m sure also that at least some of the flaccid envy I feel regarding many of the characters in these films is due to a case of action-movie-surplus disorder. Author Neal Stephenson hit the nail right on the head in his novel Snow Crash:

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”

Now in my 40’s, I’m old enough to know better. Sadly, I don’t yet appear to be old enough to actually start acting my age. Or rather, I probably am acting my age. In fact, by some accounts I could be said to be acting supremely mature for my age….given that, emotionally, I’m probably about twelve years old.

So I spent the weekend watching these films on my big-screen TV in my comfortable living room, basking in the company of my wife and my cats and my cushy upper-middle-class life, with a mixture of excitement and a sort of wistful longing. And when I was done, I set both back on the shelf, alongside the DVDs, and got back into the groove of my comfortable, humdrum existence. Or perhaps it’s a rut. Either way, the sides are smooth, which makes it tough to climb out of….not that I want to.

We were watching BBC America the other day (a quick personal note: I LOVE Direct TV. Yes, I miss getting NWCN because I tend to watch news at odd hours when the local affiliates aren’t broadcasting local news, but the fact that we are getting a HUGE range of channels, we can choose to ‘ignore’ all of the sports channels, and we get all of this without paying Comcast for second rate service and a stunted- from-birth DVR is by far enough to make up for losing Northwest news 24 X 7. ) and I ended up getting sucked in by a program called “The Truth About Online Anorexia”.

It was a fascinating and horrible look at the effect that the internet has had on anorexia. Ranging in coverage from online ideas for truly frightening “crash” diets, to the so called “Pro-Ana” (pro-anorexia) sites that encourage anorexics all over the world by posting pictures, how to tips, and a horrible, horrible list called “The Thin Commandments”.

And it got me thinking.
It’s clear that anorexia is a disease of a modern, developed society where food security is never an issue. I am somehow doubtful that, say, teen girls in Ethiopia in the mid-’80s, were at ALL prone to developing the idea that they were somehow overweight. And I can’t think that people in any country in ANY time that are personally responsible for producing their own food, those who know how hard it is to actually have food, would be prone to developing eating disorders.

But when did anorexia really become a problem in the US and worldwide? I can’t imagine in the 1950s when Marilyn Monroe and her curves were the beauty norm (and, incidentally, when pictures of Nazi concentration camp survivors were still fresh in everyone’s minds) that starving yourself to “beauty” was something that would go through anyone’s mind.

And just to clarify, I know I’m oversimplifying the problem greatly. No anorexic thinks that they are starving themselves, rather that they are “dieting” to achieve an ideal which, in their mind, is attractive and desirable. They’re not thinking about it at all, it’s the way that they’re wired. However, I don’t think that the possibility of being wired that way would be or would have been possible in the 1940s during rationing and surely not in the 1920s and 30s during the depression. When did anorexia really start?

And is anorexia not only just a disease of a modern, developed society with no question about food security, is it a disease of overdressing? If we all were prone to walking around stark naked, when everyone could see what everyone’s body looked like and that NO ONE except the terminally ill looked like walking skeletons, could the anorexic ideal image become fixed in people’s minds?
Again, a gross oversimplification. The idea of a society where everyone walks around stark naked pre supposes the concept that we had no issues with temperature control, that we were all wired to NOT think about our bodies. I guess that answers the question though. If we were all stark naked all the time, I don’t think anorexia would be possible.
Certainly willful anorexia isn’t present in the animal kingdom. As many people as I see whose pets “just WON’T eat…..” (regular pet food instead of table scraps, the diet food that I am recommending, commercial pet food instead of snooty, unbalanced “natural” raw crap, etc.) actually WILL eat what is being offered if they’re put in a situation where they have no other option. Body issues just don’t exist in critters.

Or is anorexia maybe a disease of UNDER dressing? Were everyone to dress as devout Muslim women do, covered from head to toe with only a gap for the eyes, would anyone ever be able to develop the particular pathology where they compared themselves to everyone else? That’s not quite right. Anorexics don’t necessarily compare themselves to other people, they compare themselves to the image that they have of themselves. But could that image develop if no one EVER was able to see another’s body outside the marriage bed? If you never had any idea of how the body of another person of your gender looked like, could you develop the notion that yours was wrong?

I’m not going to get into the question of rates of anorexia in devout Muslim areas versus those in areas where religious devotion is less avid because there’s no way to get any sort accurate information about it. This isn’t a discussion of religion, mind, I’m more interested in the psychology of the question.

And though recovered anorexics that I’ve known who were anorexics pre-internet managed to do just fine in starving themselves mostly to death without online help I have no doubt at all that my current medium of choice is no damn help at all. Are rates of anorexia higher now than they were in 1980?

I’m really glad I never got into human psychology. I’d spend far too much time inside my own head to be of any use to anyone.

My last post was rather a downer and I’ve managed to restrain myself from posting syrupy cute kitten photos for a while, but I just can’t manage to do it anymore.

KITTENS!

This past week has to go down as one of (I’m not going to tempt fate by saying the worst) the worst weeks in my professional career.

I started the week with a concussion that I got feeding the kittens on Sunday. Please don’t ask how I got a concussion feeding kittens. Just take it for granted that Andrew is extremely grateful that I seem to be able to save all my maladroit tendencies for home.

So Monday morning I walked into work still rather lightheaded and ditzy. Head still sotto voce throbbing, but tolerable.
The network server crouched in the office was making a weird humming “I’ve got a drive running” sort of noise. However I’ve learned to stay the hell away from computers except to type on them, and since everything seemed to be running normally the morning receptionist and I just looked at each other, shrugged, and went about our day. When the boss lady showed up later that morning she called the IT guy who started running diagnostics and, as the computers were still running normally, we left Piet to do his thing with the server.

Tuesday would have shaped up into a pretty decent day for me. I was booked for surgery all day, didn’t have a single appointment scheduled so I would only have to interact with clients via telephone. This is a GOOD day for Margaret.
Breezed through five procedures (two neuters, two spays, and a bladder stone-ectomy) and was actually done in time that I could eat lunch and see a work in appointment. And (this is very important) I had all of my charts and all of my surgical reports written. I’d even managed to get all of the invoices done BEFORE anyone showed up to pick up their pet.
Now granted, I did have to delay the second spay because, since I have a tendency to throw away the disposable surgical gowns that we use (and re-use after sterilization) when they start to get a little funky, there was only one surgical gown in the building and it had to be re-sterilized before I could use it. I’d started the day with three, usually enough to get through five procedures, but since one was throw out-able, and the second TORE when I was changing gloves to close up the abdomen of the dog in whose bladder I’d been mucking about…. Well, that left just one and the autoclave takes about 90 minutes for a full cycle.
Oh well, I can adapt to that! We just jiggle the day’s schedule about a little bit, everyone got lunch and, as I said, I had time to see an appointment that needed to be seen that day (I only wish I remembered what the pet’s name was and what I saw her for).
Finished with my fifth surgery, getting things wrapped up for the day. One surgical report and one appointment chart to write up. A few phone calls to make, and then I can go home.

Then the server barfed.

And I do mean barfed. Piet The IT Guy had never seen anything like it. Three drives all committed suicide at the same time. It wasn’t a virus, it wasn’t malware, it wasn’t any sort of outside attack. I’m not sure what, exactly, was wrong with the cursed thing, but it barfed. Ghosts, pixies, Nunnahee, Menehune, whatever. SOMEthing got into our network server and it was dead. RIP.

We’re a paperless practice. That means all our medical records are -yup- stored in the computer. All the patient information? Computer. Client information? Computer. Prices? Prescription labels? APPOINTMENT BOOK? Computer, computer, computer.
Without the server the network doesn’t work. Without the network the practice management software doesn’t work. Without the practice management software we are DEAD IN THE WATER.

Since there wasn’t anything else I could do (can’t write charts, can’t make phone calls) at that point I was done with my day so I left, offering drinks at my place for whatever survivors there might be at the end of the day. We all figured that Piet would have the server back up the next morning.

We were WRONG!
Wednesday morning I walked in, there were sticky notes all over my desk detailing things that had happened the day before. Piet couldn’t do anything remotely so he was going to be coming down to see if he could resurrect the bloody server in person.
One of the first things I do when I get to work in the morning is to wander into radiology and turn on the computer that runs the digital capture station. I noticed that the computer that runs the diagnostic workstation, a bit of electronic wizardry that makes it possible for us to send the digital radiographs we take to the storage servers and, more importantly, to the radiologists, was making a funny noise. Not anything like the whirring, running drive sort of noise that the network server had been making, but a whiny sort of click.
One of the notes that was on my desk Wednesday morning was about some radiographs that had been taken on one of my patients the day before. Since I couldn’t do anything useful like writing charts or making phone calls I figured that reviewing those images would be a good use of my time while I was waiting for my first appointment to show up.
Except the images that had been sucked into the digital capture station the night before hadn’t made it the two feet to the diagnostic station. The diagnostic station, in fact, wouldn’t even bring up the bit of software that we use to view any of the films. It just sat there blinking at me. Desktop was normal. Shortcut to the viewing software was there, I could even click on the shortcut and get the “please enter password” window. I just couldn’t get past the password (and yes, I was using the correct one).
Oh god!
Piet The IT Guy doesn’t mess with the computers that are used to run our digital radiology system. Piet, in fact, is not qualified to mess with the radiology computers.
So we have to call the radiology computer people to come out and exorcise the diagnostic workstation.

In the mean time it’s time for appointments to start. Oh right! Appointments!
Mysterious people walking through the door with mysterious pets to see mysterious doctors for mysterious medical complaints. Without our appointment book we have no idea of who to expect when, with which pets. And unless the person walking through the door is familiar to us or happens to know which doctor their appointment was scheduled with……
Without medical records we have no idea of a patient’s previous history (What medications were given? For how long? What was the response?), and even the healthy ones coming in for vaccines were mysterious. What vaccines are you due for? Basically unless the critter had a rabies tag with a year on it, we couldn’t vaccinate anything. And if we could give a rabies vaccine we couldn’t issue a new tag or a certificate because, yup! No computer!
One of my favorite clients, G, showed up with her dog for a recheck Wednesday morning. At least I was familiar enough with G and her dog that I had some sort of idea what we were rechecking and what the dog’s medical condition had been at the previous exam three weeks ago. I’ve known G for heck, ten years? Twelve? I thought she’d be a nice, calm break in a day that was rapidly looking like it was going straight to hell.
G is in her mid-60s and I’ve known that she’s been dealing with colon cancer for at least the last few years. Last I knew though, she was stable. Still some evidence of metastasis, but radiation therapy was working and the outlook was optimistic.
Except Wednesday morning G told me that the radiation had failed and that she had three new metastases. Inoperable, nonresponsive to chemotherapy and, obviously, unfazed by radiation. She’s terminal. We had a discussion about what I can do to help her aging and somewhat forgetful husband keep their stable of aging and crotchety little dogs going for as long as is humane once she’s gone. I just hugged her, finished up with the patient in question then went back to my desk and cried. I’ve lost clients and been happy (for my own sake) about it, I’ve lost clients and been relieved (for their sake) about it, but never one who had managed to breach the divide between client and friend. I try to keep my professional and personal lives very separate, but G has managed to work her way into both of them. I will miss her a lot.

By Wednesday evening Piet managed to get our computers linked to HIS server and the last computer backup we had made (Monday night) shoved into his server so we at least had a few computer stations that would work. The stations were slow and we still couldn’t print prescription labels, but we could at least get charts written up and invoices charged out. We still had major chaos with the appointment book because appointments that had been made, moved, or changed between Monday evening and Wednesday afternoon were mysterious. We had double booked appointments, we had new clients coming in for no known reason, but we were making SOME progress. I got my Wednesday afternoon charts written, realized that I had to re-create all of Tuesday’s charts, write up all of Wednesday morning’s charts as well as deal with all of the lab call backs and phone messages that had been piling up since Tuesday afternoon and just gave up and went home.

Thursday morning I got to work and put my stuff down so I could sign on to my computer. I woke up the monitor and realized that Wednesday night had been one of the nights where the computers shut themselves down automatically to install updates. I restarted the computer like normal.
The remote connection to our practice management software on Piet’s server was gone.
I couldn’t do anything about it and it was way too early to call Piet, so I went into radiology to wake up the digital and, hopefully, finally have a look at those radiographs that had been taken on my patient on Tuesday. Except the diagnostic station was still barfed, and there was a note for the service rep who was supposed to show up later that morning.
I began to have fantasies about hitting myself in the face with an axe.
Our more tech savvy tech showed up and was actually able to re-establish my computer’s link with Piet’s server. So at least I had a (retarded, slow, and forgetful) computer to work on. The day is looking up.
The day definitely started to improve when the Piet and the tech managed to jury rig something so that we could actually print prescription labels. Could only print from one computer station, but this is progress no? Radiology is still down, but I don’t have to hand write prescription labels and we don’t have to guess at prices when we’re writing invoices. Heck, that’s almost luxurious.
I got ALL of my Thursday charts written. I got the rest of my Wednesday charts written, and I managed to re-create all of the surgical reports and records from Tuesday. By Thursday afternoon I still had an unholy pile of lab call backs and phone messages, including two from a deaf woman who wanted me to call her TTY connection to discuss why the cat that I’d only seen once had died abruptly just before his second appointment with me on Monday. Phone calls, schmone calls! I’m going HOME!
I went on a coffee and cookie run so the rest of the crew wouldn’t fade out while they were trying to get caught up and finish the rest of Thursday then turned towards home.
Except…..

Except just as I got to the turn that I take in front of the airport…..
My car started to lose power.
It was only one little cough and when I downshifted and stomped on the gas it went away so, maybe it was nothing.
Maybe.
Except you all know that it wasn’t.
Lost power again at the next turn I had to make about a mile from home. Downshifted and stomped on the gas, got her going again. Straightaway for the next 3/4 mile through the tunnel under the south runway for Sea Tac.
Cough, gag! (stomp, downshift, curse, pray, sweat! A tunnel under a runway would be an extremely sucky place for the car to die!)
I managed to sweet talk my car into continuing to run until the intersection of Normandy Road and Des Moines Memorial Drive. Where, for the record, the stoplight wasn’t working so it was flashing red in all four directions.
A quick left turn, a cough, a gag, a downshift and a stomp and….. PUTT.
Dead.
Halfway through a turn in the middle of the westbound lane, traffic trying to get past on either side and I could frickin’ WALK to the service station two blocks away, but I can’t get out of the car because it’s in the middle of the road. I could push the car to the service station, but the damn thing is headed UP HILL.
I called the state patrol. I called the AAA. I called my husband.
State patrol said they’d send someone out to manage the traffic around me, AAA said they’d send a tow, but it might be as much as an hour (although since I was blocking traffic they’d try to get out there faster). Andrew arranged to meet me at the service station two blocks away, but since I couldn’t leave the car, there wasn’t any point in him coming out.
A very nice off duty officer from Tenino (shout out to the Tenino police department, this dude did go above and beyond) parked his cruiser behind me with his lights on. I rolled down the window to let him know what was going on and we both agreed that he’d stay there until the state patrol showed up. The headlights went off, the console went dead, and the window wouldn’t roll up.
Did I mention that it was raining?

So I sat there getting soggy waiting for the AAA and the state patrol to show up.
Everyone eventually showed up and my car was decanted off at the service station. Finally at home and in my jammies I sat and stared for a LONG time.

I woke up this morning rather shell shocked.
Went to work.
The computer worked. It was still slow and retarded, but it worked. The gnomes that are certified to work on the radiology computers waved their magic wands and I could see the radiographs that I’d been waiting for for three days.
We still had a few mystery appointments, but they were managed in a (somewhat) timely fashion.
By 1 p.m. Piet had reappeared from Lynnwood with our resurrected server. All the computer stations worked, and ran at a decent speed. I could print prescription labels from whatever damn work station I pleased.
I could connect to our common documents file, I could print estimates, I had internet access and I could even connect to the printer to print client information pamphlets.
The service station called.
The good news is that the fix on my car was cheap.
The bad news is that they couldn’t find anything wrong with the electrical system.

With the way the rest of this week has gone, I’m not sure that I won’t die by lightning strike in the next few hours.
I’m wearing shoes with rubber soles and staying away from water.

I mentioned, back in July I think, (ah yes, here’s the correct post) that one of the reasons I love my profession is because of the wide and wild variety of species with which we deal.
Human medical people got NO idea whatsoever about how absolutely COOL medicine can be when it has to be applied to things that range from fins to legs (sometimes lots and lots of legs) to wings to carapaces.

And so I submit my experiences with opening up VIN and getting to the front page where, amongst other things, there are links posted to interesting veterinary journal articles and interesting conversations on the message boards.

Over the summer there was one day when there were links to two articles:
“Treatment of venous ulcers with surgical adhesives derived from snake venom”
and
“Notes on gestation periods and litter size in the arenicolous buthid scorpion, Leiurus quinquestriatus”

Who knew? A group of baby scorpions is a litter! And, for the record, the gestation period varies from 155 to 277 days and litter sizes range from 35 to 87 offspring.
And let’s just talk about how cool it is that snake venom may be useful in treating venous ulcers (a classification that includes pressure sores and diabetic ulcers amongst others).

And just the other day I opened up the front page on VIN and dropped right into a conversation about seizures in an ostrich.

Real doctors treat more than one species!

Things that are irrelevant enough that I can’t develop them into posts of their own, but which require comment regardless.

Recently spotted bumper stickers:

“GOD HEARTS FAGS”
Noted on the bumper of a mid ’90s model Toyota also sporting a “Vampire Tattoo and Piercing Studio” bumper sticker, a rainbow ribbon magnet, and a license plate holder outlined in skulls. I thought it was notable as it was made to look rather a lot like the signs that those religious homophobes who follow a certain loudmouth apostate wave that read “GOD HATES FAGS”. The similarity was really quite remarkable.

“HEY ACLU ‘Merry Christmas!’”
Noted on the bumper of (of course) a late model gigantor American SUV (a GMC Jimmy?). To which I respond, “oh get OVER yourself!”. Christianity isn’t the ONLY religion in the world, accept the fact that there are people in the world, even in the United States of America, who don’t worship like you do and that they might not appreciate what they consider a religious reference as a greeting. Consider how you’d feel if, everywhere you went, people said to you “Allah akhbar”. Upset yet? Yeah, I bet you are.
So shut the hell up about Christmas and wish people a happy holiday season. If they don’t like your Christmas then just leave them alone.

Recently heard inanities:

“Do you want a coupon book for the weekend after Thanksgiving?”
The receipt checker at the outside door of Costco asked me this as I was leaving with a $300 load of groceries. We routinely make one massive Costco run somewhat before Thanksgiving and then stay the hell away until the middle of January or so. When I was walking out the door with what obviously amounted to a huge amount of groceries, what on EARTH made him think I’d want (or need) to come back a week later?
To say nothing of the fact that there is no amount of money on earth that would be enough to get me within 10 miles of Costco on the weekend after Thanksgiving.

“My cat’s got an abscess on his face, but I’m not going to take him to the vet. I wouldn’t go to the doctor myself for something like that so I won’t take my cat for something I can take care of at home.”
Really?
You wouldn’t go to a doctor if you had a massive infection on your face? You’d rather sit around with a pocket of pus under your skin and a huge fever? (and from experience I can say with certainty that cats with facial abscesses tend to have shocking fevers)
Why do people say things like that to veterinarians? If they’re trying to impress us with their compassion or savvy in treating animals they’re not. Pretty much universally we think that people who futz around with home remedies for something that we can fix quickly and definitively are complete jerks.

And, my descent into Andy Rooney-ville:

Since when have pajamas been acceptable outerwear? I have started noticing people wandering around in public in p.j. pants and sweat shirts. Weird, no? To say nothing of REMARKABLY drafty this time of year.

We have been hearing sponsorship ads on NPR from the Mini corporation. Y’know, those remarkably cute little cars? They advertise themselves on NPR as having “go-cart handling”. Erm… I don’t WANT my car to have go-cart handling. I prefer my car to have real live grown up car handling. Although, as Andrew put it, at least go-cart handling is better than bumper car handling.

As has become the custom, we welcomed in the new year with a cornucopia of friends, food and fire, here at Chez Us. We made pizzas, quaffed drinks of both the hard and soft variety, set off fireworks and made much merry. At 12:42am, naturallement,  we hid our heads in propitiation to the Spam God. Many thanks to the 20+ friends and family members who showed up and joined in the rannygazoo.

Like last year’s celebration, we capped off the overall experience with a bonfire, attempting for the second year in a row to completely use up the ginormous applewood stumps we got from Margaret’s parents’ house. For the second year in a row, we were unsuccessful in getting the damn things to completely burn away; this may become a yearly effort that spans well into the (un)foreseeable future. Unlike last year, however, we decided to hold said bonfire in an actual fire pit that we built from those sort of wedge-shaped concrete blocks you see holding up the more frufru retaining walls in your better neighborhoods. This was a tremendous improvement over last year’s plan, in which we dug a hole in the dormant backyard garden for the fire, thus forcing our brace of inebriated guests to stagger back and forth between our muddy backyard and our poor innocent carpets. The fire pit worked out so well that we’re going to keep it around for use in other occasions, including as a replacement for our aged and highly improvisational charcoal grill system, which consists of two army-issue roasting pans, filled with briquettes and standing on cinderblocks. I plan on getting a couple of big stainless wire racks to span the pit and use as a grill surface for our various barbecue parties. I’m also bound and determined to use it for a monster chili-pepper-roasting party next pepper season…..it’s been entirely too long since we’ve had us a big pepper-palooza.

Among the highlights of this year’s celebration was a fire-breathing demo by Jason, who brought his very own personal stash of tiki torch oil for just this purpose, even though by the time he started he could probably have just spit on the fire and gotten a similar effect.

We also took the occasion of the new fire pit as an opportunity to burn a sage bundle that my sister Meg had put together and sent us many years back from New Mexico. That makes us sound way more New-Age-Hippie-Airhead than we actually are; we weren’t trying to summon the good spirits or align our chakras. It just seemed like a good time to make a little offering to Whatever’s Out There for the plenty we seem to have more than our share of. Sage burns nice and stinky….an acrid, cleansing smell. Made a nice topper to the evening. Well, morning, really.

This year’s party was nowhere near the drunken bacchanal of least year. While the liquor flowed freely, most folks seemed to rein themselves in a bit this year; we dropped from four pukers down to one, a very respectable decrease. And no one had their face drawn on with indelible marker this year. True, one of our revelers got on his phone and started prank-calling after-hours emergency vet clinics (interestingly enough, the same reveler who later barfed), but to be fair he was kind of goaded into it by others who shall remain nameless. Ethanol surplus or no, everyone remained the fun, happy, easygoing folks they are when sober. Which is yet another thing I love about our friends; on the occasion that they get shnockered, they just become the same people that we love and respect in the first place, only more so. Our friend Steve proffered the opinion that the inhibition-lowering effects of alcohol give you a chance to see what kind of person someone really is—a happy drunk is probably happy in their regular life, a nasty drunk is probably a bit of an asshole, etc.—which in the case of our group is an encouraging thought indeed. The sight of one fellow, two and a quarter sheets into the wind, cleaning our kitchen floor with a paper towel because he was a bit scandalized at how much dirt folks were tracking in from outside, just made me want to give him a big ol’ hug and thank whatever forces shape our destiny that we have such fundamentally decent and good-hearted human beings to call our friends. Everyone should be so lucky.

It occurred to me as we were cleaning up after the party that, without expressly intending to do so, we have put ourselves in a position that pretty much perfectly accommodates the goals we envisioned for ourselves early in our domestic relationship. Back when we were still ensconced in the wilds of deepest darkest Pullman, we used to fantasize about what our lives would be like once we returned to civilization. We envisioned a home in/around Seattle, where friends would gather for parties or drop by on the spur of the moment, where we could all just sort of bask in each other’s company and fellowship. And while ’tis true that we don’t all gather together as often or as extemporaneously as we might otherwise like, this is more a factor of the crazy-demanding schedules by which most of us live our lives….sort of a “the spirit is willing but the day planner is weak” kinda thing. And when the opportunity arises and friends and family manage to congregate here, whether for a movie night, a game brunch or a birthday party, it’s always a good time. Through sheer serendipity and some effort, we have created a home in which folks seem to feel welcome, which is really the very best we could have hoped for.

To all of our friends and family, near or far, the very best in Ought Ten.

I usually send out Christmas cards. I intended to do the same this year, but when I got around to getting them out to stuff and address I found that I had none.
Damn.
See, every year I usually go a little crazy with the Unicef catalogue and order a whole bunch of cards not realizing that I’d done the same the year before and still had some left over. It’s kind of a brain fart-ish holiday tradition and I can’t feel bad about it….I’m supporting Unicef after all!
Except that, as it turns out, I actually had some sort of brain fart in my brain fart last year and realized that I still had a ton of holiday cards and that I didn’t need to order any more.
So I didn’t.
The left overs from 2007 exactly took care of the list for 2008 and I was thrilled, thinking that I’d be able to make a big fat Unicef order in the summer or fall of 2009 and get a whole new batch of pretty cards. Unicef always has the prettiest cards.
Have you ever thought to check your supply of holiday cards in August or September?
Nope. Neither have I.
So three weeks ago when I sat down to do the Christmas cards I opened the drawer where I usually keep them and they weren’t there. I thought it was odd, but then remembered that I’d shifted things around in my desk drawers and filing cabinets after I finished redecorating my study last year so I checked the drawer where the Christmas cards _used_ to be. And you know what? The weren’t there either!
Suffice it to say that the Christmas cards that I thought were in my study weren’t, in fact, in my study because I’d sent them all out last year. And if you order holiday cards from Unicef in the first week of December, you can bet that you won’t get them in any prompt fashion (it being December and all). Mine came yesterday.

So happy holidays everyone. If I’m feeling energetic I might send out New Years cards this year, but since all of the pretty cards that I purchased from Unicef three weeks ago are, for the most part, Christmas or Hanukkah themed it seems a little silly to send them out after Hanukkah and Christmas are over.
But here’s a couple of pretty pictures anyway.

Isn’t Doug (on the left) cute in his new Christmas lights?

Peace and joy to you all.

It was with a mixture of amusement and bewilderment that I took delivery of order number xxxxxx when it arrived on my doorstep yesterday afternoon. Everything arrived in a timely manner and in good condition. So far I am more than satisfied with your pricing and your customer service. however, there is one matter that needs addressing.

My order was for forty-eight rolls of Seventh Generation toilet paper, thirty-two rolls of their paper towels, and two gallons of Dr. Bronner’s Citrus Castile Soap. Your prices were very competitive, particularly since UPS Ground shipping was included free of charge. After a brief bout of confusion regarding my billing address—which I regard as a good thing, reflecting as it does your particularly stringent precautions against online fraud—my order was completed.

About a week later, I was working in my home office when I heard the blare of the UPS van’s horn and got up to greet the driver. He met me at the door with my delivery….all seven boxes of it.

I was a bit taken aback. Your packing department had elected to send each twelve-back of toilet paper in its own box. The paper towels were broken down into two shipping containers, one containing three eight-packs and the fourth in a separate box.

Not only that, but each cluster of rolls was tightly secured on all sides by a thick coating of….bubble wrap. As though toilet paper were susceptible to bruises, dents or stress fractures during shipping.

In fact, the only thing that wasn’t rendered immobile in its box by a thick corona of bubble wrap were the only two things that could conceivably have benefited from such treatment, namely the two gallons of liquid soap. They arrived, terrified but none the worse for wear, in a single box with one bottle upright and the other on its side, with a smattering of bubble wrap thrown in as a garnish. Your trust in the power of plastic screw caps is touching.

As a consumer trying to use his buying power to help make small differences in the world, I can tell you that, when I think of helping to reduce conspicuous waste—by, say, purchasing paper products made from recycled materials—the image that comes to mind in no way resembles this:

All this instead of grouping the paper goods into, say, two boxes—one for the TP and one for the paper towels—with a third box for the soap. This would have actually saved you money; I ran the numbers at UPS.com. At standard retail shipping prices, the four separately boxed twelve-packs of toilet paper would have cost at least $14.10 per box to ship to Zone 8 (me) via UPS Ground, for a total of at least $56.40. I say “at least”, because the actual dimension of the boxes you shipped them in was slightly larger than the actual roll packs, which means that an even greater dimensional weight would apply and bump up the cost. By contrast, four twelve-packs shipped in one box via UPS Ground to Zone 8 would run about $52.37 retail. The cost of shipping the paper towels breaks down in a similar way.

Furthermore, I suspect that the Seventh Generation products I purchased are supplied to retailers such as yourselves in “cases”, bulk lots of multiples of four (say, four twelve-packs of toilet paper per case, or four eight-packs of paper towels) and that these cases arrive at your facility already boxed. I can only hope that you were out of those pre-boxed cases at the time the pick list for my order was printed, leaving the packer/shipper with no choice but to scrounge for appropriately-sized boxes to use in the fulfillment of this order. The thought of someone pulling a case of toilet paper off the warehouse shelf, cutting it open, removing the contents and putting them into four individual boxes for shipping is enough to turn my brain to Cheez Whiz.

Actually, I have a pretty good theory as to why my order was shipped the way it was. Two words: “holiday help”. Or perhaps “temp agency”. Someone with little or no experience on the job and not a whole lot of impetus to try to do things in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible. Or perhaps this is merely a case of someone with r-e-e-e-a-l-y bad spatial-relations skills. Either way, I’m certainly not suggesting that you dismiss this person out of hand. They may have numerous other desirable qualities and qualifications. But you might want to take them off the pick/pack/ship fast track and onto something more their cup of tea….assuming, of course, that they can get their tea to fit in just one cup.

Yes, I do walk all winter. We have a treadmill in the basement, but it’s elderly and given to overheating which makes it shut off suddenly. It’s noisy, VERY noisy, and I’m not very tolerant of the consistent rattle-bang anymore. And when running it’s a source of constant fascination to the kittens. The last time I was walking on the treadmill I had just gotten up to a decent speed when Pogo decided to leap off of the windowsill to try and catch the moving belt, landed on the deck behind me and got shot off the back of the treadmill to slam against the wall behind us.
On the whole walking outdoors seems a lot safer.

And a lot more pleasant. I don’t like to walk when it’s pouring rain, but if it starts raining when I’m out walking.. Oh well.
But any other sort of weather is pleasant and each has its own certain charm.
Walking after it’s frozen? Fantastic. I love seeing the ice crystals in the dirt and since there are two or three small streams on my walking route it’s always fun to see whether or not they’re frozen over. I usually have to be extremely careful where I put my feet, but I’ve not ended up on my ass yet.
I’m not so much of a fanatic that I go out to do my power walking in the snow. My walking route is hilly and I don’t really trust most drivers to not skid out of control and mish me.
Windy? I like wind. I usually end up having to wear my sunglasses since I most of our weather comes from the west and I spend about the first third of my walk heading straight west. The wind makes my eyes tear so much that the protection of the sunglasses is a necessity and I get some truly strange looks from passing cars. Besides it’s fun to chase leaves and try to stomp them.
A week or so ago I was walking in a fog (and no smart ass comments about how fast I do, or do not, wake up in the morning, thank you very much). A damn cold fog, but at the hill at the top of my walking route I can see the water so I was watching the water lift off of the fog. When I got to the bottom of the hill, there was still enough ground fog to make things and people appear mysteriously. I like fog.

About halfway through my regular walking route there’s a small section of land that I can’t quite classify. Surrounded by untrammeled suburbia it’s…. Well, it’s wild. For lack of a better name I generally call it the walking path.
I’m neither naive nor romantic enough to think that this is a section of virgin forest, but it’s certainly undeveloped. The land is obviously owned by the city of Normandy Park, the path through it is maintained to a certain degree, and I see their trucks in the parking lot now and again. It’s this chunk of land that is the bottom of steep sided bowl which, this being western Washington, guarantees that about 90% of the year it is very wet It’s full of alder, maple, oak, and holly along with any type of native undergrowth you can imagine. In the spring it’s bursting with skunk cabbage (I like skunk cabbage — it’s pretty regardless of how it smells) and horsetail. In the summer it’s full of berries. Any surrounding houses are far enough away that they can’t be seen when there’s leaves on the trees. It’s far enough in from the road that unless something large passes by you can’t hear road noise. It’s quiet, it’s damp, it’s peaceful. I’ve seen opossum and raccoon, I’ve seen deer sign, and once I saw a coyote. Birds of all kinds, I saw a pileated woodpecker this morning. I purposely slow down when I walk through because I take such pleasure in just being outside.
I was discussing this with a checker at Trader Joe’s the other day. We agreed that there frequently isn’t enough outdoors in modern life and that, on the whole, we thought that the world would be a nicer place if more people spent more time outdoors. She’s a gardener, the whole discussion had started when she asked me if I thought the weather (gorgeous at that point) would hold long enough for her to get outside that afternoon. I replied that I hoped so because I still had a ton of bulbs that needed to go in the ground and we were off…

But if I’m nuts for walking three to five miles a day as often as I can in any type of weather, well, mostly it’s because I don’t get much other excuse to be outside in my daily life.
These are all photos that I shot in one trip around the walking path. There are some marvelous things to see when you walk outdoors. Even in suburbia.

I had myself a mini-epiphany—I guess that would be an “epiphanette”—a few weeks ago. I had decided it was high time for me to upgrade my desktop publishing rig from my serviceable but long in the tooth Power Mac G5 to something more robust. I have been working non-stop on a variety of creative projects for the last four months or so, and I have calculated that a good 15% of my time is spent simply waiting for my computer to catch up with me. Photoshop filters, export translators, disk activity—all of these and more take processor and disk time, and it’s time I had to spend sitting around with my thumb up my tuchis instead of getting other shit done. The Mac OS is good at multitasking, but interrupting a highly intensive task by starting up a few less intensive ones tends to cause all tasks to slow down; better just to wait until Job A is complete before starting up Job B.

Anywho, I calculated the money required to get myself a top-flight new Mac Pro, plus a few other components that would greatly improve the experience. The total came out to about four thousand dollars. The only remaining question was when to go about getting it. The Mac Pro was getting well past it’s normal development cycle; there was bound to be a new model announced any day now. This would not only mean improved performance and new features for the money, but sale prices on the previous models. So I quelled the voices yelling “now now now now now!” in my head, and hunkered down to wait for the announcement.

About a week and a half into my vigil, I had my epiphanette. Why, I wondered, was I waiting for the advent of a new computer from Apple, when for the same money I was planning to spend, I could buy a top-of-the-line PC, cross-grade copies of all the software I use, and a fast PC laptop to go with it?

It sounds like a Microsoft ad, I know, but there it was: logic was staring me in the face, and I could deny it no longer. So, as of about seven days ago, I have become—in the timeless words of my brother-in-law—Bill Gates’ butt monkey.

Not that this is quite the tectonic shift that all my drama-queen bloviating would imply. Of the six (!) working computers in the house prior to my purchase, three of them were PCs anyway; two gaming machines and my Web server. I’ve run Uncle Andrew dot Net off of both PCs and Macs over the years, with few complaints about either platform, once I prised my blog from the clutching talons of IIS 5 and moved over to Apache. And while it’s true that I’ve done all of my creative work on the Mac platform, the actual software used to perform my job differs little between the two platforms. There are a host of keyboard shortcuts that one must retrain oneself to use, of course, and there are certain pitfalls of cross-platform translation that one must be aware of. But the interface, and the visual metaphors that support it, are essentially identical. I’m finding my way around the new software with relative ease.

The operating system itself, that’s a different matter entirely. My new computer is running, of course, Windows 7. My impression of it is somewhere between lukewarm and warm. It’s not a bad OS, by any means; the common lore that Vista was Vista 0.5 and Windows 7 is Vista 1.0 seems right on the money. As with Vista before it, I like very much the fact that I can turn down various special effects like the whole Aero Glass thing, which to me is just an embarrassing distraction, the nerd equivalent of a big gaudy spoiler and a Street Glow kit on a Honda Civic. That’s something I wish Apple would incorporate into OS X, though I doubt they ever will. I really like the new way of grouping system tray items into “always visible”, “sometime visible” and “never visible” subsets; that’s a huge space-saver. I like how dragging a window to the top of the screen automatically maximizes it. And as has been the case since the Earth’s crust cooled, printing from a Windows machines seems infinitely faster than printing from a Mac, using either of the most popular printing languages, PCL and Postscript.

But my biggest requirement of an operating system—that it not get in the way of what I’m trying to do—is to my mind one of 7’s biggest stumbling blocks. Much of the Windows 7 experience seems geared towards tricking it into doing what I want it to do. Why is it that I can put the shortcut to a folder on my computer in the Start menu but not a shortcut to a folder on a network volume, like a NAS? Why don’t folders in the Start Menu jump open when you mouse over them, instead of requiring you to open the root folder and then dig through the submenus to find what you were looking for? (And for that matter, why is it that when you do click on a folder in the Start menu, the OS doesn’t instantly recognize what you’re trying to do and show you that folder on the desktop, instead of keeping the folder hidden under whatever program window happens to be in the foreground at the time?) Why can I put a shortcut to an application in the Quick Launch area of the Task bar but not a folder? Why can’t I rearrange the order of Toolbars in the Taskbar dynamically by dragging them around? Microsoft helpfully included a “Navigation Pane”, a sidebar on the left side of folder windows with links to commonly accessed items. That’s great, just ducky; so why the fuck would they not make it so you could add things you commonly use to the Navigation Pane and remove things that you don’t? I will never, ever need the “Homegroup” link. What I could really use is a list of folders, selected by me, containing my most commonly accessed projects.

And the killer, the Big Kahuna granddaddy WTF³ feature of all time has to be the way Windows handles special Unicode characters like ®, ™, ß and so forth. On a Mac, in any application and the OS itself, if you want a ™ symbol, you hit “Option-2″. In Windows, if you want the same symbol, you hit “Alt-0-1-5-3″. That, or you go to the Start menu, open the Accessories folder, open the System Tools folder, select Character Map, find the ™ symbol, highlight it, select Copy, go back to your document and select Paste. What could be easier?

Now it is true that many individual Windows apps have much simpler keystroke combinations built in for such characters, but the Mac OS has used “Option-2″ for the ™ symbol for any and all scenarios since time immemorial. I imagine that there must be some good reason for keeping Windows wedded to such a bizarre array of rules regarding special characters, but I have no idea what it is.

[I brought this particular gripe up at a party yesterday, and my friend fisherbear explained that this convention was a holdover from the early days of Windows, and that it allows for access to the complete UTF character set from the keyboard so it is in fact a more complete solution that that offered by Apple. To which I say; maybe so, but just because a system offers more options doesn't necessarily make it better. My feet can take me over a broader range of terrain than my car, too; doesn't mean I'm going to walk to my in-laws' house in Bellevue instead of taking my car.]

And yet despite all my kvetching, here I am with a brand-new 2.6GHz Core i7 machine with 12 gigs of RAM, two 1-terabyte hard drives, two DVD burners, a Radeon HD 5850 video card, Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Gamer sound card and Windows 7, lovingly constructed by my favorite local computer store, plus a lovely little Sony Vaio laptop and up/crossgrades to all my software, all for around the same price as a dual-Xeon Mac Pro with 6 gigs of RAM, one 640 GB hard drive, One DVD burner, an NVidia GeForce GT120 and stock audio. And no upgraded software, save for a copy of Parallels so I could run Windows on it as well.

None of which is to say that I don’t still love the Macintosh; I’ve just kind of drifted away from it over the years as I’ve gotten my hands “dirtier” in the working innards of computers. I think that the Mac platform is a boutique product. It’s there for people who want performance, stability and superior design from a computer, and are willing to pay a premium price for it. Unlike days of yore, the Mac is no longer solely for people who “don’t know anything about computers”. Because of the UNIX roots of OS X, there’s now a sort of “donut hole” effect in the demographic of Mac users; a demographic that spans all the way from grandmothers and dorm-dwellers to oceanographers and astrophysicists. In the middle of the donut hole are those of us who want power and performance but don’t want to pay out the pooter for top-notch ‘puter. People who are willing—nay, are compelled—to tweak and tune, fiddle and futz with our machines until they are everything they could possibly be, or at least until we break something and have to start all over. I would never dare to imply that this sort of person is either smarter or dumber, more or less mature, higher or lower on the invisible yet pervasive ladder of technocracy than those who choose another path. There is room in the digital firmament for every constellation; Windows, OS X, Linux, Unix, Amiga, BeOS, what have you. All except the CP/M folks; they need to be cleansed from the Earth. Joke, people, it was a joke.