The Lion, the Witch and the...

To put the happy ending first, I did build both wardrobes, and they're very tall and good looking enough that I've temporarily christened the bedroom the Colonial Room. I look forward to putting stuff in them.

I wasn't always so optimistic.

I started building the wardrobe just shy of noon last Friday, the day after we closed on our condominium, had our IKEA blowout (many dollars spent), and celebrated our new lives as adults in thirty-year debt. IKEA flat packs as much as it can, so this very tall, heavy item was packaged in a cardboard box just a little longer than its longest side panels, three feet wide and maybe six inches deep. It's not very expensive in its base configuration because IKEA makes it out of relatively flimsy particleboard - understandably, since you never pay much attention to the ceiling or floor of your wardrobe. It's the doors that are made out of nice stuff, possibly wood, probably particleboard coated in a heavier grade of white plastic, plus a pane of glass you can't make out of recycled stuff (except sand, I guess). You pay as much for one door as you would for the entire wardrobe. I would remind myself of this several times during the afternoon debacle.

I figured that building a wardrobe would be like building bookcases. They look alike, especially the way IKEA makes them: tall side panels with evenly spaced holes for customizing the interior with additional shelves, attaching doors, or mounting a simple light so you don't have to fumble around in the dark for your blazer during the long, dark northern winter months. They've got a lot of the same hardware, including screws, more screws but with flat heads for latching other, sort-of-screws that look like a marriage between a miniature coffee can and a flying saucer that latch onto the flat head screws to tighten the join between planes. Add to this list wooden dowels for those parts requiring not so many screws and a packet of tiny nails that would lose in a fight against thumb tacks used for tacking down the flimsy white wardrobe backing and hopefully providing a little more stability. One thing IKEA did not provide? A hammer.

I remembered with some excitement having run past Clark-Devon Hardware not more than four blocks away, so, since I was running short on time, I hopped in the car (sorry, environment, Al Gore). Parking at the meters on the side was my first mistake. Though the side looks like the entrance, the builders very cleverly constructed this hardware store so the only front facing the street is a large, foreboding brick wall punctuated occasionally with sealed up doors with instructions to go north. Here, the zombies had already attacked and won. The side entrance, closest to the meters, held the rental office. I discovered this when I followed the guy in front of me under the assumption that he knew what he was doing, then bumped into him as he turned on his heel as soon after realizing he'd walked into the wrong entrance. It's funny, but it normally doesn't take very long for me to figure out north, but maybe the signs of zombie plague had freaked me out.

When I did at last find the entrance, the interior was about as far from Home Depot as you can expect. Tiny aisles, everything under glass, and a nail department that seemed to stretch to infinity. It took me about five minutes' questing through the labyrinth to find my $5 hammer, at which point I had to ask an employee to open it up. He was fast, nice, and told me repeatedly to have a nice day. Would that I had heeded this omen.

I paid for my hammer with my debit card, barely twenty four hours into my home ownership and already ridiculously cash poor. The gas company representative - the reason I had taken the day off work, though, honestly, I could have used any excuse - still had not showed up, so I arranged my tools and started screwing. Or should I say, "screwing up."

Sorry for the cleverness.

Not to brag, but I've built a lot of Legos in my life. I understand step-by-step instructions and can usually parse where a screw is supposed to go based on the dotted lines and diagrams that apparently accompany any Scandinavian export. My first four screws I messed up in four different ways. I just could not get it right. Usually, the little piece of my brain that serves as fact-checker helps me here, since I'm always asking, "Why?" If it doesn't serve any obvious purpose, can I throw it away without consequence? How much should I allow myself to be directed by these so-called "directions"? This brain part was not helping me, perhaps taking a nap like dolphins whose brain hemispheres take turns sleeping. Whatever the reason, I kept assuming I knew the next step, taking the plunge and then having to undo the screw or screws. Hence, I was only about an eighth of the way through wardrobe one of two before I spied the gas company rep sitting in his van across the street from us, reading the paper.

Rather than wait for him to hit the buzzer when I was in the bathroom or some place equally inconvenient, I threw on shoes and walked out to his van. He was very nice and quite Chicagoan, big, young face, attitude that says, "Yeah, you might be tough, but we made our city out of slaughterhouses, so fuhgeddaboudit." He checked our pilot lights. The gas had not been turned off since the previous occupants had owned and heated the unit to the very moment we bought it, so the pilots were fine, although he did recommend moving the flammable paint supplies away from where the realtor had stowed them, right next to the furnace. Stupid realtor.

Unfortunately, we couldn't find the gas meter. I found out later where the room was, and that I didn't have the key to it and would not until the owners mailed the additional keys to us. A further wrinkle to that plan was the fact that they were mailing our keys to our new address. The address for which we did not have a key to the mailbox because they were going to mail it to us. This logic loop was eventually settled by the former owner, who stopped by on Sunday to drop off a bag of keys, some of which were labeled, others not so much. I am proud to say we can now get mail and access the gas and electrical meters. This didn't help me much Friday, when I had to send the gas man on his way. He said I could make another appointment and, encouragingly, "You've got gas now, at least." When I called Brandi, she took this as an ominous sign, but I assured her the gas company could not shut off your heat when the weather dipped below freezing, and I think that helped and might even have been true or at least based on solid Internet rumor. But I didn't call Brandi just then, either. No, to alleviate my frustration with the weather, the keys, the gas and the hammer, I thought I would get something big done and assemble Wardrobe Number One.

So there are six sides to a wardrobe: top, bottom, left, right, front and back. Front will eventually hold the doors and back is kind of flimsy cardboard, so initially you only have to make the sides, top and bottom. According to the directions, once you have all of the hardware attached, you attach the bottom panel to one of the long nine foot side panels resting on the floor, and tighten. You then stand the assembly and have a friend stand on a ladder and hold it while you attach the side panel, tighten, then the top panel, and tighten, after which everything should stand on its own.

I didn't have a ladder. Improvising like MacGuyver, I took our IKEA Poang chair from the sun room and tested out its steadiness, which was about on par with the slick deck of a sailboat on heavy seas. In other words: lousy. Unfortunately, unless I wanted to grab our neighbors' porch chairs or take an hourlong trip back to the old apartment, I didn't see much of a choice. More worrying, I didn't have a second person, and those panels were heavy. Improvising with less-than-Macguyver-like inventiveness, I steadied the side panels against the walls at the corners of the room, climbed up on the flexing wooden chair I couldn't be certain would not snap in two under my two hundred pound burden, and set the top panel on the edges of the precarious side panels.

For a moment, everything held.

Of course, a proper wardrobe has to do more than balance. I would have to maneuver the top panel so the holes in its sides matched with the screws I'd previously installed during the "which screw goes where?" phase. I got one side matched up - the left? So hard to say now... - but couldn't tighten it down because the holes were in the bottom of the board, against gravity, so the hardware I had to drop in would just fall out without a steadying hand. At this point, I realized the IKEA directions may have called for too few people. Raising a child takes a village; raising a wardrobe, about three-fourths of one. Still, I figured if I could get both sides at least hanging from the screws, I could head down my rickety Poang chair, grab the hardware, tighten, lather, rinse, repeat with the second unit.

I pulled the top panel up, off its resting place on the side panel, then over towards the other side. That's when it slipped off the screws loosely holding it. It came crashing down. The swell, cheap particleboard did what it does naturally and shattered where it could. The top panel was broken. The bottom panel was broken in many places and looked like it had gone on an ill-fated skiing trip. One side panel was mostly intact... except for the holes one might use to, for instance, hold together a wardrobe. These had been yanked by the screws and the passage of the top shelf towards the earth, and the particleboard here, too, crumbled appropriately.

I sat for a little while in my Poang chair and cried. Eventually, I called Brandi, who said it was going to be okay, we're going back to IKEA anyway for bookshelves, and did the gas man come, by the way? I told her about that failed quest and she was upset that I had not called since she had just spoken with John, a member of our condo board who might have been able to get us into the basement space. In as calm a voice as possible, I said, "Now... is... NOT... the... time."

That would come later, when I realized I could ignore IKEA directions and build the way I wanted, on the floor, where you don't need to balance and gravity holds your tightening hardware in instead of mocking your efforts to defy it. Later, when I guiltily disposed of the corpse of our first wardrobe, leaving one panel next to the dumpster because it would not fit inside. I kept the hardware because, very, very rarely IKEA omits a part and you have to call their version of tech support and wait to have it shipped to you. I want to build NOW, even if it means screwing it up and developing a blister stigmata from pressing the screwdriver into the center of my hand. It's a desire that can not be and was not held back by failure.

The room looks beautiful now, still not complete, but moving forward.

The Condo - 1

We signed the papers Thursday, the week after Thanksgiving. Brandi and can now call ourselves homeowners, landed gentry, barons (but not robber barons, that comes later). Mostly everything went right, as right as the process ever goes, everyone else around the table assured us. We met at Ticor, a TItle CORporation downtown, and in fact shared the elevator down from the parking garage, walked through the lobby, then rode in the elevator up to the office where we signed with our attorney before we even realized she was our attorney. Brandi had her suspicions, but I kept wondering, "Who is this woman smiling at us?" I thought she looked too young. I hope she reads this post; maybe she'll give us a discount on future legal expenses. It wasn't until we got off at the proper floor - one floor below the floor we thought we were going to - that she turned to us and asked us who we were. Then the truth came out. We met our lender, Britt, our lawyer, Catherine, the sellers' lawyer, Holliday/Holly, the Ticor agent whose name escapes me and our realtor, Iliana, who arrived a little sleepy because she had gotten roped into a "Lost" marathon the night before and, really, once you start with that show it is dreadfully hard to stop. She had a big mug of coffee and slumped a little. Compare her to Brandi. My adorable wife had woken up at three in the morning, seven and a half hours before our closing, posted a blog update, written a website, and called the title company to make sure our check cleared and we were coming in for a smooth landing. As we sat in the Ticor office, Brandi practically vibrated herself to invisibility, she was so excited.

As it turns out, the bank check was one of the few bumps in the road to closing. The title company had not received word of its clearing and the deal would not go through without that word. We owed a certain amount for closing and had overpaid, and so would receive money back... if the check cleared. If not, we would have to get a certified check from the bank, eating up more time for the closing, return, then cancel the old check we had written. Probably it would have tacked on another hour to the closing, which bothered us not very much because we had both taken the day off of work to see to it this property came into our hands. Our attorney, however, who by this time we recognized, had another closing a little after noon and another closing after that. Her Blackberry went off about twenty times as she sat there, talking us through the legalese. We knew we chose right when we went with her for our attorney, since, every time her phone went off she would pull it out of its cradle, glance at it or send the caller to voice mail, then stick it back on her belt without breaking stride. She just kept on talking. I'd like to know where they teach people to multitask like that. "Busy day," she muttered, each of the twenty times. Do you think?

At any rate, using the Ticorp agent's Internet connection, Brandi accessed our bank records to prove that, yes, the check cleared, after having been deposited Monday. Monday? We wrote it the Wednesday before... but, because of the Thanksgiving holiday, of course, it had not been fully processed until after the weekend. Stupid banks and lenders... though we adore them as well and will for the next thirty years or more.

Speaking of lenders, Britt was incredibly sweet and patient, watching over the transfer process. At one point, she asked if Brandi had received her email. We thought it an odd question until we realized that she had taken a picture of us signing and emailed it to us from her phone. Technology is great.

As far as the signing itself, I have few complaints. The monetary amounts being so large, the lenders, sellers, city, county and state all not only want you to know the rules and what it takes to break them and default on your loan, they want you to acknowledge you've read them and sign in triplicate that you understand. Unfortunately, the process is so choked with these documents that by the end you're barely glancing at the paper, so if a bunch of guys in scrubs come to my new condo to take one or both of my kidneys, we'll all know why.

We had an additional speed bump at "Avenue" versus "Street". The lender played it smart and just put the street name on all the lending documents. Not so the title company. Rather than wait to reprint every changed page, our attorney added a third task to her multitasking and crossed out every instance of "street" and put in "avenue". She said the word started to lose meaning after a while. We initialed at every change, effectively doubling our signing burden. At the end of the signing, we had to sign a sheet of just signatures to give the title company, lender and anyone else who now owns a piece of us something to compare to in case someone comes to them with a legal document claiming something outrageous like, "I hearby stake the next round of poker on my condo... signed, M. K. L." Now they have the MKL to prove it was me and, yes, I was both drunk and stupid.

Signing complete, we all shook hands and Brandi and I thanked everyone. It was during the thanking that the sellers' lawyer finally said the two words she was ever going to say to us, "You're welcome." I think she also commented about the weather to our lawyer in a snarky way, as in, "It looks like snow. Good luck getting to your other closings...", but that may have been my imagination.

We had plans for the rest of the day and I believe we got about a third of it done. Prior to the signing I had wavered between inordinate optimism and an indifferent pessimism, as in, "They need, what, like five signatures?" to "Shane and Clair spent all day and cried four times before they were even allowed to THINK they could own a house!" so just to be safe we packed in about four weekends' worth of events. We have a lovely problem with our new home that not a lot of first-time homebuyers face: what to do with all the space. Before the villagers start chasing us down with burning torches and pitchforks, I should amend that we are sacrificing a lot of closet space, which we hope to amend through wardrobes, but more on that in a moment. The first place either of us think to go when dire furniture need is Schaumburg... to the great, towering three story blue and yellow anti-zombie fortress and Swedish meatball source that is IKEA. So, after downing a meal at McDonald's (note to Brandi from Brandi: never again with the Chicken McNuggets) and dropping off our four packed bins of cleaning supplies and painting gear, we headed northwest.

We knew what we wanted. We knew where to find it, approximately. We knew the cost. So why did it take us two hours and cost so much more than we budgeted? I blame the Swedes. Their wily design and clever marketing is more captivating than QVC could hope to be. Like an expedition to the Congo, it took an extraordinary effort to find what we were looking for, and I think we lost several of our porters doing it. Since Pip - our Scion xA - despite looking a little like a mini Cooper on steroids isn't more than five feet deep and the boxes we bought topped out at nine, we opted to rent a van to get everything home. IKEA doesn't actually rent vans. Instead, IKEA has a green phone next to the furniture pick up. You take it off the cradle and it automatically dials - that night, it automatically dialed Joe, who had a cell phone and worked for Enterprise. Enterprise rents by the hour, which stinks if most of that time is transit to and from the city of Chicago. Brandi and I loaded boxes. If ever that woman proved to me she could withstand the pain and physical endurance of childbirth, it was watching her huff her way through carrying the other end of the seventy pound wardrobe boxes. That woman has stamina, especially when you realize that she was up hours before the rooster crows. Even our insomniac cat Patrick must have wondered what was up with this woman.

As soon as I got in the van, I made this noise, "Hwannnnghhhh! Hwannghhhh!" because driving it felt like piloting a cruise ship with a periscope for a windshield. Is it a law that heavy, large vehicles must use light, skinny steering wheels and a transmission the size of a popsicle stick attached to the steering column, or do they make the steering controls by ripping the elements out of cars manufactured in the seventies? And while I'm ranting, can IDOT - the Illinois Department of Transportation, but, honestly, just one letter away from IDIOT - please hammer out the lanes for tolls on I-90? As is, you can't figure out if you're in the cash or the automated IPass lane until you're practically on top of it, and I'm surprised there aren't more accidents near the toll booths as unwitting drivers cut across four lanes to pay eighty cents instead of a thirty dollar ticket for running the wrong lane. As it was pointed out to me, Illinois doesn't want you to pay cash. It costs a lot more to staff the toll booths with warm-blooded mammals than the IPass lanes with space age electronics... which is fine, except that a certain percentage of cars will never have an electronic pass, just as a certain percentage of people riding public transportation will have no need to buy an electronic card. Tourists and people with poor credit and hence no credit cards won't have an account to debit, or won't have the desire to open up a small security hole to let a city or state automatically deduct an arbitrary amount of cash from their cash flow. Finally, what ever happened to the machines into which you tossed your eighty cents? Are those gone forever or just phased out while Illinois constructs the Toll Plaza of the Future or something else that would take as many years to develop as the Apollo space program.

When we got home - new home - we unloaded, both of us fairly beat and even more so with the knowledge that, best case scenario, we still had two hours' work ahead of us dropping the van off and driving back again. Gravity had, cruelly, remained unchanged, so getting the wardrobe boxes up two flights of steps proved daunting and would have been impossible if not for IKEA's flat packing and a rather inventive method of carefully flipping the boxes end-over-end up the stairs. Snow was by this point just starting to fall. The only thing more suspenseful than whether or not we would make it to the second floor without broken bones was what was in the boxes once we finally started constructing. Would we find all of our hinges? Had the particleboard survived banging against the sheet steel floor of the van? Did the Swedish inmates who built and packed the boxes include everything or could a hex wrench tucked into the unmentionables prove useful in prison?

We drove back, and back again. The tolls got easier as the landmarks delineating them became more familiar. Two miles southeast of the enormous scrub-covered landfill, we find the southbound toll. Northbound lies not far from the Meijer exit.

Meijer: the Chicagoland WalMart substitute Brandi swears we will never again visit. We tried to take advantage of the Black Friday deal the store offered on 20" flat panel LCD TVs - $99, after $200 rebate - but if a deal sounds too good to be true, it isn't, necessarily, but at least a third of the cash-strapped families in the city will buy a minimum of one, and arrive twelve hours before it opens, effectively negating any swell plans you had to "beat the crowds". Also, the attitude of the employees there really, truly stunk. During the line-up to the $99 TV, one stressed out woman came up to our line, now so long and snaking that it wound from electronics through pharmacy, frozen foods, canned foods, checkout and the entrance, and shouted at us, "What are you thinking, people? Nobody can get into or out of the store! MOVE!" Now, I'm no mind reader, but, I believe from the Meijer Black Friday ads 90 percent of the people in line were clutching that the majority had shown up for cheap TVs and paid only secondary importance to the layout of the line. One might even suspect that that was the Meijer employee's job, but pointing it out to her would probably have gotten me peppersprayed. The second time we went back, just before our IKEA run and suffering from boundless optimism that we knew where to find it. We found it, but, had this been the Yukon, some of our sled dogs would not have made it. As we walked in, a woman, a different employee not necessarily out to prove her worth to management with her technique of Line Management Through Shame, was getting ready to get some carts from the parking lot, swearing like a sailor: "Yeah, I have to grab some f'ing carts and haul them in. F'ing F." Probably, she said more than F, but that's all my delicate ears could hear. Their TV selection was small, and overpriced, and underwhelming, and so we will not be returning to and certainly not purchasing food from (due to possible "not-clean-food" practices from disgruntled employees) this particular Meijer.

I had another adventure with the wardrobe, but that is another story and will be told another time.

We have a condo!

IKEA

IKEA can change you. Case in point: this strange man here, with gardening implements for hands. Can you believe he was once a productive member of society, quietly administering networks and performing improvisational comedy for select groups of friends, loved ones and holiday events? No? With its low, low everyday prices and items flat packed into easily-assembled kits by inmates at select Swedish penitentiaries, there is madness brewing underneath the surface of the inexpensive items IKEA wants to sell you. Fight Club was a warning.


The same gentleman here wields a lamp many times the size of his head, perhaps in a vain attempt to find his spouse amidst the confusingly hexagonal layout of the IKEA store. By the slight growth of beard on his face, one might surmise he has spent many days in the store. One would be right.

Countdown to Condo

This Thursday, Brandi and I hope to celebrate the next milestone in our ongoing steps towards maturity: land ownership. If all goes well in the next few days - and we've heard so many stories of just the opposite - we'll get keys to our very first piece of owned Chicago real estate. Mostly. As with most everyone in the middle class, we will own the property only so long as we make timely mortgage payments to our lender, since we didn't have the price of the unit laying around in our couch cushions. Also, since it is a condominium, we are in the curious position of owning a property and still paying rent, which everyone insists on calling assessments because, hey, why use one syllable when three will do. As near as I can understand, even though we own the unit, since it's on the second floor and would crash to the ground if the unit below it and the building holding both were to instantaneously disappear, we must pay homage the building in order to make sure it doesn't. It seems a lot like idol worship to me, but I say that about everything.*

At any rate, there are about a million details to attend to, which can add a lot of wear and tear to an already stressful holiday season. Friday, we tried to take advantage of Black Friday deals for gifts and managed to walk away with everything except the LCD TV and the set of cordless phones we decided we didn't care for. We set the alarm for 4:15 and managed to get up on first snooze, but it still wasn't enough to snag the $99 (after rebate) Meijer LCD TV, nor the pricier but larger 32" deal advertised at Micro Center. This may not be a popular opinion, but I blame the rest of Chicago, if not the world, for taking up the retailers on their deals before I've had my chance to suck them dry like a cash vampire. We have to schedule a walkthrough Tuesday to make sure the owners haven't made off with anything vital like toilets or furnaces since we first saw the condo. This would be far more relevant if the owners were a) crooks or b) living there now and moving out, possibly scratching up the walls in the process. Since we never heard cackling and the dry-twig-like rasping of evil palms rubbed together in glee at our deception, and since the owner was already moved out when we first saw the place, we think we're nearly in the clear there. For our first night of occupancy, we packed several bins of supplies, including bedding, toilet paper and candles and matches just in case something goes horribly wrong with Commonwealth Edison and our electricity doesn't go through. Between Thanksgiving and cleaning out the Superfund site that was my office, we threw out seven bags of garbage this weekend, including the turkey carcass, irrelevant leftovers, electronics too old to use or install Linux on, and shredded receipts and credit card offers that had somehow shoved themselves in every free nook in my office shelving. Though the rats may feast, they will not learn my social security number!

It seems odd that this week is the last week in November because we've been living most of the last two months at the start of December. As much as remains to be done around the apartment to turn us over to the condo, it looks like most of the heavy intellectual work is done, making room for the brute force, time plus muscles plus the occasional inclined plane and fulcrum approach. I look forward to it. I am thankful for the opportunity and the vacation time to handle it. I am grateful to have a wonderful, hard working wife to support our dream and share in it.

* This week's idol worship includes: video games, teleconferencing, corporate logos, bars, skinnydipping, bowling, status reports, chrome fenders, bowling bars, NASA, peanut butter and anything other than jelly, Rogaine, green bowling balls, lay ups, Amish furniture, red bowling balls, bowling shoes worn outside the alley, juggling more than three items of varying weight and geometry, TMX Elmo, and video game bowling. I should add LCD TVs and Black Friday, but like professional wrestling I love them too much to condemn them.

World's Worst / World's Best

World's Worst Cobbler:
"Two left shoes... and the work is shoddy."

World's Best Cobbler:
"Two shoes left... and the world is shod."

Hard Drive Failure

It happened again last week. Like a horror movie, sometimes you know it's coming, the shadow of a claw reaching around the corner, a haunting melody repeated through a chorus of children's voices, Linda Blair spitting pea soup at the camera. One of my coworkers reported a blue screen on his computer last week. It was all over by the time I got to his office. The hard drive had begun to fail sometime over the weekend. I wasn't even around to back it up before it died. When I tried to restart the computer, hoping against hope that some crucial system hive file had been damaged at an inopportune moment, the worst was confirmed: error, no hard drive present. The hard drive had died.

It happens. It's happened to me more than once, and it's never pretty. System administrators - a group that technically includes me - always tell you to back up your data. I've even set up a fairly elaborate system of backups for the computers at my workplace, with shared folders written to a RAID 5 hard drive (three or more hard drives slaved together to think they're one, with one drive acting to check against the data against the others and if necessary restore or correct missing or corrupt data), backed up onto tape. Eventually, I wouldn't mind off-site backups. Point is, all these elaborate preparations still count on people dragging their data to the drive. I could automate it - and have, somewhat inconsistently - but it slows up the shutdown, not to mention the network. And the human element had not backed up his hard drive since May. He had lost work on his data sets, documents and particularly his dissertation. What's five months measured against eight years' school? Potentially a lifetime, especially when the degree is needed for a job, and the job is needed to pay off all those student loans from the previous lifetime. Still, if the loss is enormous, the cost to recoup it is appropriately capitalistic, meaning the companies that will recover your data, probably, will bleed you dry to do so. Fees go anywhere between $50 (unlikely) to $1,000 or more (how bad do you want your data?). My heart breaks when a hard drive dies. Even if the user backed up a minute before, something went down, and it's probably important.

Sometime before the turn of the millennium was my first hard drive failure. Unlike my coworker, I can almost certainly trace its death to my hands. At the time, I had a Mac clone, a Power Computing machine with something less than a gigabyte of hard disk and a processor that would be more at home in my Treo than in something attached to a monitor. How did we do it back then? The unit was a pizza box that I had set on its side to clear up desk space. One night, in an explosive fit of ire, I hit the box. Nothing happened, of course, and certainly whatever had gone wrong on screen or in system had not gone right because I was boxing the packaging. I hulked out a little, pounding the bottom of the box. Suddenly, the monitor went blank. I had killed my computer. Whatever my problem was at the time, it wouldn't bother me again. Then again... I brought out the toolbox, unscrewed the top of the machine looking for... What? A circuit breaker, now set to "off"? A tiny vial of kryptonite accidentally broken open next to a miniaturized Superman on a hamster wheel? A component sit-in?

As it turns out, that's kind of what I found, as I found the processor lying loose, popped off the motherboard. Apparently, I'd hit it in just the right direction to send it flying. I re-seated it, turned on the computer and crossed my fingers. It worked!

A few weeks later, the computer started making grinding noises. Naturally, having dealt with the innards of the machine, I ignored them until the computer would not start up. Then I called tech support. They sent out a guy who told me, nope, there's no fixing that; the delicate arm that reads the platters on your hard drive and hovers, mere atoms above it, has crashed into the platter, scratching the data it's trying to read. It's like trying to read a book by the light of the page you've just set on fire. Had anything happened to the computer recently, any sudden impact?

I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. Strictly for the warrantly, mind you, not my pride. Not my pride.

So the data was lost forever, although the fact that the technician who replaced the drive had a CD of illicitly copied programs to replace or update those consigned to binary paradise did soften the blow. I managed to recover a small portion of the data a few years later when I stumbled across a small cache of 3.5" disks I had forgotten to wipe clean. Still, it's strange when a part of your life develops amnesia, and exactly like the intersection of real life and the movies, hitting yourself on the head again will not bring it all back.

World's Best / World's Worst

World's Worst Veterinarian:
"Bad news, I'm afraid. I killed your pet rock."

World's Best Veterinarian:
"The good news is, I fixed your dog... and your transmission... with the same set of tools!"

Sunday Feast!

I made chicken parmesan yesterday, six chicken breasts pounded flat as papyrus, slathered in egg whites, powdered with Italian seasoning bread crumbs, gently placed on a thin bed of Ragu sauce in Pyrex dishes, then covered with shredded cheese, more Ragu with Italian seasoning, garlic powder, fresh diced onion and home grown sliced tomatoes ripened on the windowsill. The dinner took somewhere between three hours and six months, depending on your "go" time - the pounding of the chicken or the planting of the seeds - and was quite a lot better or at least more to our taste than restaurant chicken parmesan. We accompanied the meal with sparkling white zinfandel repurposed from the Kleinerts' thirtieth anniversary celebration, and afterwards I felt very, very tired but too awake to nap. I think I read, but it's all a little hazy. For desert, Brandi made a nifty Cherios-Krispie treat. Basically, you substitute Cheerios for Rice Krispies, melt marshmallows and butter and glom the mass into a pan. I hinted strongly that the aluminum heart pan would symbolize our love. I further hinted that frosting our treat would be a great symbol of the sweet cement that binds us, but that may have been a bridge too far, since the treat was a little too Krispie and needed a little warming up to more easily parse with my elderly mid-thirties teeth. Brandi liked it as-is, but she is very kind.

I enjoy this kind of hard work on days when I don't have too many projects going on. I also appreciate the patience all my relatives, friends, ex-roommates and ex-girlfriends had with my food experiments, sometimes layering starch-on-starch in bewildering ways that tested the patience as well as the palate. Thank goodness I passed out of my ramen phase ages ago. Or did I? We still have some in the cabinet, in case I feel like making mom's broccoli slaw, but the urge to chomp on it raw is strong, even in the face of a feast.

Sunday Feast!

I made chicken parmesan yesterday, six chicken breasts pounded flat as papyrus, slathered in egg whites, powdered with Italian seasoning bread crumbs, gently placed on a thin bed of Ragu sauce in Pyrex dishes, then covered with shredded cheese, more Ragu with Italian seasoning, garlic powder, fresh diced onion and home grown sliced tomatoes ripened on the windowsill. The dinner took somewhere between three hours and six months, depending on your "go" time - the pounding of the chicken or the planting of the seeds - and was quite a lot better or at least more to our taste than restaurant chicken parmesan. We accompanied the meal with sparkling white zinfandel repurposed from the Kleinerts' thirtieth anniversary celebration, and afterwards I felt very, very tired but too awake to nap. I think I read, but it's all a little hazy. For desert, Brandi made a nifty Cherios-Krispie treat. Basically, you substitute Cheerios for Rice Krispies, melt marshmallows and butter and glom
the mass into a pan. I hinted strongly that the aluminum heart pan would symbolize our love. I further hinted that frosting our treat would be a great symbol of the sweet cement that binds us, but that may have been a bridge too far, since the treat was a little too Krispie and needed a little warming up to more easily parse with my elderly mid-thirties teeth. Brandi liked it as-is, but she is very kind.

I enjoy this kind of hard work on days when I don't have too many projects going on. I also appreciate the patience all my relatives, friends, ex-roommates and ex-girlfriends had with my food experiments, sometimes layering starch-on-starch in bewildering ways that tested the patience as well as the palate. Thank goodness I passed out of my ramen phase ages ago. Or did I? We still have some in the cabinet, in case I feel like making mom's broccoli slaw, but the urge to chomp on it raw is strong, even in the face of a feast.

World's Worst / World's Best

World's Worst Painter:
"You'll find this portrait really brings you to life with just one shade of gray."

World's Best Painter:
"You'll find this portrait really brings you to life, Mr. Dorian Gray."

Thirty cents over and two dimes shy

On the way home tonight, I had an experience with a vending machine I want to relate.

I left work late tonight. Chicagoland was dark as it ever gets. Downtown looked like a Milky Way of square starry windows. I was thirsty and stopped by the vending room of the Student Center where I spend half of my time. I had a one, a five and a twenty, but 20 oz. Diet Pepsis cost a buck and a quarter. I would have to pass. Wait, though, the change machine accepts ones and fives. I tried it. It was broken. In fact it was so broken that the light that indicated it was broken was broken. It didn't even blink at me and when I shoved my five in its bill slot, it just stared at me like a one-eyed toddler offered creamed spinach for the first time. I would have to move on.

I had another chance at the Blue Line station. I realized that I had a tiny amount of change at the bottom of my mesh pocket in my backpack, enough for the $1.25 Diet Coke. I'm brand-agnostic. I put my dollar in. It whirred at me. A little background may help: Chicago Transit Authority builds its stations in such a way so that they're never entirely weatherproof. Great steel and glass structures wrap pierced by multiple tracks always have, by some curious law of CTA contractors, at least one face ripped away so that bitter winter winds may howl through the station, mitigated only partly by heating lamps they have installed in 0.10% of the station. Anyone who wants to remain warm must get in early and not mind getting squeezed to the back while several hundred people try to cram themselves into the same 10' x 10' area. It sounds like a frat joke, but it's the Chicago way. In the midst of this, the CTA has installed two vending machines, one advertising Diet Coke and the other Dasani, a flavor of Diet Coke without caffeine, sugar, artificial colors or sweeteners, flavor, or effervescence, although, through clever processing the Coca-Cola corporation did manage to add a cancer-causing agent to mitigate any possible health benefits one might glean from drinking the water.

It's clear the autumn has been unkind to the Diet Coke machine. After rejecting my dollar, the machine continued to whir as though to say, "No chance, sucker, move on." Not so easily daunted, I considered a cool drink of water. Water is for wimps. I put my dollar in the Dasani machine, not to give up my quest, but because I'd had a better idea. Some vending machines give you the paper back when you hit the "Coin Return" button; others dispense coins. Assuming the latter, I might bypass the whirring Black Knight of the Diet Coke money input and score myself the Holy Grail of my soda experience. I hit "Coin Return".

Perhaps the Coca-Cola Corporation had got wind of my plan, or, in the relative drought - forgive the pun - of Dasani vending machine purveyors of late, did not have good change to give, but the machine gave back not four quarters but, for reasons of its own, one quarter, one nickel and seven dimes. Yes, it adds up to a dollar, or so I hoped. Something sat uneasy in me about the non-quarter change, though the biggest problem I could think of at the time was that machines sometimes reject it.

I dropped the quarter in. The red LED lit up: $0.25. Not a bad start. Dimes followed. A few slipped through without tripping the LED, but I assumed they went to the change return slot and could be fed through again. I was wrong. The counter sat at $1.05 and I had put in all my change, including the extra quarter and dime I had found in my backpack. Some demonic entity unknown to me had rendered three of my dimes entirely moot.

At this point, I could have just pressed the "Coin Return" button and considered myself suitably chastised. After all, thirty cents is not too much to pay for wisdom. But I would have done so thirstily. I went into a frenzy. I started pressing buttons. I searched through my backpack. Could I maybe have missed one quarter? Four nickels? We knew what had happened with the dimes but I was willing to chance it if at the end of the day I might hold a Diet Coke in my hands. Maybe if I hit the machine at just the right angle, whatever supermagnetic force (a combination of science and the supernatural?) might release its hold on my dimes. I looked at it crossly. It just whirred at me. Sometimes, as though to taunt me, it would change the direction of the whir, sucking instead of rejecting. If I still had my dollar bill... I stopped short of kicking the beast. Also, I had seen enough violent pictograms representing hapless stick figures trapped under vending machines to know that only evil could come of my rocking it.

In the end, the train came and I had to give up the entire enterprise. I had to console myself with happy memories of vending machines gone wrong in the past. Like the one in college that kept rejecting my change but adding it to the tally. Or the one at the other end of the platform that dispensed two Diet Cokes in quick succession where I'd only put in the cash for one. Instant karma, indeed.

This Halloween, I will go as the human I most despise...

..all of them.

Wait. That's not me. I know times can get tough, but I can't stay bitter. Sure, between the marathon, job, house hunt and caring for a wife and two cats, I never had time to make a costume for Brandi, but there's always next year. That's also what we're telling ourselves about National Novel Writing Month. We want to convince a bunch of our friends to do it in February. If you're reading this, you're a target. I know February is shorter than the traditional November, but one thing it does not have: Thanksgiving. And since most of America north of Louisville is going to experience 35 minutes of sunlight a day for the next couple of months, you have no excuse but to sit down and work on that Programmer's tan in front of a CRT or LCD. That's the kind of tan that browns the skin around the eyes and makes the middle larger.

Don't make me start cold calling.

Lifesource won't leave me alone. When we move to our apartment about a year and a half ago, I put us on the Do Not Call list, which I think telesales folks just made up as a prank. I can't measure the success or failure of it, though. Maybe if I hadn't signed up for it, I would never have gotten off the phone with the telemarketers, instead of having time to brush at least the top half of my teeth between calls. Lifesource calls the most. Technically not a sales call, they're still plenty aggressive about trying to extract my blood. During the nine months of marathon training, I was afraid of the performance hit I would take and I fell far short of my all-time high of four donations in one year. I hope people really do need my blood. It would be a shame to discover it was being used to feed legions of the undead. I wonder how they feel about the citrate used to keep the blood from clotting. On the one hand, it's hardly naturally found in the undead food chain. On the other hand, neither is yoghurt in ours. Whenever Lifesource calls and Brandi answers, she asks who is calling and hands the phone over, saying, "It's the vampires." Shh! I know that and you know that and but they don't know I know, and I'd rather they took a little bit at a time than all at once. Having to wear a crucifix to the donation center would just suck, no pun intended.

World's Worst / World's Best

World's Worst Supervillainess:
"Why, when Mr. Bond tries my new ultraviolet lipstick he'll just think I'm the bee's knees."

World's Best Supervillainess:
"Why, when Mr. Bond tries to escape, he'll find my new ultraviolet lipstick will bring even the bees to their knees."

My name is Matt Larsen and...

...every time my wife sees Sam Waterston on TV, she sighs. "Poor man," she says.

Then I remind her that it was Jerry Orbach who died.

The Marathon

The Chicago Marathon came and went on Sunday and I ran it. It took me four hours, fifty-nine minutes and thirty-three seconds. That's a lot slower than I wanted, but, to quote some of our country's current leaders, you don't run the marathon with the legs you want but the legs you have. And so I did.

My dad and stepmom flew out for the experience. Let me amend that: they flew out to watch me run a marathon and buy an Apple computer. I've finally turned my parents into Switchers. Mom, you're next. We bought the Macbook on Saturday and spent a little time installing software and familiarizing them with the little marvel, then went to carbo-load at our favorite neighborhood Turkish restaurant. Free bread plus delicious gorgonzola chicken (times seared ahi tuna salad and mujver, or fried zucchini pancakes) divided by the amount of time we had to wait (about thirty minutes, which seemed longer because people were jostling us most of that thirty minutes) equals happy tummy. Dad and Deb appreciated the experience and, tired, went to bed early while Brandi made signs and put temporary red mousse dye in my hair. It was a busy day and a tense night. Both of us had dreams about the marathon. In mine, ten minutes before the start, I was just crossing State Street, shoeless for some reason, and trailed by a lackadaisical family unconcerned about my potential tardiness. Brandi had about the same dream. What would Freud make of that? Dreaming about a marathon before the marathon. Clearly, we're all in love with our mothers.

I should not have worried. I woke up with the alarm, strapped on my sneakers and ChampionChip (to record my race time separate from the start time; crucial when the start horn goes off and you don't even get to the starting line for another twenty minutes), pinned on my number and stretched a bit. I had run a couple miles the night before just to remind my legs what they were there for and had to account for that soreness. We got out of the apartment at about 6:45 AM, plenty of time to cue up for a race that didn't start until 8:00... that is, in an ideal world where the CTA doesn't decide to close tracks for construction, during the weekend when 1.5 million people would line up to show their support for 40,000 runners. We waited on the Brown Line track for about fifteen minutes. It doesn't sound like much now, but I was so full of adrenaline that any delay left me wanting to punch walls or CTA administrators. Neither were handy, so I just sat. You could tell the other runners immediately. Some, like me, dressed in winter gear except for the legs - I wore shorts - while others compensated for the cold snap by wearing what looked like snow camouflage suits, pants and jacket made of plasticized white paper almost entirely like FedEx envelopes, designed to be worn once and then thrown away mid-course if necessary. Boy, did I wish I had thought of that by run's end. As Dad, Deb and Brandi bravely said, the cold wasn't that bad if you dressed right. Truthfully, I was grateful for the chilly weather at first. I had trained in such ungodly hot weather over the summer that I thought any break in it was going to improve my race. I was wrong. We'll get to that in a moment.

The race started in Millennium Park, next to Buckingham Fountain. You may remember this bit of architecture as the chief visual at the start of Fox's long-running hit, "Married... With Children", jets spewing while "Love and Marriage" played over it. The jets were turned off. It's too cold now and the danger of freezing too high. Another clue. Brandi, Dad and Deb walked with me along Columbus Drive until they ran into a line: nobody allowed past without a number. We said our goodbyes. Brandi kissed me... on the lips! I walked forward, trying to find my way to the proper pacing group. New Balance had runners with signs going back to 5:00. I figured I was more of a 4:00 and tried to wade through people but it was a system of diminishing rewards. Eventually, you found yourself people aside, only to realize you were maybe three people in front of them. I make it a point not to honk someone off if they're going to be in kicking distance for the next three miles. I cooled my jets at the 5:00's.

One funny thing about marathons as opposed to 10Ks in my experience is the clothing. Marathon runners (except for me, I guess) tend to be a little bonier than the spectrum of more casual 10Kers. They get cold faster. So, like the FedEx snowsuit folks, they put on disposable clothing to stay warm until they don't need it any more. Relative to the value of the race - for some, a once-in-a-lifetime run - even a nice set of sweats becomes disposable. So you see clothes popping up like popcorn before the horn goes off, more and more afterwards. People would take off sweatshirts, garbage bags, snowsuits and throw them towards the edge of the corral. It didn't matter much whether they made it or not or if anyone was waiting to play catch on the other side. This brings to mind an opportunity for the bargain-inclined, since you could comfortably attire a family of thousands (and use the leftover bags to throw the useless stuff away) from marathon castoffs. But that's neither here nor there.

Eventually, the airhorn blew. After the wheelchair racers' start, and about ten minutes after the lead runners took off, the pack started to shuffle forward. My jokes, "Well, maybe we're making better time than we think we are..." and "Tag, you're all it," were met with silence, except for one woman in yellow, who said, "I don't get it." Okay, Ms. No-Fun. As we moved inexorably closer to the start, accelerating ever so slowly like a reverse Xeno's Paradox, I was amazed at the piles of clothes along the way. Not everyone had triumphantly cast off their cool weather gear. Some deposited them quietly on the ground, perhaps hoping to sabotage the five-hour runners and guarantee marathon's return to the elite sport it once was, perhaps unacquainted with the Nelly song that kept going through my head as clothing flew like disembodied witches over our heads, "It's getting hot in here... So take off all your clothes." A joke formed in my mind about witches, water and a well-intentioned Kansas girl, but with nobody to tell it to, it kind of died.

Eventually, we reached the starting line. Then we were off, if not like a shot, at least we were off.

Brandi and I had loosely planned a route for her, Dad and Deb. Let me amend that: I had recommended a route based on the marathon info in the Thursday Redeye paper, a route that would amount to non-marathoners taking the train to four different stops around Chicagoland. Brandi took that in and never exactly said "no", but it was clear from the get-go that she wanted more than four stops. The marathon guide listed all of the spectator spots along the way - I think there were twelve - and you could tell by the way her eyes lit up that her ambition was to hit all twelve, turning her, dad and Deb into the scrolling scenery you see in Flintstone's cartoons. So immediately, I felt a friendly paranoia, the inverse of a soldier in enemy territory after a shot rings out. Where did it come from? Anywhere. Could it be around this corner? Or this one? How do I separate the friendly faces from the even-friendlier?

As it turns out, the gang would see me at mile two and seven, miss me at seventeen because my pace had slowed so much and catch back up with me about 200 meters from the Finish line. As it also turns out, while it's hard to pick your loved one out of a crowd of 33,000, it's even harder to do the reverse, especially when team Larsen took off the special red caps I bought to help them stand out. I never saw them until the end. I wound up seeing two improv friends before I saw my family (TJ, in Chinatown, as I run by: "Matt!" Me: "TJ! How *are* you?" TJ: "Fine! How are you?" Matt, now nearly out of earshot: "Running!"). I was kind of bummed, because after mile eleven, all I wanted to do was hang off of my wife and sob. But maybe it's better I didn't. Sometimes the harder thing is for the best.

Brandi explained afterwards that, knowing the CTA's irksome work schedule and the trouble the gang had to go through to zip between miles two and seven, they retired to McDonald's for breakfast to plot their more leisurely route. They did see me at mile seven and thought I saw them. They shouted my name and I turned and waved. Brandi snapped off some photos. I ran on. I didn't see them, though, and it's not that I'm suffering from a hazy recollection. I waved at everyone. Several times along the course, I saw signs for "Free High 5's". I took advantage as much as I could. Ordinarily, I'm comfortable in my technological nest, my poly-cyber-womb, a bevy of computers arrayed around me at each of my three offices, places where I prefer not to be disturbed by social callers. Not Sunday. I wanted to cheer back for everyone cheering me on. I needed them, not least because I had no clear clue what had happened to my family. Several times, I thought, "I hope they're okay."

I ran on. I had a pretty full bladder at the start and was grossed out / envious of the runners who peeled away at the start of Lincoln Park to pee on the trees. One woman running next to me said in a weird accent, "No picnics today," which I thought was apropos. I skipped the Gatorade/water breaks until hunger started to gnaw at me at mile seven. By that time, I was starting to feel it. My knee, which at times in the past gets tricky, was starting to ache. When the wind blew, it went right through my light, artificial fiber shirts and shorts, and about thirty seconds later it felt like each step on my right knee someone was rubbing tacks against the outside. It hurt. All I could do was run forward, though, and count on my legs warming up enough for it to go away. Around mile eleven, I nearly collapsed. My pace, which had been around 9:40, dropped massively. I slowed to a walk, cursing. Had I not run my way up through the pack, past the 4:45 pacers? Had I caught up with the 4:30s and passed them in vain? Did I have a prayer of catching the 4:15s now?

In a word, no. No, I did not. Just walking was painful and I wasn't sure I was going to make it to mile 12, much less 26.2. If Brandi had been around the corner, she would have had a tough time talking me into staying in the race. But Brandi was not around the corner, and the only way I was ever going to meet her was by moving forward, taking advantage of everything the race course offered to get me to that finish line, because I had made a promise not only to myself, but to everyone who RSVP'd to the "Matt's Running the Chicago Marathon" party we'd arranged later in the day. How could I meet their eyes and say I'd run 11/26th of a marathon? How would I feel when they said, "Well, at least you tried. And it's longer than I can run..." That's the bummer of running your second marathon. You know it's not longer than you can run, and some part of you just hates yourself for being so much more petty than you were before.

So, I took Gatorade at every stop, knowing it would make my bladder less comfortable but keep my energy up. I lurched into a jog, using my arms for momentum, quietly thankful for the cross-training I'd done in the pool. I counted the miles down to Taylor Street, where I knew they had PowerBar PowerGel, basically sugar packs with the consistency of shampoo and the flavor of coffee-flavored fruit. At mile 15, I waited in line for the stalls, not so much because I feared an accident on the course but because I knew I would feel an iota better with just one pain to focus on. I was lucky. One man in line said he'd stopped three times during the race. Three! I would hate to have been part of his training runs, no pun intended.

If the mechanics of running were pretty simple, the course was even more so. I was never far enough behind that I didn't have people around me, though after mile 3 the density dropped to slightly less than an average day at the airport. We ran north, turned around 180 degrees almost to our starting point, then west a few miles, turned around, south, west again to the PowerGel break, east (and by this time, every turn I mentally screamed, "Get to the END, already!), south a while, east some more, north, south and north for the final stretch. Having two marathons in two cities to compare, I can say that Chicago's goes through slightly less-sketchy neighborhoods at the end, but not by a lot. I still can't decide whether it's good to be so much more familiar with the expanse of Chicago than I was with Cleveland's course. I guess it will take more marathons to figure it out.

Another unexpected bonus of the course this year was the foliage. Chicago has been lucky this year to have an extended fall. When the leaves started turning almost immediately after Labor Day - they change faster after a hot summer - I thought we were in for a brutal winter right away. I was pleasantly shocked. I had also done a lot of training runs at night, so not having to stop for stop lights and enjoying nature's fireworks along the way really was a boon.

What can I say about the finish line? By now, all of Chicago is talking about the winner of this year's race, who crossed it, keeled over, bled in his brain and went to the hospital. He's recovering now, but there are ominous rumors of someone's misplaced banana peel. I kid. Regardless, by the time I crossed, three hours after the winner, there was no sign of that particular drama, just a big green "Finish" stretched across Columbus Drive. I said to a guy with the name "Billy" written on his shirt (neat trick: then strangers can root for you along the way), "Come on, Billy, let's finish this." He thanked me for the encouraging words and we ran for it, as best we could.

Afterwards, I was more grateful than words can describe, for the support of my friends, my family, the city, the thousands of volunteers, bananas, my wife, my wife for being my wife, and to all the other runners. I was also very, very grateful not to be running. And so I am still.

What the DICKENS?!

I snapped this on the way to work yesterday. Looks like all the weather people were right and summer has to come to an end. Pity that Chicago experiences only two seasons, though. I was looking forward to at least a little fall. Now I'm not just wearing my lined pants because I need to do laundry. I really want to stay warm.

I think it stinks that hot summers here are typically followed by cold winters. You'd think we could come up with some kind of weather karma, but, no, it's air. It obeys its own rules (see: tornados, hurricanes, other violent but non-spinny currents that still hurt people and property). As I've gotten older, I've stopped looking forward to all of the things I can make with snow and started realizing that, hey, that guy digging his car out of the snow in all the towing commercials is going to be me very, very shortly. I wonder if I should invest in snow tires.

The Coffee Controversy

The change in weather surprised me. Summer passed faster than the Indy 500, though with less repetition. I knew intellectually that Chicago's summer more or less dies after Labor Day. I knew that Brandi and I would go to New York City a hair before Labor Day and return a few days after. I somehow could not reconcile that emotionally with the cold weather. I'm no atomic clock, but it feels like we should just be easing into July. Halloween slapping us in the face is kind of a slap. In the face.

I'm glad it's here, though. Autumn is for me what breakfast is to a lot of people. I can enjoy it any time. I love the look and the smell, the crunch of leaves under my feet, fireplaces burning just enough wood to melt the ice caps another 10 million tons. My new Canon DSLR takes great foliage pictures and I'm blessed to work on a campus with lots of colorful trees. Getting out of work at the golden hour doesn't hurt, either. I caught myself thinking how much I loved the smell of this time of year as I left work when I suddenly realized that it wasn't just rotting leaves and crisp weather, but the velvety fallout from the Blommer Chocolate Factory. I miss living closer to that.

Autumn also takes a lot of pressure off my wardrobe. Summers like our last stink for exercise. When going outside for exercise is like going to a loan shark for credit consolidation, you can kiss your six pack goodbye. In the fall, I can wear long sleeve shirts and pants, and they look good on me. My big legs look best under a bit of fabric. Last year for Christmas, Mom got me lined pants, and three seasons of the year they feel smashing (the fourth feels like a rainforest, sticky, hot and with its own microclimate). In the fall, there's no shame for wanting cool weather. We call it "enjoying nature".

The downside of all this joy is that sometimes I freeze my skin off. Our office manager puts the air conditioning on when temperatures rise above 65 degrees (F). Everyone else has space heaters. I work with computers, and if I had a proper server room, I probably wouldn't complain, but thanks to a spate of hiring, we have a housing crunch at one of my offices. Our backbone computers and network gear are scattered across several cubicles, protected from theft or damage only by luck and ignorance, of which we have a good deal. The waste heat will not keep me warm. I've resorted to drinking hot beverages: tea, broth, and yes, even coffee.

I never used to like the taste of coffee. Tea I found passable, if you steep it overnight and add lots of sweetener, it's like hot gatorade. Coffee is harder to disguise. Like beer, most of the grownups who drank it while I was growing up said I would learn to like it in college. I didn't drink alcohol until two years after I graduated Miami, and I still don't particularly like beer. Coffee eluded me even longer. I get enough pep from soda and a good night's sleep. I am no stranger to the nap. The bitterness turned me off for a long time, until I discovered creamer, or, as it is sometimes called, whitener.

Adding cream, milk or those weird powders that sit next to sugar in pretty much every office in the western world changes everything. Bitter coffee turns into something like coffee ice cream. I can drink it without trying to scrape my tongue out with a fork. My stomach forgives me and all the artificial sweeteners I cram in. I feel more satisfied with something warm inside of me, and I no longer have to wear seven sweaters to work.

Caffeine? What was that? I can't hear you over the sound of my gnawing my nails down to nubbins. Yeah, there's some caffeine in coffee. Once, I saw a chart comparing beverages for caffeine content. Mountain Dew has something like two cups of regular Folgers coffee's worth of caffeine in it. Chocolate has caffeine, but it probably won't keep you up all night. The big surprise comes from Starbucks. They way over-caffeinate. If you've ever stood behind someone in a Starbucks line complaining about the need to get his/her fix, you're not far away from truth. Starbucks decaf has more caffeine than regular coffee. I don't even want to think about their regular. I've heard even visualizing the venti size can cause chest pains.

Funny enough, I only think about this after I've consumed my fifth or sixth cup of decaf and feel like pain cannot affect me. Why even bother calling it "decaf" if you're going to fall that far short? That's like saying, "We're sending the Apollo astronauts to the Moon or Australia, whichever. Heads it's Australia." I get nervous, sleep-phobic, and all of the typical traits of your average overcaffeinated wage earner. Perhaps one of the reasons coffee keeps me warm is the way it ramps up my metabolism.

I don't like the idea of being dependent on a drug for my energy. Vacations past, I have returned to see my folks or other essential familial event, having recently completed some large project. I head to bed early and sleep in late. Withdrawal makes me boring.

What's to do? I'll probably take some good Knorr vegetable bouillon cubes to work for a salty pick-me-up. I may have to lay off the coffee for a while. Every health expert tells you to get more sleep. Perhaps my seasonally affected disorder will fall in line when I move somewhere sunnier. In any case, like many, many people, I will endeavor to drink less coffee, get more exercise, and enjoy life a lot more. Even if it's not too beautiful to ignore doesn't mean it's not beautiful enough to appreciate.

Apple Pick-tures

Here are some pictures of what the Chicago Larsens and the Clairmont-Wilsons did this Saturday. Mainly: pick apples. No, times are not that difficult for either household. We did it for pleasure, mostly, although if apple farms really wanted to please us they would build themselves a bit closer to Chicago. But that's neither here nor there. In the shot above, Shane Wilson, like the apocryphal Newton before him, studies an apple. In a baseball cap.

In the picture below, Brandi and I are posing like a modern "American Gothic", with Brandi in her M*A*S*H t-shirt playing the role of "wife" and me in the "Just be glad I'm not your kid" t-shirt playing the role of "twit with pitchfork". Though we bear little resemblance to the models of the original painting, we are clearly dressed in the colors the artist intended.


Ah, the joy of apples! Brandi shows off her latest pick with a girly grin while fashionista Clair
shows she's got what it takes to triumph on "America's Next Top Corn Model". Other pictures I should probably include but did not include: Brandi with Bunny, the Great Corn Relay, Pumpkins!, and my personal favorite, Creepy Dried Gords on the Ceiling of a Barn for No Reason I Can Understand.

Sunset, UIC Campus, Friday

I shot these on the way to meet Brandi for dinner. Golden hour + autumn + manicured university field = heavenly.

Of course, Brandi and I crossed signals as to which restaurant we were meeting. I wound up making her drive an extra twenty minutes, effectively cutting down our together time to about nine minutes. So the mood didn't last. But that's why we have cameras.

World's Worst / World's Best

I'm two days late for my second posting of this, so I'll try to snazz it up some.

World's Worst Hairdresser:
"I find I do all my best work with sheep shears and Nair."

World's Best Hairdresser:
"I styled your beehive tall enough to plug the hole in the ozone layer I made creating it."

- and another -

World's Worst Online Poker Player:
"I really love the feeling of having four aces and no pants. Fold."

World's Best Online Poker Player:
"I can tell you're sweating, ncc1701_4eva. Your IP just blinked."

- and -

A shout out to my Columbus connection, Dave and Karen Maxwell, who have contributed marvelous comments to my first "World's Worst / World's Best" post, and who are just awesome in general. Good luck with Maxwell 1.4!

Here is my favorite of Dave's comments:

World's Best Pirate:
"Arr, me harties!"

World's Worst Pirate:
"Me heart! Me arteries!" *thunk*

Also, because I think I made this exceptionally unclear in my first "World's Worst / World's Best" entry, please do not feel that you *have* to submit a full entry to join in the fun. I would love it if you would send me even careers you would like to see spoofed, which I will turn around and add whatever spin I can dig up in a week or less. Thanks for your comments so far (Maxwells, I'm looking at you) and I look forward to hearing from you again.

Hello, my name is Matt, and...

...my cats either love me or want to eat me. Either way, they lick me.

Rainy Night Impressionism

These are a series of pictures I took on my way home from work, after dropping Brandi off at Glamorama. I know it probably looks like I dared death itself, snapping photo after gorgeous photo as sheets of water cascaded off the windshield. My only answer to that is, yes, I am a daredevil, and a sexy beast, and also water looks a lot larger when you stick the camera right up to the glass and manually focus on raindrops the size of pumpkin seeds.

The Problem with Radio Shack

I walked home from work yesterday. For my father, for a period of about ten years, this would have been a feat of profound ease, since he lived directly above his business by six floors. I'm about seven miles away. Luckily, I wore my iPod Shuffle mom got me for my birthday, my distance running shoes, and a good attitude. The miles went quickly. I took some shots of the UIC campus at golden hour - the magical time just before sunset when the refraction of the Earth's atmosphere brings the reds, oranges and deeper colors (green flashes just before the sun disappears) normally bounced into space back to the planet. Combine that lighting with just a little slow motion, body armor and Viggo Mortensen and you've every third shot from "The Lord of the Rings". They reminded me of the three years Brandi and I shared in our old apartment. Sure, it was small, but every cloudless sunset we watched downtown turn into a pumpkin-hued faeryland. Then the sodium lights of the parking garage came on and night turned into a permanent sunset from the south. It wasn't our favorite direction anyway.

I walked through some prospective neighborhoods. Chicago has changed so much since I moved here. I remember my friend Dave advising me to live anywhere but Cabrini Green. Now there are condos going up opposite the mall there. Yeah, you can still see the shattered hulks of the low income skyscrapers dominating the view there, and, yeah, only the brave or the foolhardy really live there just yet, but you have to admit it's a step up.

Not that all change is positive. ComedySportz lost its lease on the space it occupied for five and a half years, the former Steppenwolf space, soaked in history and the screams of the victims of David Mamet's early stabs at dialogue, because the owner sold the building out from under them to build condos. The Annoyance Theatre got it worse: they turned it into a parking lot. (Joni Mitchell refused to comment.) Sometimes you work so hard to improve an area that your reward is your failure to afford anything there.

Still, Chicago looks nice. We're in for a good time this Saturday when we go out to look at condominiums. Bucktown, Wicker Park, Humboldt Park and other spots along the Blue Line elevated train may be on the slate. I like to know a place with my feet. My feet give thumbs up. This is painful, and I won't ask them again for their opinion.

Ultimately, besides wanting to get home, I also targeted Toys R Us (how the hell do you get the dyslexic "R" on a standard keyboard and how are they listed on the stock exchange: "TZRS"? Or is that a company that makes tazers?) and Radio Shack. Toys, etc. had the usual bevy of games, dolls, action figure and - my favorite - shape shifting robots that transform from robots to cars, airplanes, rockets, video cameras, construction equipment, dinosaurs, enormous spheres... and back! Unfortunately, I'm a little too Down-the-Rabbit-Hole to appreciate what's out now. Haunting all the Transformers forums waiting for the next leaked shot of MegaSCF Starscream or the Cybertron Jetfire repaint they're calling Astrotrain has spoiled me during non-virtual toy runs. Of course, I've still got the itch. Just ask Brandi how many times we've gone to Target that I have had to go to the toy aisle to look at Transformers. (Every time.) So, while I pondered the wisdom of dropping $35 on a Millennium Falcon that transforms into roboticized versions of Han Solo and Chewbacca, I ultimately decided against it and just used the free access to the Little Boys' room to relieve seven miles' bladder pressure. Then it was off to Radio Shack where, try as I might, I could not make myself enter.

Here we come to the crux of the problem. I wasn't tired, at least not tired enough to walk two doors down. I had enough time, though we were nearing nine o'clock, I still had at least fifteen minutes to spare. I needed to go; the aforementioned GP2X has a loose spring inside the battery compartment that is just waiting for me to grow some guts and solder it down. I needed solder and possibly a new soldering gun. I like looking. Why did I dread going inside?

It reminds me of a quote from Braveheart. Edward Longshanks, chief villain of the film, proposes the Droit du Seigneur, whereby any bride who marries a Scot must spend her first night at the castle of the English lord, presumably with the English lord, and not necessarily sleeping. "The problem with Scotland," Longshanks says, "is that it's full of Scots. We'll breed them out."

The problem with Radio Shack is that it's full of Radio Shack employees. I'm not sure what part of their training adds that extra sheen of craziness when they ask what they can help you find but I inevitably feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end when they get near me. Probably, they know a lot more than me about electronics, but that doesn't help them find what I need, just gives them better segues between RJ-11 phone cord and selling me last year's Cingular clamshell phone and plan. I feel what I think a doe would feel in a sporting goods store: sure the all-cotton shirts feel nice and I can even nibble on some but doesn't that "hunting" section have something to do with harming my relatives and OH MY GOD, I think some of those shoes are actually made out of my Aunt Berenice. The three nicest words in English may be "I love you", but in the hands of an expert, the four creepiest are, "Can I help you?" followed by the nine creepiest, "Can I help you find something at Radio Shack?" No, please, gosh no. I would feel worse about my prejudice, but the chain that foisted both the Tandy brand and the TRS-80 on an unsuspecting America deserves a little pain, I think. If I need a top of the line remote control car, I'll pay the dumb consumer tax at Sharper Image. If I want something more reasonable, I'll hit the eBay, where I'm sure there are thousands just waiting to get out of the homes of kids who grew out of burning through AA batteries chasing squirrels around pavement and now burn rubber chasing the ladies in their beaters. Besides miniature electronics sold for 99 cents in little dime bags, what the hell else does Radio Shack have that other chains do not? It's not customer service or a dedication to quality (Apple) or kitsch (Spencer). When they're not busy lurking in their own stores, what other things do Radio Shack employees do? And who would want to work there?

The secret may lie in those little dime bags after all. I had a disturbing thought: what could explain all that gear, survival in one of the harshest retail environments, a longevity that would put the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers to shame, and why do they bug customers with a metronomic regularity? What if the last human employee of Radio Shack died sometime in the early nineties, having not hired his replacement, but BUILDING him (her/it) in his significant downtime? What if Radio Shack is staffed by robots, inhuman golems driven only by the desire to sell little bits of themselves in lilliputian sandwich bags and sipping freely of the AC wall sockets during lunch? I know we were all worried about Steve Jobs being replaced by a Steve Jobs-bot, but HAS IT ALREADY HAPPENED and IS IT SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MEDIOCRE THAN WE EXPECTED?

I can say no more. That Tickle Me Elmo is watching me with suspicion and malice. I have to distract it, either by tickling or a flamethrower and I'm all out of tickles.

Arty Pics

This is Bob, a great, great guy. Bob stood up for me at my wedding and helped make my Cape Canaveral bachelor party interesting by shooting up insulin at the children's section, just after we saw all of the Mennonites go into the robot exhibit. This story is starting to read like a Palahniuk novel, but, honest to gosh, it's true. Bob also improvises, directs, writes, draws, and teaches his new puppy amazing tricks because he is better to his dog than Shaggy ever was to Scooby, and all of that art in his life breathes a lot of life into a dumb off-the-cuff lunchtime shot like this. I swear, women in bonnets and men with the crazy beards, making a big beeline to the robot exhibit while my bachelor posse stood by and made jokes about making a horse drawn spaceship... but while we laugh now, perhaps we won't be so amused when our robot masters place their Mennonite best friends in the food mines while the rest of us labor away in the solar drilling fields.

This is a picture of a pole on the way to work in the morning. I like it because I think it looks like a modern take on a Jurassic forest, with metal apatosaur heads looming in the distance, while a bestickered tree stands in the foreground, advertising the dominance of the alternative punk band mammals that will dominate the landscape after the great Lawsuit descends on all from the skies. Watch the punk bands swell absurdly large, then give rise to a strange new lifeform in the musical scene: intelligent record execs! Seriously, though, if you're running late, try not to do it in Roscoe Village, because it is impossible to catch a cab there even though there's a gas station on the corner. They just don't come through. Roscoe is one of those middle streets, sitting between the much larger arteries of Belmont to the south and Addison to the north, but Damen, the north-south cross street, is too far west to be lakefront and too far east to be the highway. So you sit and wait for the bus even if you're running really, really late.

What's that sound? Why are you moving your fingers back and forth like that? Oh, damn you, World's Smallest Violin, you always ruin my Pity Parties! Someone fetch me more Pity Punch.


Someday, my kid will ask me, "Where do you work, daddy?" and I'll eventually tell the wee one that I support two offices' networks at a state university. Then I'll pull out these pictures to show that it's really not as bad as it seems. First, though, I'll probably say I'm a super spy with a bunch of documentaries about my adventures called, "Thunderball," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and, embarrasingly, "Octopussy". By that time, I hope to say that I have been played by a number of different actors, including Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalten, Pierce Brosnan, and that guy from "Layer Cake" nobody's quite sure is going to work out. And since I'll have all the usual gadgets one has working on a network - Cat5 Ethernet cable, laptop, palmtop, flash drive, USB hubs, network switches, flat panel monitors, and the kid won't know any better, I can say that they were gifts from Q, my inventor, and that anyone else who has them is just copying, and can't press a button for the keyboard ejector seat. Probably, the only way my kid will see through my ruse is by calling out my lack of British accent, which I can rectify in advance by always having one around my children.

I took this shot of downtown Chicago looking out from I290, which I cross every day to go between both of my offices. I mean, when I'm acting as a double agent between East and West Germany, both of which still somehow exist as political entities. I know it looks like that dark zit in the top half of the photo is a plane about to run into trouble, but you have my word that it is not going to collide with anything and we don't need to pass any more Patriot Acts to assure ourselves that Big Brother is looking out for our best interest. The building to the right of the Sears Tower (center, black, ugly) is nicknamed the cake building, for reasons that have nothing to do with what the food court serves. I know. I asked. I think the footprint somehow resembles a cake, although if I had a cake shaped like that at my wedding, I don't think I would have been able to top it with Transformers, because my weird quotient would already have been filled. The cake building looks orange in this light, but is actually a shade of pink, and very tall, though not as tall as its friend across the street, who cheats by adding all the spires to its official height.



Chicago for the Legally Blind

Finally, these are a few deliberately blurry shots showing off the power of not using autofocus. I guess you can click on them for the larger shot, but as alternative that uses no bandwidth whatsoever, you could also lean closer to your monitor.

Little Gray Pillbox

For some people, it's young, young, young, dead. James Dean famously lived his mantra, "Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse," although how you're supposed to judge the aesthetics of your funeral when you're the guest of honor is a little beyond me or anyone else without an advanced degree in metaphysics or witchcraft. Some people live this without actually dying young. Were Keanu Reeves to depart us tomorrow, I think a lot of America would believe he's in his forties. You can hide a lot behind Botox. Just keep a close eye on how far it penetrates into your acting.

Other people are destined to look old forever. Walter Matthau could have done "Grumpy Old Men" in his mid-twenties. Peter Falk is just now catching up to the age he played in "The Princess Bride", but the chorus of "but he's too young to look so old!" never reached my ears. You can watch Steve Martin age on the covers of his old standup albums, hair turning within just a few years from black to jet white.

And so we come to my darling head. My friend Melanie plucked my first gray hair out of it at sixteen, in French class. I was kind of excited. Another person - Mike Myers I think - observed that Europe is a funny place, with young people pretending to be old and old people playing at being young. Proof: men utterly unqualified to wear Speedos subjecting everyone around them to the torture of caged cellulite. I always looked forward to growing up. Here, I was already growing old. Bonus!

Fast forward another sixteen years. What do I have to show for all this time? At this point, I expected my eyebrows to be gray, but all I really have to show for it is a set of gray racing stripes and a bunch of gray cowlicks at the crown of my head. Looking at it in the mirror, I observed to the woman shearing my head down to a bearable length tonight, it looked like a gray pillbox hat, or perhaps yarmulke. Happy Jewish New Year to me. Time to party like it's 5999. (It's 5576, I think.) Probably it will be 5576 on the Christian calendar before the last mousy brown hair falls out of my head, but, you know, near-immortality is a nice trade-off.

And anyway, now that I'm older I can start pining for the days when I was younger. I've already started with Transformers, comic books and calling my beautiful wife my "girlfriend" (she's so adorable). What next?

Larsenopolis Goes Interactive: now soliciting comments for World's Worst / World's Best

Hi. I'm not sure if you're out there, especially after my especially long hiatus from web logging, but if you are, I would love your help.

I'm going to start a new entry for this blog called "World's Worst / World's Best". This is a joke. Not the fact that I am starting it; that is no laughing matter. "World's Worst / World's Best" will be like the classic short form game "World's Worst", except there will be only one player and two jokes. The first is what the world's worst BLANK will say in a given situation. The second is what the world's best BLANK would say. You supply the BLANK.

As a particularly lame example not to be confused with comedy, I offer the following:

World's Worst Banker:

"Interest rate? Well, I'd date you but I wouldn't take you home to mom."

World's Best

"I've taken the precaution of securing your money in my chest, next to my beating heart. Mint?"

If you are interested, please add a comment to the blog. I would prefer you add them to World's Worst / World's Best entries, but we're not exactly doing brisk traffic here, so I and my army of Larsenopoli will scour all comments for, say the next week. At least one will be chosen, the the person submitting given credit, especially for humoring me. I look forward to hearing from you.

Weekend Snapshots

The eBay eFfect

I accidentally bought a digital camera off eBay. I say this with the full knowledge that nobody slips and makes a bid. At some point, you're serious. I was looking at DSLRs, digital single lens reflex, cameras that use viewfinders and sensors sharing the same light. Not that it matters as much today with viewfinder-less digital cameras , but the cool thing about SLRs before they went D was that the mirror that sent the image to the viewfinder popped out of the way when you pulled the trigger to take a picture. This made a satisfying potato chip "click". Camera makers now sometimes add "click" sound files to bring back that soul-satisfying virtual celery crunch, but it always suffers from small camera speakers and you can't feel the camera jump in your hand like a startled pet. There's also the issue of interchangeability. SLRs have (expensive, holy cow!) lenses you can pop on and off depending on whether you need to shoot a hummingbird mid-flap or Lindsay Lohan in a bikini on a private beach, 300 meters away and hiding behind a particularly long blade of sawgrass. Finally, in the realm of "what you immediately get with the camera besides promises and a neat sound", we have depth of field. In a nutshell, this means the camera will get a shot of your subject in focus with the background out of focus. It's a way to make the viewer see the final picture in 3D without resorting to headache-inducing polarizing lenses, dorky glasses or intricate modelwork.

I put in a bid at what seemed an absurdly low price for the camera. It was. Another eBayer outbid me in about an hour. I thought, "I'll check back later and see how high this sucker gets." I did. Numbers stayed low for the unit, so I made another bid. And, I think, another. I'm kind of stretching the word "accidentally" here, aren't I? Like a bad gambler, I did not establish an upper limit for myself, and higher prices started to seem quite reasonable. This is why, on the eve of my first foray into the tense world of home buying with my partner, pal and caller-outer Brandi, I found myself trying to explain why our household needed a fifth digital camera (sixth, including the camcorder, although I also count crappy 640 x 480 camera phones). The fact that I needed a piece of tape to hold the battery compartment closed did not help my case.

So I'm hoping that posting some pictures I took this weekend redeems my cause somewhat. Also, bitterly muttering, "silly, silly me".

Sixty Pound Cotton

Thanks to Brandi's brave steps in the direction of laundry by the pound, I took a look around my office / dressing area - I like to multitask? - and decided there was a Solution. I loaded all my dirty duds into two bags and dragged them to a swell place by Diversey and Elston. We dropped them off, picked up poker chips for Brandi's Ladies' Poker Night, saw a bunch of condos (more on that later), came back and loaded everything into the car. Wow! I can see why things have gotten hashish-smokin' easy for the modern housewife and overworked, home-schoolin' college dorm dweller. Even the cost is bearable, considering the cost in quarters and time of dragging sixty pounds of mostly cotton blends to the laundromat's bulk washers. Oh, and I also just bought a DSLR. I can't complain about money, ever... again.

Real Estate Note for the Day: a man urinating on your window is a sign you must not buy that garden apartment, even if you really like how much light it gets.

We were out looking at condos and stopped in at an open house around Lawrence and Kedzie in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. There was one finished unit and the rest you kind of had to visualize. I like that part. Dad sees the world through the lens of an architect, so to relate to him past childhood, I've learned to appreciate architecture in the raw, and hopefully to fill in the gaps between studs with my imagination. The first floor unit looked nice but a tad small. Brandi pointed out that some places work out great for renting but stink when you know you're going to own them. We wandered across the hall to a condo with two bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms and one great room almost as large as a basketball court. The developers had combined the living and dining rooms into a Devastator-esque giant room designed to knock down and steal the candy of lesser rooms. It was nice but just at the edge of what we can afford and, we were informed, headed north by $10,000 in the next week if we didn't snap it up. We finished looking and started back down when we spied the garden-level apartment door open and thought to take a look. One word sprang to mind, "feh." It had decent light for something buried just slightly in the earth, but overall felt like nothing to write home about since it lacked southern exposure and abutted on one side to the building next door. Again, we started out... but, then I spied, just across the back deck, the ground-level version of the light-filled apartment with the uber-room upstairs. The back door was open and, while not explicitly welcome, we weren't forbidden from traipsing across and taking a look.

It looked decent, though varying significantly with the floor plan of the room above. Here, the rooms were more segregated and the overall impression of vast space was dampened by it. I went to the bedroom space forward and realized with a shock why significantly more men live in garden-level apartments than women. A man was urinating, pretty much anywhere he pleased, but certainly on the building and in clear view of the windows and quite possibly on the windows. See, the building on that side went right to the sidewalk, and, to his credit, moments before he had been peeing in front of an empty apartment.

By the way he staggered when he was done, I'm pretty sure he was drunk or ridiculously proud of watering the windows. In hindsight, maybe it's like those movie villains who insist environmental disaster is the earth's immune system trying to shrug off the pestilence of humanity. Maybe the building's immune system was this man, peeing at us from behind the safety of a pane of glass. I don't care. Brandi felt that the neighborhood might need a few more years to turn itself around and I agree, wholeheartedly.