Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Missives from Mexico, Part the Second: Cozumel

We took the ferry to Cozumel, Mexico, during our vacation to Mexico, during which time we did... approximately nothing, and not constructively, either. It was my fault. Even though I had every intention of getting up early to swim, I slept in. Then I finally ran. By the time we got out the door, it was 12:30, and by the time we arrived at the dock, the guide book said the next ferry to Cozumel from Playa del Carmen left at 3:00. I apologized profusely.

Brandi, starting to catch on to this Mexican guidebook nonsense, suggested we try the ferry anyway, since the worst that could happen was that the guidebook was right. She was right; it was wrong. The next ferry left at 2:00, getting us onto the island at 2:00 PM. Plenty of time for sightseeing and even a spot of lunch, right?

Wrong-o, mister. Cozumel is a lot bigger than it looks like in a guidebook (where it looks to be about the size of my palm; how crazy would that be? Each new visitor would have to knock an earlier visitor off). So popping down to the lighthouse was out of the question. Nor could we visit Mayan ruins, since they closed at 4:00. Time drew tight. We finally hired a cab from the port to the ecological preserve, with its cool lighthouse, and he was very nice and somewhat skeptical that we could fit it in, to the point that he called ahead for reassurance that it would be open. He got it, and off we went. Only... by "open" they meant, "open if you got there at 2:00, since after that they kick people out." So we had a 500 peso ride from downtown to the southern end of the island for nothing. Still, our cabbie took pity on us, and offered to drive us on a long loop around the island for 400 pesos. To this day, I'm not sure why he was so determined to make lemonade of our lemons, but I appreciated it. He took us around and I got lots of shots of the island, which, outside port, was exceptionally barren but for a few restaurants clinging to its rocky shores.

Here comes the panorama:

We took lots of photos, and at the end of the day (which came all too quickly), my only complaint was the strange force of gravity that made me look fat in almost every single photo taken of me that day. Blame it on wearing a t-shirt with English on it, an excess of burritos, or the eerie pull of the Bermuda Triangle about 1,000 miles away, but somehow I walked away with a face full of bloat. See it here? My tummy is clearly trying to escape from my clothes, and has conscripted Brandi's forearm in its efforts. Also, the horizon is tilted, but our cab driver can't be great at EVERYTHING. Can he?

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Missives from Mexico, Part the First

Wow, it looks like Sweeps Week for the Larsens has turned into a blood bath of events. Depending on how much downtime I have at work--and right now, I must admit, it looks pretty good--I hope to be able to shoehorn as much as possible into my blog. In the interest of kicking things off, I would like to present a couple of cell phone pics snapped in Mexico:

Here, Brandi shows off her chicken enchilada smile, courtesy of a tiny, open air restaurant we found next to an only-slightly-larger hotel in Playa del Carmen, which everyone insists on calling just Playa. We drove into town to get a measure of its famous fifth avenue, called Quinta for reasons obvious to the bilingual, and I accidentally got off the highway a touch too far north of the city. We drove through a neighborhood that looked impoverished, and by that I mean, filled with trash. I think you can chart a direct graph of neighborhoods in Riviera Maya, correlating "Ghetto-ness" on the x-axis to the rising amounts of trash per square yard on the y-axis. I worried that the guidebooks had exaggerated very badly the tourist appeal of this quaint town by the water, but, it turns out, it puts on its best face as it gets closer to the two mile long strip of shops and hucksters. The restaurant we found was at the northern end, which we dutifully walked after stocking up on tacos con pollo, sopes and enchiladas. Brandi ordered in Spanish, which she did pretty much everywhere we went, because I did not study and get very shy trying to convey my thoughts through flailing. My hero.

Image two also comes from my iPhone, and was also taken at Playa, but about four days afterwards. It is probably the most flattering shot of my body that has ever been taken, somehow completely downplaying the lunch belly I doubtlessly acquired when we returned to the exact same restaurant (Saturday before we left was a kind of "best of Mexico" that played a little hectically). Pictures just do not do justice to the many colors of the sky, water and land, which, if printed, would exhaust the blue toner in your color laser printer almost immediately. It's beautiful. It's also hot. Temperatures while we were there topped out at 90 degrees F. I noticed you could always tell the natives because they walked around with umbrellas during the day to shield themselves from the sun, which just put the beatdown on you. Yesterday, I had several people tell me they could see I wore sunglasses, and knew what shape they were. Since air conditioning costs so much, and the temperatures vary so little, most of the architecture takes a passive cooling approach, which basically means they're umbrellas shielding you from the sun and rain. Lots of them use palapas, or bundles of grass, including the roofs of most of the buildings in the Grand Mayan resort where we stayed. We had a bit of trouble finding the lobby because, we learned, it had burned down, and they were either temporarily "improving" it or "improv-ing" it by putting up an air conditioned white tent we were supposed to just know to head towards when we drove through the elaborate front gate. You see a lot of relief in photos we took of ourselves in the water, not least of which because the sea, or lagoons, or whatever water-based goodness we've stuck ourselves in, cools us off and keeps our brains from baking.

Also, as you're looking at the picture, take note of the lump on the left side of my body. That is the shape of my shoes, which I've removed, tied together, and hung from my key clip to keep dry. That's the kind of ingenuity you can do when you're not baking your brains.

More later.

Stuffed Sheep Meets Puppet Snake 1

Stuffed Sheep Meets Puppet Snake 2

Stuffed Sheep Meets Puppet Snake 3

Sunday, April 27, 2008

The home face

Brandi and I are back in Chicago following a weeklong vacation to
Riviera Maya, Mexico, where we swam with dolphins, swam in the ocean,
ate mounds of salsa and chips, snuba'd, and taught/learned to drive a
manual shift. This, following a joint 34 person Seder with the
talented and amazing Sara Wolfson. We're glad to return to a place
where it does more than threaten to rain.

More photos from our vacation will follow. Meanwhile, the data silence
ends NOW*.

* Technically, at the start of this post.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

View from the Bottom

I ran on Saturday, and kind of a lot. Brandi did me a favor and let me sleep in while she went to class, but I knew it was only a minor reprieve, because the Cincinnati marathon looms and I needed very badly to bump my mileage up to cross that finish line. I might still do the 1/2 (though, as my friend Kevin noted, quoting the comedy of Dave Gorman, one half of success is still considered failure), but I wanted to at least have tried. Pity the skies refused to cooperate. Weather outlook called for rain and snow (!), with a high of about 42 degrees. I ran a marathon in temperatures like that, but not with rain, and it took a lot out of me. Saturday, I intended to run nearly as much with lots less support.

Luckily, as a heart model--an experience I still need to write--I had bought a track suit to keep me some approximation of warm. I wore my hat and gloves, strapped on my iPhone and psyched myself up by loading on Goldfrapp, which most straights hate. Since nobody told me in high school that the Pet Shop Boys, my musical tastes have wandered into a decidedly gay territory. I like early-period Wham. Who cares? I like the beat... and women (specifically my wife). Leave it to the historians to figure that out.

The running path was understandably deserted. I ran pretty slowly, pacing myself. It's so hard when you see a goal like the Hancock building slowly creeping forward in your viewpoint. If you run faster toward it you still don't get there all that fast, and you run the risk of burning yourself out. My landmarks were: Foster Beach, Irving Park, the bridge at Diversey, the North Avenue beach restaurant shaped like a landed boat, the Hancock, Navy Pier, and finally Shedd Aquarium, for a run of about 10.5 miles. But wait! I also had to come back!

At this point, I snapped the above photo and took my first drink of water from one of the few drinking fountains running at this time of year. You might think that running in rain would stop you from sweating, but I had a tough time regulating my temperature across all the zones on my body. Hot hands are the worst, but so are hot legs, sweaty back, matted hair and the chaffing that accompanies any of the above. Wind blew rain in my eyes, so I naturally assumed when I turned around that things would get a lot easier and the wind would blow at my back.

How wrong I was.

It turns out the wind was at my back, but eddies in it blew rain into my face. When I turned around, I got hit with a full blast and realized, uh-oh, this may be a lot harder than I thought. I'd brought my bus pass, cash, ID and keys, so I could always get back the easy way, but that would mean giving up, and I'm terrible at doing that. So I soldiered on. Drinking water chilled me somewhat, so I found that I had to put my had and gloves back on and zip up my jacket fully. I was still cold. I tried to run harder, but at this point, exhaustion was taking its toll. My gloves were soaked and my hands reduced to five-pointed popsicles. My hardest point came at the stretch of concrete pier between Navy Pier and North Avenue. Nothing blocks the wind coming off the lake, so it blows right through you. It felt like a huge cold hand was pushing me backwards. I kept at it, realizing that I needed to focus on the distance runner's method of putting one foot in front of the other, knowing you'll get there eventually.

Somewhere between North Avenue and Irving Park I felt my eyelids getting droopy, a sign of hypothermia. I started looking for places to sit down, maybe rest my legs for a bit. Part of me knew that would be a bad idea, worrying about my legs stiffening. Also, I could have fallen asleep and then I would really have been in trouble. So I soldiered on.

Eventually, alternating between walking and running, I made it to Devon Avenue, only a half mile away from home. There was a 7/11 I planned to stop at to celebrate. I'd been planning my purchases for the last three hours, so it was a great joy to walk inside. I bought a half gallon of orange juice and a banana. It would have been funny to watch me struggle to get my money out of my pockets at this point. My hands were so frozen that I couldn't find the dexterity to push my fingers together, or feel them well enough to know when I was holding money. When I tried to apologize for the wet money--rained, not sweated on--my voice came out in a weird slur, "Shorry," because, unknown to me my face had frozen. I probably should have bought coffee, but knew the cold-fighting properties of vitamin C would come more in handy in the long run.

At my door, I struggled with my house keys. At the start of the run, I had tied them together with a rubber band to keep them from jingling and annoying me. At the end, I didn't have enough dexterity to pull the rubber band off, so I basically bit it off. Sticking the door key in the lock also proved tricky because I didn't have enough strength to turn it. Funny how you take for granted the ability to grasp things between your thumb and forefinger. Luckily, bringing the other hand into play solved that problem. Two more doors and I was inside, amongst the cats and ready for a bath. I shivered through half of it. Our building is kind of quirky in that three units share the same (small) hot water tank for the shower or bath. So if anyone has taken a shower at any point during the day, you're going to run out of hot water. Hot water will run in the sink, dishwasher or kitchen all day long, but in the place where you might actually dip your body it's guaranteed to run out. I usually route around this by putting a big pot of water on the stove, settler-style, then pouring it in the bath after it gets appropriately hot. In that moment, I had a chicken-and-egg problem in that I needed to feel warm enough to get out of the tub to put on the pot to feel warm enough. I got it, eventually, but, geez, somebody needs to get on that.

Post-bath, I enjoyed hot beverages, cats and Battlestar Galactica, season three, on the couch for the next several hours. I figured I deserved the break.

XP Bad Boy

What's got me all worked up in this photo? Besides the Metra train schedule for the Chicago to Kenosha line? It's the fact that I got Windows XP to run on a Toshiba Satellite A215. It took some doing. Probably resulting from some Faustian deal with Microsoft, Toshiba sells many of (possibly all of?) its consumer notebooks with Windows Vista. The woman who bought the notebook, a co-worker of mine who is just starting to explore the possibility of life after the University, wanted things to work as much as possible the same as her desktop, which runs Windows XP. I offered to help her as a favor. This led to six tense hours yesterday as I installed XP (easy!), downloaded additional drivers from third-party sites (less easy...), and finally went searching for the drivers from step two that did not install properly (very much not easy at all, except that it involved little physical effort). If worse comes to worse, I reasoned, I could always reinstall with the original system DVDs and offer my most profound apologies for wasting everyone's time.

I hate that crap.

So I sweated through it. My earliest breakthrough was installing the display drivers. I can always tell on a laptop (or any flat panel) when the display is set to a nonnative resolution. Everything looks soft and weirdly fuzzy. Once I got that down, I tracked down wireless drivers, which helped me bootstrap the Ethernet drivers into the machine. The last little bit came when I got the SD card slot driver to work. Now when I looked at the Device Manager, no little yellow icons with exclamation marks peeked out at me. The machine was clean as a whistle. I only had to patch it.

More than a hundred updates later, and it's still going. I can't wait for SP3.

I'm also wearing that expression to make my hair look smaller. I've got a proper 'fro going on and badly need a trip to the hair cuttery. Soon.

Monday, April 07, 2008

Laundry

Sunday, I did a ton of laundry. Not a metric ton, and not at once, but about seven loads. I'm guesstimating that I haven't done laundry in about a month, or if I had, it wasn't a very organized affair. I think I squeezed in a couple of loads that I never bothered to fold. I'm slightly bothered by the wording, "squeezed in a couple of loads," but I'll trust you to draw the right conclusion. It's an incredible feeling to look into your closet on a Monday morning and see a nigh-endless vista of possibilities.

One casualty: I had to part with one of my favorite pair of khakis, whose pocket I had ripped beyond repair. Holes in legs I can forgive. Shredded cuffs look pretty cool. Pockets, though, I use. You may take my life, but don't force me to surrender my pants with the extra pockets at the knees. If I could get away with parading around in a flight suit with pockets from neck to shins, I think I probably would just buy a pair of goggles and have done with it. But a ripped upper pocket means you can't hold your cell phone, or your wallet, or have to transfer one or the other to a dangerous back pocket (which for cell phones means potential crushing, wallets, stealing) or to a knee pocket (which can cause damage to your knees when you run). I've thought this through entirely too thoroughly. At any rate, the pants now rest in peace in the kitchen garbage, the closest large garbage can to the laundry.

In the middle of the laundry, Brandi and I took a trip to Best Buy, where I bought a USB network adapter for my Mac Mini, the better to hook our newfangled flatscreen television up to a computer, which we could then network and do videoconferencing from our couch. Surprisingly enough, this vision of a networked den worked on the third try, and we had a nice midday chat with Brandi's parents in Florida, marveling at our ability to say "hello!" and "what's up!" and other things of not much of consequence through 1800 miles' distance, and for nearly free. It was at Best Buy where we snapped the above picture, which is also an homage to my father in law, Eric Kleinert, author of "Troubleshooting and Repairing Major Home Appliances." The t-shirt comes courtesy of our friend Marla, who toured America on behalf of a major hotel chain and returned with free snarky tees for friends. The saying on it looks a bit like a surreal caption: who, after all, wouldn't wake up after finding himself trapped inside a washing machine? And why do we need reassurance? Shouldn't we be helping this chap?

Brandi looks way cooler in her shot:

Weekend on Bikes

Brandi and I took some much-needed R&R this weeekend, resting up and getting ready for countdown to April's seder and our trip to Mexico. Saturday, we took out the bicycles and went for a ride along the lakeshore path down to Foster Avenue beach. The weather was a bit cool, but perfect with a sweatshirt, and a welcome respite from the cold weather blues that got pretty much everybody down this winter. On the additional plus side, Brandi and I now both have padded seats, to combat the inevitable numbness that besieges our bony backsides.

I think my wife looks absolutely adorable in this picture. I, on the other hand, thanks to the wraparound mirror shades that Brandi advised me not to buy in the store, but which I thought fit nicely and would stay on my head when I went running in them (and do!), look like a complete jag. Seriously, doesn't this picture just scream, "Get off my beamer, you jobless hobo!" Even my canines look fake.

Just to add a counter to that photo, here's a picture of me on my ride, a Citizen, which is a folding bike I can (theoretically) take on the train.

Geek cred restored. +50 HP.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

File this under "Why not?"

On the way into work today, in the elevator, I had what I hope is a cool revelation and not just a cold medicine brain fart. Our building recently replaced both the main and the service elevators. During the long period of construction, I got used to using the service elevator, so that now every time I walk into the main elevator, I get a little confused by the button layout and hit the wrong floor. This is a dumb mistake; there are only five floors in the building. So I add about 30 extra seconds to my commute having to wait through the fourth floor to get to the fifth. So, no big deal, right?

But, I thought, what about the old prank where a punk kid hits all of the buttons on a high rise elevator and runs off cackling while the passengers are forced to endure a stop at every single floor on the way to their destinations? Short of the taser, there has to be a way to stop these mischief makers, as well as iPhone-absorbed chowderheads like myself.

THEN IT HIT ME

Why don't they program the buttons so that if you hit them a second time, you don't go to that floor. I'm no elevator button expert (I'm hired for my looks), but to my mind, relative to hardware that reduces your chances of a Speed-like plummet to your doom, the costs to change the panel should be trivial. Training would be pretty fast, too:

1) Hit a button once, go to that floor.
2) Hit a button twice, don't go to that floor.
3) Hit a button again, go to that floor again.
4) Hit it a fourth time, don't go to that floor.

This kind of odd-even button interface would work fine with anyone who has ever used a light switch. We understand on/off. We can make this work, people.

I hope you're listening, America.

Big Hair, Brown Sweater

It's that time of the year again, when my haircut has grown past all bounds of respectability, and yet I continue to ignore it for another week because I don't work or live near a hair cuttery and I'm too busy to find one. Sigh. Most days I like being a mammal. I don't grow torpid in cold weather. Hot weather makes me sweat instead of, I don't know, die. And while I cannot personally lactate, I can in theory make kids who could, and help out in their live birth by encouraging my wife to breathe. The fur part bugs me, though. As you can see from how tall my hair gets when it grows out, I could easily replace it with a crest of feathers, or an especially nice bony protrusion to help me ward off intruding males. If possible, I would also like clear membranes to slide over my eyes when they get dry, so I don't have to blink.

So while it would be a shame to have to give up my inner ear bones (what up, hammer, anvil and stirrup?), I might consider it a fair trade for not having to look like Eurotrash every time I forget and/or feel too lazy to scrape the front of my face with sharpened steel. Also, I wouldn't have to feel shame when I took a trip to the beach, and revealed testosterone's effect on my shoulders, which look like they're taking on the overflow of refugees in the resettlement from hairline to back.

People are gross.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

The Princess Tent

Brandi and I were at my dad's place, getting ready to head out to breakfast, when we noticed the princess tent my dad set up for my niece, Regan. After looking at it wistfully for a few moments, my wife said, "I wish I had a princess tent." I agreed, and said that every home should have at least one, the better to live out the following scenario:

"Honey, I'm home. Honey? Where are you?"
"In the princess tent!"

This naturally led to the speculation as to whether or not Brandi would fit inside the princess tent, which she did, and led to further speculation as to whether or not I would as well. I'll spare you the details of the origami-like folding of our legs. As you can see from the photos, despite a combined length of nearly twelve feet, we both fit inside the tent.

Unfortunately, while cramming yourself inside a pink nylon tent never intended for the outdoors might be a fun way to spend a few moments, and despite the pillows helpfully strewn about the floor, sitting in the tent for more than a few moments was decidedly uncomfortable, and, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, or, perhaps more appropriate to the decor, like human birth, we were forced to emerge into the outside world through an opening only marginally large enough to fit us.

The results, far more comical than your average birth, are posted below. Brandi's exit has not been captured due to the fact that she cares whether or not she is humiliated in a public forum. Having performed comedy in baseball pants and a bowling shirt (or, occasionally, a referee jersey) for the better part of a decade, I have no such reputation to protect.

Family

We went to Cleveland last weekend to attend my grandmother's funeral. Grandma Larsen was 87 years old when she died, in the care of the staff of the Normandy in Bay Village. She had been suffering from Alzheimer's for nearly eighteen years, and the end, when it came, was comparatively painless. While losing his mother broke my father's heart, he was glad to have had a mother like Grandma Larsen, and grateful to have had the chance to say goodbye.

The memorial service took place at Bay United Methodist, which Grandma, raised a Lutheran, rather mysteriously attended for the majority of her life, eventually guiding her son John into the ministry. Uncle John spoke last at the service, and he was funny, touching, loving and respectful not just to Grandma, but to his brothers as well, repeating my Uncle Bob's anecdote about Grandma reading the book, "The Little Engine that Could," and its effect on his life. Three of the cousins, Brett, Kelly and me, were also asked to speak, and I really enjoyed their take on growing up with Grandma in Vermillion, Ohio, with life on the beach and trips to the candy store. Really, you can't Hollywood a better story than that.

Afterwards, we all gathered at my father's house in Rocky River, and eventually took this photo. Unfortunately, my sister Heather and her family couldn't stick around, as they had a number of events they had to make for my nephews. Whenever I think I'm busy, I think about Heather and her amazing ability to keep track of two boys, one girl, a husband, a household, *and* run a marathon. I think she's brilliant and organized well beyond my own small ability. At any rate, we gathered what family members we could find and posed for this shot on the back deck. It was fun afterwards to compare the faces of the family to the photos my dad took almost two decades ago in my uncle's church in Salem, OH. Kids have grown. Weight has shifted (mostly to the face). More kids came onboard (from where? STOOOORRK!). It's important to remember that the silver lining to losing a family member is having these moments with your family.

PS - thanks to Brandi for driving the entire way back. We make a nice team.