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

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.

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.

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.

Does this even need explanation?

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.

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.

Bourne Again

My friend Natalie asked me to tape her sketch comedy show, "Mass Hysteria" Friday night, and so I showed up with my camera and tripod slung across my back like an A/V assassin. The show was fun and hopefully I kept everything in focus enough to produce an entertaining and instructive 30 minutes. Instructive because she, her cast mate Vinney and her director will be reviewing the DVD tonight. In order to get the disc in her hands, I made arrangements to meet her mid-day by her office. Natalie, being by far the funnier of the two of us, joked that we should call it vague names like "the stuff" and not look each other in the eye when we handed it off. Since I'd just watched "The Bourne Ultimatum," I was more than game, and planned for a full scale police chase across LaSalle and into the subway tunnels. As evidenced by this photo, I wore gloves to prevent fingerprints, and disguised my hair using a special graying formula that, used properly, takes years to put in. When I got close, unable to trust voice communications (okay, I was having problems with my cell phone), I texted Natalie, and hid behind a light post.

Well, imagine my disappointment when after handing it over, no sirens went off, and we wound up chatting about the show and how dumb it is when people tell you to do two things at once and, when you ask which is the highest priority, respond with, "They're BOTH my highest priority." Since my deep cover continues to be successful, I will retain the identity of "Matt Larsen," a person who does not know karate, or car-fu, and who, when surprised, tends to scream like a nine year old girl. I do, however, make really great stuffed peppers.

Dangerously great.

Heart Model

Yesterday, I drove to the suburbs so my heart could audition for a modeling gig.

You heard me.

A couple of years ago, I learned from my friend Shad that the companies that manufacture ultrasound scanning machines periodically hold trade shows to sell their machines to the doctors, hospitals and Tom Cruises of the world. At the conferences, they employ tall, fit men for the simple expedient that there are fewer layers of flesh between paddle and the organs. The job of the models is to lay there and be scanned, and, by the way, not talk. It sounded too close to my ideal job of getting paid to eat to pass up, and, when Shad's agency called to offer me a position, I happily accepted. What I didn't know at the time, though, was that I didn't have the job yet. They were actually giving me a chance to audition for the part, in the middle of a conference. More challenging, I couldn't get into the conference until someone from inside it let me inside. Surprisingly, it gets worse. I was not the only person trying out. Being a nice guy, I let the other guy go first, taking the one badge that was available and heading inside. Outside, I waited. And waited.

Turned out, the guy went in there and said I never showed. The machine scanners pretty much just needed whoever turned up first, and, because I was a nice guy, I lost out. The agency took a little pity on me, and paid me a token amount just for showing up and getting dumped on, but it was still a major blow to my finances to miss out on that kind of opportunity.

When the same agency called again, I took it with a grain of salt. I drove out to the suburban office still carrying a little baggage in my heart, which I hoped they would detect.

It came as no surprise that the security girl at the front had no idea what to do with me. I came with a contact name and a phone number, and they still managed to bungle it. A gentleman named Dave came out, shook my hand, and guided me to a room just off the reception area where they had a machine set up. He apologized for the chilly room and the chillier ultrasound gel, had me peel up my shirt and started scanning my abdomen. At that point, I probably should have asked more questions about why he was scanning my belly instead of my heart but, hey, I'd never gotten one of these done before. It tickled. Like a fifties housewife, I lay back and counted ceiling tiles. He complimented me on my pancreas, which, I was told, had a nice tail. He was also impressed that I had come without eating breakfast, since it left my gallbladder full of gastric juice and prevented pockets of gas from bouncing back to the ultrasound paddle and ruining the image.

Flattered into silence about the heart scan I'd been promised, I said I rarely ate breakfast. Dave continued on, noting one healthy kidney and the other, both in the right place. (Apparently, unbeknown to the owners, kidneys may or may not rise to their proper positions; one man Dave had scanned, a prisoner at a facility in Joliet, found out inadvertently that he had what was called a pelvic kidney. Mine was fine.) At some point, he showed the image of my heart, and I relaxed a bit. What I knew about ultrasound was confined to friends' pictures of their unborn children--"Skeletor babies" they call them--and Dave seemed pretty knowledgeable.

Did I mention that while all of this was happening, caterers were setting up for a meal?

Finally, a woman came in and started comparing names to lists. When she couldn't find mine, she realized I was with the OTHER unit, for cardiology, and I was politely asked to wait once more in the lobby. Dave seemed vaguely sad that he had learned how to operate the machine on me and would have to soldier on without, but another model was there and more than willing to help calibrate. I went back to the lobby, to sit and ponder the irony.

Eventually, I noticed a minor hubbub at the check in desk. I walked over, remembering the penalty one pays for timidity, and was rewarded when I looked at the name badge of the woman there and saw my contact. This was it! There was another heart model there, also named Matt, and if I hadn't come by when I did, I might have been sitting on that couch still. Luckily, they took us both into a different, less chilly room, where they gently scanned our hearts and noted the results on a piece of paper. As a bonus, the woman who scanned me also did my carotid artery, so by mid-morning I'd had everything from neck to belly button scanned and logged. I joked with her that I'd hoped Dave did a good job cleaning off the ultrasound gel, lest the cardiology folks get jealous. I was met with weak laughter. What can I say? I'm a heart model, not a comedian.

My telekinetic wife

Okay, I guess you could argue she was having a bad hair day. Or maybe the atmosphere was charged up just prior to a thunderstorm. Maybe she just walked too fast across the carpet.

But I'm still sure we never should have let the government experiment on her using the same drugs they used to create Project: Akira. That was just one of our bad ideas. We probably shouldn't have bought that motorcycle, either. It just wasn't in our budget.

I knew we never should have moved to Neo Tokyo.

(Hop over to Being Brandi to see the original.)

Link to AKIRA!

Babyshop

With apologies to dearest friends Clair and Shane, I am posting this adorable little throwback to 1998 with an animated GIF of their son, who is adorable even as he gazes upon you with the intensity of Goldfinger. A site I stumbled upon last week offered up fake 3d images created with animated GIFs shown at slightly different angles. It tricked the brain into seeing depth. I wondered if I could do the same using our friends' baby as a test subject. I think he made it through okay, except Blogger seems to have stripped out the animation. So it goes...

Next baby test: the Milgram experiment.

It's St. Patrick's Day and it's no joke...

Just like the joke goes*, it's Saint Patrick's Day and we really did get patio furniture. We had to travel to two different Targets this weekend to find what we were looking for: a love seat glider plus ottoman. Here it is, weatherproof and everything. Doesn't it look simply lovely? Since stores nowadays don't actually trust you to be able to get the thing you're purchasing, we looked around the outdoor furniture section, looking fora Target team member, but apparently the humanity-reducing plague struck there first, because there were none to be found. (Brandi and I are robots, and therefore immune. Thanks for asking.) We then made the mistake of going to the front of the store, where we found a cluster of red-shirted Target team members and one slightly-less-red-shirted, harried Target team member. This turned out to be a manager who, when we asked about the lovely outdoor love seat, grew irate that nobody was on call in the section we had come from, then grew more irate that the item we wanted was out of stock in the store room. He apologized profusely, after reaming out his underlings over his headset, and offered us two alternate Targets.

On a whim, we headed to the northernmost Target, at Logan and Elston, in part because we were already driving that way to avoid the drunken spectacle following the parade on Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive. At first, it seemed like they didn't have it there, either, as the team member we approached began using stockroom lingo that fooled nobody (and certainly not two intelligent, virus-immune robots). "It's a ghost," he said into his walkie talkie. Then, following another search, the love seat was found, sans ottoman, which would have to come from the warehouse. It was a shock to find out that Target stores are that large and yet much of the inventory must come from a warehouse EVEN LARGER THAN THAT. Did we want to come back? (No, not really.) Wait. It would only take ten minutes or so. Did we want to wait? (Yes, okay...)

When we brought the box out to the car, we knew we would have another problem. The team member who helped us (our fifth or sixth of the day; apparently, buying furniture, like raising a child, takes a village) thought we could just shove it in the back of our Scion xA, but, having moved 12,544 metric tons of stuff in that car, I knew exactly what would and would not fit. Also, as Brandi pointed out, the box was clearly larger than the opening. Still, he thought it worth a try. No go. So we pulled the love seat out of the box, and, lo and behold, everything fit.

I told our helper, "Give that box to a kid who wants to build a fort." Probably, it got crushed. Hopefully, it was empty.

We are finally ready to celebrate spring in style.

* Classic ComedySportz groaner.
Ref: "Hey, Mr. Voice, how are you tonight?"
Mr. Voice: "Oh, I'm okay. There's this Irish guy on my porch who won't leave."
Ref: "Oh, really, who?"
Mr. Voice: "Patty O' Irish Stereotype."

Team Armsen-Larsbruster

My mom called me the other day to let me know that my sister, who ran the Cincinnati Flying Pig half marathon last year, would be doing the full marathon this year. I almost cheered. My sister is a full-time mom of three who has hardly enough time during the day to take a breath. For many years, while the kids were very small, she hardly had time to walk, much less train for a marathon. Brandi and I asked her to stand in our wedding about a month before she found out she was pregnant with child number three. My sister had a little more than eleven months to be pregnant, get fitted, have a baby, and lose the baby weight to fit the dress again. She did, and it amazes me, and I'm a DUDE.

It amazes me even more that we'll be running this race, kind of together. Heather has a group she runs with, and of course we're at completely different paces, but with any luck afterwards we can get into a fight over who is more sore, and where. She is my sister after all.

What are you doing... Dave?

One of my duties as a network administrator is to set up the videoconferencing equipment for communications between Chicago and Urbana. In other offices, this would be as mundane as turning on a switch and a couple of TVs, laying microphones out on a table, and bidding everyone a good session as I walk out the door, humming to myself and counting the days to my retirement. At least, that's how it would work in the magical fantasy office that I've built out of the sad reality of our Rice Building office. For starters, the machine, a Polycom ViewStation FX, is at least a decade old, probably older, having sat in the Office of the President's conference room for that long before being shipped to us in a big cardboard box as part of a spring cleaning program that netted them two flat screens and us this machine plus two CRT televisions only slightly lighter than a Volkswagen Beetle. The TVs perch precariously atop steel carts, waiting, I believe, for the smallest tremble to hurl themselves face-first into the floor, where their weight will carry them, China Syndrome-like, to the center of the earth while the rest of us scramble to get the hell out of the way. For obvious reasons, we don't move them around very much.

The ViewStation, which is basically a mysterious streamlined base station with a disturbingly HAL-like eye poking out of the top and a few triangular microphones emerging from the station like Martian tentacles, also acts just like a Martian in that it's mostly dead or at best hibernating in anticipation of warmer, wetter climes. The on/off switch at the back works about 50% of the time, resulting in an amber light at the front of the unit. DO NOT BE FOOLED by its yellow glow! Anything short of solid green means the machine is cycling endlessly through its "clicking phase," a term I just pulled out of my ass to describe the faint humming emanating from inside of the plastic beast. Sometimes, in its cleverness, the amber/green diode won't light at all, then suddenly blink amber a couple of times, and shut off again. To solve this, I shut it off and turned it on again, repeatedly. Sure, occasionally, I would experiment with holding the only other button on the right side of the machine, but it usually amounts to nothing. I usually start off with a half an hour to do a setup that should take less than five minutes. As the failures mount, I start to hit that power button with increasing desperation. My boss usually shows up about five minutes before the scheduled meeting. She has less interest in videoconferencing than I do, and sometimes offers to hook up the speaker phone, but usually she makes fun of me first. It's hard to sit there, moronically hitting the power button over and over again, waiting desperately for the Polycom logo on the TV, and argue that I'm doing the best job I can.

For a long time I thought it just hated me, or I was as retarded as my sister thought I was growing up. But, no. Last month, I found a post on older Polycom equipment, and the silver soldering they used to connect components. Over time, the silver corrodes, leaving an insulating surface, and the machine stops working. They've since switched to gold, which is great, but they're expensive as hell, which is not. So, I continue to sit there, at first confidently, but slowly moving into begging and eventually all-out prayer to the machine god to stop hitting the snooze button and get to work. It's only a matter of time before I punch that thing in its goddamn HAL 9000 eye and set up the speaker phone. Which is also Polycom, but it works.

Looking at the world through rose-colored...

I wore glasses to work today. It's been ages since I wore them last, and my co-worker Scott observed, "You just don't see glasses that big anymore." True, I'm desperately out of fashion. I got these glasses a little bit less than a decade ago, when I was at work and started getting an ocular migraine. At first, it looked like a tiny spot of static in the corner of my eye, then it began to spread, taking over my right eye and the periphery of my left. Then the headache hit me. Apparently, the optometrist told me, I was compensating for 20/25 vision in my right eye with the muscles around my lens, which had gotten fatigued and decided to stab me through my nerve endings. So I bought glasses, nice ones at the time, ending a two-decade era in which I also wore glasses, but fake ones, since I had 20/20 vision in both eyes.

Now I'm older, but apparently my eyes aren't getting significantly worse, despite the fact that I a) read pretty much all the time, b) work on computers, c) draw with my face about 2" away from the paper. I wonder if the extra muscle strength is due to the fact that I punish them, and if one day they won't just pop out in search for a better owner, like pugs, except without the smashed face.

I never noticed it until now, but this face looks an awful lot like my "Sling Blade" pose. Some call it a kaiser blade. Mmmn-hnnh.

Moo

I got a call yesterday that a telecommunications company is holding a look-see audition, and would I be so kind as to attend? Since I have a pretty paltry acting resume at the moment, and can always use the money the gigs bring, I excused myself from my day job and headed over to the photography studio. It was pretty far west, so I had to take the train to a bus. A couple of other riders, it turned out, were headed to the same audition. I should have realized. Most people riding the CTA in the middle of the day don't bother looking too glammed up. When we got to the door, the four of us went inside to a proper cattle call.

Times past, I've gone to auditions and been pleased to find that the casting people grouped me among the "attractive, tall, full-head-of-hair, Caucasian males," which flatters me even as it assures me I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting the part. Face facts: I'm mostly a "comedic type" with a decent, if not 0.8% body fat, physique. They come taller, broader-shouldered, lots less gray. Whatever group they add me to, it's usually pretty narrow. For a photo call, I come in, fill out a card with availability, sizes (I'm never sure of "shirt"--medium? Do I need to know my arm lengths? Chest? Neck? Taper?), conflicts, get set up, flirt with the camera under bright lights and flashes, then go. This, by the way, makes me seem a lot more prolific than I am. This happens every couple of months at best. Acting for me is a part, part, part, part time job. I usually can get away with sneaking out on a lunch hour. Once, I went out while it was raining heavily and convinced my visiting boss that the massive
wetness staining the shoulders of my blue dresa shirt was part of the shirt's pattern, and that I hadn't gone anywhere. I got that part, perhaps due to sheer brazenness.

Today, though, the place is packed. People, pretty people of all stripes, ages and ethnicities, sit on every available horizontal surface. I don't know how I'll make it back to the office in time for
an early afternoon meeting, or the audition at my agent's offices afterwards. Really, this kind of logjam only happens once every couple of months. I'm happy that I was honest, this time at least.

My smiling headshot looks up at me, mocking, from my knee. I got a seat by default, in the same meritless way you get one on the CTA: someone got up right behind me. A slight awkwardness as he came back afterwards and asked for his coat, which I was slouching against. He held no grudges. In fact, seeing me type on my iPhone, he held out his own and said, "You should watch out for those soft cases. A friend of mine had one and dropped his phone, and his headphones stopped working." I pointed out that my silicone case helped me run with my phone. "Cool," he said. Neither of us were auditioning for AT&T. Potentially awkward? Only if they catch me!

Does it count as a white lie if you make money off it?

Hardened Criminal

I moved a lot of stuff this weekend, wearing nothing when I should probably have invested 1.5 seconds putting work gloves on. My hands are a mess of nicks, scratches and splinters in need of pulling. Still, looking haggard in my hands doesn't bug me as long as you leave alone my pretty, pretty face.

That ended last night.

We went to bed early, around 9:30, still groggy from weekend drama. The cats, as usual, found warm spots on top of the covers and we cuddled up. Rio, our orange demon furball, sometimes feels unsatisfied with the top of the covers, and will climb underneath in order to snuggle closer to our--to her--giant, warm, pillow soft and pajama-clad bodies. Most nights, it's like wrapping your arms around the ideal stuffed animal. She goes to sleep. We go to sleep. At some point in the night, she gets hungry, bored or rolled-over, and clambers out with tabby stealth. Not last night. Something in our configuration upset the cat, and she climbed out hastily, pausing to land a back claw directly in my temple.


"Are you okay?" Brandi asked.

"I think I'm bleeding," I said. Awake, now, and no longer warmly cradled in the arms of sleep, I went to the bathroom and peroxided my face. It could have been worse and no malice was intended, so I shrugged it off and went back to bed. It took another 45 minutes to get to sleep, then my dreams were weird, and I got up very early in the morning to eat Girl Scout cookies. I wish they had healing properties. If I'm 50 pounds too heavy to run the marathon in May, Thin Mints are to blame.

Wilmonts Are Go!

Adding to the drama of the weekend, our delightful friends Clair and Shane introduced us to the most marvelous, and certainly the youngest fellows it has been our privilege to meet, their son. Though a quiet, studious type, it is clear from the full head of blond hair and the fisticuffs maneuver which involves raising his hands to calculatedly cover his face that he has great potential for rogueishness. That, and the fact that he is, as his father says, "The most beautiful baby in the world. I'm not kidding. Absolutely beautiful."

Shane also said of his son, "NOT to eat."

Plans to build my candy home proceed apace.

Congratulations to Shane and Clair. Thank you for letting me hold "DC."

The cowboy rode yesterday and it was a hell of a ride. Ryan Dee Gilmour and I started moving props and the set out of my basement at 3:50 AM Sunday morning, and worked until 7:00 PM. The cast was great. Director Kevin Chatham kept his cool all day long and took in stride the two parking tickets the city of Chicago issued his car, several of which came minutes before his meter ran out. Some of them run fast, I don't doubt it.

Typically, we ran very behind at first, caught up with ourselves, got ambitious, ran behind again and several things failed completely. I beat myself up that I thought cranberry juice would work as a substitute for real fake blood. It just ran too clear on camera. Those will have to be re-shot, in close-up, with the sets we saved, unless people accept that being shot results in a massive loss of lymphatic fluid. Perhaps it's innovative?

At any rate, many thanks to the talented cast, my patient and lovely wife, and chief set designer, architect and builder, Heather Elam, who amazingly juggled time between job, partner and young daughter Daphne to do something nearly impossible.

I'll post more as we near a final product.

Busted

So, this post may appear very derivative, especially if you like me are an avid reader of the blog of Tim Ryder, but I'm going to take part in a very special forward, called the 123 Meme. The rules:

123 Meme Rules: (1) Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating! (2) Turn to page 123. (3) Find the first 5 sentences. (4) Post the next 3 sentences. (5) Tag 5 people.

Now, here's where my nerdiness is revealed. Because I have the option of either: a) MCSA/MCSE Exam 70-290 Training Kit: Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment, or b) an ebook by Charles Stross called Scratch Monkey that I've been reading on my iPhone. I'm rejecting choice (a) because its pages are numbered in maddening non-linear chapter-pages, meaning there is no page 123, nor is there a 1-23 because chapter 1 ends at page 22. Other chapters might go as high as 60. Also, who really wants to read sentences like, "The DSADD command, introduced in Chapter 2, is used to add objects to Active Directory." Boooooring.

So here's Charles Stross, who is anything but...

Oshi came to her feet suddenly, felt her blood pressure drop and blipped her adrenal glands into play -- aren't military bionics wonderful -- and looked round. Green contours of light tracked through every surface, revealing and concealing the secret life that surrounded them. She pursed her lips and whistled, experimentally; in one corner a cobweb flickered lucent blue.

Now comes the viral part. I'm tagging Brandi, Ryan Dee Gilmour, Mom-in-law Eileen, Dave Maxwell, and Shane Wilson, to hopefully kickstart him off this blogging dry spell that recently culminated in the birth of his delightful son, Dashiell.

Luck to you all.

The Pain!

Thanks to del.icio.us, I've recently come across a site http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/ featuring clips of classic Garfield cartoons without the central character. What's left is a little baffling, existential, and tremendously entertaining.

"The Pain!" is my favorite.

Happy Two Times Two

Brandi and I celebrated our four year wedding anniversary yesterday at La Donna restaurant in Andersonville, on Chicago's north side. Four years! It's passed, not in the blink of an eye, but well, I think. We each had the prix fixe menu, because nothing says "married four years" better than a good deal, and great food, including pear salads to die for, salmon (me) and ravioli (her, then me, because I am a food Hoover) and finally mint chocolate chip gelato, which is like ice cream but formed out of Italian. The server was so nice to remember or overhear that it was our anniversary and included these little candles in our gelato, one for every two years. Is this the tradition? It is now! She was also kind enough to run, then re-run, then re-re-run our credit cards after a mix-up with the table next to us, which had a couple also out for a romantic evening, who had also ordered wine and the prix fixe menu, but who paid with a different credit card. If the price had been closer, I wouldn't have minded paying for theirs. At the end of the night, they said, "Our anniversary is in November. See you then!"

November, got it. I'll be wearing the red carnation.

Boot Failure

I work in computers. Most often, a boot failure means the hard drive died, or, less often, the power supply or the motherboard. On very rare occasions, the RAM dies, or the heat from the other components causes a part to become separated from the motherboard.

This morning, I had a very different boot failure on the way to work. This kind turned my leather Caterpillar work boots into one half of a pair of flip flops. When I walked into the office, every other step went, "FLUP!" (pause) "FLUP!" (pause) "FLUP!" It doesn't help that I wear men's 11-1/2 boots. Ironically, this morning I was thinking about bringing my running shoes to work, in case I got uncomfortable or wanted to work out, but the threat of snow later made me reconsider. That's it; we need time travel PRONTO.

I wound up fastening a pair of rubber bands from the heel to the little leather piece that sticks off the back of the ankle, just to give me a little more stealth. Later on, Joe, a very kind man who works in my office, hooked me up with some super glue. That, plus the rubber bands, should keep me from having to make an emergency visit to Payless.

Stuff like this reminds me that this week, in my life, is Sweeps Week. So much drama.

The Challenge of Hauling Lumber in a Compact Car

Brandi and I did a little post-work tango last night, where she drove to class downtown and picked me up so that I could drop her off. Why? Myopic Cowboy errands, picking up bedsheets (Big Lots, in Niles), olde tyme bottles (American Science and Surplus, in Chicago), and lumber (Home Depot, in Evanston).

The last was kind of a magic trick, for anyone who has met our car, "Pip." A Scion xA chosen for its price and good mileage, Pip has served us for the two years we've owned him. He's driven Brandi to work, us to Ohio, and, last year, hauled half our stuff from our old apartment to our new condo. This took about twenty trips. (For the other half, we hired movers, who broke a window at our old place and promised to but never paid for it.) I know this car like Russians know Tetris. When I bought the lumber, a part of me wondered, "Can I get this stuff inside my car or do I have to strap it to the roof and spend another half hour outside in twenty degree weather?" Another, more swaggery part, replied with, "Ahhhh, forget about it. You got this." When questioned further, this squirrely personality fragment said, "No, really, it's easy. You run the 2x4s diagonally through the cab with the passenger seat laid flat and the rear passenger seat backs down. If that's not enough, you may even be able to wedge some boards under the passenger footwells." Sure enough, this worked, as evidenced by the photo, which looks like our car has been tragically speared.

For the curious, the navigation system Brandi's parents bought us is called "Gigi."

Winter is still very pretty...

Winter, our eyes met across the dance floor. You were dancing with the sunrise while I stood in the corner, swaying to the beat. I admit, I blinked back tears, though whether they were for the remorse in my heart or the stinging wind peeling off the upper layers of my facial epidermis, I can't say. I do know that when I captured this picture, of a bubble of ice surrounding the bud of a tree, that your heart is

cold, and you turned away from me once again.

Don't call me, winter. And my email is off the hook.

AKIRA!

I am a nerd, and I do Photoshop, therefore I subject you to this photo, taken at the 2008 Chicago Auto Show by my lovely and terribly patient wife.

Winter, I'm breaking up with you...

That's it. I've had it up to here with you, winter. I'm sick and tired of your attitude, and I'm breaking up with you.

We used to be really great friends, winter. When I was a fat kid, you used to be the only time of the year I felt comfortable to play outside, since every other season made me uncomfortably sweaty. I used to really love making snowmen, going for sled rides, skiing, tobogganing, and even sitting by the fire gazing out at your monochromatic majesty through frosty windows. You didn't make me wear a t-shirt in the pool to cover my gross fat ripples. You were the great equalizer. Everyone wore coats! I used to love to pull down the icicles you made drip from the sides of buildings, pretending to be a pirate, or a Jedi, or a space Jedi pirate. You were adventure!

Even when I grew up, you were a pleasure. Last year, you came and went and like a nice fling, I never really knew where I stood with you. You came and went so often. Was it global warming? You taught me to enjoy the time we had, so I even forgave when you dropped ten degrees below, freezing the pipes in the apartment below ours, and flooding our basement. I know it wasn't your fault, winter! You said so! And they were cheapskates who didn't pay for the gas to heat their place, so you taught them a lesson. I wasn't afraid of you, then, either. When you snowed, I knew that in a week or two, the roads would be clear of it and I wouldn't have to worry about potholes or slipping on the sheet of water that melts off and then re-freezes when the temperature drops back down to the teens. You were temperate and kind and when you left for spring, you didn't pull the trick of popping back down to freezing to kill off all the early budding plants. You just went, and my memories were fond.

Now, though, you don't leave. Like the Cranberries, you linger. You make lawns look like glaciers. You nearly broke my elbow when I fell on a sidewalk covered with a thin sheen of nearly frictionless ice. You make me feel unsafe walking under a large building. Sure, icicles look fun when you're a kid and they're hanging from the second story. Now, hanging from the fortieth story, they look like they could slice you to the bone. And they might. When did you turn murderous, winter? And why do you cost so much? When heating the apartment to livable temperature means sacrificing my kid's college education, I can only conclude you suck. What you've done to my car, between salt and potholes, is unforgivable.

Winter, I'm breaking up with you. If you don't take your snow and leave in the next two weeks, you'll be hearing from my attorney.

Myopic Cowboy t-minus 6 days and counting

We started building sets for my next short this weekend. "Myopic Cowboy" will shoot on Sunday, March 2nd, at the Playground Theatre, and will require transforming a very nice black box theatre into a saloon set. Thanks to the incredible talent and planning of Master Carpenter Heather Elam, we're off to an excellent start. We drove out to Home Depot Saturday to buy supplies. I had a sneaking suspicion at checkout that the number they charged us was strangely low. Sure enough, after securing the seven faux-wooden panels and plywood to the top of Heather's car and loading in the 1x4s, 2x4s and 2x6s (I sound construction-y!), I checked the receipt and found that they didn't charge us for any of the panels or plywood. We basically (accidentally) walked out with about $100 in building materials. So Home Depot gets a credit.

Afterwards, we transported everything from the car to my basement, Ryan Gilmour having very nicely chipped a safe path through the glacier forming in the back walkway of our condo building. Every time it snows, people trudging through to walk dogs form a new glacier that gets incredibly slippery and dangerous if you're carrying anything heavier than a fountain pen.

My original plan called for us to buy everything next Saturday, start building immediately after the final Playground show, and then tear everything down after we finished shooting and before the evening show on Sunday night. The modified plan is only slightly less insane. Now, we'll build 80-90% of the sets in my basement, transport them to the Playground immediately after the final Saturday night show, finish and rig Sunday morning until the cast arrives about 8:30 AM.

So far, we've got a bar and several panels of what we're calling "wainscotting" for the back wall. The Playground is a very wide theatre, so I thought the majority of the cost of this project would be the back wall paneling. Thanks to Home Depot, I can now blow that money on my weight in M&Ms, if I please. As the week winds on, I'll be finishing the top of the bar, buying sheets to cover the back wall of the Playground, and staining the shelving for the area behind the bar. I've got a talented cast and director and can't wait to see how this turns out. Basically, Sunday calls for a lot of coffee and optimism.

I'm very excited. Can't you feel it?

The coda to my day...

It arrived today. Sweet mother of mercy.

Next step: wire (and unwire) up the living room.

It's worth repeating...

<lecturing>

I don't often post links. Arrogant? Perhaps. I'm not the most interesting person I know. Still, I think the time has come (and gone and come again) to call your Congressperson to put more pressure on the Bush-Cheney administration to open up the documents created during the "Energy Task Force" held in spring of 2001, when the Bush administration was yet young and untroubled. Our Vice President, who has earned the double entendre of his title many times over, has fought quite successfully to keep what went on in that meeting secret, although eventually it did come to light that solar, wind and geothermal need not apply, but the major US oil companies had a free hand. When this came to light, the Bush administration trotted out a last-minute energy policy, which was basically, "More of the same. Global warming, schmobal schmarming." It was lame. Why this would necessitate bringing together enormous energy companies who all basically already agree remained a mystery we can only speculate on.

Jon Taplin, however, does it particularly well here.

I don't mind oil. I own a car. We heat the condo in the winter using gas and while I really like the solar panels on top of the Uncommon Ground at the end of our street, I kind of hate the atmosphere. Utilizing oil is a good idea, but I'll tell you what... using it wisely is a better idea. Passing laws to force automakers to make more energy efficient cars, or to pay a tax for the guzzlers they do make, is a good idea. Advising homeowners on better insulation and tax breaks for solar energy is also good. It doesn't take a heroic amount of change, just someone interested in a little belt-tightening. Because if we don't figure it out soon, we're all going to groan under the weight of $200/barrel oil.

And that's not even factoring in the human cost. Don't get me started.

</lecturing>

Ooh, day...

Day, you broke my heart today, a little, but you're not over yet. You've still got time to pull it through.

First, it you took away my Active Directory-integrated DNS on my server. So everyone's Internet crumbled like a stack of cards. Yeah, I'm looking at you, day. Sure, you doled out the discoveries: you taught me how to break my Internet and restore it without flying into a tizzy or having users approach me with pitchforks. Soon, perhaps, you'll let me use NSLOOKUP without fear of retribution. Come on, day, you can do it.

Second, you sent me a box. But not just any box, day, the box that should have held the little Airport Express thingy I ordered more than two weeks ago. You and those Apple folk pulled a little prank on me last time by sending it to the building but not the suite number where I worked. It all worked out in the end, though, or at least it should have if there were anything inside the box. Instead, empty of anything but a packing slip and some brown paper, meant, I imagine, to cushion the nothing they sent.

Remember that moment in "Se7en" when Brad Pitt looks into the box? And you never see what's there but you just know what's inside? I think it was this:

PACKING LIST

Ship to:
Golden field by power lines

Ship from:
Constant rainy, hellish city

Line number:
002

Quantity shipped:
1

Part number:
M9470LL/H

Description:
Human head, blonde, female, blue eyes, possible future star of "Shallow Hal," "View from the Top"

I would have shot Kevin Spacey, too, whether or not he had anything to do with it. That would have made my day.

Acting

...is as easy as sneezing. People know when you're faking it.

The Nicest Gunship Pilot You'll Ever Meet

My lovely lass, at the gun turret of a massive Army helicopter that, the Army rep inside it said, he landed on the roof of the convention center, took the blades off, and helped push into the auto show. Again, cheating... sure it has wheels, but how many other cars there can fly?*

* Three. This is, after all, the Future.

Steampunk Bumblebee

Several fun things about the Chicago auto show:

- The cars are pornographically shiny. You can see from the shafts of light on our faces in other photos that there are a lot of high intensity spots giving everyone indoor tans. What I did not capture were the polishers, who wore blue jumpsuits and carried buckets of buffing stuff (try saying that ten times fast) and whose job I believe was to try to stay ahead of the sticky fingered mob. Good luck with your Sisyphan task, say I.

- The old cars on display, blocked off by railings and curtains, drew an okay crowd that was a drop in a leaky bucket compared to the Army section, which had a helicopter. Now THAT'S cheating. Second-most popular: the yellow 2008 Camaro featured in the Michael bay action porn Transformers. Here, the exhibitors cut out the middleman and a lot of explaining by titling the placard not "2008 Camaro as featured in the Michael Bay robot snuff movie Transformers, code-named Bumblebee" but simply "Bumblebee Camaro."

- I really like the idea of what would have happened had the robots of Cybertron emerged just a half score of decades earlier. Of course, having played with Transformer toys more than half my life, I can't look at a Scion xD without wondering how the legs would flip out, and whether you can see the head from the underside.

Trunk and Disorderly

I made Brandi take this photo of me at the auto show because I think it's funny to see large men in tiny spaces. On the other hand, I've always been more of a claustrophile. On car trips as a kid--my mom, my sister and I used to drive ten hours from Cleveland to central Illinois--I used to wedge myself in the footwells of the back seat.

Growing up was bittersweet. On the one hand, I could fight back when my sister wouldn't stick to her side of the car. On the other, I lost the soothing vibration of the driveshaft, mere centimeters from my face.

Chicago Auto Show Rule No. 1

Safety first!

Seriously, who is that kid? She makes the "Matt gets stuck in the safety sign" work ten times better than it should. It's still, only moderately funny, but thank heavens for little girls, eh?

I mean this in no way creepily. Safety first!

You can buy it, too! (Car not provided)

One of the things I stumbled on during my trip to Target this morning was a remote start / remote entry system for a car. I don't know what to say. We've impressed a lot of friends and family with our "CHIP-WIP!" (sound of car unlocking) system. Now this little $80.00 doohickey wants to narrow the gap. I won't be able to use my increasingly warmed over joke with Brandi:

Me: [walking up to the car after Brandi used remote start on our car] Brandi, don't you care about global warming?

Brandi: Sure I do, buddy. What's up?

Matt: Well, you left the car running. No wonder we get such crummy gas mileage.

Brandi: Ha-ha-ha-ha.

Note: I may be exaggerating Brandi's response by one "ha." I have now told this joke about 10,000 times.

Where in the World Has Our Fed Ex Package Been?

I took this shot a month ago, but I only just hammered out posting
photos to my blog directly from my phone. So here we go!

With all that labeling, how does FedEx know where to deliver your
package? One word: owls.

It goes like this, "Da da DAH, DAH DAH da dada..."

I wish you could Google music. This morning, I'm listening to a Paul Oakenfeld track called "Zoo York," which uses the exact refrain from the trailer for "Sunshine." And anyone who saw that incredibly intense trailer knows how hard the music ratchets up the tension.

Which is doubly amazing when you consider how often a trailer about a menial office worker who rises above his circumstances is set to the music from "Brazil." (Listen for the percussive typewriters.) Or a wacky gang of mismatched eccentric types take to the road set to "The Breakfast Machine" by Danny Elfman from "Pee Wee's Big Adventure." And the entire John Williams Star Wars score is just a rehash of Holst's "The Planets." I may be overreaching. Nevertheless, I will continue to do so until my demands are met: tell me the name of that song.

Steaknives

I got my first set of grown up steak knives today, cashing in the points on my credit card (it was that or gift cards to Best Buy and other retail stores I might as well buy stuff with a CREDIT CARD at). The knives came with a sharpener, which is how I know they're for grownups, as well as the sharpness that can slice through child flesh all-too easily.

Carrying them home on the train made me feel like a superhero, although any criminal who would wait for me to pull them out of their cardboard sleeves and then be intimidated by the resultant 5" of steel should probably find another line of work. The handles are walnut. This is one of those few instances where I'll condone the willful destruction of a tree, the other being when I'm cold and there's a fireplace, or chainsaw art. Come to think of it, my wood morals are a lot more loose than my feelings about leather.

C'est la vie.

Open Court Drama

Last night at Open Court, an old teammate showed up to play. I wasn't very thrilled. He and I used to play on a team that had zero chemistry and broke up, partly, over him and the fact that he could never do a show sober. You know those old clips they play of Elvis having his Vegas meltdown? Imagine that, except every show, improv, and he was never all that famous to begin with. Welcome to my last Thursday night.

First, he walks in while Erin Pallesen, playing MC, introduces our intrepid audience to the idea of Open Court, where everyone who wants to plays on an insta-team, and announces, interrupting, that he would like to join the second group because he was just coming from another show. Erin took it in stride, he paid his money and we all hoped he would at least be a little less dramatic.

We divide the audience into two groups of about nine people apiece. We warm up. My old teammate cannot keep it together, even during a rather banal game of "Zip-Zap-Zop." He keeps interrupting to apologize for lacking focus, in the process... draining our group's focus... saying also how excited he is to see me and meet my wife, who I'm reasonably certain was my wife when last I saw him three years ago. But maybe not. I don't know. Deal with it, dude, my wife is HOT.

So, we name our group and do the "Toin Coss," which in an ordinary show would determine group order. Last night, purely perfunctory. The other group took the stage. My friend disappears for the next twenty minutes. Hilarity ensues. The other team finishes, and we're up. Our suggestion: alcove.

My friend immediately takes the stage, doing all three of the things he's good at: accents, ignoring his partners' input, and talking a lot without actually saying anything funny. He hits the suggestion over the head, hard, with, "I'm making this phone call in this ALCOVE." Don't forget to add a funny German accent when you picture this, because it makes the moment unforgettable.

So we get a few scenes away from this, thankfully, when in should wander my old teammate, this time in an Irish accent, calling himself, alternately, "Terry" and "Teddy" Kennedy. Now, I realize with certain accents these two names can sound alike, but he was enunciating and nobody on stage had any idea what the hell to do with his input because a) it had next to nothing to do with the scene, which was not crying for a walk on by ANY Kennedy, b) my friend's grasp of politics and particularly the complicated history of Ted Kennedy and his affair with fast cars and booze was shaky at best. So we watched him ruin another scene.

At the end of the show, he told me how excited he was to see me again, that he'd been in the hospital for four days beating back the flesh eating bacteria with powerful antibiotics, and that he was producing a Broadway show now. Certain things must be taken with a grain of salt. Those with hypertension should probably steer clear of my friend.

Everyone else was great, though. If you've never been to Open Court, come, Thursdays at the Playground. It's guaranteed to be entertaining, at the very, very least.

Warm Feet, Cold Head

In anticipation of the weather, today I wrapped my feet in socks and boots, and in between the two I stuck plastic baggies to keep my dry socks waterproof. It's a sad fact of winter in Chicago that, like Forrest Gump and his box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. What we've gotten for the past week is very soggy snow. I wear my Asics running shoes a lot and I'm always plotting my path to make sure I don't spend the day with wet feet. In the last couple of weeks, my big toes started poking out of holes in the top... luckily, they don't much care about the appearance of a Network Admin at work... and every time I walk on linoleum after a tour on wet pavement, my right shoe makes this weird, tiny squishing sound that I like but others doubtless find annoying. I can afford shoes, but these ones are veterans of the Chicago Marathon 2007 (AKA the Bataan Death Marathon) and I've only just gotten around to breaking them in. At any rate, no squishy sounds coming from my feet today, just warmth radiating away from industrial-strength leather and soles thick enough to make me as tall as Tim Ryder. If you know or are Tim, you know that's an accomplishment and, hopefully, a compliment.

Still, on the opposite side of my body, my head is cold today because I finally got a haircut last night. I'd ignored my head since we shot "The Crashers," and it was not flattering to me in the slightest. My hair doesn't get long so much as big. Much as I tried to pin it down by shampooing and conditioning, it still sprouted out like a big gray-brown dandelion. Lucky they don't care much about my appearance at work, but at some point I figured I had to do something about it. With Brandi busy working up Super Tuesday stats at wgntv.com, and a temporary reprieve from the gym due to my having donated blood, I headed out to the SuperCuts to get the kind of buzz that won't get you in trouble with the law. At least, here.

• As a sidebar, the dude cutting my hair was very cool, and covered in tattoos. I noticed one on his arm was kind of mechanical, put two and two together and said, "You've got a cyborg arm tattoo!" He was impressed; apparently, in the two years since he got the tattoo, nobody had realized it was supposed to look like his skin was peeled away, exposing the mechanics underneath. Looked pretty obvious to me. Then again, part of me secretly believes I'm surrounded by robots anyway, so you'll forgive me if I treat this as proof.
• As another sidebar, to finish up my college English degree, I took a summer class in differential equations. The most interesting part of that class was the equation for finding out the temperature of a body colder or warmer than its surroundings. As the body approaches the ambient temperature, it slows the rate of its cooling, so you cannot chart the change in temperature linearly. That's where differential equations--mathematics in which the output of one equation feeds into itself at a different point in time or space--come in, to help you calculate the temperature of the object at any time. The same equations are used in chaos theory to make those cool graphics and loose weather predictions and by Jeff Goldblum in "Jurassic Park" to explain why dinosaur containment will inevitably fail.
  

I guess the rest of this story is anticlimactic. I got enough taken off that anyone who doesn't notice the change isn't looking or hasn't seen me in two and a half months. I'm looking forward to running and swimming again, having now recovered enough blood or at least fluid to keep me conscious, and having lost enough hair that I can keep cool even in a mild sprint. I used to like winter so much, but now I just wish it were as simple as the other seasons.

Sigh.