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
Don't call me, winter. And my email is off the hook.
Next step: wire (and unwire) up the living room.
* Three. This is, after all, the Future.
- 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.
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!
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.
With all that labeling, how does FedEx know where to deliver your
package? One word: owls.
Sara's caption:
Last week, my good friend and occasional partner Bob left for Portland with his lovely S.O. Stacey to start what will doubtless be an amazing theatre. I'm going to miss him.
I think you could build an analogous device to work on Chicago's elevated trains. You can measure literary pressure by how many people per car are reading "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". I counted four tonight.
I think that means a storm is coming.
In Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, you can't go far without running into Abraham Lincoln statuary, and indeed, that's exactly what happened the other day when Brandi and I went in search of Mexican food in Andersonville. On the walk down, we diverted into a park so that I could take notes from a cell phone call. It turned out, there was a very large bronze Lincoln at the north end. I thought it was neat. You don't often see anything other than old Lincoln, the one stooped both by Civil War and being 4" taller than anyone else he knew, 8" with his hat on. Young Lincoln, while no more pretty, at least doesn't look like you can break him in half just by sneezing on him. Here is what Mary Todd married and became an opium addict for.
Here is a clue in the form of another photo, showing me with Brandi's bronze boyfriend. From this photo, I think you can conclude that I call it a Sling Blade, though some call it a Kaiser Blade. Mmmn-hmmn.
While in Amsterdam, I tool a couple of panoramic photos with my trusty little Canon which, coincidentally enough, comes with a panoramic function that lets you take multiple pictures to be stitched together in the image editing program of your choice (Photoshop CS3 for me). First, we see the Dam. This plus the Amstel river gives Amsterdam its name, or so I was led to believe by the canal tour. Admittedly, I was not able to hear all of this because the boat was crowded and the Spanish family near me would only stop talking loudly during the Spanish bits, leaving me, the English speaker, a bit out of luck.
My second panorama is a shot of one of the wider canals of Amsterdam. Natives will probably recognize it immediately. I have no idea. Street names were posted on the sides of buildings, and were in fact reasonably handy to navigate by using the Amsterdam rule of thumb: think in circles. Everything past the harbor is built in a loose loop. I wish I had planned my trip better and bought a book with an actual foldout map in place of the dummy map my Frommer's guide came with. It looked good enough in the bookstore, but I realized soon enough that it did not have all the streets listed when I folded it out and tried to navigate by it. I had a similar fear in Amsterdam that Brandi and I had when we first got into Rome: that bands of thieves would stalk me the moment they saw me holding a guide book and knew I was a tourist. The only thing that happened when I held a book and a quizzical expression was a nice man who looked like he was on the way home from work asked me if I needed help finding anything. I said "no". I had scarier moments getting Euros out of the ATM, when I was approached by a scraggly-looking man of indeterminate age speaking German at me and clearly looking for some kind of handout. I walked away quickly. Following the usual big city safety precautions has served pretty well in all the cities I've visited so far, so, yes, a small amount of paranoia serves me just fine.
View from the top - even if your seat on the ultra-sophisticated 747 cost the same as a used car, it still might suck like mine did for the flight to Amsterdam. I was in the very back, wedged between two irate women who obviously wanted to be anywhere but there. Why? Our seat backs were against the galley wall and did not recline, but the seats in front of us did. It felt a little like the moment in Star Wars when Luke, Leia and everyone realized they were stuck in the Death Star's trash compactor. I had my Shuffle, my computer and my book and spent it reasonably comfortable, but boy was I glad I packed the earphones because the middle-aged Dutch woman to my right just could not stop making "tsk" sounds with her mouth every time she shifted to make her back more comfortable. Let's just say the only people having a good time in our section were the Dutch college students wearing cowboy hats and clearly enjoying the mediocrity that was "Wild Hogs", the in-flight movie.
Here I am at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. If you say it fast enough, it sounds like "sh*thole", which it isn't. Rather, it's the hub for air and ground transportation, as the train to the city departs from there, as well as the shuttle to my hotel, the Amsterdam Radisson SAS. I left at 4:00 PM Monday afternoon and, due to the strangeness of a rotating, round Earth and time zones, arrived 8 hours later at 7:00 AM Tuesday morning. Mostly, I did not worry about jet lag because I rarely sleep much anyway at conferences, and this was no exception. I think in my three nights there I slept a total of about ten hours, which is pretty dismal, as was the weather when I got in. People were friendly, however, and everyone in hospitality spoke English, although since I looked somewhat German I got a few greetings in Dutch and a quick shift to the Queen's tongue when I looked quizzical and said, "Uh, hello?"
The hotel was not very far from the airport. In fact, it was close enough to snap this picture from my room. The sound of approaching airplanes did not bother me too badly - as I said, sleep was pretty rare anyway - although you can see how crummy the weather was the first day. It gave me good justification for a nap on the right side of the pushed-together king size bed made of two twins.
This photo comes from a visit to the Brown Elephant Zander and his wife Julie made with Brandi and me during their visit with us late last January. The Brown Elephant is in Chicago, at Halsted and Waveland, in Boystown, not that you would know it except by the "umph-umph!" of deep-bassed electronica coming from Circuit night club next door.
St. Patrick's celebrations this year meant getting up at 7:15 AM on a Saturday. Punishment like that deserves a reward just as large: drinking. We officially started at 8:00 AM when our neighbor John kindly prepared coffee spiked with Bailey's Mint Creme, to get us properly warmed up for our ride by Red Line train downtown to watch the Chicago Police dye the river green. Since the dying did not start until 11:00 and we got downtown at about 9:00, that left a significant gap which we handily filled with a stop at a bar for green beer and the most godawful sandwiches I have ever seen. The corned beef looked like it had been sheared from an animal fed for the majority of its short, artery-hardened life with 100% pure lard, and that it had fought the cutting. They came with "chips" (British for French Fries, I guess because they don't like the French either, after that whole Henry V thing), but the whole thing looked so impregnated with fat that open flame nearby would probably have been considered a fire hazard.
Eventually, we got to the river, and waited forever for the dying to begin. I have lived in Chicago for almost thirteen years now, and had never seen the river dyed. Saturday, therefore, was one of the most anticlimactic days I have ever lived, since, when the dying finally started, most of us had no idea that it had, or whether the Chicago Police had even finished. From our vantage point by the Clark street bridge, all we saw were slightly brighter green tendrils drifting downstream, mingling amongst the ordinary dark green of the Chicago River. We went upstream to see if we could spot the dye bombs or whatever they use to turn the river an unnatural Leprechaun green, but they had already finished. Yet, looking downstream, we still saw hundreds of people perched on the bridges and all along the river, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever the hell we had been looking for moments earlier. Maybe, after enough time elapses, all of the green coagulates into some awesome monster, or turns into money, but about the only entertainment we got out of it was trying to catch necklaces the Heineken people were throwing to promote their Dutch beer on the Irish holiday.
This is Brandi at Year two, double-fisting wine as her reward for enduring my so-called "jokes" and "science". We took it at a winery in Utica, Illinois after a wine tasting that left Brandi sober enough to drive to Starved Rock and me dumb enough to giggle all the way there.
Here's the Brandi after losing about four pounds of hair. I'd always really liked the idea of Brandi with short hair and been tantalized a few times by the inevitable post-hair show shearing that followed the infamous year of the "rat tail" and the "blonde 'do" (same year?). And I was right. She looks gorgeous.
Sorry to hurt your necks, but that's Brandi, too, on our bed minus the mattress, after I assembled all of the IKEA stuff we bought. The slats take the place of the box spring mattress we had to leave at our old place because we weren't going to get it out the door without major plaster renovation. Until the movers hauled over the queen mattress, we slept on this getup with an air mattress teasing us with what the real one would feel like. I guess it's like marriage: sometimes it takes a little negotiation, but the aches and pains just let you know that you're building something better.To put the happy ending first, I did build both wardrobes, and they're very tall and good looking enough that I've temporarily christened the bedroom the Colonial Room. I look forward to putting stuff in them.
I wasn't always so optimistic.
I started building the wardrobe just shy of noon last Friday, the day after we closed on our condominium, had our IKEA blowout (many dollars spent), and celebrated our new lives as adults in thirty-year debt. IKEA flat packs as much as it can, so this very tall, heavy item was packaged in a cardboard box just a little longer than its longest side panels, three feet wide and maybe six inches deep. It's not very expensive in its base configuration because IKEA makes it out of relatively flimsy particleboard - understandably, since you never pay much attention to the ceiling or floor of your wardrobe. It's the doors that are made out of nice stuff, possibly wood, probably particleboard coated in a heavier grade of white plastic, plus a pane of glass you can't make out of recycled stuff (except sand, I guess). You pay as much for one door as you would for the entire wardrobe. I would remind myself of this several times during the afternoon debacle.
I figured that building a wardrobe would be like building bookcases. They look alike, especially the way IKEA makes them: tall side panels with evenly spaced holes for customizing the interior with additional shelves, attaching doors, or mounting a simple light so you don't have to fumble around in the dark for your blazer during the long, dark northern winter months. They've got a lot of the same hardware, including screws, more screws but with flat heads for latching other, sort-of-screws that look like a marriage between a miniature coffee can and a flying saucer that latch onto the flat head screws to tighten the join between planes. Add to this list wooden dowels for those parts requiring not so many screws and a packet of tiny nails that would lose in a fight against thumb tacks used for tacking down the flimsy white wardrobe backing and hopefully providing a little more stability. One thing IKEA did not provide? A hammer.
I remembered with some excitement having run past Clark-Devon Hardware not more than four blocks away, so, since I was running short on time, I hopped in the car (sorry, environment, Al Gore). Parking at the meters on the side was my first mistake. Though the side looks like the entrance, the builders very cleverly constructed this hardware store so the only front facing the street is a large, foreboding brick wall punctuated occasionally with sealed up doors with instructions to go north. Here, the zombies had already attacked and won. The side entrance, closest to the meters, held the rental office. I discovered this when I followed the guy in front of me under the assumption that he knew what he was doing, then bumped into him as he turned on his heel as soon after realizing he'd walked into the wrong entrance. It's funny, but it normally doesn't take very long for me to figure out north, but maybe the signs of zombie plague had freaked me out.
When I did at last find the entrance, the interior was about as far from Home Depot as you can expect. Tiny aisles, everything under glass, and a nail department that seemed to stretch to infinity. It took me about five minutes' questing through the labyrinth to find my $5 hammer, at which point I had to ask an employee to open it up. He was fast, nice, and told me repeatedly to have a nice day. Would that I had heeded this omen.
I paid for my hammer with my debit card, barely twenty four hours into my home ownership and already ridiculously cash poor. The gas company representative - the reason I had taken the day off work, though, honestly, I could have used any excuse - still had not showed up, so I arranged my tools and started screwing. Or should I say, "screwing up."
Sorry for the cleverness.
Not to brag, but I've built a lot of Legos in my life. I understand step-by-step instructions and can usually parse where a screw is supposed to go based on the dotted lines and diagrams that apparently accompany any Scandinavian export. My first four screws I messed up in four different ways. I just could not get it right. Usually, the little piece of my brain that serves as fact-checker helps me here, since I'm always asking, "Why?" If it doesn't serve any obvious purpose, can I throw it away without consequence? How much should I allow myself to be directed by these so-called "directions"? This brain part was not helping me, perhaps taking a nap like dolphins whose brain hemispheres take turns sleeping. Whatever the reason, I kept assuming I knew the next step, taking the plunge and then having to undo the screw or screws. Hence, I was only about an eighth of the way through wardrobe one of two before I spied the gas company rep sitting in his van across the street from us, reading the paper.
Rather than wait for him to hit the buzzer when I was in the bathroom or some place equally inconvenient, I threw on shoes and walked out to his van. He was very nice and quite Chicagoan, big, young face, attitude that says, "Yeah, you might be tough, but we made our city out of slaughterhouses, so fuhgeddaboudit." He checked our pilot lights. The gas had not been turned off since the previous occupants had owned and heated the unit to the very moment we bought it, so the pilots were fine, although he did recommend moving the flammable paint supplies away from where the realtor had stowed them, right next to the furnace. Stupid realtor.
Unfortunately, we couldn't find the gas meter. I found out later where the room was, and that I didn't have the key to it and would not until the owners mailed the additional keys to us. A further wrinkle to that plan was the fact that they were mailing our keys to our new address. The address for which we did not have a key to the mailbox because they were going to mail it to us. This logic loop was eventually settled by the former owner, who stopped by on Sunday to drop off a bag of keys, some of which were labeled, others not so much. I am proud to say we can now get mail and access the gas and electrical meters. This didn't help me much Friday, when I had to send the gas man on his way. He said I could make another appointment and, encouragingly, "You've got gas now, at least." When I called Brandi, she took this as an ominous sign, but I assured her the gas company could not shut off your heat when the weather dipped below freezing, and I think that helped and might even have been true or at least based on solid Internet rumor. But I didn't call Brandi just then, either. No, to alleviate my frustration with the weather, the keys, the gas and the hammer, I thought I would get something big done and assemble Wardrobe Number One.
So there are six sides to a wardrobe: top, bottom, left, right, front and back. Front will eventually hold the doors and back is kind of flimsy cardboard, so initially you only have to make the sides, top and bottom. According to the directions, once you have all of the hardware attached, you attach the bottom panel to one of the long nine foot side panels resting on the floor, and tighten. You then stand the assembly and have a friend stand on a ladder and hold it while you attach the side panel, tighten, then the top panel, and tighten, after which everything should stand on its own.
I didn't have a ladder. Improvising like MacGuyver, I took our IKEA Poang chair from the sun room and tested out its steadiness, which was about on par with the slick deck of a sailboat on heavy seas. In other words: lousy. Unfortunately, unless I wanted to grab our neighbors' porch chairs or take an hourlong trip back to the old apartment, I didn't see much of a choice. More worrying, I didn't have a second person, and those panels were heavy. Improvising with less-than-Macguyver-like inventiveness, I steadied the side panels against the walls at the corners of the room, climbed up on the flexing wooden chair I couldn't be certain would not snap in two under my two hundred pound burden, and set the top panel on the edges of the precarious side panels.
For a moment, everything held.
Of course, a proper wardrobe has to do more than balance. I would have to maneuver the top panel so the holes in its sides matched with the screws I'd previously installed during the "which screw goes where?" phase. I got one side matched up - the left? So hard to say now... - but couldn't tighten it down because the holes were in the bottom of the board, against gravity, so the hardware I had to drop in would just fall out without a steadying hand. At this point, I realized the IKEA directions may have called for too few people. Raising a child takes a village; raising a wardrobe, about three-fourths of one. Still, I figured if I could get both sides at least hanging from the screws, I could head down my rickety Poang chair, grab the hardware, tighten, lather, rinse, repeat with the second unit.
I pulled the top panel up, off its resting place on the side panel, then over towards the other side. That's when it slipped off the screws loosely holding it. It came crashing down. The swell, cheap particleboard did what it does naturally and shattered where it could. The top panel was broken. The bottom panel was broken in many places and looked like it had gone on an ill-fated skiing trip. One side panel was mostly intact... except for the holes one might use to, for instance, hold together a wardrobe. These had been yanked by the screws and the passage of the top shelf towards the earth, and the particleboard here, too, crumbled appropriately.
I sat for a little while in my Poang chair and cried. Eventually, I called Brandi, who said it was going to be okay, we're going back to IKEA anyway for bookshelves, and did the gas man come, by the way? I told her about that failed quest and she was upset that I had not called since she had just spoken with John, a member of our condo board who might have been able to get us into the basement space. In as calm a voice as possible, I said, "Now... is... NOT... the... time."
That would come later, when I realized I could ignore IKEA directions and build the way I wanted, on the floor, where you don't need to balance and gravity holds your tightening hardware in instead of mocking your efforts to defy it. Later, when I guiltily disposed of the corpse of our first wardrobe, leaving one panel next to the dumpster because it would not fit inside. I kept the hardware because, very, very rarely IKEA omits a part and you have to call their version of tech support and wait to have it shipped to you. I want to build NOW, even if it means screwing it up and developing a blister stigmata from pressing the screwdriver into the center of my hand. It's a desire that can not be and was not held back by failure.
The room looks beautiful now, still not complete, but moving forward.
