How is a cat like an iceberg?

90% of her is below the surface.

Rio's new trick is to lay on the hole in the cat tree in just the
right position to leave her belly sticking out. She apparently thinks
this is a perfectly rational cat thing to do and I am not one to argue
with her. We've had fierce enough conflicts in the last few days, from
her jumping into the refrigerator to the catfight she picked with her
brother under our bed, what this cat wants this cat gets.

Which, come to think about it, would be a good catchphrase for when
I'm dressed in a suit wearing mirror shades.

Heart Model Recall

Since I'm supposed to be finishing a short story right now, I thought I would procrastinate by posting some of the notes I made about a month ago, during my brief stint as a heart model. My other incentive is Karen Maxwell, who reminded me during her visit last weekend that it looked like I was welshing on my promise to write about it. So, here it is, largely unedited bullet points from my halcyon days of cardiologists, ultrasound, and grainy images of my aorta:

• We've got a total of six models for three scanning beds. The SOP is two hours on, two hours off.
• The scanning techs don't mind if you fall asleep, although yesterday my tech Mark woke me up when it looked like some important people were wandering by. It took about ten minutes, but when they finally walked up, the grayest-headed among them said, "Aha! A model who is actually awake!" Score one for Mark and me.
• Lying on a bed while people scan your heart would seem like the easiest job in the world, except for a few things. Laying on your side without moving very much can be a challenge. Also, spending any amount of time in a cold convention center can give you the sniffles. Now take your shirt off and cover half your chest with ultrasound goo. It gets cold. Sometimes they give you a blanket to keep yourself warm, but I didn't know that at first and toughed it out my first two hours. Consequently, my first two hours kind of sucked.
• I spotted a couple of friends on the way in this morning, wearing red and white jumpsuits that read "bad" and "good," respectively. They were, apparently, cholesterol. Another heart model explained to me that they and their cohorts stood on escalators, sometimes getting in the conventioneers' way, sometimes helping them out. That's what cholesterol does! See how much your heart is like a bunch of medical professionals checking their Blackberries at a Chicago convention center?
• Our booth has more square footage than our condo, and probably cost the company as much to rent for three days. They have several TVs (like our condo), a MacBook Pro (very like our condo) which is connected to a $50,000 base station used to process the imaging from ultrasound paddles attached to it (not at all like our condo). Because I was curious about other machines, I offered to rotate with other heart models, but I was met with apathy and in one case resistance because the guy said he'd bonded with his scanner. All right.
• While hanging out waiting for direction today, another demonstrator started talking to me and another heart model about the necessity of getting female heart models in, since having topless women demonstrating machines would be a significantly bigger draw. We chuckled politely. Even though it was the first time I'd heard it, it didn't feel like a very original joke, and since I'm a couple decades past adolescence, it's lost a lot of its titillation. Then the guy started talking about how great it would be to get the female models lubed up with ultrasound goo, at which point I said, "Um, awkward." The other model left. The guy who made the comment started a new conversation, the "my machine is better than your machine" tack, with which I could not argue, since I didn't design my machine, I just sat under it.
  
• One of the booth presenters this morning walked in with a cheese and ham croissant that she wasn't going to eat and offered it to us. Another heart model, Spike, whom I had helped yesterday by looking up CTA routes to McCormick Convention Center, had not eaten breakfast and took her up on the offer. He went back to the area they designated for us to stow our stuff and returned about three minutes later. "Did you eat that already?" I asked. "I was starving," he explained. We made jokes about their scanning his chest and discovering it, completely whole, lodged in his heart. That's what passes for humor in this place.
  
• Convention food costs, as Spike observed, are "minibar prices." Other, smarter models brought their food. I am not smart, not in that way.
  
• Yesterday, I made the mistake of buying a Starbucks "Skinny Vanilla Latte" in "Venti," which would mean "Large" if "Large" weren't the smallest Starbucks size. This drink, which was skim milk, sugar-free vanilla, and I guess espresso, messed me up almost the entire day. My stomach hurt a couple hours after drinking it. By the end of the day, it hurt to move my eyes. Even being allowed to lay back and sleep on the table kind of sucked when the pounding behind my eyes would not stop. When Brandi picked me up afterwards to go grocery shopping, I leaned heavily on my cart like someone four decades older. I can see how old people really love those walkers with wheels and seats, because my kludged version worked great.

The Tale of the Fish

Our dear friends the Maxwells visited this weekend, and we traipsed all around the city Saturday, showing them the Bean, the lions of the Art Institute, the Lego store, American Girl Place, and our Nintendo Wii, as dictated by the laws of hospitality. They left Sunday, hopefully as triumphantly exhausted as we felt, although they, too, had a full day ahead of them.

As dictated by Maxwell tradition, we all gathered on the sofa for the final group photo. I offered my tripod. Karen said that would be perfect, so I went inside the office to retrieve it. It was tangled up with my camera bag, per usual, so I freed it and hopped back to the chaos in the living room. Unbeknownst to me, the door to the office lay slightly ajar. We all scrunched together, dramatic Evelyn, squirmy Henry, Karen and me, with a hole for Dave who was setting up the timer. Dave finished up, squeezed in at the end of the sofa, and we all put on our best smiles.

Something splashed in the office. Distracted, I blinked, and saw the flash through the red of my eyelids. I realized two things simultaneously:
1) we would have to take the photo again
2) Margaret, the Betta fish Brandi took home from Publications International, was in mortal peril from avid fishercat Patrick.
Already, we could hear more splashing. We needed to act, and quickly. Brandi and I jumped up and ran into the office. Both cats had availed themselves of the forbidden space, Rio strolling underneath the desk, Patrick standing over... Margaret, out of her tank and clearly punctured behind her left gill. She lay very still.

Behind us, Evelyn started to cry. She didn't know exactly what happened, but sometimes feels overwhelmed when grownup display heightened emotions. Karen ushered her back into the living room. Brandi and I swept the cats out of the office, ignoring the body of the fish for the moment while we dealt with the photo op. Evelyn continued to cry, and we asked her why. She said she was afraid that Patrick was hurt because he had been bitten by a fish. Brandi assured her our cat was fine and un-bitten, delicately omitting the part of the story where Patrick did the reverse. Brandi smiled tightly and said, "Well, you were right," referring to our longstanding and slowly-simmering argument about whether or not one should take care to close the office doors. After all, what could happen? I asked her not to joke. The thought of playing accomplice to murder, even of something as small and flushable as a fish, made me feel guilty as sin. Dave set up the camera again, and we smiled, some of us falling back on our acting training. This time, everything came out fine, and the Maxwells prepared to head out to Cedar Point on what was turning out to be a decidedly crummy, rainy day. Wait, though, a new wrinkle: Karen still needed the weather report for Sandusky, Ohio. Would the roller coasters still run? Might the sun shine yet on the largest wooden roller coaster in the world? Brandi hinted that we needed to use a computer not in the office. Luckily, my laptop lay on the floor of our bedroom where I'd dropped it the night before, hoping for and, in the end, sleeping through the chance to get some homework done on a sketch writing show. We looked up the weather (lousy) and I helped take the last of the bags to the car, holding the big blue and yellow IKEA umbrella to keep raindrops the size of mothballs off the kids and Karen. Dave did the same with the second umbrella. Finally, waving in the archway of our building, I saw them off and went inside.

Brandi was in the process of cleaning up the office when I saw down heavily on our overstuffed living room couch. She had a paper towel which she was carrying to the bathroom for the traditional fish burial. Suddenly, she stopped. "I felt it twitch," she said. "What do I do?" I didn't know. She opened up the paper towel and saw that Margaret's gills were still moving. "How long can a fish live out of water?" Omce again, I had no idea, although later it would occur to me that Bettas, which in the wild inhabit tiny mud puddles they occasionally hop out of, might have evolved the ability to survive considerably longer than, say, a tuna. "I just don't want her to suffer."

"Well," I said, "Did you keep the tank? Can we put her back in it?"

"I threw it away."

"I'll get a glass. Meet me in the kitchen."

I filled a glass and Brandi dropped Margaret in. We watched for a few seconds as she drifted somewhat lifelessly in the water, the puncture wound all-too clear. But then her gills started moving and her fins got in the act as well. While not exactly speeding through the water, she was clearly hanging on, and I decided it was worthwhile to see how long we could extend her tiny fish life. I pulled her bowl out of the garbage and filled it, and together we poured her from the glass into her old home. Again, she drifted for a few seconds, but this time we could see clearly that she wasn't bleeding into the water, and therefore might not be mortally wounded. So, once again, we set her up on the desk in the office and crossed our fingers. Brandi submitted a question to an online fish expert about where to go from here, and later that afternoon got the answer: droplets to dechlorinate the water and help Margaret restore her natural, fishy slime. Directions call for one teaspoon per ten gallons of water. We put two drops into her softball-sized bowl and called it a day.

Two days later, Margaret is still not floating on the top of the tank, and my guilt is starting to rest, even if my paranoia over open office doors is strong as ever.

Evil in the Friendly Confines

So, we're at the Cubs vs. San Diego whatevers (San Diegans? I don't
know; sports are complicated) and our team is just creaming those West
Coast softies. The score is 12 to 3 in the seventh inning, and I've
seen more home runs in the last hour than your average episode of Red
Shoe Diaries (what ho!). The Cubs finished two innings with five runs
per, and held the other team to just one run. So it's exciting as heck
in Wrigleyville tonight.

Adding to our excitement, we're not paying for any of this. Brandi's
work has a lounge at Wrigley Field, so we parked for free in the Brown
lot, walked a block and a half to the field, then enjoyed kosher dogs,
Caesar salad on a pita, chips, nuts, quesadillas and alcoholic
beverages. There was even a dessert cart just loaded up with carrot
cake, chocolate cake, Snickers pie, ice cream, gummy bears, M&Ms,
liqueurs in chocolate cups, chocolate-covered strawberries, cheesecake
and cookies of both the chocolate chip and Reeses Peanut Butter Cup
variety. My worst heartbreak this evening was thinking I would have to
choose just one. The nice cart lady let me have four (Snickers pie,
vanilla ice cream, raspberry syrup, and a chocolate cup filled with
Grand Marnier... Which, by the way, tastes like Deep Woods Off
mosquito repellant... in chocolate). My diet is toast.

You can tell from this blurry picture, because I seem to have gained a
lot of weight in my chin. I now have a passing resemblance to Tim
Curry in Ridley Scott's "Legend."

I'll trap your earth in snow forever unless Tom Cruise puts on some
pants. Now.

Wrigley Field at Run 12

Brandi and a very swarthy me at Wrigley Field, courtesy of Brandi's
work.

Is your marathon half full or half empty?

I chose half full.

Unfortunately, my sister had prior obligations, including shuttling my nephews around to no less than three sporting events, as well as seeing my brother in law off to the airport, and could not spare the time to do the full marathon. So this is where we diverged in our running choices. I still think she did a great job and can't wait to see what her running future brings. Her friend Janis apparently finished just before me (how dare she?), so congratulations are in order all around.

Funny thing is, I remember coming to this point one year ago, when I did the Flying Pig half marathon, and wondering what it would feel like to take the other option, the Road Less Traveled. Now that I've taken it, I have zero regrets. The weather was as perfect this year as last, and I had only a few major twinges, like my left knee sending shooting pains through my body as though promising to secede from the rest of me and form its own Confederacy. Easing back on the throttle helped that a lot, and while I still feel it two days later, I don't think it's a permanent condition.

My other photo, for this post at least, comes from early in the run when we turned back into downtown Cincinnati after briefly foraying into Lexington, KY. I noticed last year and this that one of the bridges bounces a bit alarmingly as you run across it. For a few moments, it felt like gravity wanted to play tricks on me, as the ground fell away from me and then rushed up to greet my not-yet-sore legs. Then lessons from twelfth grade Calculus-Physics class came back to me, specifically the image of the Tacoma Narrows bridge as winds tore it to shreds, and I just prayed the bridge would hold together long enough to get all of us runners across it. The bridge held.

I have a different view of this shot than when I first took it. I blame my sunglasses for making me think I could shoot into the sun and get decent photos. Now, I think the photo looks like Postapocalyptic Zombie Run, a competition where the first undead runner to cross the finish line gets the first bite of the only remaining human. Sure, the race planners hold stops along the way, but they just serve parts of the carcass. It's better when they beg.

I should probably have never seen "28 Days Later."

View from the Flying Pig

I finished a marathon yesterday, my fourth one and fastest (by nine
minutes, at a still-slow 4:40). The weather was positively glorious,
starting off in the forties and rising to just shy of the sixties, but
without a breeze or a cloud in the sky. 22,000 people ran, all told,
including half marathoners and relay racers, who raced in quarter-
segments and whom I cursed for their freshness as my fatigue started
to set in. I sneaked my iPhone onto the course, despite the ban on
electronics on the raceway, as well as a bag of steroids for those
really steep hills. I kid.

I took what shots I could as I ran and will be posting those later.
The quality ranges from poor to atrocious, probably thanks to my shaky
hands, sunglasses, and my bad idea to always shoot into the sun. What
can I say? My brain was on marathon. I'm happy I could even slur my
words when my mom called me to tell me where she was waiting along the
course. (She played support crew for me, my sister and my sister's
friend, gathering jackets at the six mile mark and cheering us on.
She's great and I love her.)

More pics and commentary to follow.

In case you forgot...

Chicago after a rainstorm can be just heartbreaking in its beauty.
Sunset under the clouds reminds you that sometimes, and very, very
rarely, God doesn't need a goat sacrifice to smile down on Wrigleyville.

Missives from Mexico, Part the Third: Silly Fun at the Temple of the Warriors in Chichen Itza

There's a lot of conjecture about the functions of the various structures in Chichen Itza, home to the Castillo, the great step pyramid of the Mayans and one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. We don't know a lot about it because Mayan culture went through a cycle of growth and dieback probably related to their use/misuse of land and maize production (although this, too, is conjectural), and the site was only lightly occupied by the time the Spanish arrived to conquer the crap out of everyone. When you visit it today, you see labels everywhere describing the sacred symbols and what they might mean with, unfortunately, a lot less critical thought than I would have hoped for.

Case in point: the ball court, which has stone hoops about twenty feet off the ground through which the Mayan ball court players would shoot their natural latex balls by bouncing them off their abdomens. We've since revised this estimate because physics says it ain't going to happen. You just can't get the height. So the stone hoops' function remains a mystery, although archaeologists still claim the game had a religious function. Maybe. The Coliseum in Rome had a religious function, too, AFTER the Christians took it over. Before that, it was mostly theatre with real blood effects. My point is that it drives people crazy to say, "I don't know," but you've got to bite the bullet before you put out a common sense solution that isn't very sensible.

At any rate, Brandi and I had a lot of fun clowning around in the Temple of the Warriors, and given that we're not entirely sure what went on in the Temple of the Warriors, or even if it had a secular function, we hope to spare the wrath of Kukulkan (Mayan Quetzcoatl) for another day. Who knows, really? Maybe hamming it up for the camera and tripod was EXACTLY why the Mayans built the temple.

Please don't eat my heart, feathered snake god.

Missives from Mexico, Part the Second: Cozumel

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

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

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

Here comes the panorama:

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

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?