Fifty two years ago, it took a team of scientists and engineers (along with the military of the Soviet Union) to build and launch the first artificial space satellite.  On the evening of October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched into low Earth orbit.  Radio operators around the world picked up the “beep” signal it broadcast for twenty two days.  Sputnik 1 did change the course of history.  However, like most technological products, it’s not quite the marvel it once was.  Even at the time in 1957, it was designated by its creators as the “simple satellite”.

Sputnik was essentially a large metal globe about two feet in diameter.  It had a pair of antennae – like television “rabbit ears” – that stuck out eight or nine feet.  Inside, the interior was mostly taken up with heavy batteries, enough to power the one-watt transmitter for a couple of weeks.  There were two switches – like those in a thermostat – that controlled a fan.  If Sputnik got too hot, a switch would activate a fan.  If it got too cold, the other switch would turn the fan off.  A third switch measured the pressure of nitrogen inside the satellite.  If Sputnik were hit by a micro-meteor, the switch would have activated a radio signal.

These days, pressure and thermal switches are available “off the shelf” using cheap components the Soviet scientists in the mid 1950’s could only dream of.  One watt radio transmitters can be built to fit in the palm of your hand and even the batteries required would be perhaps a quarter of the size of the originals.  As for the outer shell, the design is obviously well known.  A firm in Arizona has even posted the plans on their website.

The launch to orbit would be the biggest challenge.  It’s not a technological issue anymore, but rather an economic one.  Today, the average satellite launch runs somewhere around $120 million dollars.  That’s six times more than the entire budget of the Soviet space program in 1957.  It’s possible a Sputnik might be launched in conjunction with another – larger – satellite.  By current definition, a 23 inch aluminum sphere would be considered a pretty small satellite.  Perhaps even someone might be willing to launch it for “old time’s sake”.  In 1997, high school students built their own version of Sputnik 1 and the Russians put in on board one of the supply ships for the Space Station Mir.  That fall – near the 40^th anniversary of the first Sputnik – astronauts took a spacewalk and “hand launched” it into orbit “towards the moon”.

When I was in college, my grandma would write me all the time.  Every other Friday, I could expect a letter in the campus mailbox.  There would be a little “mad money”, which was well appreciated when it meant the difference between pizza and yet another meal at the residence hall cafeteria.  However, what I really liked were the letters themselves.

Grandma had her finger on the pulse of the town.  She seemed to know everyone (and assumed I knew everyone too; people were just referred to by their first names).  While the names changed from letter to letter, the circumstances were always the same… and they weren’t good.  They were feeling poorly… when they hadn’t just outright died.  Even if they were okay, they were losing their jobs or their house, their sons or daughters were running away (and never with anyone good).  Car accidents, bad storms; I’d usually get three or four pages of this and – I hate to say it – it would make me feel better about how things were going with me.  Sure, I might have a bad test or a class that wasn’t going well, but compared to the people in Grandma’s letters, I didn’t have a care in the world.

My friends noticed I never seemed to be fazed by anything and I found myself spreading the Word of Grandma.  Soon, you could hear it across the campus of the University of Illinois.

“You think that’s bad?  You should hear what Bob’s grandma said…”

“Ah, Bob’s grandma wouldn’t even mention something that trivial…”

“Come on!  Bob’s grandma knows two people worse off than that and they have no legs.”

One Friday I didn’t get a letter.  I have to admit I didn’t write as regularly as Grandma did; I think she beat me about three to one.  I was a bit concerned (after reading Grandma’s letters, it was hard not to be concerned).  I called upstate long distance.  To my relief, Grandma answered the phone (that ruled out a meteor hitting her house and an earthquake swallowing the town).

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I didn’t want to write because I didn’t have any mad money to send you this time.”

“The money’s nice, Grandma,” I said, “but I really like hearing from you and getting the news from home.”  There was a pause.

“Well, I can’t think of too much that’s happened.  I guess I’ve just been so worried about so-and-so.  She’s not been feeling good…”  And I sat back and listened and tried to keep the smile out of my voice.

Daniel and I were driving to Rockford to pick up a bunch of balloons for his birthday.  He seemed more distracted than usual and kept muttering to himself as we went along.

 ”How does it feel to be ten?” I asked.

“I’m not nine yet,” he told me.  “I was born at night, so I’m still nine until tonight.”  That’s technically true.  I asked if he wanted to hold up opening his presents until 10:38 at night.  He shook his head; after dinner would be close enough.

“Do you feel any different than being nine?” I asked.

“Well, my voice hasn’t changed yet,” he announced with a sigh.  Daniel yawned.  “And I’m more tired than when I was nine,” he said.  I nodded.  I’ve noticed you get more and more weary as you get older; weight of the world and all that.  “I’m hungrier now,” he said.  “I’m going to need lunch.  And cake.”  Well, that could be arranged. 

He thought for a bit.  “I still like Hot Wheels,” he decided.  “But now I’ll like them just because of all the fond memories I had playing with them when I was nine.”

Daniel got a balloon at the Boone County Fair, courtesy of Green Giant.  They’re a big employer in Belvidere.  Daniel handed it to me and asked if I would blow it up.  I threw it in the air and made a “BOOM!” sound.

“There you go,” I said.  “All blown up.”  Despite the enormous crowds on hand, it was strangely silent.  Daniel didn’t laugh, didn’t even crack a smile.  His eye lasers were set to flambé.

So, I ended up inflating the balloon to Daniel’s specifications.  It ended up a little bit larger than I would have made it myself, but I thought it was manageable.  I was wrestling with the end and trying to knot it up when I noticed Daniel was standing with his eyes closed and his hands across his ears.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence!” I said.  Daniel opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Oh, I knew you could do it,” he said.  I didn’t say anything.  I just let the balloon deflate in my hand; a juicy raspberry sound.   He asked me again if I would blow up the balloon.

“Well, do you trust me to do it?” I asked.  He nodded.  I took a deep breath and got it near to the size it had been when – suddenly – it popped in my face.  I flinched backwards with the latex end still hanging between my lips like a damp cigarette.  Daniel didn’t say anything, just handed me another balloon from his pocket.

“Here you go,” he said.  “You have my confidence!”

“I noticed you just happened to have a second balloon,” I observed.

“I knew that you could blow up the balloon,” said Daniel, “but I figured you might need some practice.”

It was Thursday night.  My dad was on vacation and we all got into his big green company car to go see a movie at the drive-in.  It was a nice evening; clear without much wind.  A lot of other people had the same idea.  The line to the Sky-Hi drive-in in Addison stretched out of the lot, down the long road from the ticket booth, all the way out onto Old 53.  My dad was driving.  My mom was on the passenger side, smoking a cigarette with the window rolled down about an inch and a half.  I had the backseat to myself, but I was straddling the transmission hump in the middle and leaning forward, resting my chin on the back of the bench seat.

The Impala had an AM radio with a hairline antenna built into the windshield.  I remember it had two knobs.  One had a set of lines on it and the other had a music note icon.  That was kind of funny because we never listened to anything else in the car except the news.  My dad had WBBM tuned in; we could see the tall broadcast antenna out the side windows if we wanted.  I remember the sun was almost down when the President came on.  I wasn’t all that interested in what he had to say, but both my parent’s shushed me.  This was important.  My mom turned around to look at me.

“Listen to this,” she said.  “This is history.  You’re going to remember this for the rest of your life.”  She was right.  I still remember President Nixon saying he was going to resign at noon tomorrow, thirty-five years ago.

Daniel and I were driving back from Chicago.  We had left Aunt Amy’s late and now it was just past midnight.  Daniel looked at the clock and smiled.

“Look, Dad,” he said, “it’s tomorrow!”  I smiled, but shook my head.

“No, it’s today.  It’s always today.” I replied.  Daniel furrowed his brow and looked back at the clock.

“But it’s past midnight,” he said.  “Tomorrow starts at midnight.”

I said, “A day starts at midnight -”

“Tomorrow!”

“No,” I said, “tomorrow is just a word that means the day after today.”

“But it was Saturday when we went to Chicago,” said Daniel, yawning.  I nodded.  “And now it’s Sunday.  It’s tomorrow.”

“Saturday and Sunday are the names of actual days,” I explained.  “Today and tomorrow are descriptions.”

“You mean adjectives,” corrected Daniel.  Touché.

I continued, “The word today means the day it is right now.  So on Saturdays, today is Saturday and when it becomes Sunday, today automatically changes to Sunday.  It’s the same thing with tomorrow.  It just means the day after today.  At midnight, when today shifts to the new day, tomorrow also shifts.  So, it’s never tomorrow, always today. ” 

I was pretty satisfied with the answer and the argument did end there… mostly because – by then – Daniel has fallen asleep in his seat.

I don’t drink and I don’t smoke.  The Diet Pepsi I get from the fountain at the corner gas station is about my only remaining vice.  I even cut back on that.  I wash out the plastic cups because I can refill them for half price.  With the economy in the shape it’s in, we’ve been watching our pennies.  We’ve cut out some things here and there, but – at 59 cents each – I was able to keep refilling my Diet Pepsi.

A few weeks back there was a notice taped to the check-out counter.  The price of refills was going up from 59 cents to 79 cents.  That didn’t sound like much on a Pepsi by Pepsi basis, but it was an increase of almost 34 percent.  We’re talking health insurance premium style increases.  I shopped around; stopping at other gas stations on other corners.  I might have saved the gas.  They all ran about 79 cents for a refill.

While my corner station offers cups maxing out at 44 ounces, the tollway oasis cups hold 64 ounces.  I picked up one on my way home from Chicago one evening and washed it out.  I refilled it with Diet Pepsi at my corner station.  I noticed it took significantly longer to fill it up completely.  I non-chalantly brought it up front and paid my 79 cents.  So, while the cost has gone up 34 percent, I’m getting 45 percent more Diet Pepsi each time.  I have to admit, finding a loophole in the fine print that breaks my way for once feels pretty good.

It would probably feel better if I wasn’t so jittery all the time and could sleep at night.

Daniel and I rarely play basketball.  We do go out on the driveway a lot, draw chalk lines around the tall pole which has a net attached to the top.  Between the various grandparents, I believe Daniel owns about thirteen dirty orange basketballs which are housed in a large box in the garage.  But when Daniel wants to shoot some hoops, we rarely play a game as pedestrian as “basketball”.

“This game is called ‘Pointer’,” said Daniel, “otherwise known as ‘Lucky’.”  He shot a couple of baskets and explained the rules.  If we scored a basket, we got one point.  That sounded straightforward enough.  Sometimes in Daniel’s games, we get more points the farther away we are.  Shooting from the street nets five points in “Freeze Line”.  My personal favorite is “Robbed”; if your shot goes in and out of the basket, you still get one point for trying.  I stepped up and made my first shot; no good.  Daniel shot and scored.

“It’s five to zero,” he announced.  I was confused.

“How do you have five points?”  I asked.  “I thought each basket was worth just one point.”  Daniel explained the shots he took while demonstrating counted because “they were educational”.  I didn’t remember that rule at the outset, but let it slide.  I set and shot.  The ball bounced off the backboard into the net.

“Five to zero still,” said Daniel.  Wait a minute.

“How come my basket didn’t count?”  I asked.  It turned out it did count.  However, after the ball came down, it bounced into one of the puddles on the driveway left from the storm that went through earlier.  Puddle splashes cost a point.  Daniel made his next basket.  I stepped up to the line.

“Wait!” said Daniel.  The ball overshot the backboard and bounced into the garage with a crash.  I turned to look at him.

“What, Daniel?”

“I was just going to say ‘good luck’,” he replied.  I stumbled into the garage and retrieved my basketball wedged in a pile of gardening supplies on the far side of the lawnmower.  I came out just as Daniel was scoring again.

“That’s nine to zero,” he told me.  Hold it.

“How did you get nine?”  I asked.  “You just had six!”

“I made three baskets while you were getting your ball,” he explained.  It was a previously unknown rule allowing the other person to make as many shots as possible instead of delaying the game.  Daniel made another basket, but his ball rolled through a puddle afterward.  “Ten to zero now.”

“But your ball went through the puddle,” I complained.  “It doesn’t count.”  Daniel carefully explained how it wasn’t the puddle that mattered, but the splash.  My ball had bounced into the puddle and made a splash.  His had just rolled through the puddle.  That was allowed.

I did – eventually – score some points in ‘Pointer’, but ended up losing 40 – 30 as the sun went down behind the house across the street.  I demonstrated good sportsmanship by congratulating Daniel on a good game.

“It’s too bad you lost, Dad,” said Daniel.  “Don’t worry, I’ll come up with a different game next time.”  I have no doubt our next game will have different rules and regulations.  However, no matter how it’s played, I believe it will be called the same thing: Daniel Wins.

Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1909.  That rang the death knell of the carriage industry.  Soon the mass produced automobile replaced the horse as America’s primary mode of transportation.  These days it’s more common to see a car pulling a trailer with a horse inside rather than the other way around.  However, there is still a small market for horse drawn carriages.  I’ve seen them downtown.  I’ve seen them at weddings.  Where do the Amish get their wagons?  I’d ask them directly, but there don’t seem to be too many Amish online.

Based on my research, a lot of them have been restored from originals made at the turn of the twentieth century.  If you happen to have one lying around in the barn somewhere, there are a number of people around the country specializing in stripping down old horse drawn carriages and rebuilding them like new.  I was surprised a restored twenty year old car probably costs more than a restored hundred and twenty year old wagon.  To be fair, that’s just the cost of the carriage.  The horse (of course) is extra.

I don’t have a spare carriage lying around in the garage… at least I don’t think I do (our garage is a bit of a mess).  However, I found a couple of carriage works online that build brand new ones.  They offer new models with lots of glass and regular rubber tires and suspensions.  They don’t even need to be drawn by horses; I found one designed to be hauled behind a motorcycle.  I don’t know how well these sell; I would think the average horse drawn carriage buyer is probably more of a traditionalist.  Carriage works also offer new versions of classic carriages and wagons.  When I say classic, I mean classic.  I found a Roman style chariot for sale, straight out of Ben Hur.  The offerings seemed reasonably priced to me.  I could either buy a Smart ForTwo or pick up a stagecoach that seats six on the inside.  Seriously, which one would look cooler parked in the driveway?  There are some differences in buying a horse carriage as opposed to the horseless variety.  A lot of features found in the most basic car are options on a carriage; headlights and brakes, for example.

With high priced gas and two of the Big Three auto makers in bankruptcy, many hear the death knell of the American auto industry.  However I found nary an “I told you so” on all the carriage websites I checked.  In fact, one carriage works in Michigan has a deal: if you’ve purchased a new GM or Chrysler product, they’ll take ten percent off the price of a new four wheel carriage.  I did note Ford cars were not eligible; after a hundred years maybe a few hard feelings still linger.

Last week was crazy at work.  I was so busy I didn’t have time to post a blog.  It was the first time I missed my daily posting since Christmas.  While that was annoying – no one likes to break a streak – I was more bothered by missing my weekly Weight Watchers meeting.  I’ve been on Weight Watchers for about sixteen months.  I’ve lost fifteen pounds and – more importantly – I’ve kept it off.  I credit my success to – get this – following the Weight Watchers program.  If I eat the number of points I’m allowed and I exercise regularly, I tend to lose weight on a weekly basis.  This sounds pretty obvious and – to be honest – it is obvious.  However, weight loss in reality has been harder than I thought it would be when I joined last spring.

The reality is it’s easy to get lazy and it’s easy to cheat.  The weather in Belvidere averages “rotten” with occasional lows in the “crappy” and “downright nasty” range.  It’s very easy to look out the window and come up with an excuse not to take a long walk in the park.  It’s easy to cook up something and not weight it out exactly.  It’s easy to estimate the number of points.  Therefore, it’s easy to gain weight back.  That’s where the meetings come in for me.  Once a week, I get together with a bunch of people who are in the same boat.  After sixteen months, I don’t think I’ve run into any situation someone else hasn’t already brought up.  I’ve received good advice on making the best of tricky situations: holidays, vacations, business meetings.  If no one has any ideas, at least I can get some genuine sympathy.  And that goes in both directions.  There have even been weeks when our leader has come in and confessed of some transgression.  Double-stuffed Oreo cookies are her Kryptonite.

I’ve attended meetings in other towns and states when I’ve been on the road.  I have to say we have a really good leader.  She’s very dynamic and she’s funny.  The meetings run half an hour and the time flies by.  I’m inspired by the meetings.  When I come home Wednesday night, I’m set to start a brand new week with my patented point tracker.  I find the meeting keeps me going through Thursday and Friday.  Saturday is a bit of a challenge; I don’t have a set routine to help me make good choices.  Sunday is even harder.  My motivation picks up on Monday and Tuesday and by Wednesday afternoon, I’m downright frightened.  I’ve come to the conclusion I am a consummate liar.  I seem to have no problem lying to myself.  I ate all the right things all week, I say.  I exercised right and left.  And if I can lie to myself, lying to family and friends is – frankly – no big deal.  I like the meetings and learn a lot, but I’ve found I can lie to everyone there as well.  Everyone except the scale used for the weekly weigh-in.  I may have myself convinced it was a pretty good week… until that digital readout shatters the illusion.

I’ve been interested in computers since I watched them on Star Trek reruns when I was a kid.  Back then in the 1970’s, computers weren’t exactly interactive.  I remember when my friend Greg got a program called ELIZA for his TRS-80.  It was an early attempt at artificial intelligence.  Mathematician Alan Turing tried to answer the question whether or not a computer might be considered intelligent.  He came up with the “Turing Test”.  Basically, if you could talk to a computer and didn’t realize it was a computer, the computer would be considered intelligent.

Greg and I could type in statements in English and ELIZA would respond back in English.  While that was a novelty (generally all typing on the TRS-80 was in BASIC), the actual conversations with ELIZA sound more interesting than they really were.  The original ELIZA program was written in 1966, the same year Star Trek debuted on television.  The TRS-80 version of ELIZA struggled to make conversation from whatever words could fit into 4,000 bytes of memory.  Pretty much anything we typed in was answered with something like “That’s interesting, please go on.” or “Why do you say that?”  It was like having a conversation with a Magic 8-Ball.

Surprisingly, the concept behind ELIZA – having a large pre-programmed list of words and phrases – is still in use in artificial intelligence programs today.  The major difference is speed and scale.  Even a basic system today can hold a million times as much data and access it in nanoseconds.  I was curious to see how these new artificial intelligences matched up against old ELIZA.  I found a few so-called “chatterbots” online.  They all seem to work the same way.  A chat window is available on the page.  You type in English and it answers in English.

The first one I tried – Yeti – was pretty bad.  Everything it answered with was all in caps, so it seemed like it was shouting random things at me.  I guess it could have passed for human if the person was seriously deranged. I had a better time with Jabberwacky.  I managed to talk back and forth with it a half dozen times before things started to get a little… off.

JABBERWACKY: London is my favorite place in the world.
ME: Why?
JABBERWACKY: My friends don’t like me. 

I lost my connection to Jabberwacky shortly after that.  I hope it didn’t do anything rash.

After talking to machines that were obviously machines, I thought I’d try an actual Turing Test.  I was supposed to have a chat for five minutes.  Sometimes the site connects to actual people, other folks talking the Turing Test.  And sometimes it connects to a machine.  My chat partner was named “Landru”.  We had a very pleasant chat for about a minute and a half before he froze.

Apparently Meka was right.  I watched too much Star Trek as a kid.  Like Captain Kirk in so many episodes, I am able to bring a machine to its metaphorical knees just by having a discussion with it.  So, note to NASA: if Pioneer 11 shows up again, rebuilt as a planet killing death machine, give me a call.  I should be able to take care of it in a jiffy.

I hadn’t planned to buy any fireworks this year.  With the economy being a bit scary, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been shaving bits off the family budget.  Fireworks – sadly – fall in the “miscellaneous expenses” category in Quicken; that was the first to go.  However, I didn’t think we would be denied fireworks on the Fourth of July.  There are usually a couple of good shows in Belvidere.  If the city’s show isn’t all that spectacular, I can always count on an exciting – if a bit erratic – display from my neighbors after they’ve polished off a case of beer or six.

I keep forgetting Belvidere doesn’t celebrate the Fourth of July.  Instead we have a four day festival that (sometimes) coincides with Independence Day.  A few years ago, Heritage Days wrapped up on the Fourth of July.  They closed the main bridge downtown.  We all went out there with lawn chairs and watched a brilliant display flowering over the Kishwaukee River.  It was beautiful.  This year, however, Heritage Days were last weekend.  So much for professional fireworks.

We’ve had a good run of crazy neighbors over the years.  My dad’s neighbor Maynard and his twin brother (not-Maynard) used to come back from Wisconsin with a station wagon full of fireworks for Independence Day.  This was the 1980’s; when a station wagon still denoted a car with the same square footage as a battleship from World War II.  Later on when we lived in Hanover Park, our neighbors would celebrate with a simulated nuclear attack on the neighboring suburb of Bartlett.  It would take us three days to pry the dog out from under the kitchen table.  And here in Belvidere, our neighbors spend their weekends drinking and shooting off fireworks.  They start as soon as there’s a dry Friday night in the spring and keep at it until the last Saturday night before the snow flies.

You can imagine my surprise when – come 2:00 in the morning – I had no thunderous blasts rattling the window, no debris raining down on the roof.  In fact, I didn’t hear anything: no hooting, no whoo-ing, no profanity.  Even the hair band music that thumps off the siding of the houses in the cul-de-sac behind us was silenced.  I felt like stalking over there, waking them up out of their blackouts and telling them how disappointed I was.  Didn’t they know this was bigger than any mere kegger?  They were letting me down, my family down.  Heck, they were letting America down.

Daniel decided to take things into his own hands.  I picked him up from summer camp Friday night.  He asked me if we could buy some fireworks.  He had about seven dollars and change.  I had about a dollar more than that.  We strapped into the Corolla and drive north to the border; home of cheese, gifts and fireworks.  We walked in and the gift shop area was empty.  There was no one in the deli section either.  The fireworks counter was doing a brisk business though.  I grabbed a plastic basket and waded into the fray.  It didn’t take long to figure out we were in over our heads.  I suppose we could have pooled our money together and bought one of the rockets mounted behind the counter, but that would have been it.  And it didn’t make us feel any better when little kids – half Daniel’s size – were lugging Roman candles taller than they were into line ahead of us.

I was despairing, but Daniel inspected every nook and cranny of the store.  He found fifty cent boxes of snakes.  I was going to buy a fountain that shoots out sparks for eight dollars.  Daniel found a package of four for half that price.  On top of that, they had a “buy one, get one free” offer.  Daniel managed to fill a respectable portion of our basket for fifteen dollars.  By my estimate, we should be able to light up the street in front of our house for a few minutes; long enough to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” and maybe throw in a rousing rendition of “Welcome to the Jungle” as well.

I was waiting in line at Wal Mart.  This is nothing new.  I believe they have a policy that guarantees all patrons – no matter what time of day – will have to wait in a line with at least three customers ahead of them.  It feels like most of the time I spend at Wal Mart is in a line.  I might feel differently if I had something to take my mind off of it.  Sadly, once I took my focus off the smashed bits of watermelon on the floor and stepped nimbly around the juice, there was nothing much to look at.

The magazine selection was solely made up of so-called “women’s magazines”.  There was Woman’s Day and Family Circle.  If I couldn’t find any articles to page through, I was hoping for a little eye candy at least.  Sadly, Good Housekeeping dropped the ball on that one.  Their cheesecake shot was… literally cheesecake.  I thought Wal Mart should have the courtesy to put a few magazines up front to counterbalance the recipe-centric periodical selection.

Out of the eleven people in line with me, seven of them were men.  Yet we had no representation on the magazine rack.  Maxim would be nice, but I understand it’s a “family store”.  How about Popular Mechanics or Motor Trend?  Even women in line might like a break from Soap Opera Weekly to take a look at Newsweek or Time.  I’d even settle for TV Guide.  Better yet, here’s a suggestion.  Open up some more f$%^ing lines so your customers don’t have so much time on their hands to ponder the paucity of available reading material.

Like most people, I’ve seen a lot in my life… too much actually.  I’ve seen shocking things.  I’ve seen scary things.  I’ve had images burned into my brain I will never forget, no matter how hard I try.  While things I see have given me nightmares, it’s my sense of hearing that seems to dig deeper into my brain.  Certain sounds instantly generate that primitive fear “fight/flight” response.  For example, I’ll hear a certain sound at work and I’ll find myself cringing before I’m actually aware I’ve heard it.

BLOOP-BLOOP-BLOOP!

We use instant messaging at work.  My message window may stay closed for days, but as soon as I need to be totally focused on something, I hear this sound and my mouse control is taken away from what I’m doing.  IM is considered a “mission critical” application though most of my messages seem to be either “R U There?” or end with someone asking me to call them on the phone.

CHIRP-CHIRP!

We had Nextel phones at my previous job.  While we were all supposed to be using the Push-To-Talk feature, the only person who did was my boss.  I’d hear the PTT sound followed by his deep grumble courtesy of half a century of cigarette smoking.

“Br- B- Fr- Ma- Ha-”   Our main office was in a skyscraper in the middle of the Loop.  We didn’t have the highest cell signal there.  I’d send back I couldn’t understand him and a moment later my phone would ring.

“Br- B- Fr- Ma- Ha-”   It never occurred to my boss if Push-To-Talk didn’t work, calling me directly from the same cell phone wouldn’t work either.  This was doubly annoying because I knew he was sitting in his office with a perfectly functioning landline on his desk right next to where his feet were propped up.

DING!

When I started working for the phone company, my PC was a 386 running at 12 megahertz.  This was slow even then.  My hard drive was so small; I couldn’t have Word and Excel on it at the same time.  Every few days I had to uninstall one and install the other from a tall stack of floppy disks.  Needless to say, this didn’t make my computer very stable.  Pretty much anything I did would cause it to emit the Windows patented “Ding!” sound to tell me something was wrong.  While it drove me crazy, it actually drove one of my “pod mates” crazier.  After listening to my system through the fabric walls of my cubicle for months and months, he graciously volunteered to give me his new Pentium machine.  The IT department moved with uncharacteristic swiftness; I actually got to use the new computer a few times before I was downsized.

THWEEP!  THWEEP!  THWEEP!

We had a speaker mounted to the wall in the drive thru at Burger King.  The alarm would go off any time a car pulled up to the menu.  It was loud enough to be heard as far as the stalls in the men’s room and it wouldn’t stop until you ran all the way back to the window to answer.  The speaker system was old when I started, but our franchise owner was cheap.  We kept it until it died.  The good news was we got modern headsets to wear.  The bad news was the sound was the same and so was the volume.

Our radio station broadcast in stereo, but I thought of it as surround sound.  Everywhere you went in the station, sound would follow.  It poured from the speakers in the hallways.  It was emitted from small monitors built into the mixing boards.  I heard it in my headphones and my co-workers’ headphones (they all have tinnitus now).  Some of the stabs would make me jump.  Some of the stings would make me wince.  Some of the songs we played made me nauseous.  However, there was one sound that made me go cold and drop my stomach into my shoes.  That one sound above all, one sound worse than the rest.  That one sound that set me off more than any other: the sound of total silence.

I was sitting up with my mom at her kitchen table.  We usually start with the basics: what’s going on around northern Michigan and Illinois.  By then, it’s the middle of the night.  Everyone else has gone to bed.  This visit started out no differently.  It was maybe three or four in the morning and even the dogs had given up on us and turned in.  My mom was talking about my brother David.

“He should have been a lawyer,” she said.  “He would argue anything and everything.”  I nodded.  David loved to argue.  He was passionate if not always correct.  I learned a lot from arguing with my brother (mostly that it was pointless to do so).  “He’d never admit he was guilty,” she added.  We both remembered a time when David had decided to stick a pencil eraser up his nose.  He was in Kindergarten and this seemed like a perfectly good move… until it got stuck and he couldn’t get it out.  The nurse managed to pluck it out with tweezers.

“‘Well, the Tooth Fairy didn’t stick that eraser up your nose,’ said the nurse.  David jumped all over that and had her arguing all about the Tooth Fairy,” said my mom.  “She forgot all about the original argument over who stuck the eraser up his nose.”  That was David’s favorite tactic; feint and watch your opponent over-commit.

“And the time he burned a hole in the side of the couch,” Mom said.  “I knew it was him, but he would not admit to it.  It just drove me crazy!”

“Oh, I burned the hole in the couch,” I said.  This was back in 1988.  I was a senior in high school.  The light had been lying on the floor about eight inches from the side of the couch.  The heat melted the artificial fabric and made a hand sized hole.  I hadn’t noticed it until my mom was rearranging the furniture several months later.  I didn’t realize David got into trouble about it.

I also didn’t realize my mom didn’t know I did it.  She looked at me for a long moment and narrowed her eyes.  And for the first time in about thirty years, I found myself grounded.

It was dinnertime and Daniel’s turn to pick the destination.

“Where do you want to go to eat?”  I ask.

“Burger King,” replies Daniel.  I back down the driveway and shift into DRIVE.

“Burger Queen, huh?”  I say, “Well, okay.”

“Dad…” warns Daniel, eye lasers heating up.  “It’s called Burger King.”  This is a little game I invented, mostly in self-defense.  I call it “Push Daniel’s Buttons”.  We turn the corner and make a left at the retention pond in the center of the subdivision.

“How about Burger Prince?”  I ask, trying to maintain a straight face.  This is key to getting a reaction.

“Da-ad…” says Daniel.  The object of the game is to get “Dad” stretched out into as many syllables as possible without Daniel actually exploding.

“We could even go to the Burger Artist-Formerly-Known-as-Prince.”  I thought that was pretty good, but I was the only one.  I don’t get a “Dad”.  Strike one.

“How about Burger King?” he says finally.

I ask, “You don’t want to try Burger Chief?”

“Dad, let’s just go to Burger King!”  I make a left and head out of Farmington Fields.  Traffic is slow going into town.  There are not many cars, but the ones that are there tend to drive below the speed limit.  There’s plenty of time left on the clock.

“What about Burger General?”

“Dad…”

“Burger Sultan?”

“Da-ad!”

“The Burger Meister Meister Burgher?”

“Da-a-ad!!!”

Daniel’s nose is crinkling now.  I wait for the stoplight by the bank to turn green for my lane, so I can head down the main street of Belvidere… ironically not called Main Street (that’s two blocks over).

“We could always try Burger Dictator,” I say.  Daniel’s face clears up.

“What’s a dictator?” he asks.  Oops.  I might have overplayed my hand.

“A dictator is someone who is in charge of a country without being elected,” I explain.  This play could make or break the game.  Daniel smiles.

“So, a Burger Dictator is like a Burger King!” he says triumphantly.  I laugh.

“Nope, dictators don’t have to transfer their power via family members,” I respond.

“Rats,” says Daniel under his breath.  He knows he’s been skunked.

“I know,” I say.  “We can go to Burger President!”

“Da-a-a-ad, we are not going to Burger President!”

“Burger Senator?”

“Da-a-a-a-ad!”

“Burger Congressman?”

“Da-a-a-a-a-ad!!!”  Daniel is bright red and practically foaming at the mouth.  “We are not going to Burger Congressman or Burger Senator or President!  We are going to Burger King!  You hear me?!  Burger King!!!”

We’re sitting at the red light by the Piggly Wiggly.  I look at him for a long moment.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”  I say finally.  “You only had to tell me.”  Daniel smacks his forehead with his hand and shakes his head.

“Sheesh!” says Daniel.  “To get what you want these days, you have to go nearly crazy!”  We cross the river and head towards the row of fast food restaurants.

“So, we’re not going to Burger President,” I say.

“That’s right,” says Daniel.

“And we’re not going to Burger Queen or Senator,” I say.

“That’s right,” says Daniel.

“We’re not going to Burger Congressman or Prince or Sultan or Generalissimo,” I say.  Daniel growls a bit.  I ignore it.  “If I see a Burger Pope on the side of road, I’m going to just drive right by.”

“Da-ad…”  I hold up my hand and cut him off.

“Nope, we’re not going any of those places.  We’re going where Daniel wants to go.”  Daniel nods warily at the news.  I put on the blinker to pull in the parking lot.

“Next stop, Booger King.”

“Da-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ad!!!”

Daniel had a sleepover with one of his friends from school.  I don’t know why they call them “sleepovers”; sleep is the last thing on anyone’s mind.  I had many sleepovers when I was a kid.  Meka had a few herself.  Despite this, we agreed his friend could spend the night.  We had to prepare, of course.  We both took a short nap to recharge before the kid’s parents dropped him off.

Things didn’t seem to go well.  As far as I can tell, they spent most of the evening alternately arguing or pouting.  They argued and pouted over the Wii.  They argued at pouted while building an airport out of Legos in Daniel’s room.  They even asked to borrow my digital camera – the one that takes movies as well as pictures.  They made a number of jerky videos of themselves arguing silently and pouting.

I escaped in the truck for an hour to pick up pizza at Little Caesar’s (actually the pizzas were ready in fifteen minutes; don’t tell anyone).  Both were pouting by the time I got back.  Neither of them ate much pizza.  The Wii was done for the night, so I put on a movie.  They argued about popcorn.  Daniel wanted some; his friend didn’t.

They retired to Daniel’s room and continued to argue and – I assume – pout.  We could hear the arguing through the walls; pouting is a quiet activity.  I’m a night person and so is Meka.  However, they outlasted us, squabbling through the wee hours into the cold gray light before dawn.  They were up a few hours later.  I slowly came to and could hear them rumbling and grumbling outside our bedroom door.

Ironically, they both could agree it was “the best sleepover ever”.  As his friend was packing up to go, they both asked if they could have another sleepover soon, maybe even tonight.  Not so ironically, Meka and I agreed on the answer: no.

Daniel and I were wrapping up dinner at the Happy Wok.  We had eaten our fill of fried rice mixed with everything but shrimp.  Daniel likes shrimp, but “only on the side”.  I pulled the plastic off a fortune cookie and handed it to him.  Daniel extracted the ribbon of paper and read it intently.  I heard a low “Yes!” from across the table.

“What does it say?”  I asked.  At first he wouldn’t tell me; he thought fortune cookies worked like wishes upon a star.  Finally, he handed me the piece of paper.

“Do you know what that means?”  asked Daniel gleefully.  I had a pretty good idea.  It doesn’t take much to start Daniel talking about all the things he wants.  His flights of fancy tend to be non-stop normally; here he’d been handed an E Ticket.  I tried to listen as I munched the stale bits of my fortune cookie, but Daniel’s verbal torrent kept threatening to overwhelm me in its rushed run-on sentences.  As far as I could gather, Daniel’s plans included everything shown on commercial television mixed in with the car ads pulled from the pages of the Bargain Hunter we get when we go to Burger King.  It was Christmas and his birthday and everything Meka or I have ever said “no” to.  I finally had to cut it off.  He hadn’t taken a breath in about eleven minutes and I was worried he’d pass out.

“Daniel, it’s good to have dreams –”  I held up a hand to stop him; I knew “dreams” and “plans” were two different words.  “But how are you going to pay for all of that?”  Daniel explained he was going to be a “millionaire architect” and design the sort of buildings he’s always constructing in SimCity.  I felt my attention drifting away with the tide.

“… and I won’t have to go to school…”  I heard that.  He felt the fortune would be enough to get some high-paying architectural commissions.  In fact, it sounded pretty much like Daniel planned to have people to just stop by and throw money at him.

“You’ll probably still want to go to school, Daniel,” I said, “just in case the fortune doesn’t work out.”  Daniel smiled.  He had thought of that already.

“No, I can still be rich,” he told me.  “If my plans don’t come true, I can just sue the restaurant!”

It was the end of January.  I had just come to Ann Arbor to ask Meka to marry me.  We were sitting at one of our frequent haunts; pop in hand and waiting for appetizers.  Meka was all smiles and kept admiring “the rock” on her finger.

“What kind of wedding should we have?” asked Meka.  I wanted something small and simple, informal and fun.  I said I wanted a “hippie wedding”; to be barefoot in a meadow, maybe take our vows by a stream.  Meka was on the same wavelength.  She thought it would be nice to get married with a few friends and close family in her parents’ backyard.  After the ceremony, we’d have a cook out on their deck.  We had the whole thing figured out by the time our entrees arrived.

This sense of accomplishment lasted about a day, until we told our respective parents.  Wedding invitations – we were instructed – were based upon social obligations.  They had been attending weddings for years; we had to reply in kind with invitations of our own.  Meka called me at work that week and said her mom had a list of 100 people to invite.  I laughed… until my mom handed me another list of 100.  The backyard idea was out.  I was threatened under pain of death to wear something nice at my own wedding.  Shoes were mandatory.

Meka drove into town that weekend and we went out to dinner.  We sat shell-shocked in the booth waiting for our food.  There was a lot more to wedding planning than we realized.  One of Meka’s co-workers asked when we were getting married.  When Meka replied June, she asked what year.  I remembered setting up one of my first database projects to help out a friend of mine at work.  We had to come up with a table arrangement for her reception.  She was planning on several hundred guests, all of whom apparently disliked one another.

“I’m beginning to understand why people cry at weddings,” said Meka quietly.  The whole thing was beginning to spiral out of our control.  We discussed what was really important about getting married and decided almost everything – frankly – didn’t matter.  We decided if someone had an idea, we’d put them in charge of it.

“What if it still gets out of control?” asked Meka.

“Easy,” I replied.  “We elope to Vegas and get married by Elvis.”

It turned out delegation was the key.  Meka’s mom and her aunts had a great time planning the details.  My mom worked on getting wedding pictures.  Every so often, things would still get crazy.  The invite list went through about six hundred revisions.  Someone would remember someone needed to be invited (“though I’m sure they won’t come”).  Meka and I would sit back, smile and nod, look at each other and think “Elvis”.

In the end, we didn’t have the wedding we originally envisioned, but it was remarkably similar in spirit.  I wasn’t barefoot, but I wasn’t in a tuxedo either.  We split the difference and I bought a suit.  We didn’t get married in her parents’ yard, but we did get married outside next to the Fox River.  We didn’t have a cook out, but we arranged a nice dinner for everyone that did not include rubbery chicken.  And while we weren’t forced to elope to escape the craziness, five years later we flew out to Vegas to renew our vows under guidance from “The King”.

It was our tenth anniversary and I wanted to make it a day Meka wouldn’t soon forget.  I knew people celebrated their diamond anniversary after sixty years.  I was pretty sure the fiftieth anniversary was symbolized by gold.  I looked up ten years on the Internet and found out the traditional gift is tin.

I didn’t want Meka to miss a minute of our special day.  I woke her up early with breakfast in bed.  The tray was a bit beat up; they haven’t made TV trays out of tin since I was a kid.  I found one on eBay in reasonably good condition.  Meka held it tight in her lap so the left leg wouldn’t give way.  She passed on the canned fruit cocktail I had poured out.  It was in heavy syrup (and when they say heavy, they mean heavy; it was essentially fruit flavored gravy).  I guess she didn’t care much for the guava nectar either.  It was imported from Mexico and the only kind of juice I could find in an actual tin can.  Most beverages are in aluminum cans these days.  Meka got up to brush her teeth.  I heard her gasp.

“I probably should have mentioned the new toothpaste,” I said through the closed door.  “Crest Pro Health uses stannous fluoride instead of sodium fluoride.”

“What happened to the lights?” she asked.  I had forgotten about that.  I put in brand new fluorescent tubes.  They have a tin based powder inside.  It’s what gives them that special kind of light that accentuates all the detail on people’s faces.  She got dressed and followed me downstairs.  I had picked up one of those special magnets made of tin and niobium they sell through the scientific catalogues.  I had stuck it to the fridge, but I couldn’t seem to pull it loose.  Well, she’d find that later.  I had plenty of gifts.  I handed her an envelope.  Meka opened it slowly.

“Stock?” she asked.  She pulled out the certificate and looked at the attached print-out.  “What’s Temple-Inland?”  I explained they were a company out of Texas.  They specialized in making cardboard boxes and building materials.  The housing bust had hurt their business.  They had closed some plants and let a lot of people go.

“I thought it was symbolic of us,” I said.

“Moving from ‘buy’ to ‘neutral’?”  I laughed and pointed to the Dow Jones ticker initials: T-I-N.

“Get it?”  She got it.  Meka smiled when I handed her a small present.  She opened it up and looked surprised to find it was Altoids.

“You think I have bad breath?”

“Of course not,” I lied.  “They come in a tin.”  She nodded.

“I was kind of hoping for something… you know…”  I knew what she wanted.  Over the years, I’ve tried to shower Meka with jewelry.  Unfortunately, it’s been more of a thin drizzle.  She was excited I had something for her to wear while we were out.  She closed her eyes and I placed the tinfoil crown on her head.  I got the idea from Lone Star Steakhouse.  They make you one special when it’s your birthday.  The tin is impervious to rusting by water.  I told her it would last a long, long time.

“We’ll see about that,” Meka replied.

We jumped in the car and drove downtown.  A number of buildings in Belvidere date back to the late 19^th century.  The town was a transit hub and one of the biggest makers of tin toys.  Meka wanted to stop and take a look at the antique stores and maybe have some ice cream, but I kept her moving.  Eleven stores still have their original hammered tin ceilings.  I wanted to make sure she didn’t miss a single one.  After that, we drove down to Byron to look at the nuclear power plant.  Maybe I seemed a little too excited when I explained a tin based alloy coats the fuel rods.  Even though it was our anniversary, the guard at the gate wouldn’t let us in.  It was still a nice drive; about an hour there and an hour back.  I explained they use a lot of tin alloys in manufacturing processes, including making beer and pharmaceuticals.

“Did you get me any pharmaceuticals for our anniversary?”  I laughed and shook my head.  “I don’t suppose you bought me any beer,” she asked.

“They haven’t made beer in tin cans in a long time,” I replied.  “Besides, you wouldn’t want to start drinking so early, would you?”  Meka didn’t say anything; I think she was admiring the view.  We got home as the sun was setting.  I put on the movie I ordered from Netflix.  Believe me, it wasn’t easy locating an industrial film on the Peruvian Mining Industry.  It was in black and white, but the sound was pretty decent, considering it was produced in 1937.  They probably used tin ribbon microphones in the studio.  It was a very educational hour and a half.  I got up and gave her first choice for dinner.

“We have Beefaroni and Spam,” I said.  I heated up the tins and handed her a dish and silverware from an old Boy Scout camping kit.  We sat on the couch and ate slowly while watching The Wizard of Oz on BluRay.  Meka seemed pretty engrossed in the movie.  I slowly leaned over, put my arm around her shoulder and whispered in her ear.

“Oil can.”

Meka screamed and acted like she was trying to stab me in the chest.  The knife was made of tin and just bent on my shirt.  I thought it was a pretty good joke and had a good laugh.  Meka apparently laughed so hard, it made her cry.

I’m not a summer person anymore.  Even when I was young, the main reason I liked summer was I didn’t have to go to school.  Nowadays, when every season is work season, I prefer the cool clear fall days in late September and October.  It was already warm when I woke up.  My office gets the morning sun.  I spent most of my working day adjusting the window air conditioner.  It has a dial that ranges from one to ten, but it seems to either not work or threatens to freeze me until the twenty fifth century.  I flipped it on and off, trying to achieve some sort of balance.  I can’t say I was successful, but at least I got some exercise.

Daniel doesn’t start summer camp until next week.  I felt bad he was left downstairs most of the day – alone – with just snacks and toys and television and the Wii and his Pokemon cards and two magazines.  I offered to throw the football around with him at lunchtime, but he declined.

“It’s really hot out,” said Daniel.  “And the hot won’t get off your skin.”  I knew what he meant.  We went out to get something to drink.  It was north of ninety by mid afternoon.  There was no breeze at all, rare for Belvidere.  My hair started to curl up and out as soon as I opened the front door.  Daniel sat in the passenger seat and proceeded to turn all the vents towards his face.  He was disappointed to discover the air conditioning in the truck isn’t instantaneous.

We had dinner and watched a show together.  The sun set around the time Daniel got ready for bed.  I made a list for the grocery store.  A large anvil cloud, dark purple, hung in the western sky like a mountain.  It loomed over the store as I walked in.  I wasn’t in there long, but by the time I came out, a gentle rain was falling.  People all around me were running past.  I took my time however.  All the groceries were bagged in plastic and I’m not made of sugar.  Actually, it was rather pleasant.  The warm rain washed away the heat of the day.  I let it soak into my shirt at the shoulders and I could feel it working its way through my tangle of hair.

I stood by the truck until the shower was over; two minutes, maybe three.  It didn’t take long for the still air to regain its oppressive nature.  But by then, I was in the truck, heading for my air conditioned home.

The old saying is true.  You do learn something new everyday.

Meka and I were watching The Daily Show one night.  As part of the opening segment, Jon Stewart cut into a video clip and said, “Yeeeeeeesss???”  Everyone laughed in the audience.  Meka and I chuckled at home on the couch.

“Where is that from?” she asked.  I don’t think she really expected an answer, but I had one.  I like to listen to old-time radio programs.  They air them on NewsRadio 78 at midnight.  Unlike a lot of the broadcasts, The Jack Benny Show is still pretty funny.  It doesn’t rely so much on topical humor or ethnic humor more cringe-inducing than funny to modern audiences.  Jack Benny created one of the first “sitcom families”.  It consisted of Jack and the regular cast along with a number of frequent minor characters, including a put-upon sales clerk that seemed to work at every store Benny visited.

“Gale Gordon,” I answered.  “The ‘yeeeeeeesss???’ character started on The Jack Benny Show and was played by Gale Gordon.”

I happened to be looking up something totally unrelated to Gale Gordon, Jack Benny or Jon Stewart on the Internet the other day.  I stumbled upon a mention of Frank Nelson, who of course played that put-upon sales clerk on The Jack Benny Show –

Wait a minute…

A couple of hours of research later and I realized I had made a mistake.  It was Frank Nelson who had the recurring role on The Jack Benny Show.  Frank Nelson was the one who moved to television and did voice work, playing the same put-upon sales clerk on The Flintstones and The Jetsons.  Comedians continue to pay homage to Nelson’s character.  There’s a recurring “Yes Guy” on The Simpsons and – of course – Jon Stewart does a mean Frank Nelson impression.

Gale Gordon did work on radio.  He was part of a couple of classic “sitcom families”.  He played the put-upon Mayor LaTrivia on the Fibber McGee and Molly program before becoming Lucille Ball’s husband on radio before I Love Lucy started on television.  Later on he worked with Lucy again, playing her boss Mr. Mooney on The Lucy Show.  He would frequently growl, “Mrs. Carmichaelllllll???”, but he never said “yeeeeeeesss???”

I explained all of this to Meka in the interests of keeping the record straight.  I didn’t want her to spread a mistruth about who originated the “yeeeeeeesss???” character.  It turned out I didn’t have to worry about that.  Like I mentioned, the old saying is true: you learn something new everyday.  However, often times it is not exactly Earth-shattering in importance and you may find that no one else cares.

I guess I learned two things that day.

I had been telling Daniel we would go on a bike ride “soon” for a couple of weeks.  Daniel would usually remember my promise when torrential rain was pouring down.  However, the clouds finally parted over the weekend.  Meka was out with a friend and we were out of Diet Pepsi.  I told Daniel to get dressed.  We would take a trip to the gas station.  The round trip is less than three miles.  I took my bike down off the wall in the garage and Daniel opened the door.  Waves of heat and humidity poured in.  I hadn’t planned on that.  I also didn’t plan on having a bent brake caliper.  My back tire hummed as the one of the pads rubbed against the rim.

Daniel wanted to show me the “secret way” to the gas station.  He had discovered it when he made an unauthorized visit a couple of months ago.  First, we had to ride past all the other things he had discovered.  There was a house succumbed to foreclosure; the grass growing two feet high in the yard.  We passed the Farm and Fleet.  Through a gap in the houses near the end of the subdivision, we could see some light industrial buildings in the distance (his words, not mine; Daniel is a big fan of Sim City).

The problem was none of these sights were anywhere near the gas station.  I turned us around and we pedaled a more direct route to the Road Ranger.  The sweat was dripping down from hair into my eyes, making it hard for me to see.  The last quarter mile was a steep incline where the road rises from the pit dug by the developers up to the natural level of the land.  I half rode, half dragged my bicycle with its whining back wheel up to the parking lot of the gas station.

I bought a pop for each of us.  Daniel had some money burning a hole in his pocket.  He spent his cash on a bag of candy ranging from sour to super-sour.  The Road Ranger has a wide sidewalk to nowhere on the side of the building; perfect for parking and sitting in the grass.  After forty-four ounces of pop and a few minutes rest, I was ready to head home.  Daniel took the lead again and led me down a “short cut” he remembered from his travels.  I should have known better…

An hour later we stumbled into the house and collapsed on the couch.  I was hot, tired and we still didn’t have anything to drink at home.  Luckily, Meka got back only a few minutes after we did and she had picked me up a Diet Pepsi when she stopped to get gas.

Daniel and I are big fans of the show Life After People.  The show’s premise is everyone on Earth vanishes suddenly.  Every week, the narrator rather gleefully intones how the mightiest works of Man succumb from weather, animals and plants.  We’ve seen the end of Chicago and London, Atlanta and Seattle.  We’ve seen bridges snap and skyscrapers collapse into ruin.  Famous landmarks around the world are ravaged and corrupted.

It was only a matter of time before Daniel decided the fate of Belvidere.  We were out in the backyard, not mowing the long grass.  Daniel walked over to the swing set and gave it the once-over.  The swing set is made of treated wood.  Meka and I stained it when we put it together six or seven years ago, but it’s fading in places already.  Daniel showed me cracks in the wood.  There was a chip missing where the baby slide used to be attached.  Water will get in and that means “freeze cycles”.  This is a favorite mode of destruction from the show.  He stood on the platform and inspected the swings.  The metal chains would rust away.

“They’re covered in plastic though,” I said.  Daniel shook his head.  The plastic would crack and peel over time.  Daniel figured it would be gone in a hundred years; a hundred and fifty at the most.  The parrots would get out of their cages after we vanished.  Their babies would sit on the swing set.  The seeds they drop (and brother, they drop a lot of seeds) would grow up all around and cover the swing set in a grassy forest.  I thought I might mention Akane and Pepper are both female, but decided against it.

The Cub Scout birdhouse would come crashing down when the fibers of the Nylon rope holding it in the air snapped one by one.  The plastic rings would fill with water and fall off in bad weather.  The tornadoes roaring through would be the final straw.  Their winds would knock down what was left.  After a thousand years, Daniel concluded, you would still be able to tell the swing set had once stood in our backyard, “but only if you were an expert.”

The 1950’s were coming to an end and Man was preparing to explore the furthest frontiers.  In the United States, the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration was designing the Mercury spacecraft.  A single astronaut would be set atop a modified ballistic missile.  The first flights would go almost 200 miles straight up and down.  At the same time, the Soviet Union was working on the Vostok space capsule.  Their plan was to launch it using the same rocket that had already scored such space spectaculars as the first two Sputnik satellites.

While both nations looked up to the highest heights, the US Navy was planning to dive into the deepest depths.  The Trieste was an experimental bathyscaphe.  It had already explored the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and was engineered to withstand the pressure at 20,000 feet.  The Navy purchased the Trieste and began a program of extensive modification.  In the 1870’s, the British ship Challenger had discovered an area of the Pacific Ocean that was more than 30,000 feet deep.  Project Nekton was designed to send men to explore the bottom of the sea.

The Trieste’s habitation module – where the crew would sit – was a round steel sphere less than seven feet around.  This was slightly larger than the bell shaped Mercury capsule and slightly smaller than Vostok.  However, it could hold two crewmen.  Like its rocket counterparts, the habitation area was only a small part of the entire craft.  The Trieste was primarily a large tank of gasoline; used for buoyancy rather than fuel.  Gasoline is lighter than water.

Anxious moments abounded in all of the programs.  Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok spacecraft almost spun out of control when it failed to detach from its equipment module.  A faulty sensor causes astronaut Scott Carpenter to overshoot his landing by almost 250 miles.  As the Trieste descended, the outer glass of the window cracked.  Communications were a challenge for all three craft.  The Soviet Union lacked a deep water navy and could only communicate with the Vostok spacecraft when it was over friendly territory.  The United States set up a global network of listening posts and they could talk to their astronauts for at least a few minutes every hour.  While the Trieste was technically traveling only seven miles, round trip conversation time was fourteen seconds; five times longer than the lag the Apollo astronauts had when they were on the moon.

Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight lasted slightly over fifteen minutes.  Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit took an hour and a half.  It took the Trieste almost nine hours to get to the bottom of the ocean and back, but the crew was only able to spend twenty minutes there.  And while more than five hundred people have followed those first pioneers into space, no other human being has ever returned to the deepest part of the ocean.

I was working with a client system the other day.  They had a business process they wanted the computer to do automatically.  I do that all the time.  I worked with them to break the process up into a couple of dozen distinct steps.  From there, I was ready to build the automation.  I’ve been using the same software package for almost ten years.  Still, I run into issues every now and then.  I wasn’t surprised when – around step ten – something didn’t work right.

Software tends to be more of an art than a science.  There may be many ways to do the same thing and some ways work better than others.  I planned ahead; I had time in the budget to do “basic troubleshooting”.  I checked through the processes I had written – one by one – and tried to isolate where the problem was happening.  I got it down to a single step.  It would add the information in one place, but not the other and that was preventing the rest of the process from working.

Unfortunately, it didn’t tell me why the information was not being added.  Believe it or not, I like error messages.  They give me suggestions as where to look next.  In this case, the process said it was working fine, but it just wasn’t.  I thought I might be going crazy.  I tried some alternatives; rewriting the process in a bunch of different ways.  Finally, I started getting an actual error: Invalid Subscript Reference.  That wasn’t too helpful.  The official definition of the error was a subscript reference was not found.  I was an English major in college; I figured out the context all on my own.  I looked the error up online and got references to applications and projects.  None of which were even close to what I was doing.

I had one final place to go for help: the software developer.  I hate to say it, but most “software bugs” I have found tend to be caused by improper usage.  I’ve called developers to complain, only to discover I forgot some minor (yet key) detail that blew everything up.  I ran and re-ran the process to make sure the error happened every time I ran it.  I even took the unprecedented step of rebooting the server.  Seriously, you’d be surprised how many sins are forgiven when you do that.  I wrote everything down and sent the developer the step by step, blow by blow account.

To my surprise, it actually was a bug in the software.  I received a very nice apology for my inconvenience and – even better – I got a software patch to fix the problems I was having.  I applied it to the machine and was relieved the information was added to both places like I expected it to.  I wasn’t crazy and I hadn’t forgotten some obvious step.  I felt the same vindication a driver feels when they take their car into the shop and it still makes the same mysterious noise for the mechanic.

Microwaves and me go way back.  We had a microwave oven in the back room when I worked at the movie theatre in college.  One of my favorite things to do was bend a paper clip into a design and set it on a flat tortilla chip.  A few seconds was all it needed to start sparking and flaming.  In thirty seconds, I had a custom designed “branded” chip.

When I worked at Burger King in high school, our microwaves were industrial strength.  I could heat up a Whopper patty to a temperature that would burn my hand in eight seconds.  One slow afternoon, I placed a cleaning rag in one of the ovens and jammed the pre-programmed buttons so it would microwave continuously.  The rag dissolved into a pile of smoking thread in about six minutes.

Our first home microwave was permanently mounted to the cabinet above the stove.  Microwaves were still pretty new back then; it came with a color booklet that explained what you could cook via “radar range”.  It also explained you should never microwave anything that had an unbroken skin or shell.  Beans would burst and hot dogs would split down the sides.  And we were warned: under no circumstances should we try to hard boil an egg.

My friend and I waited until my parents were gone for an afternoon.  We debated how many eggs we should cook and settled on “all of them”.  I didn’t want to make a mess; I put a dozen eggs in a bowl and covered the top.  I set the digital timer for 99 minutes and 99 seconds.  The oven hummed to life and we went into the living room to wait.  I flipped on our Wurlitzer organ and played a few songs until there was a loud blast from the kitchen, right on the down beat of the electronic chords.

The kitchen was full of smoke and steam and it smelled like burning eggs.  Slimy egg juice was dripping down the far wall of the kitchen above the table.  The explosion had literally blown the door off the microwave.  It was hanging open by one hinge and – to my horror – it was still on!  We dropped to the floor to dodge the deadly radiation.  I crawled on my belly across the kitchen and managed to whack the CANCEL button with the end of a long wooden spoon.

We opened all the windows downstairs though it was December in Chicagoland and the temperature was somewhere south of freezing outside.  My friend went through a roll of paper towels cleaning up the wallpaper and the counter and the floor.  I gingerly aligned the plastic ceiling of the microwave so it wasn’t obvious that it was broken in half.  I slipped the door back on its hinges and crimped them shut with a pair of pliers.  The microwave still worked after our little experiment, but the safety features were compromised.  You could open the door and it wouldn’t turn off automatically.  Luckily, we had just got it.  My parents thought that was how it was supposed to work.

With blue sky above and green grass below, Daniel and I spent most of our Sunday afternoon working on the yard.  I took care of the edges; mowing the outside pattern then handing the lawnmower over to Daniel to cut within the lines.  I rolled out a knotted pile of bright orange power cord and used the trimmer to lop off the tall thin line of grass growing between the fence posts.  We wrapped up as the shadow of the house stretched all the way to the swing set.  I was sweaty and tired.  Daniel looked like he had personally fought every blade of grass in the yard.  We owed ourselves a trip to Dari Ripple.

Every small town in America has a place like the Dari Ripple.  At least, every small town should.  They specialize in soft serve, but have the “hard packed” stuff as well.  There’s no drive thru window.  There’s not even an inside.  We parked the car and got into the line waiting on the sidewalk.  I think some of the folks had been waiting there since the stand first opened in 1952.  Daniel killed fifteen minutes reading over the menu printed on the side of the building, even though he already knew what he wanted: a banana split.  I watched the moths flopping around the long fluorescent tubes hanging on the eaves above the order windows.  It was a welcome distraction from the clouds of mosquitoes sucking me dry.

I was surprised by the blast of hot air pouring out from behind the screen window where I placed my order.  I just wanted a small shake.  That was two scoops of vanilla ice cream, milk and some malt powder crammed into a steel cup and placed under a mixer pole the size of a light saber.  I watched as a young woman worked on Daniel’s banana split.  The banana was quickly lost under ice cream, half a can of whipped topping, cherries and a liberal dose of rainbow sprinkles.

There are a half dozen picnic tables behind the Dari Ripple to seat the approximately fourteen thousand customers.  Daniel found us a place at the one covered in about fifty coats of bright red enamel.  We shared it with a family of six.  Except for a quick mumbled greeting, no one said a word.  We were all too absorbed with our ice cream.  Daniel had picked a flavor called “Blue Moon”; his favorite, he told me (though I didn’t remember him ever ordering it before).

“What does it taste like?”  I asked.  Daniel slowly rolled a spoonful of turquoise colored ice cream around his mouth, from one cheek to the other and swallowed.

“Blue,” he replied.  That wasn’t much help.  I asked if it was like blueberry.  Daniel shook his head.  I tried again.

“Grape?  Is it like a Bomb Pop?”  Daniel shoveled up a big scoop and handed it to me to taste.  It was candy sweet, sort of fruity, but totally unlike any natural flavor I could think of.  Daniel was right.  It tasted like blue.  The sun was low in the west and the whole world was bathed in a golden light.  I sipped my malt slowly; not wishing to get a headache, not wishing to race through a perfect moment.

As I was driving home over the weekend, I noticed Route 20 was under construction just before my subdivision.  Route 20 has been torn up several times since we’ve lived here.  However, as I was waiting to merge left I noticed something new.  A large green sign stood on the side of the road, explaining this construction was courtesy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  I took a look at the project specs on-line.  The plan is to resurface much of Route 20 all the way to the Iowa state line.  Our little resurfacing project here in Boone County is a little less than six miles long and is expected to cost a bit over three million dollars.

I’m no civil engineer, but three million dollars for six miles of road seemed a little pricey.  Every few years, I hire someone to do my driveway.  It runs me about fifty bucks.  Doing the math and doubling the answer (Route 20 is wider than my driveway in places), I ended up with a $60,000 estimate.  Surely that had to be on the high side; my dad is always telling me I pay too much and I should do it myself.  Excepting the life-size bronze statue of President Obama gazing heroically towards Marengo (I kid!), where was the rest of the three million dollars going?  Well, there is more to a shovel ready project than the shovels.  The workers wouldn’t live long if they started digging up the road without warning the drivers.  You need traffic cones, barricades, barrels, and a whole slew of signage.

I found a company in Bloomington that specialized in traffic and construction signs.  I don’t know if IDOT chose them, but I thought they were a good choice.  They’re local; the project will not only keep construction jobs, but also keep a few sign-making jobs here in Illinois.  Also, we’re close enough to Bloomington to qualify for free next-day delivery.  They sell traffic cones in bundles of ten and – ordered in bulk – they’re less than $1.60 a piece.  The cones need to be spaced every fifteen feet; that’s almost two-thousand traffic cones.  Actually, cones would not be required for the entire six mile stretch of road; they are mostly at the beginning and end of the construction area.  The middle part is dominated by barricades and traffic barrels.  Unfortunately, both cost significantly more than their little orange buddies.  A basic sawhorse barricade, painted black and reflective white, runs about ninety dollars.  Barrels run about sixty-five, but that doesn’t include the cost of water to fill them up.  On top of that, the little blinking yellow lights are additional.  They cost $20 each without batteries.  Luckily, the construction zone runs past Wal Mart here in Boone County.  D-Cells were on sale over the weekend (each light takes four D cells).  When the workers stop to get batteries, they could also get their fill of water from the dispensers in the back by the soft drink aisle.

The project planners saved themselves a lot of money on lane paint.  The quick drying latex runs about $70 / gallon and that doesn’t include a mix of reflective beads to make a glow in the dark traffic Blizzard.  Instead they opted to use Portable Variable Message Boards (PVM’s in the industry).  These solar powered signs announced the lanes were unmarked for the next five miles and to use caution.  Unfortunately, a three line PVM costs about $15,000.  It might have been cheaper to just buy the paint, especially when factored in with the pairs of arrow boards set up to blind motorists half a mile away.  They run about $4,000 each.  Metal construction signs come in different sizes and grades.  I believe the resurfacing project should use the top of the line.  It’s a good investment.  This is Illinois; they’ll be used again somewhere.  Each orange sign costs $190 and includes such familiar favorites as ROAD WORK AHEAD, RIGHT LANE CLOSED AHEAD, WORKERS, BRIDGE OUT, FRESH OIL and many, many others.  One bargain was a large 48 x 24 inch sign in brilliant fluorescent orange.  It ran $74.50, but no taxpayer behind the wheel would quibble over the cost if they could see this sign coming up ahead:

One of the first bids I ever made on eBay was for a group of Edison records.  When Thomas Edison said “record”, he didn’t mean “flat black discs”, but rather “short, squat cylinders”.  Five of them set me back ten dollars including shipping.  I remember opening up the box and pulling out five small cardboard tubes, each with a picture of Thomas Edison on the front.  I wondered if that was how the expression “canned music” originated.  I didn’t have a way to play the cylinders, but I had just bought a turntable that could play my antique 78 RPM records.  How hard could it be to find a modern day cylinder player?  Actually, new machines were available.  They cost about as much as my car.

My roommate from college was an electrical engineer.  I gave him the challenge to help me build a cylinder player from scratch.  He designed a set of circuits to connect the player to an amplifier, just like any other piece of audio equipment.  He also came up with a novel method to control the speed of the motor using a disk with holes punched in it.  A light was set on one side, a sensor on the other.  A small computer kept track of how many times the light blinked and adjusted the speed accordingly.  However, when it came to the practical aspects of the project – machining the mandrel to set the cylinder on, for instance – he wasn’t much help.

The 34^th Annual Phonograph and Music Box Show was held over the weekend.  It runs every June and I’ve meant to go for the last several years, but I usually remember it around August.  I drove out to Union early Sunday morning.  The equipment was spread out in a large meeting room and a neighboring roofed over patio.  Everyone looked a little fatigued.  I’ve seen that look at garage sales on the last afternoon.  Still, everyone I met was more than happy to talk shop and explain the basics of antique phonographs to a novice.

By the end of the day, I found out my cylinders were the two-minute variety.  They were probably recorded around 1905.  I had to worry about mold; one gentleman showed me a cylinder covered in what looked like specks of white paint.  I liked the Amberola players that were integrated into a wooden cabinet.  However, I was told these were only for the later four-minute cylinders. I would need to get a standard model phonograph that looked like a big wooden lunchbox.  Who knew Apple and Microsoft didn’t invent incompatibility?  I headed towards the door around 3:00 with a bag of records and a sheaf of notes.  One of the guys who had answered a bunch of my questions while balancing his lunch on his lap waved me over to his booth.

“So, do you have everything you need?” he asked.

I laughed, “Everything but the money!”

I read a lot of books and I follow a number of blogs.  I watch television and listen to talk radio.  I find inspiration in the way they issue pronouncements with such certainty.  Especially when I know they’re totally wrong and absolutely out of their minds.  It doesn’t take much for me to jot down a draft post.  When I want to, I can type about as fast as I can speak.  However, that draft is usually just that: a draft.  I have to go back and correct the spelling, correct the grammar and edit out much of the heat.  The problem I have is empathy.

At first, I’m sure of everything.  I know I’m right.  There are no dissenting opinions, unless you count what morons think.  However, there is that second thought.  Perhaps I don’t know everything.  It’s possible there’s a scenario, some possible fact, that doesn’t fit my orthodox world view.  About that time, Wikipedia and the local library come into play and erode my certainty still further.  Is it possible a point of view different than mine could be not stupid?

When we yell at one another, it may make for good radio or dramatic television, but yelling isn’t convincing.  No one listens.  No one learns.  There are some advantages to speaking softly.  Based on the comments I’ve received over the past year, many of my readers don’t share my religious beliefs or my politics or even follow my sports teams.  Yet, it seems like they are willing to give me the benefit of the doubt and continue to read, even if they don’t agree with me all of the time.

Sometimes I wish I could stick to stereotypes though.  I find in that first moment – suddenly – everything seems so much simpler.  Most of the so-called “big problems” we have in the world today can be taken care of with a metaphorical wave of the hand.  The rest can be used as punch lines.  My blog would probably get much more activity if I came out and issued blanket assumptions based on nothing more than other assumptions.  Everyone loves a flame war.  I am a master of the put down; ask any of my friends from junior high.  Curse my UU-ism with its principled moderation!

On second thought… scratch that.

Sometimes I wish I remembered my dreams.

I have a dream journal on my bedside table.  However, it’s gray with dust and I’m not sure if the pen still works.  The last entry was jotted down more than six years ago.  Dreaming, of course, requires one to sleep.  That’s something I have a hard time doing.  Still, the nights when I can get to sleep, I rarely remember it.  It’s as if I blink and it’s morning and the alarm is going off.  At best, I’ll slowly fade in from a deep warm feeling.  Sometimes I’ll wake up with a nagging sensation like I’ve forgotten something important.

Meka says she dreams almost every night and remembers most of them.  Not only does she dream in color, but the colors are more intense than in the waking world.  She says she has some ways to tell herself she’s in a dream.  When she reads something, for instance, it never reads the same thing twice.  From there, she’s able to take charge of the events in the dream.  Often times, she tells me, she likes to go flying.

If I have ever flown in my dreams, I don’t recall it.  I do remember having a recurring dream where I slowly fell into a deep, dark cave that seemed to stretch into forever.  The walls were made of brown rock.  Every so often a piece would stick out into the hole.  I had to stretch myself out or curl into a ball to avoid them.  I saw Alien when I was nine years old.  I remember having an on-going dream where the monster had grown inside someone, but hadn’t burst out.  Instead it was wearing their skin like a Halloween costume, controlling them.  It was slowly chasing me around, calling for me in the person’s voice.  However, I could tell it wasn’t really them.  The alien’s feet had burst out and its sharp claws scraped against the bare floors.

With dreams like that, maybe it’s a blessing I don’t remember them!  However, I have always tried to pursue my dreams, even the nightmares.  The alien sound of claws scraping inspired to write a story called Figments of the Imagination in high school.  Another became elements of a short story called The Changed.  One of the last dreams I recorded in my journal is very creepy.  I started working out a novella from it, but – unfortunately – I woke up before the dream ended, so I don’t know how the story ends.

There is a kinescope recording of newsman Edward R. Murrow in the early 1950’s.  His show – See It Now – had a split screen.  On one side was a live picture of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York.  On the other side, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  Both images were live and being broadcast courtesy of the new technological marvel, the transcontinental coaxial cable.

Fifteen years later, viewers were held spellbound by video from space.  Apollo astronauts bounced around their capsules and beamed back pictures of the home planet from hundreds, then thousands of miles away.  When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Eagle on the moon, almost a billion people on Earth tuned in to watch this latest miracle of technology courtesy of another miracle of technology.

It is our fate to become jaded by wonder.  While I can understand the pride of CBS demonstrating their abilities to broadcast literally “coast to coast”, I can’t say it was all that impressive to me, a modern TV viewer.  The grainy video of men on the moon is interesting (because we haven’t gone back since then), but doesn’t compare to the views we get these days from the shuttle or the International Space Station.  I can remember when “VIA SATELLITE” was plastered over every interview outside the studio, reminding us just how amazing it was we could actually have a two way video conversation with someone so far away.  Nowadays it’s just taken for granted.

The last analog signals have been televised here in the United States.  Soon we will have completed the digital transition.  At that point, it won’t be long before people forget all about static and snow and lack of detail.  It won’t be enough to broadcast just a beautiful picture.  At that point, high definition television will just become “television”.

It was my last morning in San Francisco.  I had been in training all week and worked in my hotel room on client issues during the night.  However, the training was done, the issues were resolved.  I checked out of the hotel and had a few hours before my flight home.  I decided to do a little exploring and check out the Muir Woods, home of a grove of giant redwood pines.

The park was maybe fifteen miles north of the city.  If it had been in Chicago, I would have been in the middle of suburban sprawl.  However, the roads narrowed and grew more and more winding.  The houses thinned out.  I slowly ascended a long set of hills.  I hit the highest point and found myself looking down at a valley of grass.  Ironic; I was two thousand miles from Illinois, but found myself on familiar ground.

Once I crossed over and drove up one last hill, the difference was literally night and day.  The sun shone down from a crystal blue sky over the grassland and it was already getting pretty warm.  However, once I crossed into the forest, the trees eclipsed the sun.  I parked then had to go back to the car for my jacket.  I bought my pass and got a pedestrian map at the gate.  I had about an hour, so I thought I’d take the short tour to a stand of redwoods known as The Cathedral.

The regular trees were maybe five stories tall, their trunks a few feet around.  It was difficult to gauge how big the redwoods were because it was literally impossible to see the forest through the trees.  I wandered down the path about a quarter of a mile and found one of the giant redwoods standing guard.  At ground level it seemed more like a partition.  The rough red bark was splintered and fibrous; long crevasses as deep as my hand cascaded down the sides.  Whispery white strands of spider web caught drops of water from the misty air.

There were only a handful of people on the path with me.  Few of them said anything aloud.  The air was still like the dim moments before dawn.  Occasionally there was a crackle in the shaggy green undergrowth.  I caught a glimpse of a small animal, maybe a coyote.  There were birds in the high canopy, but their sound seemed very far away, echoing down like a ghostly memory.  Otherwise, all I could hear was the steady ripple from a nearby brook.

When you went to bed last night, there were 999,985 words in the English language.  The Global Language Monitor website keeps a count of the total number of English words found on the Internet.  They say a new word is added to the language about every hour and a half.  The website had a clock set up, counting down the minutes and seconds.  Around dawn, the number of words jumped to 1,000,001.  They had a lot of information available about how the words were counted and checked.  I learned a lot about statistics and language, definitions of “definition” and what words were actually counted as true words.  However, the one thing the site neglected to mention was what – exactly – the millionth word was.

I thought the millionth English word might be something obvious that had been overlooked up to that point.  “Word” was listed.  “English” was in there as well.  “Millionth” was – technically – out of the running.  The FAQ (also out of the running; “FAQ” is an acronym) said they didn’t count numbers that were written out.  Otherwise, “million” would literally be the millionth word.  Names didn’t count either.  “Bob” is in the dictionary, but it describes the action of waves upon a floating object.  For example: “What do you call a man with no arms and no legs in the middle of the lake?”

In the back of my mind, I did have some doubts as to whether or not there really were a million words in the English language.  I was an English major in college.  Less than twenty years ago, our copy of the Oxford English Dictionary defined slightly over 200,000 words.  Could the language really have quintupled in that time? By the way, I checked “quintuple”; it was listed.  Maybe the monitor system counted all the misspellings on the Internet as separate words.  Ironically, the biggest problem I had was not with the words, but with the math.  If a new word was created every 98 minutes as they claimed, that meant English started out with a single word back in 1822.

While I was researching the words for this post, the Global Language Monitor website refreshed and the clock stopped in celebration.  By the way, GLM is an Internet firm that tracks word usage around the world, keeping their eye on trends in language as it pertains to culture, politics and their clients.  The official millionth word in the English language was “Web 2.0”.  The official definition: “The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.”

Words escaped me at that moment.  “Ovaltine” isn’t counted as a true word, being a copyrighted trademark.  However, I felt a bit like Ralphie in A Christmas Story when he discovers the secret messages so important to Little Orphan Annie are nothing but crummy commercials.

Daniel was up early Sunday morning.  He wanted breakfast (“but not cereal”).  I rummaged through the refrigerator while Daniel sat down at the kitchen table and looked through the pile of junk mail flyers lying next to the napkin holder.

“Awesome!”  Daniel cried.  “All decks are on sale!”  I poured him a glass of orange juice and set it down next to his elbow.  Daniel barely noticed.  He was poring over an ad for a big box hardware chain.  We don’t have a deck.  Unless they were marked down about 100% for the sale, it was unlikely we would be getting one.

“Awesome!” he said again.  “They have new showers on sale!  And tubs!”  Daniel continued paging through the paper, proclaiming each item on sale.

“Awesome!  Power tools are up to 20% off!”

“Awesome!  All fences are on sale too!”

“Awesome!”  he exclaimed.  “Floor tiles are just 49 cents each!”  That was the last straw.

“Daniel, do you know what ‘awesome’ means?”  I asked.  “You say awesome when it’s something spectacular.  You say awesome when you’re standing at the base of a mountain at sunrise or the first time you see the ocean.”  I gestured at the flyer.  “Please don’t waste it on floor tiles.”  Daniel looked a little sheepish.

“That’s a good price,” he said quietly.

“That makes it ‘good’,” I said, “not ‘awesome’.”  I placed a plate of waffles and syrup under his long face.  Daniel took a bite and started to say something, but stopped.  I smiled.

“So, are the waffles ‘awesome’?”  I asked.  Daniel shook his head.  “It’s okay,” I said, laughing.  “You can say awesome this one last time.”  He looked at me, exasperated.

“Come on, Dad,” he replied.  “These are just frozen waffles.”

Here was the deal.  I told Daniel if he was good, we’d go see a movie.  Well, he was good, so – after work – I told him to pack his blanket and pillow.  Daniel looked a little confused, but went along with me.  He didn’t understand exactly why we were stopping at the gas station to buy candy to hide in the glove compartment, but he didn’t say anything.  The last straw was when we got onto the entrance ramp to the tollway and – instead of going west towards Rockford – we turned east heading to the suburbs.

“We’re going to see a movie at the drive-in,” I explained.

“Wow!” exclaimed Daniel.  “Great!”  There was a bit of a pause and then I got the question I had been expecting.  “What’s a drive-in?”

Half the movies I saw growing up were from the back seat of a car in a gravel parking lot.  Generally, going to see a show at the drive-in meant a complete night out.  We’d eat at McDonald’s if we were headed to the 53 or the Sky-Hi.  Going west to the Dundale meant dinner at Lottaburger.  There was a 7-11 on the way out to the Cascade.  We’d buy candy and hide it under the seat.  I would giggle the whole time we waited in line, but apparently I looked pretty innocent to the drive-in staff.  Our illicit snacks were never discovered.

Drive-ins showed two movies, even at the single-screen theatres.  One was the main draw and the other was the “insurance”.  I remember being disappointed with Moonraker, but at least I got to see Star Wars for the 26^th time.  We drove all the way to the Twin to see Poltergeist II when it came out.  It turned out the better movie was something I’d never heard of called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  I really liked going to the double screen drive-ins.  If both windshield movies were bad, I could turn around and watch the other screen out the back window.  That’s the way I saw The Exorcist and Jaws.  Of course, there were some drawbacks to a drive-in movie.  The portable speakers tended to be a crapshoot.  My dad would drive from spot to spot, testing them out before we parked for the night.  Even in the seventies you could pick up the movie sound on your AM radio, but that was just substituting one tinny speaker for another.  The picture was big at a drive-in, but dim.  Dark movies were the worst.  When we saw Aliens at a drive-in up in Milwaukee, it was essentially a radio show.

Daniel and I drove down to the Cascade, one of a dozen remaining drive-in theatres in Illinois.  The last movie I saw there was Jurassic Park about fifteen years ago.  The Cascade looked pretty much the same from the outside; a tall screen like a corrugated billboard rising high above a line of trees.  They don’t charge by the car anymore, it’s individual admission now.  On the plus side, you can bring in your own food.  You can even bring stuff to cook on the grills where the playground used to be at the base of the screen (bring your own charcoal though).  We parked and Daniel was fascinated with the chunky metal speaker on a string hanging from a pole next to the car.  We had to hang one on my window though the Cascade broadcasts in stereo these days.

Daniel didn’t cotton to the idea the movie would start “whenever it got dark enough”.  We took a little walk around the lot to kill some time.  A few cement plugs marked where the swings used to be.  The “grass” was about the same as I remembered; dirt and some scraggly weeds.  The mosquitoes were the same too.  Daniel and I didn’t stick around long.  We walked back to the concession pillbox and waited in line around the horseshoe shaped counter.  It all came back to me: the boxes of popcorn, the self-serve hamburgers in their foil envelopes.  Daniel watched the purple, red and yellow “drink” rain down the sides of their respective aquariums and just had to have a cup.

It was almost dark by the time we got back to the car.  The Corolla is probably half the size of the Impalas my dad used to drive to the show, but Daniel and I were pretty comfortable.  We reclined the front seats.  I jammed the bucket of popcorn between us.  A cool breeze blew gently through the car windows.  We bundled up under our respective comforters, snuggled tight with our candy and cokes, and sat back to watch Land of the Lost and A Night at the Museum II.

I had come down to the kitchen to broil some turkey burgers for dinner.  Instead, I found myself subjected to a pitch meeting.  Daniel was running around the kitchen, acting out all the parts of a television show he had thought of.

“I call it the Note to Self show,” he said.  He pantomimed a scene where he was sucked down into an escalator and dragged back to the top.  He stood up and acted like he was dusting himself off.  “Note to self: don’t do that!”  Daniel laughed loudly and I quietly drew the drapes across our sliding glass door so the neighbors couldn’t see any more.  As he started his next act, I found a yellow card on the kitchen table and began writing on the back.  Daniel stopped in mid-discombobulation to see what I was doing.

“You’re going to need a business card if you’re going to be in television,” I said, handing him my idea for his title in the credits:

PROFESSIONAL SILLY KIDDO

Daniel squinted at me; switching his eye lasers to excoriate.  He asked me for my pencil and rummaged through the junk drawer, looking for something to write on.  He found a notepad courtesy of LaQuinta and sat down across from me.  He wouldn’t tell me what he was writing, of course; his printing was blocked by a wall of fingers.  Every so often, he would look up to glare at me and giggle to himself.  I cleared my throat.

“You know, I bought some Mike and Ike,” I said.  “I was planning to give it to someone for dessert.”  Daniel looked up at me.

“Of course,” I continued, “I wouldn’t be giving it to just anyone.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“Well, Mike and Ike are pretty delicious,” I explained.  Daniel nodded.  I could see in his eyes he was thinking of assorted fruity flavors in convenient capsule form.  “I was planning to give it to someone who was deserving of it, someone who was nice to me.”  Daniel looked around the room.

“Of course, if someone is mean to me – you know – writes nasty things about me…”  I paused for dramatic effect.  “Well, then, I would probably just have to eat all the Mike and Ike myself.”  Daniel’s writing hand paused behind his hiding hand.

“You didn’t really buy any Mike and Ike,” he said.

I placed a light green bag of Mike and Ike on the kitchen table between us.

“I don’t want to affect what you’re writing; freedom of speech is very dear to me,” I explained.  “I just thought I’d state the facts and let you draw whatever conclusions you think are appropriate.”  I gave Daniel a smile and watched as he looked at the bag of candy on the table then down at his writing.

And so that’s how I ended up with my new position as head of Wonderful Dad Company, motto: I HEART My Nice Dad.

It’s pretty easy to write a Tic-Tac-Toe game for a computer.  The first one I wrote for my TRS-80 was maybe 15 lines long.  A couple of lines drew the board, another couple of lines managed the input of the X’s and O’s, and the rest was random move generators for the computer player.

However, while it was easy to write, it was also easy to win.  The problem was the “strategy”.  There are nine possible positions on the board.  A number generator would pick one at random, check to make sure the space hadn’t already been played and draw it on the screen.  There was no intelligence.  I might have two X’s going across the top row and the computer would pick the lower right corner.  I win.

I started trying to build a better Tic-Tac-Toe player.  The resulting program ended up being quite involved, about thirty times longer than my original Tic-Tac-Toe attempt.  It was also a bit slow.  However, it was pretty hard to beat and most games ended in a tie.

Since there are only nine possible plays in the game, I figured it wouldn’t be that hard.  The first thing I did was figure out the logic of why a certain spot on the board should be picked.  I assigned each space a number.  Originally I had them as one through nine, but that turned out to be an issue.  I ended up doing them in powers of 3.  The first space was 1; the next was 3, then 9, and so on.  Each potential winning row had its own unique value if you added the spaces together.  Therefore the computer could “predict” where I might try next and block me.

If there was no chance of me winning in the next move, the computer had a choice of offensive moves.  I had a number of lines looking at possible winning scenarios and checking them against whether or not they were still available based on what I had picked.  This took the most time to write.  The original program just ignored it when I was in the way.  It would cheat to win!

If Daniel gets to pick where we’re going for dinner, it’s usually by toy.  Whatever fast food restaurant is offering the latest and greatest bit of plastic along with their kids’ meal, that’s where he wants to go.  I’m not sure how he knows.  He’s grown up with the DVR and very rarely watches commercials.  Do they even make commercials about kids’ meals anymore?  In any case, Daniel wanted to go to McDonald’s.  I wasn’t surprised by the choice.  However, I was surprised that – instead of a toy – we got a CD instead.

“This is my first CD!” said Daniel.  I was a little put off at first; I’ve burned many a mix of songs for Daniel over the last few years.  He amended his statement, “This is my first CD that wasn’t just made!”  Daniel might not have caught the commercials for Kids Bop over the years, but I have.  The “Kids Bop” concept is basically a bunch of kids singing pop songs.  I was quite prepared to detest it, of course, but had to admit I was intrigued by the song selection.  Who were the ad wizards who picked Sean Kingston’s Beautiful Girls?  I tried to imagine a bunch of kids singing “su-i-ci-dal, su-i-ci-dal” without generating some vast parental s%^&storm in the process.

After dinner, we rushed home so Daniel could slip the Kidz Bop 3 CD sampler into his stereo at home.  My office is just across the hall from his bedroom, so I got plenty of exposure to the music pouring forth.  The songs were relatively well produced; all the kids sing on key.  I have to admit I didn’t think it was as bad as I predicted.  The lyrics were bowdlerized in Beautiful Girls.  They sing “in denial” instead.  However, that and Hey There Delilah sounded like the kids were singing along with the artist rather than complete remakes.  Kidz Bop has sold something like eleven million records; I suppose they have the clout to get the real artists in the studio with a bunch of kids.  Daniel rummaged around his room and got ready for bed.  Kidz Bop 3 was set to “infinite loop” on his stereo (actually, it only made it through six times before I snuck into his room in the dark and switched the music from CD to FM).

I was at my Weight Watchers meeting this week when I had a blast from the past.  A young woman came in that I vaguely remembered from meetings a year ago.  She had quit Weight Watchers temporarily because she was pregnant; the one kind of weight gain they don’t mind.  She brought in her little baby girl, all toothless and smiling, and all of the related “baby stuff”.

I can remember when Daniel was little like that and all of the stuff we carried around “just in case”.  One of us would carry Daniel – complete in the rocking chair / car seat – and one of us would carry the stuff.  Daniel’s diaper bag was the size of a small cooler.  It was packed with changes of clothes, bibs, washcloths, wipes, nail clippers, nose drops, lotion, formula, and bottles with extra nipples.  Sometimes we even had diapers in it. 

I watched as the baby stuff came forth and completely covered a meeting table designed to seat six people.  I could relate.  It’s so hard to know what is going to make a baby happy or sad.  Like most parents, we overcompensated and tended to bring everything.  We always had Daniel’s favorite toys; things that squeaked or made a tinkling sound.  Everything was brightly colored, oversized, thickly padded and chewable. 

As we learned with Daniel, the little girl managed to keep herself entertained without all the trappings.  She was quiet through the meeting; quite content to just lie on a blanket and chew on her own feet.

While my official title at work is “consultant”, I think of myself as a professional pessimist.  I am frequently optimistic in my off-hours.  I have my sunglasses with me every day, even when it’s raining.  My cup of Diet Pepsi tends to be half full.  I even cheer for the Chicago Cubs.  However, I’ve been working with computers too long to take anything for granted.  When I work with a client, I ask a lot of pointed questions, raise a lot of objections, reset a lot of expectations and ask for a lot of time.  While I hope for the best, I plan for the worst.

Awhile back, one of my clients wanted to take advantage of the free upgrades they pay for every year to the software developers.  Right off the bat, they were less than thrilled to find out the “free software” wouldn’t actually be free.  Their system was old and complex with lots of integration.  Half of it was compiled code with no documentation; as far as we could tell it ran on “magic”.  Since the software was considered mission critical (their business would dry up and blow away without it), I strongly recommended setting it all up in a test environment first.  That decision went all the way up to their board of directors, but it did get grudgingly approved.

The computer they ran everything on was actually a “virtual machine”; a really powerful computer running a program that acts like RAM and hard drives and computer chips.  The good news was we could copy this virtual machine pretty easily and set it up somewhere else as a test bed.  The bad news was their machine was in pretty sorry shape.  I ran into issues almost immediately.  The software threw random errors.  Even simple tasks would cause the system to lock up.  At the best of times, it’s difficult to isolate a single piece of software to check it for problems.  Even when a computer is “idle” there may be three dozen processes running in the background.  After several days (and nights) of effort, I got the system stabilized.  I ran it through the upgrade process, checked the data, checked the functionality and did more troubleshooting here and there as problems cropped up.

In the end, I developed an upgrade process that – while more complicated than sticking a CD in a drive and pressing <ENTER> – was pretty bulletproof.  I took into account all the issues their system had and while I did all of this, their employees were still using their existing system.  With the process, the client would only be down for a fraction of the time it took me to do things in the test environment.  We ended up not too far over budget.  Because of the size, age and complexity of their system, I figured I would run into some problems and had included time for that in my original estimate.

Of course, that’s not how the client saw it.  It was all my fault, of course.  I should have known what the issues were immediately.  I shouldn’t have wasted so much time trying things that turned out not to be the problem.  The mere fact I asked to test it all first showed how little I knew.   If I was truly an expert I would have been able to do it all without any practice.  I suppose a lot of people in my position would have been annoyed, but – as a professional pessimist - I believe no good deed goes unpunished.  I knew – just knew – they would be unhappy no matter how things went.  And – like I said – while I hoped for the best, I planned for the worst.

Hello.  My name is Bob and I have an addiction to Wikipedia.

It started out innocently enough.  I was looking up information on one single topic.  In fact, I was using Google to do so.  One of the links just happened to go to Wikipedia.  I think you know what happened next.

One article wasn’t enough, of course.  There were additional hyperlinks throughout the text.  I had to click on some of them; I didn’t understand where the article writer was going in some cases.  Those led to other articles.  Those articles led to even more.  I was led further and further down the garden path.

I bookmarked Wikipedia in my browser.  It took longer and longer to write my blog; invariably I’d start writing and then find myself casually – almost unconsciously – loading up Wikipedia on my second monitor.  It was important to have it at my fingertips, I told myself.  It wasn’t dangerous, it was helpful.  It was like Spell Check.  It was just a tool.

I had it under control.

Soon, I was looking to Wikipedia for not only answers, but for inspiration as well.  I wrote about historical events, mathematics and science.  When I wasn’t writing, I used Wikipedia to “broaden myself”.  I was spending less and less time in my usual cyber haunts, choosing to spend all my online time navigating through the labyrinth of Wikipedia.  I pushed away my friends and family; who likes a know-it-all anyway?  I descended into a world of trivia knowledge, public debate and Unitarian Universalism.

I’d like to say that I’m all better now, but it’s not something you can cure with pill or injection.  I listen to talk radio and still have the urge to do fact checking.  Someone will send me an old clip of Dennis Miller on YouTube and I’ll have to send it to my SPAM filter.  Daniel asks me why something is the way it is and my hands start to shake when I realize I don’t know.  I watch more television now – TV Land seems to deaden my senses effectively – and I just take it one day at a time.

An era passed into history Sunday morning when Millvina Dean died in a resting home in the U.K.  While she lived a long life – 97 years – she won’t be remembered as much for who she is, but rather what she represented.  Millvina Dean was the last survivor from the sinking of the Titanic.

My mom is a natural storyteller.  When we ran out of Golden Books to read when I was a kid, she’d tell me about the things she remembered before I was born: the big blizzard in 1967, watching the news the day President Kennedy was shot, putting my infant aunt to sleep by playing her Little Richard records.  My dad didn’t volunteer too many stories, but – if asked – he would tell me about what it was like serving in the peacetime army between Korea and Vietnam.  He remembered when radio didn’t mean music, but shows like The Shadow, The Fat Man and Inner Sanctum. 

My Grandpa Ramsey didn’t talk much, but one time – without prompting – he told me about how bars in Chicago when he first came to the city before World War II offered free lunches.  Most of them were nothing good; hard boiled eggs and pickles.  However, he smiled as he remembered one that had a big bowl of cocktail shrimp every day.  My Grandma Francis remembered going to the movies before they had sound.  She loved the actor Francis X. Bushman and she cried when she heard Rudolf Valentino died.  My Grandpa drove a “Tin Lizzie” to school; before that, he rode a horse.

While my grandparents were old, I knew there were people still older that must have seen things even farther back in history.  I remember a man interviewed by Johnny Carson who remembered when President McKinley was assassinated.  That was 1901.  The Guiness Book of World Records had people listed who had been born in 1860.  There were people who remembered the Civil War still alive in my lifetime.   

I’ve always felt like a single thread intertwined in the middle of a patchwork quilt that makes up our history.  As I asked my mom and dad about the past, Daniel asks me now about watching the Bears win a Super Bowl, remembering when President Nixon resigned, seeing Scooby Doo on television when it was brand new. 

Millvina Dean was only a few months old when the Titanic sunk on her maiden voyage.  She had no personal recollections of the trip.  She couldn’t provide any details that weren’t reported in contemporary accounts and the myriad of books written in the past century.  However, she provided us with a personal doorway to those distant events of 1912; that door now forever closed as the Titanic slips down into secondhand history.

We drove into Chicago not once but twice in the last couple of weekends to visit Aunt Amy and her new apartment.  She lives in the Wicker Park neighborhood, only a few blocks from the actual Wicker Park.  Daniel had fun there; he got to run around like a maniac (one of his favorite activities).  Afterwards, we had more fun checking out a couple of ice cream shops around the area.

Cold Stone Creamery is less of an ice cream shop and more of a shoppe.  The ice cream was stored in large tubs behind a clear glass window along with containers of various chopped items: nuts, candies, cookies.  I had a small cup of French Vanilla and asked for some ginger snaps mixed in.  The barrista - sorry,  server; I forgot this wasn’t Starbucks – scooped out a shiny mass of ice cream and set it on a (cold) stone cutting board behind the window.  She proceeded to massage it with a pair of thin wooden sticks.  It looked like she was making an ash tray at summer camp.  The ginger snaps were gently laid in the depression in the middle, broken apart and gently folded into the mixture.  I was impressed.  If you have ever wrestled with a box of ice cream, trying to pry out a chunk with a cold metal scooper, you would have been impressed too.  It reminded me of watching the guys flip pizza dough at Italian restaurants when I was a kid.

I Cream is a new place.  I think it has a better take on the future of ice cream than Dippin’ Dots.  Any ice cream shop (or shoppe) will scoop to order.  I Cream takes it a step further by actually making the ice cream on the spot.  They had four main “types” of foundation: ice cream, frozen yogurt and sorbet.  They also had something called “hot pudding”, but since it was the first eighty degree day we’ve had, I didn’t see anyone actually order that.  Each foundation has various subtypes.  You can get regular ice cream, light, organic or soy based.  I picked light ice cream.  From there, I could choose from a long list of flavors.  I didn’t count them all, but it was at least as long as the old Baskin-Robbins list I remember as a kid.  If the flavor you picked didn’t lend itself to much color, you could also add in a dash of red, green, blue and so on.  They had clear tubs of toppings and mix-ins.  While this was the future of ice cream, I went with the old standby of crushed Oreo cookies.  A pair of gentlemen dressed in industrial white added the ingredients to an industrial mixer plus a flash of liquid nitrogen from a hose dropping down from the ceiling.  My scoop of ice cream was thus created with a flourish of foggy condensation that reminded me of a trick by David Copperfield.

I didn’t order the same thing at both locations, so I can’t make an exact comparison.  The ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery was creamier (go figure) and very smooth.  I have eaten enough ice cream in my life (more than enough actually; one of the reasons I’m on Weight Watchers) to know high quality ingredients.  The ice cream at I Cream was unlike any I’ve ever tasted.  It was very light and airy, almost the crystalline consistency of a snow ball.  Very tasty and welcome on a warm afternoon.  Which one was better?  The jury is still out on that; I think we’ll have to visit Aunt Amy a few more times before I issue a final decision.

Some of my favorite memories as a kid were the long summer evenings in the suburbs.  The sun set around 8:30, but it was still “light” until well after nine.  A group of us kids hung out around the neighborhood and on Wednesday nights, we’d go garbage picking.  It was exactly what you think it was.  We’d wander up and down the streets at dusk, looking to see if anyone was throwing out anything good.  Sad to say, I was never very lucky.  I found some old record albums once.  Another time I found two plastic racks that could hold eight-track tapes.

Believe it or not, someone threw this out.

On the other hand, my brother David had a knack for coming up with buried treasure.  In the mid nineties, we were living together with my mom in a townhouse.  David kept the garage full of stuff he’d found.  At any given time we might have garden tools, books, bicycles and various car parts.  Saturday morning he would load up his little pick up truck and take his haul over to one of the flea markets in the area and pick up some extra cash.  Soon he was cutting deals with other flea marketers.  One guy would buy any lawnmower David could find, regardless of condition.  Another guy was looking for radios and electronics.  I remember David had a map of Chicagoland tacked up on the wall in his bedroom.  The suburbs were all color coded based on what night their trash was put out for collection. 

One night my mom got a call.  It was my grandma.  She was upset because her television had expired and she didn’t have any money to get it fixed.  Neither my mom nor I had enough money to buy her a new TV.  David didn’t bat an eye.

“What size would she like?” he asked.  That night, he came home with half a dozen television sets; everything from a portable five inch black and white set you could take to a ball game to a stately wood grained console set that took the two of us to drag it out of the bed of his truck.  We spent the night cleaning and testing.  I used my year of Radio Shack experience to adjust colors and take the static out of the sound when the knobs were turned.  Needless to say my grandma was ecstatic to get not one, but two TV’s that weekend.  We set one up in her living room and put the other in the back room for my younger cousins to play video games on.

I was watching television with Daniel the other day.  He was watching the Pokemon cartoon series.  For the uninitiated, Pokemon started out as a card game.  Monsters were listed with various talents and points and kids could do battle with them.  The show is probably ten years old now and the original nine year olds who watched it back in the day have moved on to bigger and better things.  However, new crops of nine year olds rediscover it and the related Pokemon paraphernalia.  Daniel is just one of the latest batch to discover the wonderful world of Japanese “pocket monsters”.

Like the cartoons I watched as a kid, the plot of Pokemon is pretty much the same in every episode.  The “Pokemon Trainers”, a group of kids and their sidekick monsters (Pikachu and Squirtle, to name a couple), travel to some exotic location, looking for a new Pokemon.  Meanwhile, the bad guy and his incompetent minions also happen to be looking for the new Pokemon (what are the odds?).  After some twists and turns and usually right after “when things look their worse”… well, there is a commercial break.  But immediately following that, the bad guys get their comeuppance and the good guys win the day.

I didn’t mind the repetition.  After all, I watched Scooby Doo for years as a kid.  However, what got me was the writing.  Each Pokemon has a name.  If you don’t catch what the name is, the little monster will helpfully tell you all the time.  That’s how they communicate.  Dogs bark, cats meow, Pokemon say their name.  They say it happily, sadly; they can say their names with more inflections than a surfer can say “dude”.  I can only assume the script for a Pokemon episode looks something like this:

POKEMON TRAINERS
(surprised at the wondrous sight before them)
Huh?

PIKACHU
Pikachu!  Pikachu!

SQUIRTLE
Squirtle?

PIKACHU
Pika-chu!

SQUIRTLE
Squirtle!  Squirtle!

POKEMON TRAINERS
(amazed at the wondrous sight before them)
Ahhhh!

This is the job I want.  I think I was born to write for Pokemon.  The above sample only took me thirty seconds; I was that inspired!  While I’m sure the writers get paid ten times more than the average firefighter, the real reason I’d want to write is for all the children around the world.  Daniel would look at me with new respect… at least until he turns ten and discovers some new show on television.

I put a lot of pressure on myself when Daniel has a singing performance.  When I was in school, it seemed like we had concerts all the time.  I think we averaged two a year.  His class performance of Counting Our Blessings was only Daniel’s second one, period.  The first one had been a technical disaster; it took me many hours to restore some of the songs and mix the music.  This time, I started early in the week; planning out my strategy to make sure every possible, potential issue was addressed.

The video was critical.  I planned to have two camcorders going at the same time.  It would allow me to have two different angles of the same action so if someone got up and walked in front of one camera or the other, I’d be able to edit around them.  I bought my main camcorder right before Daniel was born.  It can take widescreen video at the cost of turning off the stability functions.  No problem.  I planned to take a tripod with me to keep the picture rock steady.  I had a second tripod for my high definition camcorder in the back of the auditorium.  I would take a wide shot of the entire stage, and – because it was HD – I could use software to zoom in and pan around the action without losing too much clarity.

Capturing good audio is just as critical as getting the video right.  My first camcorder’s stereo microphone would pick up the “wild” sound; crowd noise and the ambience of the room we were in.  As a backup, I had a portable MP3 recorder also recording.  My other camcorder had a long “shotgun” microphone aimed at the stage.  I wasn’t sure what the setup would be, but the last time Daniel’s class was at the high school, they used a mixing board.  I threw a long XLR cable that would allow me to plug in directly to their sound system.

We arrived about twenty minutes early.  I had everything neatly packed into a single backpack.  The floor on the sides of the auditorium slants upwards towards the “cheap seats”.  One side had a flat platform, but I assumed that Daniel would be on the other side (Murphy’s Law).  I set up on the slant, but I had a bubble level attached to the tripod to make sure the camera was on an even keel.  I set up my high definition camcorder on its tripod and attached the audio module.  I aligned the shotgun microphone and located a patch panel from the auditorium’s PA system.  The whole thing took five minutes to arrange and I breathed one small sigh of relief.  I flipped on the camcorders to start taping and… nothing.  The battery on the HD camera had apparently decided to die somewhere along the five minute trip to the high school from our house.

While I hadn’t exactly planned for this contingency, luckily I had a “backup parent” with me.  After a small amount of pleading, Meka drove home and brought back the AC adapter.  I untangled the cords in the dark, located an outlet and plugged it in.  The camera came to life as the kids were climbing onto the risers for the first song.

Every afternoon, I know I will get The Question from Daniel.  If he’s had a good day at school (gets a green in the parlance of the third grade), I’ll be asked.  If he’s done his homework (or if he thinks I won’t remember to ask him whether he’s done his homework), I’ll be asked.  Usually he asks The Question as we’re walking out of Third Base, his after school activity.  Sometimes it waits until we’re in the truck driving home and – on rare occasions – he’s held off until we’re pulling in the driveway.  But I know I’ll get asked at some point.

“Dad, can I play the Wii?”  If the stars have all aligned, which they usually do (Daniel’s a good student), he’s allowed to play the Wii for an hour in the evening.  Daniel like his games the way he likes life: fast.  He likes the games where his character will run around the screen.  He likes the games that feature frenetic fight action.  And he really likes driving games because the cars all go – well, fast.

“Let’s race,” said Daniel.  Daniel doesn’t ask me to play with him on the Wii very often.  Two player driving games take away a portion of his Wii playing time.  Also, I’m not very good.  We only have one steering wheel controller for the Wii and when we play together, I don’t get that one.

I find my real world experience as a driver actually hinders my playing ability.  Steering with a horizontal wand doesn’t feel natural.  The race track is crowded with cars and I’m soon trailing the pack.  I’ve been driving real cars since I was sixteen.  Squeezing my virtual race car into narrow spaces where I know it won’t fit runs counter to all of my instincts.  Daniel laughs as he laps me once, then twice.  My wand shivers in my hand as he gives me a “friendly” bump from behind.

Daniel – of course – has no problems driving recklessly.  He jumps up and down as he knocks the cars out of his way.  The only time I’ve ever beat him directly is when his car has suffered so much damage that I have the time to just toddle past his wreck.  More often, I take an indirect approach.  After five or ten minutes, the thrash metal music comes to a halt and Daniel cheers his victory.  I smile and we shake hands.

“The Wii records the action,” says Daniel.  “Do you want to watch it again?”  I shake my head.

“I’ll watch the race again later,” I say.  “I’ll just wait until you’re sixteen and want to borrow the keys to the real car.”

My mom’s parents had been married for six years before they had their first house.  They actually built it themselves.  It only had four rooms, but they managed to raise my mom and my two aunts there.  How my grandpa survived with four women in the house and a single bathroom…

My dad’s parents purchased their first home – a two-flat on the south side of Chicago – after my dad was grown and in the army.  When he came back and got married to my mom, that was their first home together too.  My parents lived upstairs and my grandparents down below.

The first house I remember was in Schaumburg.  It had three bedrooms and a single car garage.  My dad was “upwardly mobile” in the seventies and we moved through a succession of homes, each bigger than the last.  The final house we had all together was a four bedroom split level with a two car garage and good sized basement.

Meka and I lived with my mom in a townhouse when we first got married.  It seemed like a tight squeeze for the three of us plus Daniel (when he came along).  Every weekend, we’d look at the houses for sale.  The suburbs were too expensive, so we looked out farther and farther until we came across Belvidere.  We saved our money and finally put a down payment on our first house.

If I had to describe our house, I’d call it “cozy”.  Some might call it small.  It’s the second smallest model available in our subdivision.  However, that’s a relative measurement.  Our first house is about the same size – square footage wise – as my parents’ last house together.  It rivals my grandparents’ two-flat and is bigger than my mom’s house she grew up in, even taking into account the addition my grandpa added later on.

Daniel and I stopped at Lowe’s the other day.  He wanted to look through all the sheds and outbuildings they had for sale in the parking lot.  His favorite was a tall red barn.  It covered an area larger than our two-car garage.  It had a long workbench and plenty of shelf space.  At the back of the barn was an L shaped stairway leading to the second floor.  The area upstairs was about the size of our master bedroom.  Daniel led me by the hand, showing me all of the accoutrements: the vents, the windows, the skylights.

He finished, “Wouldn’t this be the perfect clubhouse for me?”

I didn’t say anything.  I just smiled; thinking about what Daniel’s first home will look like.

The cemetery where my brother is buried doesn’t allow a permanent, year-round planter on the grave site.  Every fall we have to pick it up.  I usually drive around all winter with it in the trunk wrapped in a white kitchen bag.  Technically, we can put the planter back in the spring, but I like to wait a bit until I know the flowers will have a chance to survive.  The forecasters said Memorial Day weekend was looking good.  Daniel went out with me to pick some flowers.  We ended up with a red geranium and a six pack of begonias.

I opened up the bag to the planter and pulled out the dead flowers from last season.  People stopping by David’s site tend to bring things that remind them of him: old cell phones, little dog statuettes, cigarettes and roses.  I know that everything in there is sentimental to someone, but most of it just isn’t built to last.  I gently sorted the trash out first then picked through the other items, washing them off with the hose and a scouring pad.  My mom bought a little gas station building – David was a mechanic – but it wasn’t quite little enough to fit in the planter.  I had to use the house she bought last year instead.

I planted the house first, arranging it a little to one side.  The geranium was next, on the short side by itself and then I placed the begonias in a horseshoe pattern on the other side.  There were three dog statues from last year; I placed the cleanest one in the center of the ring.  I added a couple of pinecones.  Those have been in the planter since the first spring David was buried.  They’re gray now, but still pretty firm.  Someone had placed a Chinese throwing star in the planter a couple of years ago.  It reminds me of David as well, but I was worried the groundskeepers might find it.  I pulled the house up out of the dirt and stuck the star underneath.

I set the planter in place while Daniel drove his Hot Wheels on his stone, jumping from date to date like The Dukes of Hazzard.  I didn’t think David would mind.  Other people had already been out there; there was a bouquet of white plastic flowers and a small American flag stuck in the soil.  I was going to take them to the truck, but I happened to look around the “neighborhood”.  Ahead of David’s row was a pair of military gravestones.  Staff Sergeant Joseph M. Sowa and Marine Frank Schultz had both served in World War II.

The grass around each stone had begun to creep over the edges.  Frank was down to “rank” until I pulled back the green and brushed away the dirt.  He had died in 1985.  Sowa had passed away in 1979.  Judging from the condition, I have a feeling their loved ones may also have passed on in the intervening years.  I placed the bouquet on one (after taking the price tag off) and the flag on the other.  Daniel and I gave them both a salute before walking over to the chapel.

Daniel and I went fishing for the first time.  We got matching fishing poles, small retractable aluminum tubes.  They looked like old television antennae with reels about the size of a large spool of thread.  I wasn’t too worried about how flimsy they were.  We were fishing, but I really didn’t expect to catch anything.

The Kishwaukee River flows through town and cuts across Route 20 about a mile and a half north of our house.  There’s a railroad bridge there and a place to park.  Daniel and I drove over and staked out a place on the north side of the bank.  There were a few trees and tall grass.  We beat down an area and had a seat.  I carefully pulled out a worm from the Styrofoam container and attached half to my hook, half to Daniel’s.  He wrinkled his nose.  My first cast went about three feet, but my next one hit the river.  Daniel did better; he hit the deep water on his first try.  And when we left after an hour or so, our little Styrofoam cooler had his sole catch on ice.

I’m not sure exactly what kind of fish it was.  It put up a pretty good fight for being about seven inches long.  I got my Swiss Army knife and peeled back one of the options that I rarely use.  I cut the fish open and started pulling it apart.

“What are you doing?” Daniel asked.

“I’m gutting the fish,” I replied.  “I’m taking out the organs.”  Daniel looked at the mess with horrified fascination.

“You mean the insides?”  I nodded.  The backbone of the fish came out in one piece and I set it aside and flipped the fillets over.  “Now what are you doing?”

“I’m taking the skin off,” I said.

“Wait,” said Daniel.  “If you took all the insides out and now you’re taking the outside off.  What are we going to eat?!”

I really wanted to see Star Wars when it first came to theatres over the long Memorial Day weekend in 1977.  It was an uphill battle though.  It may have been coming to a galaxy nearby, but the closest theatre showing it was at the Yorktown shopping mall, almost an hour away.  My parents had never heard of the movie and as I was only finishing up the first grade, my opinion on cinema was not yet taken seriously.  Still, I managed to cajole my dad into taking me opening weekend.  I spent the night at my grandma’s house in LaGrange.  The plan was to pick me up first thing in the morning and we’d catch Star Wars at a matinee before heading home to Schaumburg.

We got to Yorktown early, but the parking lot was already packed.  My dad was a salesman and spent much of his time on the road.  Slowly circling a mall on a Saturday morning was not his idea of fun.  I could hear him mumbling low under his breath as we searched for somewhere – anywhere – to park.  The line for Star Wars stretched out of the theatre lobby; outside and around the building.  My dad continued to grumble.  Can’t believe this… this is crazy… all these people… just to see a movie… The line slowly moved forward.  We finally got to the box office.

“Six dollars?!” he roared.  “This is a matinee!”  The young guy in the ticket booth was wearing a yellow coat like Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football.

“It’s opening weekend, sir,” he explained.  “All movie showings are full price on the opening weekend.”  My dad gestured at me.

“But he’s only six!” he cried.  To be technical, I was seven.  However, I knew the drill.  If I was six, I got in for free.  But not today.

“Sorry, sir,” said the boy behind the glass.  “It’s opening weekend.”  My dad continued to pantomime protest.  If we had been at a ball game, I’m sure the umpire would have changed his call.  However, Howard Cosell Junior was having none of it.  He waited impassively behind the glass while my dad – grumbling again – took out his wallet and pushed six dollars through the hole.  Our tickets popped out of the stainless steel counter and we walked inside.  The popcorn smelled good and I almost asked my dad if we could get some candy.  One look at his expression and the words died somewhere in my throat.

“Six dollars…”  I could hear him say over and over.  “Six dollars for a movie…”  We stalked past the concession area and waited behind a velvet rope.  More and more people filled the hallway.  I was basically at butt level and getting a bit nervous as the crowd closed in.  My dad picked me up and sat me on his shoulders.  Packing us in like sardines… six dollars… He shook his head.  The doors opened and a crowd of people poured out of the theatre, laughing and whooping, making comments and quoting things that made no sense.

The ushers quickly cleaned the theatre and finally opened the floodgates.  My dad waited for the teenagers to push past.  That turned out to be a mistake.  The whole audience was teenagers except us.  My dad always likes to sit near the back of the theatre, preferably to one side.  Those seats were taken, of course.  In fact, the only two seats together were in the first row, right in the center.  My dad just stood for a long moment, hands on his hips.  He sighed and we sat down, leaning way back to stare up at the billboard sized screen.  I heard one more refrain of “six dollars” before the lights dimmed and the movie began.

In retrospect, we had the best seats in the house for Star Wars.  I remember just staring – mouth agape – as the gigantic Star Destroyer cruised into the opening scene.  It just went on and on and on; endless spectacle.  The whole movie was like that.  I blinked in the garbage compactor scene; it hurt because I hadn’t dared close my eyes for an instant up to that point.  The final space battle over the Death Star can best be appreciated front row, center, at a full sized movie theatre.  I felt my stomach fall into my legs as we dropped altitude and dipped into the trench to fire our torpedoes.  It was just like being there.  I was glad I didn’t have any popcorn.  When the Death Star exploded, so did the audience.  Everyone was cheering the screen and applauding, even my dad.

I don’t know – specifically – what kind of day Meka had in the lab.  All I know is that she came home and was sound asleep by 4:45.  I finished up work (as much as I ever finish up work) and picked Daniel up around six.  We had a chicken thawing in the refrigerator.  Meka has a great recipe for it on the grill. I threw the football with Daniel until the shadows covered most of the backyard.  It was almost 8:00 by then and neither the chicken nor Meka had moved.  Even if I cooked the chicken myself, we would have had dinner sometime after the Tonight Show.  I had only eaten five or six points all day and Daniel was hinting at a snack.  I told him to take a look in the chest freezer in the pantry and find a TV dinner he liked.

Daniel doesn’t get many choices when we go grocery shopping, but he does get to pick out a few TV dinners from the freezer section.  I keep a bunch of them in reserve in case of emergencies (like being hungry and wanting to eat within ten minutes).  Daniel loves Meka’s chicken, so it was no surprise he came back with the fried chicken meal from the freezer.  He was all set to cook the dinner, box and all.  I told him to read the instructions.

“Slit the plastic over the chicken and potatoes,” he read.  “What does ‘slit’ mean?”

“It means make a cut in the plastic wrap,” I said.  I took a steak knife from the wood block on the counter and handed it to Daniel.  He got his whittling badge in Cub Scouts a couple of months ago; I figured he could handle making a slit.  With all the sensitivity of a fine neurosurgeon, Daniel delicately cut through the plastic with the tip of the knife and slowly (too slowly for my grumbling stomach) made an incision across the tray.

“Microwave for three minutes,” he continued.  Daniel placed the tray in the microwave, careful to center it on the glass plate.  He pressed the “3” key and hit START.  The microwave blinked for a moment then stopped.  I explained that he had to type it in minutes and seconds.  Daniel got fancy; he knew sixty times three is one eighty and typed that instead.  The microwave hummed to life and he watched as the tray slowly rotated around.  Every so often, he’d give me an update.

“The plastic is shaking!”

“There are bubbles on the chicken!”

“The corn is bubbling too!”

At the three minute mark, we took the tray out carefully and pulled back the plastic over the mashed potatoes.  Daniel stirred them for about five minutes and we set the dinner back in the microwave.

“Microwave for another 1½ to 2½ minutes,” Daniel read from the box.  “How are we supposed to know?”

“Let’s cook it for the minute and a half,” I replied.  “If it’s not done, we can always keep cooking it.”  Daniel typed in the numbers on the keypad.  He even figured out it should read “1:30” without explanation.  When it went off, I pressed the button to open the door, but Daniel stopped me.

“We need to let it set for two minutes, Dad,” he said.  So we set the kitchen timer and waited exactly two minutes.  Daniel pulled off the plastic and carried the tray to the table.  I poured him a glass of milk and found him a fork to go with the spoon we used to stir the potatoes.  Daniel dug in, closing his eyes and smiling at the first bite.

“Mmm!” he said.  “You just can’t beat home cooking!”

The work around the house never seems to end.  There are the repetitive tasks – laundry, washing the dishes, grocery shopping – but there are also a dozen projects or more on my to-do list.  None of them are crossed off.  I’m working on each and every one of them.  I like to work on multiple projects in parallel.  If I run into a show-stopping issue on one, I can quickly jump to another project and keep moving.

I was out in the yard over the weekend, edging the lawn with our electric trimmer.  I finished up the front and was working on the back when I ran out of the little plastic wire that spins around and cuts up the grass.  I knew we had a spare spool of wire in the garage.  I went in to look for it.

I didn’t find the spool, but I did come across a roll of duct tape.  I had been looking for the duct tape earlier.  I have a window unit air conditioner for my office.  With enough electronics to launch the Space Shuttle crammed in a 9 x 12 room, the ceiling fan just doesn’t cut it in the summer.  The window unit is smaller than the window itself.  I have a set of sliding panels that attach like ears to either side of the air conditioner to fill in the gap.  The unit had been sitting on the floor of my office in front of the window, waiting for me to find the duct tape to fix the cracks in the plastic accordion-style panels.  I taped up the cracks, but I noticed a screw on one side was loose.  It’s an odd size, but I have a specific screwdriver to handle the situation.

I couldn’t find the screwdriver in the garage.  However, I happened across the bottle of wood glue.  I had been looking for it the week before.  Daniel had locked us out of the house and I had to kick in the garage door. I needed the glue to fix the broken piece of door frame.  However, wood glue doesn’t exactly set instantaneously.  I needed a set of C-clamps to hold the pieces in place while the glue dried.

Actually, I found the C-clamps without a problem.

I was putting the C-clamps away when I came across the screwdriver I had been looking for to fix the air conditioner.  It had fallen down off the peg board and was wedged between the wall and a box of Diet Pepsi that still had three cans in it from Christmas.  Running to the corner gas station for a pop is one of my recurring tasks; this discovery would delay the trip for at least an hour.  I tightened the screws on the side of the air conditioner and set it into the window frame.  It did not slip out and crash into the backyard and within an hour I could hang meat in my office from the ceiling fan if I wished.

I took the duct tape and screwdriver back down to the garage.  As I was setting the tape down on the shelf by the foot pump (that reminds me; Daniel’s football is a bit flat), I finally came across the lost spool of plastic wire for the electric trimmer.  So, I’m set for this weekend to finish up the rest of the trimming around the yard.

I suppose it might be a good idea to add “clean the garage and get organized” to my list of projects.  I have two problems with that.  First, it’s hard enough to get motivated to do the to-do’s.  Being able to switch from one to the other prevents me from getting bored and not doing any of them.  Second, in order to add it to the list, I’d need a pen and – honestly – I’m not exactly sure where one is at the moment.

Daniel and I were coming out of the back door of Meehan Elementary School and walking past the playground towards the truck.  I had just picked him up from Third Base, his after school program.

“So what did you do in school today?”  I asked.  I ask this almost every day and usually get one of the following answers:

• “Same thing as yesterday.”
• “I don’t remember.”
• “I had recess and then I ate lunch.”

This afternoon I got a surprise.

“I learned some art today,” said Daniel.  He seemed to be in a better mood than normal.  That was a good sign.  We got into the truck and I waited for the click of Daniel’s seat belt before starting it up.

“What did you learn about art?”  I asked.

“Origami,” replied Daniel.  When I took Japanese in college (so I could understand what they were really saying in the monster movies), we learned some basic origami.  I learned to fold a piece of paper and make a little bird.  When you pulled on its tail, the wings flapped.  I was impressed they were teaching Daniel the art of Japanese paper folding in third grade.

“Very cool,” I said.  “What kind of origami did you learn to do?”

“I know how to make a circle,” he said with a smile.  I wasn’t familiar with making a circle in origami.  I ripped out a piece of paper from my blogging notebook on the passenger seat and offered it to Daniel.

“Can you show me how to make a circle?”  I asked.

“Sure!” said Daniel.  He took the piece of paper and crumpled it into a ball.  “See?  It’s a circle!”  That was a pretty good gag, especially for Daniel.  We both laughed all the way to Logan Avenue.

My friend Greg was the first person I knew who owned a computer.  We spent many hours after school working on his TRS-80 Model I from Radio Shack.  We played games, we connected to Bulletin Board Systems via his modem, we wrote programs in BASIC.  In the spring of 1981, he got a music synthesis package called Orchestra-80.  It consisted of a little hardware device that attached to the back of the CPU and a cassette tape of software that allowed us to enter musical notes.

We had used a simpler program called Micro Music.  It allowed you to enter musical notes by name (A, B, C) and note length (quarter notes were 4’s, half notes were 2’s).  So, Mary Had a Little Lamb looked something like this in Micro Music:

That had been pretty cool… in 1978.  It sounded like someone plunking out the melody on a piano with a single finger.  Orchestra-80 had four “voices” that could play notes simultaneously.  This allowed us to not only play the tune, but the chords as well.  However, more abilities meant more work for us.  Notes were converted to numbers based on how close they were to Middle C (which was zero), whether they were sharp (+) or flat (-), and how long the note should be played (like Micro Music, quarter notes were 4’s).

It wasn’t enough to just type in long strings of note information.  With four voices going simultaneously, it was easy to get out of sync with a single mistake.  Like real music, Orchestra-80 split a song into discrete “measures” that only contained a small number of notes, rests and voice information.

The beginning of the song contained information relevant to all the measures: clef, key signature, tempo, what instrument each voice was playing the notes on.  Greg and I spent a lot of time entering a single song – Maxwell’s Silver Hammer by the Beatles – into Orchestra-80.  We had to translate the musical notes on the page to the numbers the application would understand.  We had to come up with a way to write out the chords so they would simulate a beat.  Finally, as we started playing the song back, we had to make corrections to the music from typos and actual goofs in the music book where they had one note, but we heard a different one played on Abbey Road.  We debuted it in our music class at school that fall.

The syntax of the Orchestra-80 software was based on the MUSIC programming languages developed in the fifties and sixties.  When we were typing in songs, we were actually writing a program that would be compiled into music.  I haven’t typed a song into Orchestra-80 in twenty years, but the idea of breaking up a large “song” into smaller pieces – measure, voice, note – is something that resonates with me when I write programs today.  Almost all programming languages are “object oriented”; they split a complex program into smaller, manageable chunks.  When any programmer finishes their latest “killer application” and they run through it successfully for the first time… no matter how dominant their logical right brain might be, it’s literally music to their ears.

We were sharing a table at our local McDonald’s.  Daniel was working on his arctic orange milkshake and I was working on a blog.  I carry a spiral notebook with me when I go out with Daniel.  I eat fast and Daniel eats slowly.  I like to use the time to jot down ideas, or doodle in the margins.  It’s something to do besides urging Daniel to “hurry it up”.  This particular evening I was still writing my blog (it was a long blog) when Daniel finished up his shake (it was a small shake).

I heard a dramatic sigh.  “Dad, can we go now?”

“Let me finish what I’m writing,” I said.  “Then we can go home.”  Daniel continued to slurp noisily, capturing the last few shake molecules at the bottom of the cup.  He craned his neck to peer at my half-finished page.  He frowned.

“I can’t read your handwriting,” he said.  “It’s too messy.”

“You can read it when I type it into the computer,” I replied.  That gave me an idea.

“You haven’t written anything for your blog in a long time,” I said.  “Want to write something while you’re waiting for me?”  Daniel nodded.  I ripped a page from my notebook and gave him my backup pen.  He tapped it a few times and put it to his mouth to think.  After a few moments, he started writing quickly.  I returned to my own blog, but found my attention wandering over across the table to the latest edition of Daniel’s “Dear My Life”.  Daniel noticed this too.

“Dad, don’t copy me,” he warned.  “You can read it when you type it in the computer.”

My college roommate – Joon – was studying to become a computer engineer.  In the spring of 1990, he traded in his Commodore Amiga for a PC compatible machine.  It was a monster, running a 486 processor at 33 megahertz.  This was at a time when 386 machines were considered “servers”.  It was fast; so fast most DOS games available at the time were unplayable.  It was taller than our mini fridge and housed a dozen full-sized bays in its solid steel innards.  It weighed more than sixty pounds, but – mercifully – the designers had integrated wheels in the bottom of the case, so it could be rolled from place to place.

Over time, the cyber blush faded from the performance rose.  Joon kept it updated through the late nineties, but – eventually – it was consigned to the scrap heap of history otherwise known as my basement.  By then the bays were filled with all sorts of interesting hardware.  I remember removing a video card here, an ISA sound card there.  I still use a set of its drive rails inside my current “frankenputer”.  Eventually I pulled out everything I was ever going to use (and then some).  I dragged the steel husk up to the garage to be recycled.

After I mow the lawn, I roll the lawnmower to the street and use something heavy to hold down the handle while I wash the blade off with a hose.  Nowadays, I use Daniel for this.  Before he got big enough to help, I would grab whatever was handy and heavy: bags of fertilizer, grass seed, mulch.  One weekend – when Meka was particularly productive – the garage was bare.  I looked around and couldn’t find anything heavy enough to hold the mower in place.  Then, I noticed the old steel computer case.  I rolled it down the driveway and set it on the lawnmower handle.  It worked like a charm!  I ended up keeping the case next to the mower throughout the rest of the season.  Sure I got some looks from the neighbors; after all, how often have you seen integration between a PC and a lawnmower?

We had stopped at McDonald’s for dessert.  I was sipping on a Diet Coke.  Daniel was half eating / half wearing a caramel sundae.  We were seated at one of the tall tables in the front of the restaurant.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” said Daniel.  I had to ask.

“Why do you think you’re losing your mind?”

“I found my Floam in the basement,” he said.  “I forgot that I had ever bought it.”

“I don’t think you’re losing your mind,” I replied, taking another sip.  “You only lost a thought.  It happens to the best of us.”  Daniel pondered this and absent-mindedly slurped a spoonful of semi-liquid ice cream in his mouth.

“What if I lose more thoughts?” asked Daniel.  I watched a vanilla drip slowly roll towards his chin.  When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I reached over and blotted it with a napkin.

“You probably have already,” I said.  “But look on the bright side.”

“What bright side?”

“Well, when you found your Floam, it was like getting a new present, right?”  Daniel nodded.  I continued, “So, if you clean your room, I’ll bet you find all sorts of things you’ve forgotten about.”

Daniel smiled, “It will be just like Christmas!”  I smiled back.

“That’s right.  For all of us,” I said.

Back in the early 1960’s, Unitarians in Rockford were scouting locations for a new church building.  One of the search committee volunteers noticed some native bluestem grasses growing along the edges of the property.  Forty years later, if someone walks up the hill behind the UU Church of Rockford, there is a wide gap in the trees.  Half an acre of prairie grasses rustle in the almost continual breeze.

Not that long ago – geologically speaking – Illinois was subsumed in an immense sea of grass that stretched to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  In the 1830’s, a man named John Deere (yes, there was a real John Deere) invented a type of metal plow that could cut through the dense soil and over the next century almost all of Illinois was cultivated: corn and soybeans and finally boxy houses.

What settlers called “the prairie” was actually more than just a lot of grass.  Even in Illinois, the prairie was subdivided into seventeen distinct types.  Each type was literally packed with different species.  Restored prairies can pride themselves on having a hundred different plant species in a single acre.  Natural prairie was more than twice that.

The Clinton Administration turned over some 15,000 acres near Wilmington, Illinois, for tallgrass prairie restoration.  It is the largest restoration project in the country, but thirteen years later the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie is still a work in progress with decades of work to come.  In the entire state, less than four square miles of original prairie survives, split up into an acre here and an acre there.  Large species such as the bison haven’t been seen outside of zoos in Illinois since the 19^th century.  More than twenty smaller species are threatened or endangered.  Even the so-called Common Barn Owl isn’t that common anymore.

The prairie was plowed under in the name of progress and cash crops.  Ironically, sawgrass – a prairie plant – has been found to generate 50% more ethanol than a similar amount of corn.  There is a path through the middle of the prairie project behind the UU Church of Rockford.  Walking into the middle and kneeling down, one can almost imagine what the Illinois of the past might have looked like, or possibly a dream of its future.

Daniel developed colic shortly after he was born.  For Meka and me, it was one long waking nightmare for three straight months.  Usually, I had the coveted overnight shift.  Meka would hand me the baby around one or two in the morning.  I can’t speak for all colicky children, but – unlike the myth – he did not cry continuously.  Instead, he’d whimper.  Daniel sounded like someone was smacking him around.  I would take him downstairs and sit with him in my basement office.  I was afraid to have him upstairs for fear one of the neighbors would think I was beating him and call Family Services.

Every so often, something would happen and take Daniel’s mind off his hurting belly.  Meka had an old cat – Coco – that made her home down in the basement on our couch.  She didn’t meow, but she purred like no one’s business.  One evening, Coco came waddling over to inspect Daniel, purring like a motor with a bad bearing.  Daniel stopped in mid-cry, eyes wide with astonishment at the sound.  Coco was our new best friend.  The next night, I actually carried Coco over to Daniel (not a mean feat; she was pretty chunky).  Daniel looked at her for a moment then pushed her away and started sobbing again.  Coco was demoted back to the couch.

There was nothing I could do that seemed to help Daniel, so – actually – it was kind of boring.  I would read a bit until my eyes got tired (after three months of no sleep, that didn’t take very long).  Sometimes I would log onto the Internet with my dial-up modem.  Downloading a picture or a song would kill an hour.  Most of the time I watched television.  I watched a lot of Classic Sports Network and CNN.  One night, I was flipping through the channels and stopped at VH-1.  They were airing a video from Shania Twain called Man! I Feel Like a Woman.  It was a pretty catchy song and Ms. Twain was easy on the eyes.  The next song started and Daniel began to cry again.  It was only then I realized he had stopped while the video was airing.

VH-1 played the video a couple of more times that first night.  Each time, Daniel stopped crying.  Mercifully, the song was a big hit that fall and the video stayed in rotation.  Other stimuli came and went and Daniel kept on whimpering through the night; sometimes sobbing, sometimes whining, sometimes screaming.  About the time I thought I would snap from one more minute, I’d hear Shania Twain call from the television, “Let’s go, girls.”  Daniel would sit up straight and I’d lay back and relax for four minutes.  I’m not a bit country music fan.  I have an album by Marty Robbins, an 8-track of Waylon and Willie.  My third one is a CD of Come on Over by Shania Twain.  I never listened to it much; Daniel couldn’t see straight yet, but he only seemed to like the video on TV.  Still, I count myself as one of Shania Twain’s biggest fans, at least one of the most grateful.  The $12.98 (plus tax) I paid at Circuit City was the only way I could think of to say thank you for keeping me sane.

“Dad”, asked Daniel, “did you text a lot when you were a little boy?”  We were driving back from dinner.  Our bikes were still taking up the backseat of the truck.  Daniel was up front with me, pressing all the buttons on the radio and adjusting the vents “just so”.

There were a myriad of ways I could have answered the question.  I might have answered with just a simple “no”.  I might have said I used to text quite a lot, except back then we called it “sending a postcard”.  I split the difference and explained that – no – I didn’t text when I was young.  The technology hadn’t been invented yet.  Daniel looked surprised.

“But the telephone was invented in the 1800’s,” he replied.  “Was it just really expensive to have one when you were young?”  It occurred to me that Daniel’s definition of “phone” is different than mine.  To him, a telephone is a little handheld device that you can take anywhere, take pictures, shoot movies, play games, look at the Internet, write people and even talk to them.  I explained that – when I was his age – the telephone was just used to call people.  It couldn’t do anything else.  We couldn’t go anywhere with it because it was attached to a box with a cord and the cord was plugged into the wall.

Daniel brightened.  “It was like the ones we built for Cub Scouts!”  I laughed because the “telephones” we built for Cub Scouts were a pair of tin cans attached with string.  And I laughed even harder because – frankly – Daniel wasn’t too far off from the truth.

I was six years old in the spring of 1976.  We had moved into a new house the previous summer and I was making new friends and going off to Kindergarten in the afternoon.  I was growing up.  My television watching reflected this new maturity.  While my shows still included Sesame Street, Mister Rogers Neighborhood and the rest of the PBS lineup, I started checking out my options on other stations and one afternoon I discovered The Monkees.

The bus dropped me off from school a few minutes before the show started.  I would race home down the street to catch the opening teaser.  I didn’t always make that, but I never missed the theme song.

Here we come…
Walking down the street…
Get funniest looks from…
Everyone we meet…

I wasn’t the only fan of The Monkees in my neighborhood.  My friends Scott and Dave from school would watch with me sometimes.  Charlie – when he wasn’t busy throwing my toys in the lake behind the house – also liked the show.  I was surprised to find a record by the Monkees in my parents’ collection in the living room.  I played it practically to death on my little portable record player.  Most of the songs were featured on the show and – with a little practice – we all knew the words to Daydream Believer and I’m Not Your Stepping Stone, I’m a Believer and Mary, Mary.

It was my dream that we could be just like the Monkees.  There were four of us and there were four of them.  Out of our group, I was the only one who played any kind of musical instrument, but – even then – I didn’t see that as a major obstacle.  We watched the show, we knew the songs, we could even act out a lot of the skits (though we couldn’t figure out how they could run so fast).  I had the Monkees on the brain and talked at my parents about them all the time.  They smiled and nodded a lot.

One day, the show ended with a clip of the Monkees playing a concert.  They mentioned they would be playing “at a town near you” very soon.  Well, I had to be there.  I began pestering my mom and dad about it.  They continued to smile and nod, say “we’ll see” and so on.  That wasn’t good enough for me; I needed a firm commitment.  Finally, my dad had enough.

“Bobby, the Monkees broke up a long time ago; before you were born,” he said, exasperated.  “You’re just watching the reruns.”  I was a step ahead of some of my classmates.  I knew that little men weren’t hiding inside the television.  Still, I had assumed the people in the shows were live out there somewhere and living in those houses and apartments they showed.  The idea that none of it was real and that it could have all happened a long time ago…  I was shocked.  It was a sober moment after school when I gathered my three friends out on our new patio and had to tell them the Monkees were no more.

“I guess Mike went north, Mickey went south, Davy went east and Peter went west,” I said.  Charlie’s normal shit-eating grin vanished.  Scott’s jaw hung open and Dave was uncharacteristically still as he worked through the news.  We shared a long, quiet moment together, with the cool wind whipping the dust of the uncompleted neighborhood around us.  No one felt like playing.  Scott took off on his bike and Dave walked around the front of the house.  Charlie headed east, walking slump shouldered; he didn’t even pause to throw anything of mine in the lake.  I slipped open the patio glass door and went down to the basement.  It was too late to watch The Monkees and none of my regular shows were on.  I found PBS showing a movie about four other guys who looked like the Monkees.  They got chased by girls and played music on a train.  I liked the songs they did.  I liked them a lot actually.  But that’s another story.

I should have known better.  I had been hit by the restaurant next door once before in Indianapolis. Unlike most cities, when you stay in a hotel in Indianapolis, it’s not a guarantee that the restaurant next to the hotel will be a Perkins of a Denny’s.  I had driven down about five hours over the weekend.  I didn’t sleep well (I never do in a hotel) and after working all day at the client, I didn’t feel like doing any more driving.  I walked across the parking lot to the restaurant.

It was one of those old school steakhouses done up in Early American Dungeon.  Everything was brick and wrought iron with thick wooden beams stained dark like walnut.  Each booth came equipped with a small lamp with a bulb about the size of the one in a refrigerator.  It didn’t help; the black Naugahyde seats seemed to suck the very light out of the air.

Despite this, the service was excellent and the food was terrific.  I like a good piece of fish and I like it “blackened”.  This is a gamble; most places used “blackened” as what your tongue will look like after you eat their spice combination.  Here it was just enough to enhance the flavor and give my mouth a little kick.  I upped the ante and ordered a slice of Key Lime Pie for dessert.  This is only guaranteed to be edible in climes where limes might actually grow.  It’s a crap shoot everywhere else.  Despite their geographical handicap, they performed admirably.  The pie was delicious.

I got the check and couldn’t read the entire amount by the light of the booth lamp.  While it could be covered by the client without too many raised eyebrows, I realized that I would have to walk across the parking lot in the opposite direction tomorrow night.  Rally’s has quite a selection of offerings on their sixty-nine cents menu.

“Let’s have a race, Dad,” said Daniel.  “Back to the truck.”  We had driven to the park to ride our bikes together.  There’s a paved path about a mile around the soccer fields and baseball diamonds.  Normally, I walk out there as part of my Weight Watchers goal and general Beatles-like desire to be “half the man I used to be”.  I agreed to compete in the new tortoise and hare race.

When Daniel does something, he goes all out.  He throws a ball as hard as he can; never mind accuracy, never mind control.  When he runs, he runs as fast as he possibly can for as long as he can manage it, then stops.  As soon as he catches his breath, he’s back running as fast as he can.  If he ever goes out for track and field, I’m sure he’ll be a sprinter rather than a marathon runner.

I hadn’t ridden my bike in a long time.  The muscles in the back of my legs were throbbing from the effort.  It took me a bit, but I found a sedate but steady pace.  Daniel flitted around me like a silver and red mosquito.  Sometimes he would be a block or more ahead.  A moment later he would be far behind, resting along the side of the path.

“Slow and steady, Bub,” I said, quoting the tortoise from Looney Tunes.  “Slow and steady.”  Daniel led most of the way around the track, but I would occasionally catch up with him as he tried to recover.  I would sing the tortoise song as I passed by.  Daniel would shake his fist and glare, then jump back on his bike and pedal for all he was worth.  In the end Daniel was waiting for me, his bike parked at the edge of the parking lot.

“About time you got here!” he said.  “The rabbit beats the turtle for once!”

I got off my bike at the curb and walked it over the edge.  “Confidentially,” I said, “the race was to the truck.”  At that second, my tire touched the back bumper.  “I win!”

I was of two minds driving to the theatre to see the new Star Trek movie Friday night.  Part of me really wanted to like the movie.  The “regular guy” part likes to kick back and relax with his Star Trek DVD’s; it’s like touching base with an old friend.  He likes to watch it with Daniel, seeing him react to the Horta and the Doomsday Machine for the first time.  This would be the first new Star Trek we have shared together.  The other part of me, the “comic book guy”, walked into the theatre fully prepared to dislike the movie.  He’s followed Star Trek since Mom was writing letters to NBC while she was pregnant.  He’s seen every episode of every show, every film and read every novelization.  How would this “reboot” be anything more than a “rip off”?  How could they recast the original characters?  Comic Book Guy remembered the last time another actor played Captain Kirk.  It was the last episode of the original show, Turnabout Intruder.  It wasn’t the worst episode ever made, but it was pretty darn close.

However, Comic Book Guy had to admit as we all waited in line at the box-office, this isn’t the first time Star Trek has been redone.  There have been four other shows with totally new characters and new takes on the original mythos.  Regular Guy enjoys the original series, but is also a fan of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.  And when Gene Roddenberry – the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself – was “rebooted” off the Star Trek franchise, his replacement – Harve Bennett – gave us The Wrath of Khan.  Comic Book Guy had to agree with Regular Guy and Jerry Seinfeld that – really – that was the best of those movies.

We picked up a “mega tub” of popcorn (more than enough for Regular Guy, Comic Book Guy and Daniel to share) and found a place to sit, just slightly right of center.  Regular Guy had some concerns about the movie’s rating.  It’s suitable for kids over thirteen, but Daniel is only nine.  I remembered when I was nine, I saw Alien for the first time and it basically left me psychologically scarred.  I leaned over and whispered that if I thought a monster was coming, I’d let him know and give him time to cover his eyes.  However, the alien monster – when it finally showed up in the movie – didn’t seem to faze Daniel at all.  He spent more time during the movie covering his ears than his eyes.  This movie is loud.  If Spinal Tap can hit eleven on occasion, I think Star Trek peaks around seventeen.  I expect cosmic spectacles like black holes and supernovae to be loud in movies (Comic Book Guy does point out there is no sound in the vacuum of space; a bit of science the film gets right), but everything else is loud in Star Trek: wind noise roars and electronic equipment squeals and shrieks.  Dr. McCoy’s ubiquitous hypo sounds like a shot from an air rifle.  All the while, the bombastic score rattled our ribcages.  Actually, I liked the music; it reminded me of the over the top musical cues used in the original series versus the new age pablum of the other shows.

The visuals are well done and I liked the retro-future look of everything.  The new transporter effect looked right.  The warp drive didn’t seem as “cartoonish” as it has in previous films.  The design of the new USS Enterprise takes the best of the original design of what Comic Book Guy thinks of as the real USS Enterprise and gives it more detail without going overboard.  The interior would be right at home at any Ikea; that’s futuristic enough for Regular Guy.  But the whole movie is very jumpy and chaotic.  It’s probably unfair to single Star Trek out when most movies look like they were edited by hyperactive mice on crystal meth.  Still, it was very difficult to figure out what was going on at times.  There was a fist fight near the end of the film.  I won’t say who was fighting whom because – frankly – it was hard to tell.  The scenes kept cutting away before the punches connected.  I realize “motion picture” contains the word “motion”, but – please – could we have just a few scenes that aren’t bobbing and weaving around and around?

There are parts of the movie that were needless.  A young James Kirk steals a 1966 Corvette and drives it into a quarry.  Comic Book Guy recalled A Piece of the Action, an episode where an older Captain Kirk attempted to drive a car with a lot less finesse.  Regular Guy just watched with eyebrow raised.  Driving a Corvette that far in the future would be like breaking into the Smithsonian and taking George Washington’s carriage out for a spin.  Where does one get leaded gas in 23^rd century Iowa (for that matter, where does one get leaded gas in 21^st century Iowa)?  While it’s possible the car is a replica or something (Comic Book Guy argues replicator technology won’t be available until Captain Picard’s time), this love of “ancient history” runs pretty deep.  Two hundred years from now, the clubs will still be playing those thumping techno-metal mixes.  The alien monster was unnecessary; all it did was bump up the MPAA rating from PG to PG-13.  It chases Cadet Kirk around Delta Vega (which is apparently a moon of Vulcan now).  As Comic Book Guy expounds, Vulcan has no moon and Delta Vega used to be located at the edge of the galaxy.

The area of the movie I thought I would have the most issues with – the characters – turned out to be a pleasant surprise.  Zachary Quinto has an “old school” take on Mr. Spock, channeling some of the early episodes of the show rather than the later films.  Comic Book Guy had to agree that made sense.  The Kirk family saga was a bit over the top, but I did like Chris Pine’s take on Cadet James Tiberius.  And Uhura’s subplot was not traditional canon, but interesting (one could even say fascinating).  Comic Book Guy agreed, remembering how Spock could “not think of anyone more capable than Ms. Uhura”).  The movie also did a good job explaining how everyone could have been different ages on the original show, yet all graduate from the academy at roughly the same time.  Chekov is only seventeen in the movie.  Kirk is a little older than Sulu and Uhura because he’s been a troublemaker and enlists late.  Dr. McCoy is older than everyone else.  When asked why he joined up, he replies caustically, “She took everything on the planet in the divorce.  Space is all I’ve got left.”

Enough familiar lines and mannerisms are there to start a new drinking game.  But take the pre-defined characterizations, the sound and the fury of the special effects, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot left.  I liked the plot concept.  Comic Book Guy liked it in the Star Trek novel Killing Time better.  Nero, the movie’s bad guy (no obvious parallel there) runs around the galaxy, wiping out billions of people and permanently changes the universal timeline.  He has his reasons, of course, but it ends up sounding like a rehash of another Star Trek movie villain whom I won’t name.  We see Romulans torture Captain Pike using a method which looked awfully familiar.  Comic Book Guy screams out in frustration, how does anyone know it’s a Romulan ship anyway?  The episode Balance of Terror explains no one has ever seen a Romulan.  They’ve all been hiding behind the Neutral Zone since Jonathan Archer’s time.

The original show had some episodes that were – shall we say – a bit light on plot and character development.  However, you could usually count on Gene Roddenberry to spoon feed a message to those viewers watching “way back in the Twentieth Century” on their new color televisions.  If there was any message in the new Star Trek, it must have gone over my head.  But in the end, as the Third Rock from the Sun style credits rolled, both Regular Guy and Comic Book Guy agreed it was worth the price of admission.  Most importantly, Daniel had fun.  He ate approximately sixty four pounds of popcorn, drank about three and a half gallons of orange and wolfed down a bag of Sweet Tarts that cost more than a Happy Meal at McDonald’s.  We walked out to the truck together and Daniel quoted me his favorite line; something Mr. Scott says when confronted with one of the most thought provoking moments of the film.

“So, in the future are there still sandwiches?”

I was working from home.  Daniel had the day off from school.  The plan was I would work all morning and Daniel would entertain himself quietly.  If he didn’t bother me and I was able to get all my work done, we’d go out to lunch.  Normally, Daniel is pretty good at keeping himself occupied.  He’ll watch television downstairs or play with all of his cars in his room.  However, this day he decided to secure the house; shutting and locking all the doors and windows.  I didn’t figure it out until we were walking out of the garage and the door behind me closed with a more solid click than I was accustomed to.

I made a circuit around the house with Daniel sheepishly trailing me.  The screen door was locked.  The windows to the living room were closed.  Akane – our guard parrot – ruffled to life as I checked out the ones facing the backyard.  The sliding glass door was unlocked, but a thick piece of dowel rod was sitting in the door rail.  Considering how cheaply made our house seems, the windows turned out to be surprisingly secure.  Most of the windows have double panes and double locks.  The little kitchen window over the sink has only a single lock.  I thought I might have some luck there.  After explaining to Daniel that he was never allowed to do what I was about to try, I pried the spline away from the screen with my little finger.  I peeled enough away to get at the pull tabs that allow you to take the screen out of the window frame.  However, even the single lock turned out to be pretty rattle proof.

“We could just throw a rock and break a window,” Daniel suggested.  That was true, but we were handicapped by the fact we owned the home.  Unlike a burglar, I had to be concerned with entering without breaking as I would end up paying for it all.  However, time was running out.  I had to catch a plane.  Meka was still at school in DeKalb.  I could see my cell phone on the kitchen counter next to my keys, taunting me.  Finally, I told Daniel to wait in the backyard.  I walked into the garage and closed the door behind me.  The inside door to our pantry is up two stairs and that side of the garage is a mess.  I wasn’t going to be able to get much of a running start to hit the door with my shoulder.  I did some deep knee bends instead and tried to stretch out like I was running a race.  I took a deep breath, hoped the door didn’t have a deadbolt style lock and gave it a kick like they do on the cop shows on TV.  It moved slightly.  Two more kicks and there was a loud crack as the wood gave way.

I have never had the motive or the opportunity to kick a door down before.  I have to admit it was pretty cool.  It worked (almost) like it does in the movies.  That sense of satisfaction I felt with myself is probably the only reason Daniel isn’t grounded for life right now.

We were twenty minutes into the mission at Wal Mart.  I was in the lead, directing us down aisle after aisle, list in hand.  Daniel brought up the rear, dragging his feet and occasionally emitting a sigh.  We entered the cereal aisle and Daniel’s sighs started coming fast and furious.  I didn’t say anything and finally Daniel interrupted the Muzak.

“Can we get Fruit Loops?” he asked.

“We are getting Fruit Loops,” I replied.  Daniel shook his head.

“No, I mean real Fruit Loops.”  Now it was my turn to sigh.  We’ve gone through this before.  We buy a lot of generic items at the store: bags of frozen vegetables, gallons of milk, my allergy medicine.  If the only difference is the container, I don’t see why we should pay more.  The “Fruit Spins” taste just like the real ones and we save $1.30 per box.

“We never buy real stuff,” Daniel complained.  I looked down in the cart.  We had several cans of Campbell’s soup because it tastes better than the generic versions.  We tried Sam’s Cola once (once) and now we buy Diet Pepsi again.  And while Great Value potato chips cost a lot less than Lay’s, they are hardly a “great value” when no one eats them.  I admit if Wal Mart sold its own diet bread, I’d consider buying it.  Since they don’t, I buy the name brand.  It costs twice as much, but I save half the Weight Watchers points.  Daniel wasn’t convinced by any of this, of course.  I knew he wasn’t interested in the price, or taste, or calories.

“Daniel, if I told you we’d buy the real Fruit Loops, but you wouldn’t get the toy, would you still want them?”  I didn’t get a verbal answer, but Daniel looked down at his feet and I heard another small sigh.  In the end, we found a “compromise” cereal.  Wal Mart had Frosted Flakes on sale.  These were the real Frosted Flakes with Tony the Tiger on the box.  On sale, they were close to the price of the generic box.  Even better, they were the reduced sugar version; I could eat a full cup serving rather than ¾ cup for the same number of points.  The additional benefit of being able to get the eight box tops required to get the official Star Trek USB drive that much quicker did not weigh into the decision at all.

I wasn’t running late, but I was cutting things a bit close.  The drive to the airport took more time than I planned.  There was traffic and construction.  Some kind of accident slowed things down right before my exit.  TomTom tried to send me to a Post Office rather than the airport.  I found my way by following the landing planes.

I thought I might save a bit of time by doing the self-service check-in and just take my overnight bag as carry-on.  Whatever moments I saved were lost waiting in the line for security.  The people were relatively efficient (as these things go), but there was only a single line.  Then my carry-on bag had to be examined twice.  On the bright side, I got to stand an extra five minutes on the anti-bacterial floor mat in my socks.  I probably won’t get athlete’s foot anytime soon.

I really like the moving sidewalk setup in the Louisville airport.  The signs tell people who are standing still to stay on the right side.  This allows people who are walking to pass them on the left side.  However, I got behind a guy who was – technically – walking, but moving so slowly that people walking (walking, mind you) on the non-moving floors on either side were passing us by.

My flight was out of gate fourteen.  The signs only showed fifteen gates.  “At least I’m not at the absolute last gate,” I thought to myself.  However, there were gates on both sides of the walkways, so – actually – I was at the last gate.  I’m not exactly sure what the logic was in putting my flight there when the first eight gates were dark and deserted.

On the plus side, I didn’t have to wait very long to board the plane.  I think I had time to catch my breath and then I was onboard.  I sat back and let myself relax.  I had plenty of time; the flight got delayed and we sat for a bit on the runway.

We finally had a weekend where the temperature was moderate and rain wasn’t pouring down.  Daniel and I dragged the lawnmower out of hibernation.  We cleaned it up and filled it with gas.  With a clearing of the throat and a sneeze of blue smoke, it roared into life on the first hard yank of the pull cord.  I mowed around the edges of the yard and did the precision mowing around the bushes and trees.  Daniel did a lot of the straight back-and-forth cutting.  For the first time, I think Daniel did at least half of the lawn.  I thought about offering him a job.

I was leery of just paying Daniel some set amount to do the whole thing.  We have a good sized yard and I’m not sure if he’s up to mowing it all yet.  At the same time, I didn’t want him to get used to only mowing a small part of it because a fraction of the total payment was “good enough” for his needs.  Like a lot of employers, I felt I had to come up with a way to motivate Daniel to go from what I expected to what I wanted.  I sat down at the kitchen table and started figuring out a “compensation package”.  After half an hour or so, I came up with a plan I felt would get Daniel to do what I wanted, but if he couldn’t do it all (or didn’t want to do it all), at least he’d get something for helping.

First, he would be paid by the row.  This would be his base wage.  I really wanted him to help me with the whole lawn.  I proposed splitting the yard into four areas: the front, the back and the two sides.  He’d get an additional payment for each area he mowed with plus a “bonus” payment if he helped with all four.  Finally, I had an additional bonus if he managed to mow the entire yard by himself.  I added up all the rows and section bonuses to come up with this last payment.

The idea is he would get paid a small amount to help me here and there.  If he stuck around to help me with the whole lawn, he’d earn enough money to buy something at the store.  Once he took on most of the lawn, he’d make enough to buy a few Hot Wheels cars every week, but – ultimately – he’d be motivated to go that extra mile and do the whole yard.  However, as I started writing all the rules down it occurred to me Daniel would probably be more confused than motivated.  I have that problem myself with our bonus plan at work.  And as I tried to figure out how I was going to track and enforce everything, I came to the conclusion it would be far easier on me to keep mowing the lawn myself and paying Daniel “under the table” for his assistance with the occasional trip to McDonald’s for ice cream.

If there was ever a time for Real Life to have one of those eerie movie soundtracks, it was last Friday afternoon.  I was working from home and my cell phone started to ring.  At the same moment, I could hear the home phone ringing and Meka’s cell phone in her office.  I looked at the caller ID and they were all the same phone number.  I picked up my cell before it went to voice mail with the assumption the world was ending.

It turned out to be a pre-recorded message from Daniel’s school district.  In a way I had been expecting it all week.  Someone in Belvidere may have a case of H1N1 and – even though they hadn’t been in a school building for almost a week – the entire school district was closing down “until further notice”.  All school buildings were closed, all activities were canceled.

I should have been more worried.  I’ve been watching the news and seen the reports of H1N1 spreading around the world.  I understand the potential of a pandemic.  I’ve read accounts of the influenza outbreaks in 1918 that killed more people than World War I.  Heck, Stephen King’s The Stand is one of my favorite novels.  However, I found myself more annoyed than anything else.  Frankly, between the stress of college and jobs in a world plagued by terrorism, warfare, global warming, energy crisis and economic meltdown, I’m afraid I am just fresh out of fear for Swine Flu.

I didn’t have breakfast with my grandparents too often.  They got up at 5:30 every morning.  My grandpa had to open the store in Glen Ellyn.  But if I was there and didn’t mind eating in the darkness before dawn, my grandma would whip up one of those balanced breakfasts that they were always saying cereal was a part of on television.

Cereal was the opening course.  My grandma kept the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the refrigerator.  They were crisp and cold and terrific with a spoon of sugar on top and bathed in whole milk.  Orange juice was served in small glasses, not much bigger than a shot.  I didn’t drink coffee, but my Grandma would open the can of Folgers (also kept in the refrigerator) and let me smell it before she filled the tin coffeepot on the stove.  About this time, the water in the kettle would announce it had come to a boil.  She’d pour it in and serve my grandpa a steaming cup on a saucer, complete with sugar and milk.

That kept us busy as Grandma slipped a tall pile of Roman Meal wheat toast onto the table with a saddle shaped lump of butter.  Grandpa didn’t slice the butter from the side, but rather scraped the top with a serrated steak knife.  Small curlicues of butter would melt evenly across the surface of the bread.  Next up was a plate of bacon, crisp.  There is a fine line between crisp bacon and burnt bacon.  When we’d go out with Grandma, she would fight with waitresses over this point.  Her bacon was crisp to the point of being dry, but never burnt.  It crumbled in your mouth.  Grandma would use the grease from the bacon to cook up the eggs, whipping them with a fork as she went.  The frying pan was close to glowing red by this time.  It seemed like only an instant would pass and there were plates of “scrambled eggs” set down in front of us.

Almost as good as eating, was watching Grandma work her way around her kitchen.  Everything was in its place.  Everything went like clockwork.  It was like watching a choreographed ballet, set to the news commentary from the table radio in the living room.  The pattern had not changed in more than forty years and she worked so fast, she was almost a blur at times.  She managed to sit down and eat with us before the Corn Flakes got soggy.  And Grandma was already up and washing dishes by the time Grandpa and I cleaned our plates with the last bite of toast.

Daniel picked out a pair of small fish last summer for the tank in the living room.  I forget what they are because I hardly ever see them.  They hide behind the artificial volcano among the plastic plant fronds.  Every so often, one or the other will dart out for a moment, but that’s about it.

Daniel got up a few minutes early.  He was ahead of schedule through his shower, cereal and putting on his shoes (we have this timed down to the second).  I was finishing up my breakfast banana when he called me from the living room.

“Come see!”  I walked in and there were the fish, swimming placidly in full view.  We shared a moment, watching them as they slowly swam in circles and darted around the rocks Grandpa Dave brought back from Canada.

“I think I’ll name them Swimmy One and Swimmy Two,” he told me.

“You mean you haven’t named them in all this time?”  I asked.  “We’ve had them almost a year.”

“I never see them to say hello,” he explained as he put his jacket on.  “I forget if I named them or not.”

Daniel had a point.  I say hello to our hamster – Hamstersaurus Rex – when he pokes his nose out of his nest for an evening stroll around the wheel.  I talk to Akane and Pepper – our rental parrots – and threaten them with consumption by name at least once a day.  But the fish hide so much, I think Meka just feeds them on faith; assuming they’re still in there… somewhere.  Almost every guest we’ve had to the house has asked if we plan to get fish for the tank.

Later, at lunchtime, I did check on the tank again.  No fish in sight.  I hope they make a repeat appearance; I like the names Swimmy One and Swimmy Two and would hate for them to slip into anonymity again.

Can you find the fish in this picture? Me neither.

I first got on the World Wide Web about fifteen years ago.  I had been connecting to computers for years, primarily via bulletin board systems.  However, I could only connect to one computer at a time that way.  And – unless I had a lot of money to put towards the phone bill – I couldn’t connect to a system unless it was nearby.  I signed up for my first web account via a company called Netcom.  I remember getting the setup floppy disk in the mail (before they started just sending them to you by the gross).  I installed it and spent the afternoon slowly looking around the cyber neighborhood.

My mom had used my TRS-80 in the past, so she knew what a BBS was and how to send e-mail.  She asked me what the Internet was all about and why it was so different.  I explained how all these computers around the country and around the world were connected together and if I hooked into one, I could pretty much look at stuff anywhere.

“What kind of stuff can you see?” she asked.  At the time, Yahoo was The Search Engine on the web.  They had a button on the front page that sent you to a random site somewhere.  I clicked the button and after a moment found my computer connecting to a mail order bride site in the Philippines.  While it wasn’t exactly the impression I wanted to make, it was powerful demonstration of the Internet’s connectivity.  I’ve never forgotten it… mostly because my mom has never let me live it down.

I am not a violent person.  I’m pretty easygoing and good to get along with.  I like (most) kids.  I teach Sunday School.  I like (most) animals.  I prefer dogs, but will pet a cat when a dog is unavailable.  I think I do a pretty decent job when it comes to following the seventh principle of Unitarian Universalism.  I respect the interdependent web of existence of which humans are but a part.

However, as I write this I am on the hunt.  There is a good sized spider somewhere in my office.  The fly swatter lays on my desk next to the keyboard, ready to go into action at a moment’s notice.  I’m not that afraid of spiders.  I think cockroaches are much higher on the “oogy” scale.  As a family, we’ve had outings; observing spiders in the wild.  I’ve taken pictures of their webs dazzling in the sunlight, dew drops dangling from each thread.  Lovely.

However, spiders need to realize their place in the interdependent web; it’s outside.  Summer will be here soon.  I’m sure we’ll have some pretty big spiders living among the slats of the fence out back.  Last year we had a couple of garden spiders that were as colorful as Pepper, our rental parrot.  I left them alone out there to spin their webs, catch their bugs and crawl around wherever they pleased.  In the fall, if I found them in the house, they were dead.  Worse, if they surprised me, they were dead and in pieces.  There is a clear connection between how badly I’m startled and how extreme my prejudice is when it comes to spider killing.

I had a bad experience with a spider back in school.  I worked long hours at a radio station and once I was too tired to make it back to my dorm.  The large studio in the back was filled with old beat up furniture.  I lay down on an avocado green vinyl couch and dropped off.  I came to a few hours later with a sensation of someone lightly brushing my cheek.  I opened my eyes to find a daddy longlegs working its way across my face.  I realize it is bad form to judge an entire taxonomic order based on the actions of one daddy longlegs.  In fact, daddy longlegs aren’t even true spiders; maybe I’m going after the wrong species.

I went off to college in the fall of 1988.  Like most of my freshman companions, it was the first time I’d been away from home for any length of time.  We all experimented a bit with our new found freedom.  Some of my friends who had never drunk in their lives made up for lost time.  Others experimented with drugs of one sort or another.  As for me, I tried musical theatre.  I had never been in a play.  I had never thought about being in a play.  However, I had shot a number of movies when I was in high school and I had acted in a number of them.  When I saw the flyer for the auditions for Hair taped up around the Quad, I thought I’d give it a shot.

I signed up for the audition and got a note in Campus Mail a few days later: I was scheduled to appear at the end of the week with a group in one of the main rooms at the Illini Union.  I needed to be ready to sing a song between the years 1965 and 1975.  I picked Norwegian Wood by the Beatles.  I quickly figured out I was in trouble when I showed up with a cassette of Rubber Soul to sing along with.  Everyone else brought sheet music.  Still, I sang my song and – to my surprise – I wasn’t nervous.  I sang along to the tape and found myself mimicking not only John Lennon’s vocal, but his accent as well.  The hardest part was not cracking up.  I finished up and got a “great song” nod from another guy in line.

The next step of the audition was a dramatic read.  We were all given a snippet of a scene.  It wasn’t from Hair; it was a short monologue from a dying soldier after a battle.  Some of the guys just stood and read it aloud.  Others stalked around the room, dying all over the place.  When my turn came, I dragged a chair into the middle of the room.

“Tree,” I said, pointing to it.  And I sat on the floor, leaning up against it and went through the lines.

The final phase of the audition was dancing.  One of the stage managers paired us up: boy / girl.  My partner was in the neighborhood of eleven feet tall.  I myself am not in that neighborhood; I’m not even in the nearby suburbs.  Still, it was college and we felt we should give it the old college try.  The choreographer pranced (I can’t think of a better word to describe it) across the room and told us to follow his lead.  O-kay…  We held hands and sort of bobbed and weaved our way across no-man’s land, doing our best Betty and Barney Rubble imitation.  Next, the man (me) was supposed to hold the back of his partner’s head (her) and slowly rotate it around.  My partner courteously slouched a bit so I could reach.  The final move required me to kneel behind her and come up against her knees.  In one smooth motion, she would be up on my shoulder.  I looked up at her she looked down at me.   I took a deep breath and – to my credit – I got her off the ground.  It wasn’t to my shoulder and – alas – it wasn’t in one smooth motion.  Thus ended my first (and last) audition.

It was late and I was walking downstairs in the dark.  I was heading into the kitchen when I tripped over something in the middle of the living room floor.  I did one of those arm-wheeling, tap-dancing, out-of-control fling-forwards that I’m sure must have looked incredible to anyone in the area wearing night-vision goggles.  I hit the floor with a house rattling crash.  If that didn’t get everyone’s attention, the string of profanity that followed surely did.

“Who left the d%^& vacuum cleaner out in the middle of the floor?”  I roared, holding the offending hose in my hand.  Daniel sheepishly poked his head down the stairs and admitted that he had been the one who took the vacuum out of the closet in the foyer.

“What were you doing with the vacuum cleaner?”  I asked.

“Vacuuming,” replied Daniel.  I was a tad surprised (you would be too, if you’ve ever seen the state of Daniel’s room).  I asked him if he had made a mess; spilled something or broken it.  He shook his head.

“Then why were you vacuuming?”  I asked.  He shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

It’s amazing how those three little words cover so many situations.  Why did you put a raw egg in your pocket?  Why did you zip yourself up in a suitcase?  Why did you fill the cabinet drawers in your bathroom with water?  I don’t know.  Often times Daniel looks as confused and mystified as I do; he truly doesn’t know why he did what he did.  This was one of those times.  He remembered pulling out the vacuum and cleaning the area around the rocking chair.  And that was that.  He left it lying there without another thought.  So, I went easy on him.  I had him come down and put the vacuum away and told him it wasn’t a toy.  He went back upstairs and I followed.  Meka poked her head out of her office and asked what was going on.  I explained what happened.

“Why were you walking around downstairs in the dark?” she asked.  “Why didn’t you turn on a light?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, not a little sheepishly.

It has been my experience the best poetry I’ve written is linked to strong emotional states: love, melancholy, sadness, birth, death.  Those episodes brought forth poems almost complete, directly from my head to paper.

My grandpa died when I was eighteen years old.  It was the first close death I had ever experienced.  A couple of years later, I had an assignment in one of my rhetoric classes: write a poem using only concrete images.  Grandpa came out in a single sitting.  All I had to do was put it in some kind of form and correct the spelling.  When my brother was killed, I expected some kind of poetic epiphany.  I had to write a eulogy, after all.  In the end I did write a eulogy, but it was just a long essay; almost a proto-blog.  No poem came to me.  In fact no words came to me for a long time after that.

We were cleaning up the house a couple of years later and came across a roll of exposed but undeveloped film.  It turned out to be pictures we took the Thanksgiving before David died.  It was an odd feeling, looking at my brother in new pictures.  I think I had gone through all of the existing ones until they were burned on the backs of my eyes.  To see him in new places, new positions, new poses, was weird.  It made me realize we hadn’t seen David at all for a long time.

“I’m beginning to think that you’re not here.”

I wrote that line and had some ideas I wanted to convey.  But it was still too early.  The emotion I felt was too deep.  It came from somewhere in my reptilian brain and defied any attempt to put it into language, short of a cross between a low growl and a plaintive howl to the sky.

This past Sunday, the senior high students planned a poetry slam for the service.  They asked people to bring poetry to read.  I looked through my poems and picked out a couple from college and a couple from high school (that seemed appropriate).  I also thought I would try to come up with something new.  I rummaged through my files and found my notes.  In the shower, in lieu of singing, I rapped out some lines; trying them out for size, how they rolled off the tongue.  I finished my first take of the poem in a couple of hours.

I’d like to say that I offered the poem to the congregation and it was a big hit.  I’d like to say that, but it isn’t true.  It’s been my experience that everything I’ve written is always the best thing I’ve written… right after I write it.  Upon further review, some are still good and others – well…  The truth is I chickened out.  I second guessed my second reading.  There are parts of the poem I like, parts that are strong.  Still, I don’t think I’m quite ready to let it go.

I was in the middle of a meeting on-line when – suddenly – my Internet went out.  Sadly, my connection isn’t quite at the appliance level of “set it and forget it”.  I have to fix it every so often.  I spent five or ten minutes going through my normal procedures.  I turned off the modem, turned off the router, and rebooted my machine.  None of the normal things worked.  I rummaged around in the piles of paper on my desk and found this month’s bill with the tech support number.  Despite warnings of “high call volume”, the cable company picked up within a couple of minutes.

The problem – I was told – was not technical; rather I had not paid my bill.  That was news to me.  I was holding this month’s bill in my hand; you’d think it would have mentioned I was late.  Apparently, unlike every other utility I have, I pay the cable company for services already rendered.  If a payment doesn’t go through, the system shuts down immediately before the next billing cycle.  The support person helpfully suggested I update my account information with another credit card and everything would be all set… except I could only enter my information on-line.  They weren’t prepared to take it over the phone.

Unlike my previous encounter with the cable company, this woman did pick up on the Catch-22 situation.  After a couple of minutes, she was able to reinstate my Internet connection with the notation in my account that I would pay it off immediately.  Fine.  I reset everything again and tried to log into my personal account website.  No dice.  I hadn’t used the account site for a few months.  I checked my password database to make sure I was typing it in correctly.  As I was entering it for the fifth or sixth time, I noticed a new text block on the login form.  Passwords had to be between 7 and 12 characters long.  I checked my password and confirmed it was 13 characters long.  There was no text block allowing me to reset my password or send me a new one via e-mail.  I had call back to create a new login from scratch.

I logged in and immediately ran into issues because while the cable company calls me “BOB”, I go by “ROBERT” at the bank.  Another phone call got that taken care of.  I entered my information, set up the payment feature and made sure they would continue to send me a bill in the mail rather than on-line.  Finally, I entered my so-called late payment.  To my surprise, the Internet showed my account was all paid up and it rejected my manual payment because it was too much money.  I made one last phone call, asking – nay, begging them to please take my f$%^ing money.  Another fifteen minutes passed before I was able to get the payment accepted.  A few minutes later, I had an e-mail receipt in my inbox.  I laughed when I read the first line:

When I was a kid, McDonald’s had two sizes of drinks: small and large.  I started out getting the small, of course.  I was pretty small myself.  It was a twelve ounce drink, the same as a can of pop.  However, I graduated to the large around the time I started school.  The large size was sixteen ounces, the same as a Coke you’d get in a glass bottle.  My grandparents lived in LaGrange.  At the end of their street was one of the first McDonald’s in Illinois.  It dated back to when my mom was in high school.  They still had the old “Mr. Speedee” sign out front when I was little.  After a visit, we usually stopped there and grabbed something to drink for the ride home to Elk Grove Village.  One night, my dad went in and came out looking a bit confused.  The traditional white cardboard tray was holding three rather tall cups.  These were the “new” large size drinks, twenty ounces.

It was just a one-time event for me.  I was quickly demoted to the old large size (now a medium) Coke when we went out to McDonald’s.  This was the situation for several years until I was in junior high school.  As a typical teenager, I could eat my weight in fast food.  That sounds more impressive than it was; I think I weighed about eighty pounds and most of that was hair.  After my parents got divorced, my dad would pick us up and we’d often head to the nearest McDonald’s to get something to eat.  I’d get three hamburgers, fries and – finally – a large Coke to wash it all down.  I suppose I could have done without the additional four ounces of pop, but it was only a nickel more and I needed to have something that differentiated me from my much younger brother.

I was in college and actually working at McDonald’s down in Champaign when we started phasing in new packaging.  It had been determined the Styrofoam Quarter Pounder boxes were going to outlast the human race in our landfills, so Corporate was switching to biodegradable boxes and larger paper wrappers for the big sandwiches.  Ironically, the big drinks were being poured in more permanent plastic cups.  They started out as “limited editions”.  You would order a special drink and get it in a commemorative Michael Jordan cup or one with the American Olympians on the side.  Down in Champaign, we carried ones with the silhouette of Red Grange and the Illini fall football schedule.  They were quite popular and we sold out before the season wrapped up.  I was surprised to see the replacements were generic; just the regular McDonald’s logo.  Soon after, the new menu strips showed up.  These plastic cups were now the new large.

It’s natural as you grow up to have changes in perception.  Teachers who seemed ten feet tall turn out to be life sized when you meet them again as an adult.  Long hallways aren’t as long, backseats aren’t quite so spacious.  While I could probably still fit in a washing machine box, I don’t think I’d want to spend hours at a time in one anymore playing “fort”.  However, the cups I remembered as being large as a child have not diminished in capacity.  The cups still hold sixteen ounces, but – somehow – they’re now considered just small.

After my weekly Weight Watchers meeting, Daniel and I decided to go to McDonald’s for dinner.  Daniel stopped for a moment to pick up a free car magazine from a stack in between the two sets of doors.  He found a table and I ordered the meal.  Daniel was drooling when I walked back with the tray, but it was more from the cars for sale rather than anything in the bag.  I asked him which car he liked.  That turned out to be a mistake; I should have asked which one he didn’t like.  He rattled off model after model.

“I really like the doctor cars,” he added.  I paused from my fries.

“Doctor cars?”  I asked, “You mean ambulances?”  Daniel shook his head.

“They have all kinds of doctor cars in here,” he said.  “They go all the way back to the 1950’s.”  He thought for a minute.

“I think they used them to drive doctors around.”  That might have been true.  I grew up in the seventies and eighties.  House calls were something from late night movies on television.  Daniel consulted his magazine again.

“There is a 1950 Ford Hardtop for sale,” he said.  “It’s a real bargain for $12,990.  It held four doctors.”  Wait a minute.  Daniel flipped the magazine around on the table, so I could read the ad.

“‘DR’ stands for ‘door’, not ‘doctor’,” I said.  “It’s a car with four doors.”  Daniel looked surprised and looked back at the ad.

“But ‘DR’ stands for doctor in my books!” he complained.  I could understand the confusion and explained the concept of context.  If he saw a ‘Dr.’ on a sign by a hospital, it probably meant ‘doctor’.  If he saw ‘Dr.’ in a car magazine, it probably meant ‘door’.  Daniel argued a hospital might have doors too and I conceded the point.

“Sometimes you’re just going to have make your best guess,” I said.  Daniel frowned.  He likes his cheeseburgers with no pickles and his world in order.  He pushed the car magazine away, disgusted.

“Who would pay $12,990 for a car like that?  It just has four doors an