The Aerie
Okay, I have got to stop eating these chocolate-covered raisins that I found in my stocking yesterday.
Well this was about as nice a Christmas as I've had in a while, which disproves the saying that 'money cannot buy happiness.' As usual, I'm hopelessly out of fashion, meaning that while the rest of the world is working harder for less money under Our Dipshit President, I'm actually out of debt and well employed. And this meant that although I left Christmas shopping til the last minute, nonetheless I was able to provide some nice gifts for the kids.
For my precocious daughter, I picked up a computer graphing tablet, allowing her to draw pictures on her computer with a stylus rather than trying to wiggle one out of her mouse. I thought of this one by my own self, which I thought was very clever, and was rewarded on Christmas morning with her shout of "Score!"
Of course, she's the easy one to buy for. She has a lot of interests, most of which are not inexpensive, making for easy Christmas shopping. Canvases for painting, art supplies, computer supplies, and anything soft.
My number 1 son was trickier. He has interests too, of course, but rather more esoteric. He likes computer games, but feeding that addiction only makes the beast hungrier. And of course just giving him yet another computer game lacks a certain panache.
No, for him I wanted something that would dovetail with his computer interests, and yet persuade him to something more than a pear-shaped life in front of a keyboard (like his father). Something to get him out of the house.
Fortunately my buddy Keith clued me in this year to the hobby of Geocaching [Gee-oh-cashing]. This wholesome enterprise involves hiding and locating hidden containers (caches) using a Global Positioning System (GPS) device.
By joining the online Geocaching.com service, for free, he can locate nearby caches (there are several near our home), record his finds, and also register any new caches he creates. And since he has another friend who already has one of these devices, the two of them can conspire if they wish. Meanwhile, it gives him and I something to do on one of our oft-delayed "Dad and Kid Days." Not that we lack for things to do, just that we now have another option.
For the youngest, well, I got lucky. Shopping, in my usual hunter-gatherer fashion, I stumbled across a complete boxed set, used of "Dragon Ball Z: The Saga of Goku." What is a Dragon Ball? Where are Dragon Ball's A through Y? What is a Goku? I do not know. I do know that the names of various characters on this series are strange: Frieza, Cooler, and Trunks, for example. Why Japanese animators are translating character names into household appliances and clothing, I do not know. What I know about Dragon Ball Z is that it involves a lot of weird creatures becoming extremely angry, floating up into the air, and hitting each other.
My confusion mattered little in the face of the triple-take the boy did when he opened up this present Christmas morning.
For the wife, well, I really hate to admit it. I mean, I really hate to admit it. The commercials were so awful. And yet, after shopping all thirteen of Rosedale's jewelry stores (yes, Rosedale has thirteen jewelers) I... I ended up getting her a mojo box. I know, I know, I'm so ashamed... but it was really the best deal!
I'm also afraid my friend Giovanna will find out. She's an artist and a jeweler, and if I had had my act more together - if I had been shopping sooner than Christmas Eve, in other words - I could have commissioned something from her for a fraction of the cost. Fortunately I'm pleased with what I got, and more importantly so is my wife, so it all works out.
As for me, well, I got some stuff. And I'm very grateful for it! I got some cool books, the aforementioned chocoloate covered raisins. I also received a calendar produced by my birthmother, featuring her and her rug-making friends in various states of deshabille, "The Rug Hooking Calendar Girls." My birthmother is December, and is fortunately censored. Despite this I expect to add a few more payments onto my therapy budget... She also sent me a good book, though, so she must be forgiven.
The worst thing I got, however, were these damned chocolate-covered raisins... they're addictive!
We had a nice morning together, the traditional family breakfast of caramel rolls and Polish kielbasa. In the afternoon we went to the wife's sister's house for family Christmas. Everybody was happy. I got to see 'Elf' for the first time (Ed Asner... as Santa?!). Everybody was happy.
Today I'm cleaning - cleaning like a madman. I cleaned the kids' game room in the basement, in order to clean my workroom by moving stuff into the game room. The boys and I went through their game CDs and we're building a good Garage Sale box of old toys and games.
But I'd better get back to it if I'm going to get that room redone before the New Year. All in all, a very Merry Christmas.
Did you know that these blog entries have categories? I don't have mine displayed, but yeah, you can place entries into categories. Today's entry, for example, goes into the "Obituary" category.
[I am now swearing ferociously under my breath]
I got a call tonight that my friend Joe Berglund is dead. Has been dead for a few days, actually. Right now I'm going through the ANGER phase. Right now I'm really, really wishing that there WAS a God, so that I could well and truly kick his ass from here til Tuesday. I am so angry.
The article in the Duluth News Tribune looks like so many others I've read, but of course this one was different. This victim was a friend.
HAYWARD
Wrenshall man in crash identified
The Minnesota man struck and killed as he stood near the scene of an earlier crash was identified Thursday as Joseph M. Burglund, 43, of Wrenshall.
The Sawyer County Sheriff's Department said the accident occurred after a vehicle went out of control approaching the scene of a two-vehicle crash.
A two-vehicle rear-end crash happened on state Highway 77 late Tuesday afternoon. Minutes later, Burgland was struck by a third vehicle as he stood on the side of the highway, investigators said.
The obituary comes closer of course.
"He loved the outdoors and enjoyed hiking, camping, canoeing, pig farming, and walks at night. He believed in taking care of the earth and using alternative energy. Joe was a great story and joke teller. He was a member of Elim Lutheran Church in Blackhoof Township. He is survived by his wife, Lisa; and children, Jacqueline and Jordan... He will also be greatly missed by his furry companions, Vander, Savannah, Barni, Tundra, Hermione, Hawk and Spur."
That's closer to the Joe I know. I can picture Joe laughing, making a completely unapologetic but self-depreciating joke about being a pig farmer. I can picture him surrounded by dogs on his farm. I can easly imagine him being a phenomenally loving father. I haven't seen Joe for a long time now, him being 'way up by Duluth, but he springs so easily to mind, relaxed and laughing.
Joe and I met in high school, or actually we probably met in eighth grade, right when I moved to St. Francis. This poor picture is the only shot of got of Joe and Steve together, in the play 'The Mousetrap.' ("Oh, that's a very nice shot of the back of my head, Bob" I can hear Joe saying, his voice bubbling with laughter, "My hair looks nice and greasy!") If Steve was the oldest friend I had in Minnesota, Joe was second or third. Now they're both dead. I think I met Joe in eighth grade, when he was going out with LaNae. Even though I was sweet on LaNae I could never feel badly toward Joe - he was too nice a guy.
Joe and I were in "The Mousetrap" together (I played Paravicini, badly I'm sure), and all of my best memories of theater club include Joe, laughing. In this better picture, he is being grilled by Russ, who played a detective. I remember little about that play except I wore a fake moustache, and we all had an absolute riot.
Some of my worst memories from theater club include Joe, too - for example, there was the time when I was working backstage and a falling piece of scenery sliced open my left thigh. Joe and Denise hustled me into Denise's Volkswagon Beetle, and Joe drove me the 20 miles to the Anoka hospital in about 10 minutes flat. When I passed out along the way I'm not sure if it was from bloodloss or sheer terror. Nineteen stitches and 25 years later, and the scariest part of the event was the trip to the hospital...
After performances in our little hick town (now a thriving suburb) the closest place to get a treat was the Farrell's on Highway 10, about 25 miles away. When the cast descended upon the shop, Joe and I used to compete eating Farrell's Lalapaloozas. But he threw in the towel for good after I finished my own and then polished his off for good measure.
He and I made a Super-8 movie once, it featured him running through the woods by my house, chased by an animated camera tripod that fired laser beams. Finally he killed it with his own laser, the beam scratched into the film in "post processing," and jumped up and down for joy.
I wish they'd give you a list of people you're going to lose, and the order in which you're going to lose them. I keep losing the people close to me without warning. While my father took three weeks to die, the first thing he did was lose consciousness. I had one week's warning before my birthfather died, but I was told by the family that his diagnosis had thrown everything into such turmoil that it wouldn't be a good time to call or visit - they didn't know of course that he only had one week. And when my mentor Mr. Johnson died, way back in 1988, there were six months during which I could have been informed, but wasn't. If my aunt hadn't seen his obit in the paper and recognized his school as my former high school, I might not even have made it to his memorial.
Steve, well, Steve died slow, and in some ways that was good as well as awful. It gave me a chance to accept what was happening, even as I denied it so terribly hard. I remember how we took him to see "House of 10,000 Corpses," and even though it was one of the worst films I've ever seen it was a good experience. I felt sad after recently seeing "Shaun of the Dead," because I knew just how much Steve would have enjoyed that movie.
But Death doesn't give notice, I guess, and now Joe is gone: gone at Christmastime, leaving behind two children and his wife. And like Steve, Joe was one of the good ones. Hapless, too - he once burned down a house he was halfway through building - but full of good humor, affable, and kind and considerate at the most surprising moments.
I'm sorry Joe. Sorry about your family, sorry about your friends, and sorry about your life cut short.
I guess I'm past the anger part now... I guess I'm onto grief...
Some site downtime today, due to the jerks at Marketscore.com. I have not linked to their website, because the website loads viruses, trojans, and spywhere as soon as you connect up to it.
Who are these guys? They seem to be proud to be complete and utter idiots, that's who. They have a record of this kind of network abuse running back several years, and today they decided to spam my comments section of this blog.
Unfortunately, they're as stupid as they are venal. Their spamming tool was faulty. As a side effect of being faulty it ran very fast, like a winch with a snapped cable. Instead of producing spam comments, they rapidly filled up my computer's process table with erroneous tasks that produced thousands of lines like this:
[Wed Dec 15 23:10:15 2004] [error] [client 66.119.33.155] Premature end of script headers
I spent part of the evening trying to reconfigure my firewall to keep them out, but the firewall itself gave me so much trouble that I had to give up for now and just turn off comments.
The only people I hate worse that the jackasses at marketscore.com and other places would be any person stupid enough to ever buy anything due to spamming. I mean, is there ANYONE out there who has ever bought viagra or refinanced their home based on a spam? And if so, how can we remove these people from the gene pool?
Sigh - a whole evening wasted on this nonsense...
Ever get into a 'black cloud' mood, as if you were walking around with a big dark cloud all around you? I'm having one of those the last few days.
I hate it when I get like this. Nothing makes me happy, I only laugh at painful things, and I suck all the life and energy out of every thing around me. What really annoys me is when people ask me what I would want, what I'd like. The whole act of having to try to decide what I want seems like a tremendous bother.
My wife and I went to see Triple Espresso this evening (http://www.tripleespresso.com ). I'd been told by everyone how funny it was, how one would laugh until one hurt. It was nothing to me: it could have been a badly-produced high school play for all it meant. I sat there and could hardly smirk at what I was seeing, sucking all the life out of my little corner of the audience.
It'll pass. These moods, which I get about twice a year, always do. But for now I feel like nothing is funny, nothing is nice, everything is a bother, and nothing matters.
I'll go to bed, maybe I'll feel better in the morning.
How can it be? A blog entry? Why that can only mean one thing!
Yep, I've got insomnia again.
Actually it's not insomnia, it's carelessness. I had a cuppa joe at Professor Barker's tonight/last night, and it never dawned on me that I hadn't brewed the pot. See, I keep a can of decaf hidden on the Professor's shelves, and as I'm usually the one who makes coffee, I start off with a pot of decaf, and switch to caffeinated for later pots. I drink the first and last cups of decaf out of the pot, and stop for the evening, everyone else gets their jolt of caffeine around 10:00 p.m., and I get to sleep at night.
But tonight I got stuck at work til 10:30. When I took this job, they didn't tell me I was going to have to spend night after night doing graveyard-shift firewall changes. Well, actually they didn't tell me anything except "Hurry up and start Monday" and "Bring your own laptop." For the next month I did absolutely nothing, and found out that no external laptops were supposed to be plugged into the corporate network after just such a device brought down the whole company last year.
Anyway my big idea was to bring in another fellow to do my Thursday night firewall changes so I could continue going to the Professor's place for Tekumel. Unfortunately, several circumstances conspired to make this, the first pass at the idea, rather less than successful: at 10:30 I finally finished helping the guy set up for the changes, having spent so much time getting him configure (no fault of his, just how it worked out) that I could have done the change myself.
After the Professor's game I called home and found out the configuration failed because I got one data element wrong. Sigh.
Due to my big idea, I ended up getting to the Professor's very late, and that's when I absentmindedly quaffed the lethal cup of caffeinated java.
Hence this blog entry.
My birthmother has been oh-so-amusingly sending me pictures of Superman, a sarcastic commentary on my tendency to overwork. Let me warn all adoptees that if you're a smartass, and you search for your birthparents, they just may be smartasses. You've been warned. So just for her benefit, here's what my day was like today:
7:45 overslept
8:15 take out garbage that the kids missed
8:40 sort recycling that the kids overlooked
9:00 Find DVDs and return to Blockbuster. Andy Rooney voice, "D'ya ever take a DVD out of the player, put it in the case, and then think 'Woops, before I return it to Blockbuster I better rewind it'? I hate it when I do that."
9:30 stop at post office, mail check, empty PO Box.
9:45 - 4:45 work, most of which is spent trying to get my own firewall access fixed so that I can get my colleague's firewall access fixed. (Take a break from 11:30-12:30, walk over to downtown Barnes and Noble to see if Lileks recognizes me in dorky hat and long coat. He does, damn him.)
5:00-7:00 Home, make dinner, get kids to do homework, get kids to clear table, get kids to do dishes, get kids to play piano, pass out on couch for 10 minutes
7:30-10:30 back to work, finish firewall access fixes with minutes to spare, set up colleague with access software.
10:45=12:30 a.m. Visit Professor's for game, drink caffeine, seal doom
1:00-2:00 a.m. return home, find out firewall changes failed.
2:00 a.m.-3;00 a.m. lie in bed thinking "It was caffeinated."
3:30-4:00 write this blog. Stare at screen in stupor. Realize birthmother is wrong - I'm not Superman, I'm Stuporman! Ha! Oh man, it must be 4:00 a.m.
Now since the firewall changes failed, I don't get to telecommute tomorrow: no, I have to go in and explain why the firewall changes failed, and prepare for what will likely be a second attempt at the changes tomorrow night. Tonight. Whatever.
So it's 4:00 a.m., I've been up for 21 hours, and I don't feel tired, but I'll go upstairs and lie down for a while and see if I can't fall asleep. If I'm lucky, I'll get just that small amount of sleep necessary to make me wish I had never laid down at all...