The Aerie
We finally got some snow here in Minneapolis. When Minneapolis has to wait until January 21st for its first snowfall, the city is on edge like a young couple who miss a period: most of us would be willing to piss on a stick just to end the suspense.
The dénouement is a complete cock-up, of course. Minnesotans are some of the most skilled snow-drivers, but after months without snow the skills get rusty. While even veteran Minnesotans can be found buried up to their wipers in the snow of a roadside ditch, the first snow completely blindsides the last year’s new arrivals.
The smart ones get into trouble by driving slow: they actually stop at stop signs, sinking into the snowy mire of the intersection. The stupid ones drive 'way too fast, and by the time their SUV stops rolling the interior is coated with hot latte and pieces of cellphone.
Complementing the madness are the road-plowing rules, which are the simple and painless kinds of rules that you can expect when you mix bad weather, city bureaucrats, and towing contracts. Minneapolis actually has it easy: in St. Paul the plowing and towing rules require a knowledge of astrology (did you know that Jupiter is in Aquarius and part of a Grand Trine?) and the examination of fowl entrails. Minneapolis on the other hand simply alerts the public to a Snow Emergency by sending an intern down the basement to whisper "Snow!" into a styrofoam coffee cup, and then phoning, faxing, e-mailing and sending couriers to every towing agency in town. After giving the towing companies a day to warm up their vehicles it becomes illegal to park on the same side of the road as the even-ness or odd-ness of the date. Or maybe it's ONLY legal to park on the even or odd side of the road. The only way to tell is when your neighbor's cars start to get towed, which is why it helps to live in the middle of the block.
I celebrated the Saturday following an overnight blizzard by waking at 6:30 a.m. to take my son to the Lego League State Finals. He was not at home, however - the park had sponsored a neighborhood overnight, and he was sleeping in the locked park building at 7:30 when I arrived. Much nonsense followed as I pounded on the windows to wake someone up, got him and his friend into the van, and headed off to the tournament.
The circus had clearly come to town during the blizzard, because the clowns were all over the road. I got out of the van to push one nimnul through the intersection where he and his toy poodle had gotten stuck, and then ended up riding his bumper down the block as he timidly proceeded at a pace slower than my van on idle. He finally pulled over to let us pass, permanently embedding himself in the plowed ridge of snow on the side of the street. Hopefully the St. Bernard with the keg of brandy under its collar will find him soon.
The day was clear and bright, and the freeways when we reached them were delightfully well plowed, free of snow and dry. So of course everyone proceeded at 45 mph, except for the old couple in the hats who were going 30 and forcing everyone to swerve around them. I suppose I shouldn't complain about the safe, if slow, pace of the traffic: had the roads been dark, icy, slick, and obscured by precipitation, everyone would have been driving 75 mph and talking on the phone.
We arrived only slightly late to find the hosting school crowded with cars. I drove up front to drop the boys off, and to my surprise saw a parking spot labeled "Visitors only, 2 hour parking" standing empty. Of course, this is Minnesota - Minnesotans obey signs like that, even if it's a weekend and there's nobody in the school office who will complain. Instead they go out and park beside fire hydrants, on sidewalks, or atop smaller cars – anywhere so long as there isn’t a sign explicitly prohibiting their selection.
I snatched up the spot and was helping the kids get situated when my phone rang. A neighbor had notified us that the plows were on their way, and my car (as opposed to the family van I was driving) was parked on the wrong side of the street. My wife had tried to move the car, but it wouldn't start.
I wept as I pulled out of my parking spot, trying to avoid backing into the SUV waiting to pounce (Minnesotans WILL park in a prohibited spot AFTER someone else has done so - "I thought it was okay: someone else parked there first!"). Arriving home I found that my wife had flooded the engine, and then had drained the battery of electrical power apparently in the hopes that the cylinders might sympathetically be drained of fuel.
I jumpered the cars together (another Minnesota required skill - I've only melted a battery post once) and, having sat for quite a while by then, my car quite agreeably started up on the first try. Then there was the juggling of car and van, trying to get both off of the street at the same time. I worked through the logisitics, and five minutes after moving my little Geo Metro across the street the plow roared past. Civic duties completed, I returned to the Lego tournament, where piles of automobiles swayed dangerously in the wind-blown parking lot.
I employed a trick from my days as a stalker, and waited in my car by the front door. Soon a woman emerged carrying a paper bag, keys in hand. Patiently I followed her across the parking lot to her car. She had probably only intended to put the bag into her car, but having noticed me following her she now felt obligated to actually move her vehicle so that I could have her spot. After all, if she just closed the door and returned to the school, I might scowl at her.
I felt bad when a few hours later my son’s team was eliminated from the State Finals - not because he was upset at the loss (he didn’t seem to care, actually), but because I felt guilty about my pleasure at being able to go home early. The unfortunate winners ended up being at the tournament more than 12 hours.
We got home, had Subway sandwiches for dinner, and then our friend Debbie came to hang out with the family. Everyone got to bed very late, and I for one was practically shaking with exhaustion. I looked forward to a nice long night’s sleep.
Eight a.m. and the phone rang: a neighbor was calling to remind me that the plows were coming, and my car needed to be moved.
Bless ‘em, if it weren’t for my neighbors, I would have been ticketed and towed twice in as many days. Blearly I climbed into my car, still in my bedroom slippers. The engine started right up, but the car wouldn’t move. Yesterday’s plows had embedded my car in the same kind of snow embankment that had captured the fellow and his toy poodle.
I just hope the St. Bernard shows up soon with the brandy.
Just got back from taking a walk. I spend most of my lunches at my desk, so I don't feel guilty about taking the occasional stroll. Sometimes you gotta get out of the office. Sometimes you gotta post blog entries from work. Anyway I was on my way back and jonesin' for java when I was brought up short by the Starbuck's the sign to the right.
It was something called "Chantico," and despite the appalling faux-Aztec faux-world-citizen marketing angle, I had to try it. Maybe it would be a glorified cup of hot chocolate, maybe it would be something else, but where chocolate is concerned I'm a risk-taker, baby!
Three dollars later I emerged from Starbucks with a styrofoam cup about the right size to bring back to the doctor with a sample. I tried it.
As far as I could tell, it was a melted cup of chocolate frosting. This isn't entirely a bad thing. But for three dollars I could melt two entire containers of chocolate frosting...
Anyway...
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| Ouch! That kick sets my teeth on edge! |
I'm not entirely happy with the fact that my kids play these games, but I'm one of those parents who has come to the conclusion that there are some things you can't avoid. And one of those is kids playing video games. Oh, I know there are some tight-sphinctered parents out there who don't let their kids play these games. Many of these also cover the living room in plastic and dust their house daily. Anyone whose seen our place knows we don't live that way...
It's not as if I totally gave in. The kids STILL don't have a video game attached to the TV, and they won't have one until they decide to buy one of their own. No, I make them work for their computer games - they have to figure out how to run them on the old, crusty PC's around the house. I console myself by pretending that this forces them to learn about things like system maintenance, memory and disk storage, and PC interfaces.
In this game while you can play a variety of male and female characters of different races, colors and species, all the females have to wear heels. As unlikely as her outfit was, at least Xena wore boots. I think LucasArts should let players design crossdressing characters. Imagine the shrieks from the people with the plastic-wrapped living rooms when Luke Skywalker shows up in a bustier and heels. "Of course the game is based on mass murder - but you can't let them put dresses on men!"
Anyway I played Dark Forces II, but I really really didn't like the slaughter. You're supposed to be this Good Guy, yet you're running around with a blazing hot fluorescent light, murdering and maiming military conscripts under a brutal dictatorship. It was really unpleasant to wander back to base after slaughtering hundreds of people and have Luke Skywalker tell me what a good job I was doing being a good guy.
One of the unusual things about these games is that you can select skills and abilities from either the Dark Side or the Light Side. And depending on the choices you make within the game, you will become either a Jedi or a Sith.
So I'm playing this game now, and I'm trying to set an example for the boys: I'm trying to play the game without killing anybody.
It's tricky, and in some cases impossible. At the end of one mission, for example, I was being chased around a sand crawler by all these sand people. There was this droid that I had rescued, and it was supposed to follow me back to the starting point, but it wasn't doing so. It had rolled 30 yards from the trawler and simply stopped. I ran all the way back to the beginning of the game, and returned, and nothing changed. So I experimented by killing all the sandpeople (kind of like Anakin Skywalker), and as soon as I killed the last one the segment ended. The mission leader showed up, walked over to the droid, and said, "Good job."
They should really design these games so that you can win them without killing anybody at all.
But the last mission I was able to finish the level and escape without killing anyone. I used the Force to trick half the bad guys into being my allies, and they would open fire on anyone who shot at me, but what's a Jedi to do?
I called the boys downstairs to see the results screen. Enemies killed: 0, use of Mind Trick: 97.
The "not killing" thing defintely doesn't hold true with robots, but it does hold true with wild animals. In the next level I went to great lengths to avoid killing the Ice Monster, but unleased pent up mayhem on the Imperial Probe Droid. Hey, I work with computers.
Will my example make a difference? If I make my way through the entire game without killing (almost) anything, will my boys learn the value of digital life? I don't know, and maybe I won't get all the way through the game - after a while these little puzzles lose their ability to hold my interest. But maybe it will make them think twice about the mass slaughter in this game. Well, at least my oldest boy. My youngest, uh, no, I'll have to wait for time and karma to do their slow work on him...
For some reason I got this momentum going in December, and rather than let it flag I keep driving it forward through the various projects facing me. I have an endless list of the stupid things, and I'm not sure about what drives me to carry out one project over another. I cleaned my entire basement because my desk was messy - where's the logic in that?
But whatever causes these projects to pop up in my queue - a few years ago I spent a week steaming wallpaper off the basement walls without any idea why that project had suddenly become the most urgent - I'm now elbows deep in my latest: replacing my Linux fileserver. I'll try to keep the geek quotient to a minimum, but you have been warned.
The idea behind having a file server is to have a central household repository of information. For example, I want to put all our digital pictures on it with some mechanism to make them easy to browse: digital photo albums with which we can torture guests who overstay their welcomes. Also, I'd like to serve audio and video files from it: pull up any song or video that we own from anywhere in the house. Finally, I'd like to be able to back up all of our home computers onto it.
The idea behind having it be Linux is primarily because I need to keep my Linux skills sharp. That's half the reason I do half the things I do around the house, computerwise: just to keep my hand in. You let these skills go for too long, they fade, and you find yourself replaced on your job by some kid whose first computer was a Pentium 2 processor and doesn't remember any presidents except Clinton and Bush Jr. So rather than setting up an all-Windows household (which bears its own risks), I deliberately make my life difficult so that I can learn from it.
Anyway, my current Linux fileserver used to be my Linux firewall, but I replaced that at the start of this project. Right now the Linux box receives and sends mail, serves the web pages you're reading, and stores my unix archives from many years. However it's rather old and about 50% likely to have already been rootkitted (translation: taken over by hacker software), and everything on it is in need of upgrade. So I bought a new one to build from scratch, leveraging lessons learned in the interim. This makes the upgrade easier, since I can switch between the new and old fileservers at will.
I'm setting up the new server with RAID 1 (translation: mirrored drives [translation: it has two hard drives in it that both contain all the information on the computer, and it reads and writes from both of them simultaneously]). The idea behind this is that if one drive blows up, you don't lose anything. And since I want to store EVERYTHING on this computer, that kind of reliability is important.
Actually, it's kind of amazing: I build a 3.4 GHz Intel SATA RAID computer with dual 200 G hard drives and a Megabyte of RAM for under $1000 dollars. (Translation: I got a big fast computer, cheap)
So okay, I'm setting up this computer, and I run into some problems.
First is this thing called SATA RAID. Don't worry about what it means, it's not important. The important part about it is that I tried to get it to work with Linux, and it wouldn't. In trying to figure out the way to make it work, I discovered that it's junk. Apparently even if it worked with Linux, the SATA RAID doesn't work as well as the RAID that's built right into Linux itself, so despite having purchased this computer specifically with SATA RAID, I'm not going to be using it.
So I start trying to set up the built-in Linux RAID, and immediately suffer a lethal case of deja vu. See, I've done this before, more than once. Unfortunately, each time I've done it the period between installations has been so long that I forget everything I learned the last time. Its been four years since the last time, and I indeed had to re-learn the whole process again.
There are lots of tricks to it, most of which would defy non-geekly translation here. One is "partitioning", which is kind of like internal walls built into the Titanic that were supposed to contain water entering the ship through the hull. It works about as well as the ones in the Titanic did, too. Well, setting up those partitions is part of the RAID process, and as the RAID process is itself rather tricky, partitioning RAID is doubly tricky.
The other problem is this: with mirrored drives, you have to tell the computer "Read and write everything from both drives at once." This is exactly as if you put two blank books in front of someone, and expected them to read and write out of both books at the same time. The catch is, that the instructions to read and write in this manner have to be written in the books.
Now, if you have no other way of telling the reader that they need to read and write from both books at the same time, what is that reader going to do? That's right: pick one of the books, and open it first.
So there's no way to COMPLETELY mirror the drives, because you have to put the instruction "Use Both Books At Once" into just one of the books. (Just accept for a moment that you can't put that instruction in both books - you have to specify which book to open first).
So ONE book is "more equal" than the other. The problem? If that book - if that hard drive - is the one that blows up, well, you don't lose any information... but your computer doesn't start. Well, I'm picky - not only do I want to not lose any information, BUT I also want my computer to keep working, completely, if EITHER hard drive blows up.
So it took me forever to come up with something that would boot. First I tried to use the SATA RAID (as mentioned), then when that didn't work I tried to set up Linux' built-in RAID. I thought I did everything correctly, and I had, but then I figured out that I hadn't turned off the computer's setting to use its built-in SATA RAID. When I did that the computer booted. But by the time I'd figured that out, I'd tested so many different configurations trying to fix the wrong problem, that I had the system in a configuration I didn't really like.
So I started over, reconfigured the system again, tried a couple things that didn't work, and finally got the system up and running at 2:00 a.m.
Unfortunately one of the last setup steps is to configure your monitor. The installer said "860X600" which is pretty small, and showed a picture of a montor with only a small box in the center illuminated. I grabbed the control lever and pushed it all the way to "11", which then showed a monitor fully illuminted. I clicked "GO".
My monitor went black, and a little floating window said "Frequency over range."
Great! Now I couldn't see my screen! How could I fix it?
Ah, but this is a Linux box! i can log in remotely!
I logged into the box from another computer, and realized I was facing a problem that has plagued my entire computing career.
I have no idea how the Linux graphical interface (called "X", conveniently) works.
You'd think I'd've figured it out by now. It's decades old but it's still around, which in computer terms is like finding a trilobyte in a suit working the window at the post office. So with all this time to decypher it's workings, I never have. "X" continues to befuddle and elude me, and never more so than tonight. Addled with fatigue, I poked and prodded at several likely configuration files, and managed to lock up my computer.
Great. Reboot, try again. And again.
And now I reboot... and the computer won't reboot. It tells me that the hard drive partition -- the instruction in the book that says "Read and Write Both Drives"? -- has crashed. Unrecoverably. Kaput. My primary fear regarding this kind of disk setup, and I hit it after only ten minutes of operation.
So here I am, reinstalling the operating system... AGAIN. It's 3:00 a.m., and if this thing boots when I'm finished I'm going TO BED.
But I'm LEARNING. That's the important part. I'm keeping my skills sharp! No upstart 22 year old who doesn't know George Bush's father was also president is going to steal MY job away from me.
Unless, of course, he knows how to fix broken "X" configurations without destroying his root partition...
Randy Moss goofing around in the end-zone last weekend is not a sign that our culture is collapsing. The fact that our local news and press spent much more time covering the actions of this capering nitwit than they did covering the death in Iraq of Dwayne Bellanger McFarlane, THAT'S the sign that our culture is collapsing.
A Fire Support Specialist in the 15th Artillery's 10th Mountain Division, McFarlane's story was very common. Raised by his uncle on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, McFarlane joined the Army in the hopes of getting money for college. Instead he is dead. Coverage of his death is actively suppressed by our government, which doesn't want the public to see his coffin arrive, or his grieving family. And the local infotainment industry is complicit by deciding to promote coverage of a dancing fool over the real news of a soldier's death.
What astonishing national complacency.
Sitting here at church two-thumbing an entry. Spectacularly rude of me, but I don't care.
I like being part of this church, but I don't like going to services, for several reasons. I'm not a big fan of our ministers: I find both of them too intellectual, their sermons rather dry, unemotional, and academic. Others would disagree with me, I'm sure, but it doesn't make me want to sit through their services.
But it's a good church, with a good religious education program despite its challenges, and I'm glad we can send our kids there. I usually feel too busy to want to go to church myself, but after spending the last several weekends cleaning the basement I'm taking it easier this weekend: sort of a weekend-weekend. So I'm sitting here at the service, rudely thumbing a journal entry on my cell phone.
See, here's what I'm talking about: today's sermon seems to be about 'naming' and the meaning of names. The minister read a delightfully patronizing commentary by James Luther Adams about how an atheist's faith in their atheism is their way of worshipping God. I'm sure it's only going to get more abstract from there... 'This radical openness is the subtext of the entire mystical tradition.' Why am I here listening to this nonsense?
Yesterday was fun, and much more concrete: Keith and I took my eldest son out for his first Geocaching trip. It was a ton of fun. We visited three sites. The first one on the river bluffs near our home was one that Keith and I had visited unsuccessfully before. We had no more luck this time, but spent a good hour climbing up and down the icy cliff faces. I scaled the bluffs twice, which made for a good workout.
We found a curious series of fire-pits down there too. We couldn't figure out whether they were hobo camps or not: some clearly were, sheltered fire pits surrounded by trash. Others were not sheltered, and seemed to be built of green wood cut by chainsaws. Hobo's with chainsaws? It was hard to tell.
The second cache was a 'virtual': rather than finding a hidden jar or box, you have to find and report on some clue that already exists. In this case it was an odd half-bell monument on Nicollet Island that had a plaque bearing the cache keywords.
We went for lunch at Kramarczuk's since we were in the area, then went in search of the third cache, which was way down in Veteran's Park by the airport. That was a very good cache, easy to find but tricky. I have to admit that I was so excited about finding my first actual cache that I forgot to let my son find it! Next time for sure!
We headed home, I got some wash going and got my ironing done. My friend Gio says I'm the only person she knows who irons clothes. Watched "To Die For," which was a lot less funny than I thought it was supposed to be, and a lot more about the abuse and neglect of children than I would have expected. It was the first of many movies this weekend, more movies than I usually watch in a month.
After "To Die For" I still had some shirts left, so I loaded in the first half of "To Have and Have Not." Lauren Bacall could teach some of the people in Hollywood how to act.. and this was her first screen appearance! Va-va-va-voom! And the writing - it was subtle, understated and witty! Wow. It really cast a pall over everything else I saw during this long weekend of movies. Bogey, now, it was interesting, he looks great in every grim scene, but when he tries to smile it's downright scary.
So that was fun, and then last night my wife and I braved the cold to see 'I 'heart' Huckabees', which was easily the wierdest film I've seen in years. What else can you say regarding a movie about two competing teams of philosopher-detectives?
Today, church followed by breakfast, meaning that we didn't get home for four hours. Then laundry washing and sorting (fortunately no more ironing), followed by a late dinner. Watched the rest of "To Have and Have Not," which ended abruptly about what I would have thought was 2/3rds of the way through the movie.
One amazing thing about TH&HN were the constant parallels I saw between Bogart's character and Harrison Ford's "Han Solo." Both were recruited into a fight they were trying to avoid... and both end up shooting a bad guy through a table.
Some final laundry sorting to do, and we tossed "DareDevil" into the VCR. Astonishingly dark and brutal movie, lots of death, very grim.
So that's the weekend. If you've read this far you clearly got a good night's sleep last night, so you're ready for the week ahead. Me, I so don't want to go to work today, I can hardly stand it...
I received two private comments on my lack of comments on here, so I thought I should re-explain: when some imbicile spammer tried to post spam comments to this blog, he locked up my whole computer. Since I can't have that occurring, I had to disable comments.
However, fear not! Comments shall return. The computer presently hosting my blog (and other things) is being replaced. I'm building the new system right now. And so part of the reason I haven't bothered to update the blog software on here is because I'm building new over there.
But speaking of "no comment," I noticed that over the past couple of days, Hollywood Liberal Julia Roberts (Forbes estimated fortune of $145 million) donated one million dollars to tsunami relief, and Compassionate Conservative George W. Bush (Forbes estimate of Bush family fortune, $440 million) donated ten thousand dollars, or exactly one percent of what Roberts donated.
No comment.
Oh yeah. The other day I stated that TJ Myers, the adoptee searching for her birthfather on Fox's "Who's Your Daddy?", looked like "a washed-up C-list actress." That was rude and uncalled-for, but as it turns out it's also true...
Eventually, everything backed up to my desk. My basement was so messy I couldn't remove anything from my desk. That's somewhat like being so constipated you can't close your mouth. So I decided the time had come for the long-delayed Major Basement Clean-Up...
We have four rooms in our basement, five if you count the laundry room which is more like an alcove off a hallway. We have the Kids Play Room, my Office, my Workroom, and the Big Unfinished Room. In the center of these is the staircase up, and the laundry room beside and beneath it.
In order to clean the basement, I had to begin by cleaning the Big Unfinished Room. This had become the Repository for All Junk within our house, and was now practically impassable. It had not been helped by a series of floods last spring, the first when our pump failed, the second when the float of the new pump became wedged against the sump wall, and the third when my attempt to prevent further wedging failed.
So the Unfinished Room was a disaster area - upended furniture, soaked and dried carboard boxes, paper and pop cans from some sleepover that got out of hand at 3 a.m., and dominating it all in the middle of the room the dehumidifier up on the stump of an old dining room table, staving off mildew. (Thanks for the dehumidifier Mom, you probably saved our house!)
The whole family pitched in on the Unfinished room, and in one day it was in resonable order. On to the next.
The next room was the Kids Game Room. It was a wreck because tons of old toys and games had accumulated and gathered dust. Since the Unfinished Room was clogged, the old toys couldn't be moved out of the Game Room. A weekend was spent with soapy water and ammonia, washing all surfaces and all toys. Then unused toys were stored (neatly) in the Unfinished Room.
Then, on to the Workroom, which couldn't be cleaned earlier because nothing could be moved out into the Game Room or the Unfinished Room. It had accumulated its own set of boxes, old computers, chairs, and junk. Another weekend was spent removing everything from the room (to the Game Room for sorting), cleaning out the dust and spiderwebs. Finally I had to come up with a new storage scheme before I could put stuff back in - otherwise I'd just be back where I started.
In a fairly pathetic scene, I nostalgically packed away all of my telephone wiring (accumulated since the early 1980's), all my serial cables (accumulated since the late 1980's), and all my SCSI cabling (accumulated since the early 1990's). Nowadays they are all useless, replaced by wireless telephones, USB cables, and Firewire. The whole back wall of the room is stuff To Be Donated, which I'll get out of there soon I hope...
Pant pant.
So finally I came to the Office. Couldn't clean the Office because lots of what was in the office needed to be put into the Workroom. But the Workroom had been in chaos, so everything was backed up onto my desk.
I emptied junk from the Office to their new places in the Workroom. Then I used that space to sort all the papers that had built up. Then I used THAT space to sort all my CDs (packing about 100 away for eventual disposal). Finally I moved a bunch of stuff out of the closet and into the Unfinished Room, and sorted all my investment letters from the past year into their folders.
And finally, with all that done, I was able to put away the stuff from my desk, into the Workroom... which is where this all started about a month ago.
Next... the attic!
But the moral of the story is... we are truly owned by our possessions!
I've been chary of mentioning this year's resolution, because last year's resolution went so badly and of course it's the same one.
Well, I also don't want to mention it because it's so mundane. You can guess. Yep, I want to get in better shape.
Two years ago... or is it three? I resolved to go to the gym every day. And I made it through the entire month of January, after which I gave myself "a break" and completely lost the rhythm.
The year before last I tried to repeat. Unfortunately before February I got a wicked case of the flu which kept me out of the gym for six weeks. When I finally went back my locker rental had expired, and everything in my locker had been thrown away. Since my phone number and contact info were on my locker rental agreement I think it wouldn't have killed them to let me know they were going to discard my belongings. That annoyed me so bad I didn't go to the gym for several months.
Last year I tried again, but what with the collapse of my stupid business my heart just wasn't in it.
But now this year is looking better. I'm working steadily, I'm not broke, my locker rental is paid, and I just finished the Cold from Hell. Hopefully I can make it through January AND February without missing a day.
And I did well over the holiday break: I actually LOST five pounds over the holidays, just by eating less. Basically if I wanted to eat something tasty, I ate one bite. When I had a meal, I had one serving with no seconds. And I skipped a lot of meals, which probably isn't best but seemed to work out.
So for the past few days I've been hitting the gym, and I'm pretty satisfied. My rowing speed is way off from its records of 5000 meters in 20:00 minutes. But on the other hand I was able to run a mile. Not quickly, I had to pace myself to what was basically a trot, but I was able to run the mile.
And I've set up an exercise routine with more variety. I've been rowing for the past several years, and just slogging my way through 5K rows from 22:00 down to 20:00 across six months is no fun. So I spent my time yesterday reviewing all the equipment and building an exercise plan with as much variety and randomness as possible.
Hopefully I'll be able to stick to it - I'm planning to at least. I need to turn working out into a way of life, rather than something exceptional. Because if I don't get my health in shape, I'm going to end up on high blood pressure medicine. Or worse.
I'm not a dwarf who's looking for love. And I'm not a single person seeking love from a field of twenty candidates, half of whom are secretly gay. So I really thought I was safe from Fox.
Of course, nobody is safe from Fox. Because, while I'm not a female whose had too much work done, I am a reunited adoptee. So tonight, I'm watching "Who's Your Daddy?"
Now, it started off with three strikes against it. First, it's on Fox. Second, it's named after an expression for exuberant sex popularized by Amanda Peet in the awful film "Whipped." And third, the woman contestant, "TJ," looks, well, just terrible - too much make up, too much hair treatment, too much everything. She has the right to look however she looks, but I guess I'd have an easier time taking her seriously if she didn't look like a washed-up C-list actress. Of course, I suppose that washed-up C-list actresses have birthfathers too, so I shouldn't judge.
2005-01-05: I added the links above after the fact - yes, believe it or not the woman I felt bad about labelling as a washed-up C-list actress is in fact a washed-up C-list actress.
But I'm watching, I'm having to watch. How can I not watch this horrorshow?
There are elements that resonate with my own experience. When TJ first met the eight men who might be her father she seemed overwhelmed by the whole experience - the TV production, the apparent surprise at the structure of the show, etc. But when she eliminated the group from eight to four men, then I got the sense that it hit her: she'd met her father, she'd evaluated him, talked to him, and correctly selected him into a group of four. I could tell he'd suddenly become real to her.
And I could understand the searching, the process of peering into the faces of the potential birthfather's and saying, "Is it you? Do you look like me? Are those my eyes? My teeth?" That's familiar.
The rest of it is torturous. I know she agreed to this nonsense, but it seems wrong to put a person through this. If you know which man is her father... tell her! Don't screw around!
But in a way it reflects what the nation does with the whole issue. Everybody is allowed to know who the birthparents are, except the adoptee. The agency knows. I sat there with my caseworker on the other side of the phone, playing a game just like this one. I remember asking, "Will you tell me the first initial of her first name? No? The SECOND character of her first name? No." I wrote out forty questions and grilled the caseworker on each one, and got nothing. Nothing. Like TJ on this program, the agency played games with me. The caseworker refused me while staring right at the answers I was looking for.
And people wonder why I'm furious.
Fortunately I can do something with that anger. The Minnesota Council for Adoption Reform (MCAR) is organizing legislation in Minnesota this year, laws that will hopefully provide unrestricted access to their birth records for adult adoptees.
I've been trying to send letters to the Star Tribune about this issue, but so far they've failed to print any of them. I guess I'll just keep trying.
Meanwhile the show has ended, and yes, she was able to figure out which of the eight men was her father. It was interesting to see her confidence increase as she went along - she was completely certain by the time she made the final selection. They brought out his daughters, and also her birthmother. It was very emotional, as planned.
Of course, no mention whatsoever was made of the adoptive parents, which was just plain wrong.
And the money? The hostess mentioned that she'd won $100,000 and TJ didn't seem to care.
Maybe I'm a bigot - maybe looking like a washed-up C-list actress, and being foolish enough to put your life on prime time TV like this, maybe that doesn't mean you don't know what's important in the end.
Went on a bit of a trip this afternoon and came back with a lot of stuff for not very much money.
First we needed to pick up a mattress to replace an old one. My wife discovered Twin Cities Free Market and we've been using it for some time. In this case, a family in Minnetonka had exactly the mattress we were looking for.
I headed out and soon found myself wandering what used to be rural lakeshore paths to family cabins, but what was now a set of narrow suburban streets leading to rather run-down former family cabins. I'd called ahead, so the mattress I was looking for was actually positioned outside the garage, waiting. Tossed it in the car, told a child who answered the door to thank her parents for me, and I was away. Total time, five minutes, total cost, zero.
Next I stopped off at the Micro Center, since it was on the way home, in order to see what kind of Christmas returns might be on sale. While their clearance bins were full to overflowing, no combination of need and savings synched up to compel a purchase, and I was on my way out, when I stopped to glance at their advertising sheet. There was a listing for memory for my cell phone, with $30 off with two rebates.
Now, I'd just seen that memory in clearance bin, so I grabbed it and headed over to the customer service desk. Could I get these two rebates on this clearance memory? Yes, the lad behind the counter told me, I certainly could.
So I got in the 15-minute checkout line, and sure enough the cashier didn't want to give me one of the rebates. So there I stood, the prototypical pain-in-the-ass guy-at-the-register, while everyone in line behind me sighed dramatically.
Now, my sister in law is a haggler par excellence, and shares many a tale of how she has browbeaten retailers into practically paying her to remove goods from their store. So with her in mind I held my ground: Look, I went to the service desk before getting in the checkout line in order to assure I would get both rebates. Phone calls were made. Rarely used input fields were adjusted. Eyes were rolled, but in the end, yes, they knocked $10 off the clearance price on the memory.
There then followed a brief comedy as I tried to get the self-service rebate-printer to print the form for the second rebate, but shortly thereafter I left the store. When the rebate comes in, sometime in 2067, I will have paid about $35 for a full Gigabyte of memory for my cell phone. Of course, by that time a Gigabyte of memory for my cell phone will cost 25 cents and come rolling out of the dispenser in a plastic egg, but regardless, I have had my meaningless consumer victory for the day!
Total time, two hours, total cost, $35.
Well another year is here, and we're now a full day past the midpoint of this miserable decade. I'd say it's all downhill from here, except that it feels like it's been all downhill until now anyway.
We spent a very nice New Year's Eve with our friends Terry and Kathy - although I was a bit sad because my daughter spent her first New Year's Eve away from her family, seeing fireworks with her friends.
The rest of us started the evening by watching "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra," a very very silly movie that can only be faulted for trying a little too hard at times.
Afterwards we played "Fictionary," a parlor game (i.e. not in a box) which involves picking odd words out of their huge unabridged dictionary and making up definitions for them. I got "ogak," and helped my youngest boy with "bayardly."
Eventually midnight rolled around and all the teenagers partying in the basement (Terry's son is a college freshman) emerged briefly to toast the New Year, and then escaped before they could catch any old-person cooties off us.
Today we visited my mother's for our family Christmas. It was very nice, and everyone really liked the family portrait. My sister knew that our mother wanted a new portrait, so she invited everyone to the Northtown Pro-ex a few weeks ago for a sitting. Unfortunately the sitting was abysmally shot by some overworked high school girl, leaving us with an expensive set of proofs, none good enough to use for a portrait.
So I spent a day last weekend scanning and piecing together a portrait from the best pics of each of the eleven of us in the shoot. The result is a really excellent portrait that never existed. I moved people around, swapped bad expressions for good ones, increased the lighting, and cleaned up a lot of teenaged zits.
Finally I took the finished 24 Megabyte image around to several places. Stupidly, I tried the Kinko's in Stadim Village. I know, I know - "what was I thinking?" - well, it was nearby. Sixteen dollars of wasted computer time later, I emerged having re-learned the lesson that Kinko's is where people work who aren't nerdly enough to get hired at Radio Shack. I tried a lot of other places, too, including a Ritz Camera, another Kinko's, and even another Pro-ex. All of them blinked stupidly at me when I described the outrageous concept of printing a photo-quality image off of a CD.
I was on the verge of purchasing my own photo-quality printer when I walked into a Pro-ex in the Minneapolis Skyway and without batting an eye was assisted to print my photos. Apparently a few intelligent people DO get hired by Pro-ex, you just have to find them.
So the pictures went over well, as did Family Christmas.
Now it's 2005. We'll see what the year brings. Last year I hoped for some things and planned for others. This year, I'm ready to take what comes...