Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Wednesday, December 31, 2003 Reader Mail Slot, Episode XX Okay, my year in review: got a new job. Let's move on. When I started doing the Humpblog on Wednesdays, it never occurred to me that Wednesday might actually coincide with the last day of the month every now and then. So I didn't have a policy in place for such an eventuality. Should have planned ahead. Of course, if I ever planned ahead on anything, a lot of things would be different around here. But I digress. In any case, I've decided that on such days, Reader Mail will take precedence. There are three reasons for this. 1) Reader Mail's been around longer. 2) You, the reader, are more important than any collection of random, undeveloped tidbits I might throw together. 3) Reader Mail entries are easier. It's amazing the things one learns as a web writer. For instance, if you want to get a lot of e-mail, lie and say your cat has diabetes. This is vastly preferable to waiting around for your cat to get diabetes and then writing about it, but I didn't realize that after it was too late. It seems a lot of people have experience with diabetic pets, and were kind enough to share. We appreciated hearing from you and getting your support. Like this message from Rill: The thought of stabbing my kitty twice a day was too much to think about, especially since the thought of needles leaves me rather nauseous at the best of times. The first few injections were hard to do, but soon it became easier, especially since Balthie got to the point of actually looking forward to the damn shot (as he knew he'd be gettin' food at the end of the whole exercise). Strange when you'd pull the insulin out of the fridge and he'd hear it in the next room and come wandering in and up onto the kitchen table on his own in an insulin-driven Pavlovian response. At that point I knew that it wasn't bothering him too much. Good for you and Balthie. Too bad Strat's such a prima donna. He knows perfectly well it doesn't hurt, and yet he writhes around, yowling and clawing and spitting, every time we get him up on the counter. Then the insulin goes in and he screams like he's auditioning for a job in a haunted house, and we release him and he hides behind the sofa for the next eight hours. What a faker. Okay, that doesn't really happen. Especially after the vet told us to quit giving him the injections with a turkey baster up the anus. As for Strat's Pavlovian food response, more on that in a few days. Duncan says, He looks like a cutie, especially in the 2nd picture. I'm sure he'll be fine though with you and Trash looking after him. A diabetic friend of mine tells me they are supposedly pretty close to a cure for it, something to do with injecting people with pancreas cells, which reactivates the diabetic's own pancreas. That'll be cool. It would be nice to have our eight o'clocks back. We've tried to be careful not to neglect Orca in our concern for Strat. At first we thought she was grouchy just because he was suddenly getting so much attention, and that her annoyance was exacerbated by our suddenly giving her so much more attention to keep things even. But now we realize that she just doesn't want to be a pancreas donor. We've told her not to worry—such a day is weeks away at the earliest. These e-mails only represent a fraction of the outpouring of support we received in response to our sick cat. A lot of you have been there. Fortunately, not as many people have rolled their vehicles off an icy road. At least that's how I choose to interpret the more meager response to the near-death experience of a human being. Apparently Dawnie came closer than anyone: Tell your SIL to buy a Bug. You can take it off the shoulder at 80 (on dry, non-snowy, non-icy roads), and it will NOT roll. Even though you're convinced it will. (Yes, I know this from experience.) Although, you'll have to get the undercarriage pretty much taken apart and put back together replacing key elements, and it won't ever be quite the same again (the damn check engine light will develop a mind of it's own and come on sporadically), but it won't roll. Round for a reason, baby, and that reason is Safety. I'm not entirely clear on how roundness precludes rolling, but I confess ignorance in the face of Dawn's experience. Although if her car had rolled, I imagine it would have been pretty easy to tip upright. Simply fill the gas tank. Seriously, though, I'm glad she's OK, and I can imagine how freaked out she must have been. I'm going to make all of my friends read that to make them drive safely this winter. Thanks to Dawnie for telling her friends to drive safely, so they can survive and come back to my site. Stupid SiteMeter doesn't count dead readers. That's what I get for using a free hit counter. Which reminds me, if you find yourself tempted to drive tonight after one too many snorts of hooch, just stop a minute and think about the dent it'll make in my stats if you get t-boned. Try not to be so selfish, people. It's always nice when you can point to a study that proves something you knew all along, but those in the embarrassing position of not owning a think tank generally have to wait for someone else to do the studies for us. So it's even better when one turns up that you don't expect. Like this one, courtesy of Uli: Having read your holiday entry, and the old one in relation to the hot dog maker, I thought you might be interested in this link; hot dog makers were voted the most useless Christmas gift by the Australian Consumer Association magazine, Choice. I was indeed interested. As was my dad on Christmas Day after he opened his new hot dog cooker (decorated with a nautical theme in honor of the boat he and Mom purchased this year) and a printout of the chart was enclosed. I love how it's literally the only item on the list that nobody wants. Vindication! Plus it marks the first time that something sent to me by a reader ended up under my parents' Christmas tree. What I said earlier about Reader Mail being important? I wasn't just blowing smoke up your pantleg there. Today's best search phrase: "Cheat codes for gutterball." How bad a bowler do you have to be if you need to cheat to get a gutterball? posted by M. Giant 12:37 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, December 29, 2003 Light it Up Driving home from Christmas at my parents' house, Trash turned to me and said, "Are you tired?" "Too tired to reenact that scene in The Chase when Kristy Swanson crawls on top of Charlie Sheen in the driver's seat at eighty-five miles per hour, if that's what you mean." It wasn't. Good thing I didn't say that out loud. What she meant was that she wanted to drive around and see some Christmas lights. I was up for it, but it was almost eleven p.m., I had to "work" the next day, and I didn't want to spend two hours repeating the holiday-light-quest experience of my neighbor Mr. Lileks. Fortunately I knew exactly where to go. The previous weekend, when Chao and the Disqueen were in town, I'd driven the latter to Chao's gig. It was in the basement of a Mexican restaurant in Inver Grove Heights, a southeastern exurb that's more than halfway to Hastings. We'd just taken our exit when we spotted the beams of one of those four-way searchlights a couple of miles ahead. That must be the place, we thought. Nice of them to make it easy to find. The place was in fact several blocks past the searchlights, but that's neither here nor there. After I'd dropped her off at the venue and said my goodbyes, I went to see what the searchlights were all about. So that's how I knew where to take Trash on Christmas night. It was about a twenty-minute detour, using a couple of roads I'd never been on, without bothering to pull out the map, but we found it with little difficulty. We exited Highway 55 at Concorde Road and headed north. There were no searchlights ahead, which worried me a bit. What if we'd missed it? What if all the lights had been turned off at 10:30? What if that golden nimbus being reflected against the underside of the cloud cover was coming from something else? Then we got to where I vaguely remembered the turnoff being, and my doubts were quickly extinguished. Nothing else was, that's for damn sure. Several blocks of this residential neighborhood were still lit up like the Griswolds'. We agreed that it had been worth the detour, even before we got a gander at the giant Santa Claus in someone's front yard. You're thinking, "Oh, big Santa. So what." I haven't yet illustrated how big this Santa is. It's three stories tall. It's bigger than the house it stands in front of. It wouldn't be out of place in front of a used-car dealership. Steve Fossett could fill the thing with helium and fly around the world. If Godzilla came ashore here, he'd spot this beast and turn right back around, having abruptly decided to be good for goodness sake. And yet it says something about the quality of lights on the other houses in the neighborhood—or at least the quantity—that the thing wasn't even visible a block away amid the riot of decoration. Every house on every street radiating from this landmark was festooned with decorative illumination. A few houses had thrown the switch for the night, but we could still see the life-sized nativity scenes and vaudeville-hook-sized candy canes skewered into their yards. But the most jaw-dropping concentration was in the cul-de-sac temporarily designated as "Santa Lane." Coasting slowly through this artificial daylight amidst other carloads of holiday rubberneckers, we felt our hair beginning to stand on end from all the electrical current flowing around us. It felt like standing under a high-tension power line, and our eyes were giving us a reasonable simulation of what we'd see if we bit into one. There were illuminated garlands, trains, reindeer, polar bears, elves, and Baby Jesi everywhere one looked. There was a Santa effigy behind the wheel of an actual RV. There was a board listing sponsors, and a Fotomat-sized booth that was set up to take food donations. Trash thought this was a great place to get ideas. Which it was. Just not practical ones. I mean, I suppose I could custom-build a slipcover out of grid lights that would fit over our entire house, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to. After taking in the sights of a neighborhood that made the Vegas strip seem tasteful and restrained by comparison, we headed home. The first time I put lights on our house was the year we moved in, ten Christmases ago. Ours was the only house that was lit up. It still has the most lights, but it's far from the only one. A dozen other houses on the block have at least something glowing on their property, which is a dozen more than there were eleven years ago. I'm quietly dragging the block along, and we're making progress. Who knows what it’ll look like in a few more years? Someone else is going to have to find room for the three-story Santa, though. Our yard isn't big enough. Today's best search phrase: "What is the flat black growth on my cat's ear." As is commonly known, most cats are secret agents. Yours has foolishly allowed his microdot to be seen, which means he's been compromised. Proceed immediately to the nearest embassy or consulate, request asylum, and ask them to notify the State Department of your predicament. A new cat will be issued to you within the hour. posted by M. Giant 12:07 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:lame
By Thursday, December 25, 2003 Home for Christmas Merry Christmas! So, last Christmas I said something about a Christmas story for this year. I say a lot of things that I never follow up on. This isn't one of them, however. See, every other year I write a Christmas-related short story for my wife. They have varied widely in quality, but they're always Christmas-themed. Here's this year's. * * * "Home for Christmas" It was already dark by the time Jennifer got home. Not unusual at this time of night, this time of year. What was unusual was the house as she approached it; the dazzling array of lights illuminated the front yard and made the rest of the houses on the block almost literally invisible by comparison. Bemused, she let herself in, her shoulder brushing against the wreath hanging from the front door. She dropped her bag at her feet. Bing Crosby's voice flowed like honey from the stereo speakers: "I'll be home for Christmas...You can plan on me..." Even without that perfectly-timed lyric, Jennifer would have smiled upon seeing the inside of the house. More strings of lights hung from the ceiling, and fragrant candles filled the space with the aromas of pumpkin pie, eggnog, nutmeg, cinnamon, and Douglas fir. Or perhaps that last one was coming from the actual Douglas fir standing in the corner. The tree was perfectly shaped, beautifully trimmed, and an ideal illustration of why people say things are lit up like a Christmas tree. Underneath it was a pile of colorfully wrapped presents. About half of them were ones that Jennifer had wrapped herself. Looking at them, she was glad she hadn't waited until the last minute. Dave appeared out of the kitchen and kissed her. He kissed her a long time. "You're home early," he finally said. "Not exactly," she answered. "You know what I mean." He was still holding her. "So would you like eggnog, hot cider, mulled wine? They're all ready." She laughed. "Eggnog, please." "Coming right up." He reluctantly released her and scurried into the kitchen. She wandered over to where their stockings were hanging. Both were stuffed full, although hers had been all but empty when she'd left. Apparently he'd made good use of her absence. She picked up all the snow globes and shook them, one by one, and watched them all settle at the same time. The Bing Crosby song drew to an end. "I'll be home for Christmas...if only in my dreams." Dave reappeared with a tray holding half a dozen steaming mugs. "I didn't want to leave again when you wanted something else to drink," he confessed. He set the tray on the coffee table, then got them each a cup of eggnog. The sat on the couch and clinked glasses. "Merry Christmas," Jennifer said. "Welcome home," Dave said. The drank. "I can't believe the way the house looks," Jennifer said. "It looks like Christmas Eve," Dave said. "It looks like the night you had to go." "I remember." "Good." "Dave, that was eight months ago." "I know." "But you kept everything out." "Yeah." "And dusted." "Well, yeah." "And no way is that the same tree." "No, it dried out. I had to buy a new one and decorate it again." "How many times?" "About once a month. They kept turning yellow on me and I didn't know when you might be getting your leave." "How did you hang all the ornaments back up without me here to keep you from clumping them all together?" "I took pictures." Jennifer looked around in amazement. All the light in the room was coming from either candles or tiny Christmas bulbs, but she could still see the tears in his eyes. "Christmas doesn't happen without you," he said. "It's good to be home," she said. "Merry Christmas," he said, and she kissed him. When she was done, he said, "Let's open our presents. Then we can do your birthday." * * * "I'll Be Home for Christmas" music by Walter Kent, lyrics by Kim Gannon and Buck Ram. All lyrics are the property and copyright of their respective owners. All lyrics are provided for educational purposes and personal use only. posted by M. Giant 9:41 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, December 22, 2003 Holiday Humpblog Doing the Humpblog early this week, even though it's only Monday evening. But I've got something else planned for Wednesday, and who knows; maybe the week is half over for some of you, what with the holiday coming up and all. * * * I've previously mentioned our Christmas Village, which in previous years has been an Avalanche Village, and which this year is a Blackout Village. Chao and Disqueen--who came to town the year that Avalanche Village made its debut--came up from the Quad Cities this weekend to do a little shopping, and also so Chao's band could play a gig in Inver Grove Heights. I think this visit was part of the reason Trash went to the trouble of setting up the village at all. She wanted them to see that our Christmas Village could be a functional community, albeit one with no electricity and a majority of citizens who would be too tall to fit through any of the doors. I believe Chao was suitably impressed. They left Saturday night after Chao's gig. The next morning, Trash noticed something odd about Blackout Village. It has been overrun by the military. We don't know when, we don't know how, but somebody has clearly declared martial law in Blackout Village. Apparently the incidence of nocturnal looting and murder has gotten out of hand in the absence of power, and now the streets are swarming with heavily armed troops. There's artillery and everything. And neither Trash nor myself can remember leaving our guests alone long enough for them to have pulled this off as expertly as they did, which means it must have happened in the middle of the night. So much for Christmas Village. So much for Avalanche Village, and even Blackout Village. Welcome to Christmas Baghdad. * * * Speaking of our offbeat holiday traditions, check this out (may require registration). That's us. You can read a longer version here. Trash sent in the item a couple of weeks ago. Amusingly enough, DragonAttack was the one who notified me about its appearance: ANYWAY, I was just working, and by "working" I mean, "reading the Star Tribune" and I was looking over the Christmas traditions that people sent in, and I saw one about a family that exchanges an ugly cookie. The same ugly cookie has been exchanged for years. So I'm all, "Where's the hot dog cooker story?" I love that one! And lo and behold, what do I see but your First Christmas ornament story instead. Ha! The fact that you have at least two hilarious stories of that ilk makes me think that you guys should write a wacky children's book. I would buy it. Excellent idea. That'll be our project for 2004. Unless we forget, of course. All of our traditions sometimes get in the way of creating anything new. * * * People who subscribe to the official e-mail newsletter of the show I work for got to read this last week: Our writer loves the holidays because he gets to watch his wife bake all of her [25] favorite kinds of cookies in one day. And we love him because he brought us an entire tray heaped high with them all. Ninety per cent of that tray was gone by the end of the day, by the way. And the remaining ten per cent was still fresh and tasty when it disappeared the following day. We've still got a few trays in our kitchen; these are the ones that go to people we haven't seen for the holidays yet. I'm not getting nearly enough recognition for my restraint in not mooching from them. Somebody should make some kind of gesture to show their appreciation. A Nobel Peace Prize should cover it. * * * Boston Market Grilled BBQ Chicken Sandwich update: Deniece's parents were in town over the weekend, and my brother-in-law, having read my description of this delicacy, had to try one for himself. He was immediately on board the Grilled BBQ Chicken train, and we clinked sandwiches as if they were wineglasses. Alas, there are no Boston Market franchises near their home in Des Moines. After having that sandwich, BIL may be thinking about starting one. * * * Today's best search phrase: "How to stalk Kiefer Sutherland." It's really not any harder than stalking Lou Diamond Phillips or Woody Harrelson. That dangerous badass he plays on 24 is only a character, you know. Just apply what you learned while stalking Charlie Sheen and Kevin Bacon, and you'll be fine. posted by M. Giant 4:49 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, December 19, 2003 Deniece at 23 Months I know there's all sorts of crazy text on my site right now. Crazier than usual, I mean. I don't know what's going on. I'd fix it if I could. Actually, let me clarify that. I'd fix it if I knew it would take me less than thirty seconds to do so. Since it won't, I'll put it off and blame Blogger. Maybe it's because I changed the font size. I try to make things more readable, and look what happens. I mean, suddenly all of my quotation marks and apostrophes have to be perfectly vertical? What's that about? And if I want to use a letter with an accent mark, like é, I can just forget about it. Please bear with me, and I'll try to fix the gibberish issue, and if you can just be patient and stick with me through this I'll send you a free @$%*§^&€# after it's all over. * * * My niece Deniece turns two years old a month from tomorrow. This is, of course, the period of development referred to as "the terrible twos," a year when the only word the child seems to know is "NO!" That won't be the case with Deniece, much to the relief of all. She's already past "no." She has mastered "No. Way." And situations that call for the heaviest rhetorical artillery get the dreaded "No way, José." I didn't pick that up until I was five. I don't mean to make it sound like she's gotten any less pleasant, because she hasn't. We also have to factor in all the people and gifts and general sensory overload and lack of naps and car-accident-aftermath-witnessing she had to contend with this weekend, whereupon it becomes amazing that she didn't resort to violence. Hell, by the end of the weekend, I wanted to lie down on the floor and cry. Most overwhelming was the Saturday night gift exchange at Trash's mom's house. And Deniece was kind of overwhelmed too. She opened one gift early: an toddler-sized electric keyboard complete with bench, music stand, gooseneck microphone, and--get this--black keys that work. This was from her aunt, my sister-in-law, who is an inveterate eighties-music fan. I'm going to have to give Deniece a guitar for her birthday to counteract SIL's influence. Deniece spent her infancy thinking she was a soul star, but if SIL has her way she's going to be heading into kindergarten thinking she's a member of the Pet Shop Boys. At the end of the evening, one of Deniece's larger gifts came out. She was thrilled and grateful for each and every one of them, and wanted to take them out of the packaging immediately. We adults were reluctant for that to happen; some of these things came with smaller pieces and accessories that would have disappeared forever into the chaos of spent boxes, ribbons, and wrapping paper. Deniece didn't see it that way. She wanted it open now, thank you. No, now. No, now. Is it open? Is it being opened? No? Then we're going to throw down. Of course, Deniece, being not quite two, doesn't figuratively throw down when she gets mad. She literally throws down. As in, she throws things down. Only one thing to do: bring out the next big gift. Wow! Look at that! That's so amazing! That's so cool! You want to open it? How about later? Yeah, we'll open it later. Uh-oh. Next gift. Repeat until child is exhausted or adults run out of gifts, whichever comes first. And guess which comes first? The great thing about children at Christmas is that moment when they're transported in total amazement, before phrases like "batteries not included" and "some assembly required" sink in. And the great thing about that moment with Deniece is hearing a twenty-three-month-old human saying: "Oh. My. Gosss." Today's best search phrase: "Naked snowblower." Um, I wouldn't recommend that. After five minutes you'll be able to steer the thing with your nipples. posted by M. Giant 2:50 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, December 17, 2003 Humpblog (12/17/03) First of all, thanks to everyone who sent messages of support after my cat Strat turned up diabetic. I will answer all of you as soon as possible. I got this diabetic cat, you know? Cut me some slack, already. We started his injections Monday morning and he's doing really well. It's amazing how an immediate reward of soft food and tuna will make a cat amenable to an injection he doesn't feel anyway. He's a trouper. I think it's already having an effect. One of the symptoms of diabetes is weakness in the back legs. Well, tonight I spotted him on top of his six-foot kitty condo for the first time in months. Which is made even more remarkable by the fact that the thing has been stashed away in the basement since we painted the bedroom weeks ago. I wasn’t expecting to see improvement in him so fast, especially when his daily insulin dose is barely enough fluid to smear a the dot on top of an i. Stay tuned in the future for detailed accounts of injections, glucose levels, and other incredibly boring minutiae. You won't get them, but stay tuned anyway. * * * I didn't spend today in a movie theater watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in one sitting. I had to be at work all day. That makes me kind of sad. Then I remember that "work" was writing a radio script, and I feel better. I hope to see Return of the King on Friday. All these schedules and obligations. We hates them, yesss, my preciouss, we hates them! * * * My favorite sandwich is Boston Market Grilled BBQ Chicken. Not that I say "B B Q" when I order it. I do say "no tomatoes," which never works, but the sandwich is still worth it. It's this big, messy, sodden packet of chicken and sauce and bacon and sauce and cheese and bun and also sauce. They put so much barbecue sauce on this thing that it soaks the paper they wrap it in and it looks like they're handing you a bag containing some gory battlefield trophy. Not only is it tasty, but consuming it allows me to absorb the strength and courage of my fallen enemies. Well, not really, but it did endow me with another stamp on my Loyal Customer Card, which is just as good. My enemies are pussies, you see. * * * 'Tis the season for cookie trays. Normal people coalesce into loosely-knit federations called "cookie exchanges," wherein each member makes an obscene amount of one kind of cookie. It all goes into the pot, and then everyone in the alliance gets a share of every kind of cookie. It's quite clever and efficient, which is why normal people do it. Then there's my wife. Trash and her friend "Blaine" get together every Christmas and make cookies. Lots of cookies. The tradition started like nine years ago, when they set aside an entire three-day weekend and made about a dozen batches of goodies. They'd fill it out with things like store-bought candies and low-effort chocolate-covered pretzels, but it was still a lovely collection. Over the years, the process has been refined and streamlined to the point where last Friday, they made twenty-five different varieties of treats in less than twelve hours. That's cleverness and efficiency on an entirely different order of magnitude. Lest you think that they broke into an abandoned restaurant or school cafeteria or something, let me assure you that this takes place in a suburban residence with a standard kitchen, meaning one oven, one stove, one mixer, and one microwave. Hundreds--nay, grosses of cookies ensued. Then they were distributed among an array of hubcap-sized gift plates that were soon groaning under the weight of a staggering collection of cookies, brownies, bars, chocolates, fudge, truffles, tortes, and every other sugary baked good imaginable short of Krispy Kreme. It's like a one-way cookie exchange. They didn't just make a lot of cookies. They made all the cookies. I'm totally serious. If you live in the upper Midwest, every Christmas cookie you eat this holiday season was made by my wife and her friend. They told me to say "you're welcome." * * * Technically, the date above is a very historic date. No, I'm not talking about the Hobbit movie again. Just imagine a "19" before the "03." At today's attempted reenactment of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, the historically accurate replica of the Wright Flyer never got off the ground. I heard the story on NPR this evening. I love when they use audio from the scene: Aiplane: BRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAA... Crowd: "Awwwwww." And this surprises whom? I seem to remember reading somewhere that historically accurate replicas of the Wright Flyer have never flown. Not that I doubt that the Wright Brothers made it into the air one hundred years ago today, but even they couldn't reproduce their results when they got their flying machine home to Ohio. They had to redesign it to get it to work under normal conditions. The only reason they flew in the first place was the 21-mph headwind with 30-mph gusts. This doesn't diminish their achievement, and what they learned on that day and subsequent days was invaluable to our understanding of aerodynamics. What they needed in Kitty Hawk today was a couple of big ol' Hollywood wind machines. Get the air flowing over those giant model-airplane wings at sixty miles and hour and it could have hovered over the rails. Alternately, it might have been fun to see someone try to fly an F-14 Tomcat exactly 120 feet in exactly twelve seconds. There's something you don't see every day. Anyway, if you want to commemorate the centennial in a way I had a hand in, read this. It may not be one hundred per cent historically accurate, but look where historical accuracy got us today. * * * Hey, check out this collab thing called Fa-la-la-la-las. A whole bunch of web writers are doing entries about their favorite Christmas songs and then getting them linked up via this portal. It's neato. I did one too, which represents the first time I've ever participated in an online collab. Of course, I kind of cheated by having them link to an entry I wrote last year, but then I am nothing if not lazy. Check it out and look at the other entries by people who were good enough to follow the rules.  * * * Today's best search phrase "Smite force thousand peasants ugly baseball bat." People complain about how easy it is to learn how to build a bomb or whip up some anthrax on the Internet, but when someone wants to forcefully smite a thousand peasants with not an ugly stick, but an ugly baseball bat, nobody says a word. Won't somebody think of the peasants? Especially the pretty peasants? posted by M. Giant 8:22 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, December 15, 2003 Over the Shoulder and Through the Weeds Christmas is not a day in our family. It’s not even a week. It’s a month. And sometimes it seems even longer. This past weekend, Trash and I drove down to celebrate Christmas with the Iowa relatives. All of Trash’s family on her mother’s side is down there now, except for her sister, and Trash’s mom was hosting her first Christmas in her new home in Lacona, which is like Grover’s Corners without the 24-hour-a-day cosmopolitan bustle. On Saturday afternoon, Trash and I were on our way there in our car, following her brother in their uncle’s pickup. The last stretch of road was a little scary; as far as I could tell, ten miles of two-lane blacktop had not been plowed, salted, or sanded since the last snowfall. The posted speed limit was 55, but we kept to around forty miles an hour. Soon we arrived safely and the only thing we had to worry about was that there was no spinach dip for the Hawaiian bread. Trash’s sister was about a half-hour to forty-five minutes behind us, the only one in her vehicle. On the last curve of the icy road, not two miles from my mother-in-law’s house, her 2003 Saturn VUE began to skid at forty miles per hour. My sister-in-law fought for control, but at the inside of the curve her car slid off the right-hand edge of the pavement, went onto the shoulder, and kept going. It was already listing to the right on the uneven ground when one of the passenger-side tires went into a rut. That was enough to stop the tire’s sideways skid, but not enough to arrest the vehicle’s lateral momentum, and it started rolling. It rolled one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half revolutions before coming to a stop on its roof at the bottom of the ditch, not three feet from a fencepost. The airbag never deployed; she didn’t hit anything in front of her hard enough. My shaken, inverted sister-in-law scrambled out of her seatbelt and kicked out the shotgun window. She walked uphill to the road, where a couple of people had stopped. She was still there when Deneice and Deniece’s mom pulled up a few minutes later. The calls that came into my mother-in-law’s house a few moments later were rather confused. Cell phone coverage is not great there—the "can you hear me now" guy would have himself a richly deserved apoplexy—so while SIL was on her cell phone to MIL’s land line, other SIL was on her cell phone to BIL’s cell phone. At first we thought Denieces’s mom was in the ditch with Deniece, and then somehow the actual situation was conveyed to us. Trash’s brother, her stepfather, and I piled into our respective vehicles and headed out to the scene. We arrived only a few minutes before a Warren County deputy sheriff, and he arrived only a few minutes before the wrecker came. The deputy took a bunch of pictures for the police report. The snow tracks made it fairly easy to analyze the scene, which is why there’s no CSI: Anchorage. Then tow truck driver attached long cables to the exposed undercarriage and slowly pulled the vehicle upright amidst much crunching. That was about all SIL could take before I drove her on to her mother’s house. One thing I’ll say for Saturn SUV’s: even if they’re easier to roll over, they hold up remarkably well throughout the process. I looked inside and apart from an expectedly spectacular degree of organizational disarray, it was pretty intact in there. I was also oddly surprised to see that when a vehicle is upside down, the steering wheel isn’t on the left side any more. That was a little strange to see. Most of the contents survived, aside from part of a set of bar glasses. Even the tubs of laundry detergent only sprung pressure leaks. Basically the car is a tank clad in plastic. BIL and SFIL salvaged almost everything and brought it along to my mother-in-law’s house. Dinner and gift opening were a bit delayed, what with the paramedics stopping by shortly thereafter to make sure SIL was all right, but she got through the rest of the day. SIL is pretty much okay now, considering. She was both laughing and crying on the side of the road, getting over her shock, and when her "I’m gonna die"-sized dose of adrenaline wore off she was pretty sore. She later said it felt worse than getting stuffed into a sleeping bag and then being slid headfirst down the basement stairs. And having grown up with my wife, she knows what that feels like. She went to the doctor earlier, and he said she’ll recover. She starts physical therapy tomorrow. When she wants to look to one side she has to turn her whole body. As for the car, Despite a Saturn VUE’s internal fortitude, the plastic shell turns out to only be good for one roll, so the vehicle is probably totaled. SIL says about how she felt beforehand something was going to happen to her this weekend. Rolling down the hill she figured she was done for. She remembered her cousin, who died in a car accident in Iowa a year and a half ago. And we talked about how we were all so glad that it hadn’t been worse, that she hadn’t been seriously injured or killed. We’re also glad Deneice didn’t see the actual accident; she saw SIL walking around, and then she saw her car. Yesterday she was saying "auntie's otay" and "tires in the sky. 'Member?" She’s just old enough to have a partial grasp on what happened There’s a lesson in all this, of course, during a time of year when it’s easy to get caught up in all the gift-exchanging and traveling and cooking and all of the attendant stress, and the rushing around and trying to remember everything and getting everything done on time and getting to where you’re supposed to be on schedule. That lesson is this: don’t give glass barware for Christmas, because it’ll never survive a rollover. Also, bring your own spinach dip, because if your sister-in-law winds up in a ditch upside-down nobody’s going to care about that shit. Today’s best search phrase: "north face outlet, last years cheap stuff to satisfy dianne." If Dianne’s so hard to satisfy, I’m not positive that last year’s cheap stuff is going to do it. I’m just saying. posted by M. Giant 6:39 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, December 11, 2003 Who Are You Calling Geriatric? Strat hasn’t been thin since the year we got him. He was an eight-month-old (give or take) street cat. Half-starved, with his white fur, pink ears, and pink nose, he looked like a huge, long-legged lab rat. Or a hideously deformed rabbit. He matured and grew into his role as house cat. He adjusted to his promotion from derelict vermin to pampered prince. In other words, he filled out. He grew a belly. He was quite proud of his belly. He liked to show it off. When company came over, he’d flop over on his side and sort of pat it. If that didn’t draw attention to it, he’d commence cleaning it. Ostentatiously. It was like he remembered the days before it was there, and now he appreciated its presence and what it represented. “Look,” he seemed to be saying. “My people love me. You can tell by my morbid obesity.” Eventually we put him on a diet. We started feeding him and Orca a fixed amount of food each day instead of filling their bowls whenever they asked. They went on an exercise program whose primary task was chasing the red dot from a laser pointer. Strat lost weight. Got normal again. In 1999, we went on a two-week road trip. We gave the housesitter strict instructions not to feed them soft food more than once or twice the entire time. Judging from the furry white bowling ball that greeted us when we got home, we could only conclude that that aspect of the instructions was ignored. Back on the diet. Back on the exercise program, which had been lagging. It’s tough to get a nine-year-old cat back down to fighting weight when he’s pulled a Jerry Lewis like that, but we didn’t give up, and a couple of years ago he was able to climb up onto his six-foot-tall kitty condo again. 
Above: Strat, circa July 2002. Partial view of Orca in upper right corner. A few months ago, Banana checked in on the cats when we were gone for a weekend. “Has Strat lost weight?” she asked in the note she left us. That would be nice, we thought, but Banana has three feline bruisers of her own. In comparison to that trio, who she sees every day, Strat must look less Brando-esque to her than she used to. Last month, I was sitting at the computer and he wound himself around my ankles, a sign that he wants to be picked up. I hefted him into my lap. But I didn’t feel it in my stomach or chest like I used to. He was definitely losing weight. I told Trash. We wondered if we should worry. But he wasn’t acting sick or unhappy or pissed off. He was vomiting less than ever, and the catbox wasn’t any more foul at the end of the day than it used to be. We agreed to keep an eye on him and make an appointment with the vet if it continued. Last week, we made an appointment with the vet. I told the vet’s assistant about Strat’s weight loss, and the lack of an apparent explanation thereof. She put him on the scale: ten pounds, two ounces. Not underweight, by any means. Then she checked his chart to see how much he weighed last year. Fifteen pounds. He’d lost almost a third of himself. I don’t know how we missed this. If there had been any other signs of ill health—any—we would have caught it right away. But we never weigh him, and it’s not always easy to notice weight loss in someone you see every day. That doesn’t stop us from feeling at least a little bit like bad cat parents. The vet found a dental cavity that might have been making it difficult for him to eat, but she didn’t think that could account for all of the weight loss. Hyperthyroidism was more likely. She drew some blood and sent it off to the lab. The results would be in the next day. The following afternoon, I called the vet’s office to see what was up. The person on the phone pulled up Strat’s record. I heard typing. Reading. More typing. More reading. And some thinking. “Let me see if the doctor’s available,” she finally said. Oh, shit. After that scare, it was a relief to learn that Strat is only diabetic. We’re starting him on a new low-sugar diet today, and twice-daily insulin shots next week. This morning the vet showed us how to do the injections, and she made it look easy. Strat himself didn’t even feel it. The vet assured us that after a week or so it’ll be second nature and we won’t worry so much about accidentally driving the needle out the other side of the skin fold or mistakenly giving him an embolism or inadvertently doing a biopsy on his liver. We’ll have to bring him in once a week until his glucose levels get balanced, which could take a couple of weeks or several months. And we’ll have to adjust to the injection schedule. That part is going to be harder for us than for him. You’re supposed to do it at the same time every day, twelve hours apart. That means getting up at eight, even on weekends. It means staying home until eight in the evenings, or being home by eight, or schlepping him around with us, which I don’t really think he’s going to go for. It means having a used-sharps container in our kitchen with a big biohazard logo on it. Mainly it means having a diabetic cat. A geriatric, diabetic cat. Yes, geriatric. At the first appointment, the vet said she wanted to rule out other diseases that geriatric felines are susceptible to. “He’s not geriatric,” I said, covering his ears. “He’s only thirteen.” Apparently that means geriatric. Anything over eight is geriatric, apparently. Which seems ridiculous to me. That represents two-thirds of some cats’ lives. It’s absurd to think of someone who still chases flashlight beams, who gets very confused about gravity after a few huffs of catnip, who can’t figure out how to get the last of the milk out of a glass, as geriatric. I was old enough to drink when he was a baby, and now he’s older than me in cat years. I’m not sure when that happened. Strat has no idea what any of this means. All he knows is that he’s had to go to the person we call the “professional kitty friend” twice in the last week, and he gets a lot more soft food. Like, a lot a lot. Orca seems sort of sullen and resentful about the situation, but we can’t read much into that because it’s her default state. Meanwhile, just picking up Strat is a little bit scary because it’s so easy. Although with all the soft food he’s been getting, he already feels a bit heavier than he did yesterday. We can do this. We’ll do what we need to do to get Strat’s blood sugar down to the 80-120 range, as opposed to the five-figure number it is now. We’ll help him pack the pounds back on so I don’t forget when he’s lying on my chest. He’s our little guy, and it’s our job to look out for him. I kind of wonder who would be giving him injections every twelve hours if he was living on the street, though. 
posted by M. Giant
6:02 PM
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0 Comments:Sunday, December 07, 2003 It’s All Material Home ahead of schedule, in more ways than one. Backstage at the show last night, my boss said, “There are no bad experiences for a writer. It’s all material.” Which is true, and I knew that already, even the night before when I was having material out the ass. It’s not every web writer who can complain about a weekend in which he stayed at someone else’s expense in a beautiful hotel room forty-eight floors above Times Square with windows to the west and the north. But then, if you read every web writer, you’d never get anything done. The plan was to work on the show in New York this weekend and spend a couple more days in town, a sort of semi-working vacation. Trash would come out and join me and see the show, and we’d have the rest of the weekend and Monday to enjoy the city, take care of some Christmas shopping, see our friends and my sister, ice-skate at Rockefeller Center, and head back home with our hearts so full of Gotham-inspired Christmas cheer that we would have no choice but to vomit. It was a great plan going into it. On Friday morning, the snow had already begun to fall, but visibility was still two miles on our final descent into LaGuardia. By the time our cab to the hotel was cutting through Central Park, the place looked like a greeting card. Trash was still at work at that point, but she’d be catching her plane at the end of the business day. The company members went to the venue and set up the office stuff in preparation for the boss’s and the actors’ arrival on a plane that was due just a couple of hours after ours. We’d have our standard Friday evening rehearsal and I’d be at liberty to hook up with my wife afterward. In the early afternoon, snow hadn’t even accumulated in Times Square. The constant weight of footprints and tires on every square inch of pavement there kept it ground into a thin layer of slippery gray paste. People were just starting to scoop snowballs off of truck fenders and closed hot dog carts. It was still early. A slight wrinkle arose when our technical director called the airline to see if our boss’s plane was on time and was informed that the flight’s cancellation would make a timely arrival unlikely. The boss ended up landing in Hartford, whereupon he and the actors rented a car and attempted to drive to New York. When traffic proved that unworkable, they ditched the rental car in a river and hopped a train. Rehearsal was scrubbed, and the scripts that I was supposed to spend Friday afternoon printing and copying didn’t arrive in my inbox until after 10:00 p.m. And since I couldn’t get an Internet connection going from my hotel and I couldn’t work in the venue office after hours, it was off to Kinko’s at midnight in the snowstorm. At least they gave me a plastic bag for the copies. That was one of the nicest things that happened all evening. How did Trash react to having my job cut into what was supposed to be a free night on the town? She took it remarkably well. Partially because she was still home in Minneapolis. Her New York flight had also been cancelled, and she had also booked a Hartford flight. But then Hartford closed, which almost caused her to cancel her trip until they offered her a flight into Newark the next morning. We were much happier about that until that flight was cancelled as well. When they suggested she get to New York by taking ground transportation from her new destination of Washington, D.C., that was when she gave up. Just as well, otherwise she’d probably still be trying to figure out which train to take to New York from Miami. We were so excited about our first trip to New York in the winter, and then it turned out that New York in the winter van be kind of a bitch. And let me tell you, there’s nothing sadder than a married man traveling alone with a suitcase full of sex toys. Trash’s disappointment was mitigated, however, by the evil mood that Friday evening’s events had put me in. At one point, I was walking through Times Square while talking to her on my cell phone, bitching about the futility of my existence. And suddenly she heard my already impressive stream of carping being interrupted by a curse of thermonuclear intensity. The tires of a passing car had just lobbed a dozen fist-sized slush bombs directly into my dress shoes, the only ones I had with me. Not that my socks weren’t already soaked by then, but at least the water in them had been warmed to a few degrees above frigid by my feet. Now I’d been robbed of even that small comfort, and Trash told me that I sounded angrier than I had in years. Mostly because of the cliché factor, I think. Despite the truncated production schedule, we got the show put on, as you may have heard. I offered Trash’s ticket to my sister in New Jersey, but it was still snowing down like a mofo at that point and DeBitch the Younger didn’t think much of her chances of making it into the city. Lawre and Josh came and saw the show as originally planned, and said they dug it, and afterward we went out for dinner and a large amount of Brooklyn Lagers. Which put me in fine form to spend most of this afternoon at the airport trying to wheedle my way onto a flight I wasn’t scheduled for at the end of a weekend when the airport had closed and was now full of people who had been trying to get home for two days. I got on standby, got on a plane, and got home, so clearly my luck turned. And now that I’m home I can bitch to you. Merry freaking Christmas. Today’s best search phrase: “I hate Velcrometer.” Only 546 hits on this phrase. Beats a shoeful of slush. posted by M. Giant 9:30 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, December 03, 2003 Humpblog (12/3) One of my favorite breakfasts in the world is cold pizza from the night before. But room-temperature pizza is even better. When it’s been sitting out on the counter all night and the exposed edges of the Canadian bacon are kind of stiff and crunchy and everything’s all congealed? That’s good times. No, I’m not being ironic. I figured the same principle would apply to one of my favorite hot snacks, pizza rolls. These tiny little envelopes of magma are marvelous straight out of the oven, so how great would they be the next morning? As it turns out, not very. In fact, the term "Snot-Pocket™" comes to mind. If only I could market that. * * * Entertainment Weekly says "shit" now. I’m pretty sure that’s a new thing. * * * Trash and I spent part of Thanksgiving weekend doing holiday stuff: putting up the tree, decorations, outdoor and Christmas lights; wrapping presents, writing cards, baking, and so on. We won’t have any free weekends to do this stuff until early January, which would defeat the purpose. But we did get to just about everything. We did all of our shopping online this year, so everybody we know is getting either a tiny, wireless video camera or something that will help them "smash her walls," whatever that means. I assume it's something to do with carpentry. Trash even got around to putting up the Christmas Village. You know about Christmas Village, right? Those collections of little ceramic houses that people arrange on a table for the holidays with no regard for real-world zoning regulations, and then put a glass dome over it and cackle madly like giant, evil overlords? Normally that’s our last priority. One year we got them all out, arranged them rather haphazardly on the buffet, and then ran out of time and just threw the fake snow blanket over it to keep the cats away. This was what came to be known as our "Avalanche Village." Of course, the main advantage that an Avalanche Village has over a Christmas Village is that you don’t have to take the former down in January. Or February, or March, or even April. An Avalanche Village can be a joy year-round. No Avalanche Village this year, though. While setting things up (properly), Trash noticed that the porcelain denizens of our town tend to rely heavily on equine modes of transportation. Why she wouldn’t let me add a touch of much-needed verisimilitude with a few mini-chocolate chips sprinkled here and there is beyond me. What a Scrooge. * * * Hotmail has changed its look for some reason. I don’t see an improvement. I have to move my mouse further from my favorites list to the inbox tab, so at least my right arm will bulk up quite nicely. But the home screen doesn’t tell me if I have any new e-mails from people who aren’t already on my contact list. Which is where most of my e-mail comes from anyway. I’m not even counting all the links to barnyard pr0n. That stuff doesn’t read itself, you know. Used to be I could just go to the home screen and it would tell me I had zero new e-mails. Now I have to go all the way to my inbox to find out I have no new e-mails. At this rate, the added clicking is going to cost me a good ten minutes over the course of the next few decades. I assume that Microsoft considers this loss of my time to be offset by the benefit of making me look at more ads. Trash has been trying to get me to ditch Hotmail for a few weeks anyway, but I’m still resisting. When you’ve had the same e-mail address for over five years, and it’s on the front page of your website, you get so much spam. It makes a person feel so important. I’m not ready to give that up yet. * * * Today’s best search phrase: "Squirrel caught in a paper shredder." Well, what did you expect? A job like that, what you need is a squirrel shredder. Duh. posted by M. Giant 4:59 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, December 02, 2003 Closing the Deal For a web writer, car trouble isn’t always a completely bad thing. God knows I’ve gotten plenty of mileage from bitching about my wheels (see what I did there?). Of course, it’s still inconvenient and kind of a pain. But there’s one kind of car trouble that’s a web writer’s best friend. And that, of course, is other people’s car trouble. When Trash’s brother and his wife came up to Minneapolis to help us paint our bedroom the weekend before last, they drove her car instead of his. They don’t normally do this. He hates driving her car--a sporty little red number that he trusts as far as he can carry it--under any circumstances. Normally he insists on driving his Jeep, and that’s what they generally come to Minnesota in. My sister-in-law knew something was up a couple of weeks ago when he asked her if he could borrow her car. This is like somebody asking to be beaten. Especially if the person in question has heretofore displayed an aversion to beatings. Much of BIL’s change in attitude towards their respective cars came about on a day when he opened the driver’s door to his Jeep and it fell off. The door, I mean. In his hand. Normally when somebody pulls off a car door in the movies, it’s a display of superhuman strength. In this case, it was a display of a broken hinge, and absent superhuman strength, a car door is heavy. So my brother-in-law, who is strong, but not superhumanly so, found himself in the position of having to swing somewhere between one and two hundred pounds of glass and steel back into its precision-engineered latched position with nothing to guide it but a single (newly bent) door hinge. Which he managed, but one looks less suave doing that than pressing a little button on your key chain that results in a jaunty chirp. BIL figured this was probably a good time to take care of a few other minor problems with his car, as long as he was going to have to get it repaired anyway. Off to the parts store. He called his uncle (who by an astonishing coincidence is also Trash’s uncle), who is also having trouble with his pickup. The pickup in question is a different model from the engine inside it, so getting parts for it can be a trial. Brother-in-law and Uncle-in-law spent much of the day driving to every auto parts store in the greater Des Moines area. Which is roughly equivalent to driving to every office building in Midtown Manhattan, but let’s try to keep things moving. Every place they went, UIL would have to get out of the shotgun seat so BIL could clamber over and follow him. Occasionally, there would be a moment when BIL would, out of habit, reach for his door handle, and feel his heart drop toward the pavement one second behind the door. Then Uncle-in-law would have to get out, walk around, and lift the door from outside to help him get it closed again. And Brother-in-law would still have to clamber over the seat to get out the other side. After all this driving, eventually they had to stop for gas. BIL pulled up to the pump. UIL waited for BIL to get out and pump the gas. BIL waited for UIL to get out so BIL could get out and pump the gas. "You gonna let me out?" he eventually had to ask. The height of a Jeep’s window makes a Dukes of Hazzard-style window entry impractical. So did the suit BIL was wearing when he made the biggest sales call of his career the next day. Being a guy whose favorite movie is Glengarry Glen Ross, BIL likes to make a positive impression on prospects. Although the door was still broken, BIL had been able to replace a couple of brake parts. Sadly, he was unaware that it is customary to clean off the packing grease before installing them. This didn’t prevent them from functioning, mind you. Packing grease burns off, after all, especially if it’s on brake parts and one is applying the brakes on the way into the parking lot of an important potential client. That it tends to burn off in a cloud of smoke reminiscent of the atmospheric entry effect in Independence Day is in no way a safety hazard. It does, however, tend to make the driver hope that the potential client’s window isn’t on that side of the building. As does the need to clamber over the center console and exit via the passenger door. BIL has been experimenting with ways to do this and still look cool. Right now the favorite method is lumbering over, pretending to search for something in the glove compartment, and then getting out on the passenger side because, hey, you’re there anyway. You know. Like people do every day. Like you did this morning, probably. Someone from inside the building was holding the door open when BIL got out of his car. "Everything okay?" the guy asked. No word yet on whether the deal is closed. posted by M. Giant 3:20 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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