Feral Living

2004-02-27T05:35:00.000-08:00

2003-04-04T06:07:00.000-08:00

2002-07-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

Still here? Go check out Raising Hell: Send them your Hellish Summer Stories.

2002-04-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

Shoes
The Feral Living Shoe Project (see the remains of the old one in the right sidebar here) has been moved to a site of its own here:
http://feralliving.surreally.com/shoes/

Please update your links, thanks. (And send your shoes to miguel@surreally.com)

2001-12-18T00:53:00.000-08:00

New URL!
Feral Living has moved, please update your links to http://feralliving.surreally.com and go there now! Thanks a million to D. and Ann for all their help with design and coding, and thanks a million more to kd for generously giving me a subdomain. I'll be leaving this blog up for some time yet, most likely quite a while, to be more precise, until the archives and the Shoe Project are moved to their new home. Happy holidays.

2001-12-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

Live from the Feral Living redesign
A total of sixteen AIM windows are at this moment open to my crack team of various designers and coders, all working feverishly to put the finishing touches on the redesign of Feral Living as I try to add useful comments. Is the grey too dark or too light? Which font? Verdana, I think, or Trebuchet? Trebuchet. It looks so good, folks. And it will use Moveable Type. Mena rocks. And her husband ain't bad either. I can't wait. Tomorrow? Tuesday at the latest. Stay tuned.

2001-12-16T03:51:00.000-08:00

Stalling
Still have a headache. And my alien parasite is suddenly refusing the Lederhosen.

2001-12-15T10:41:00.000-08:00

Apologies
Sorry, nothing funny happened today, and I had no interesting thoughts. Maybe tomorrow.

2001-12-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

Bazima has moved!
Update your links.

2001-12-14T04:47:00.000-08:00

Cold,II
Coldest day of the winter so far. Birds are falling out of the sky, frozen solid, and skidding along the street like hockey pucks. My wife, who grew up here and is somewhat more accustomed to cold weather than am I, who grew up in the milder winters of SW Washington State, brought home a tube of this liquid wax stuff you can apply to the rubber seals of your car doors to keep them from freezing shut.

"Here, you go put it on the doors," she said.

I protested that I had bronchitis but it was no use. So I went outside, making noises and waving my feet at the cats to keep them from going outside (two of the three cats are under house arrest) in my sandals and sweat pants and a coat. This should only take a minute, right? I was not being a good sport about this, though. I felt it was unfair that a sick man be sent out into the cold like this. I kicked off my sandals and stepped into the garden clogs standing on the porch. I turned to head down the steps, and instead nearly did a somersault. The garden clogs were frozen solidly to the porch.

With some effort, I broke them free and went to the cars. The doors were already frozen shut, but not too bad. I got my door open. I looked at the liquid wax dispenser. It looked like one of those shoe polish things; size of a toothpaste tube, but made of medium-hard plastic, with a sponge at one end.

I squeezed and squeezed, and nothing came out. Eventually, I gave up and read the directions:

"Shake well, and apply evenly to the rubber seal of your car door."
Okay.

Think, Miguel. (It is cold out, remember?). The shoe polish things work like this: you squeeze them, some polish comes out, is absorbed by the sponge and you use that to spread it over the shoes.

But none came out. I squeezed harder. Nothing. I pulled out the plastic plug holding the sponge part to see if maybe there was some seal in place that you had to remove after purchasing before you can use it. But, no seal.

So I held it up to the door seal again, and gave it a manly squeeze, and it went "pop!" as the plug and sponge part shot out, and two-thirds of the contents sprayed over the side of the door and the driver's seat, and me.

Upon contact with air, it dried instantly. Or maybe it just froze.

I returned to the house, having a Looney-Tunes freakout, demanding paper towels, which Alpha brought me while Beta held the cats to keep them from escaping.

I cleaned it up as well as I could, but it was dark and I couldn't really see what I was doing. Eventually, I figured out how the wax dispenser worked - you have to press it up against the rubber seal, which presses down a valve it seems, allowing the wax to flow. I got the drivers doors of both cars waxed, returned to the house, thawed out.

This morning I finally got a good look at my car, in the light. It looks like a mastodon tried to mate with it. But the door opened on the first try.

2001-12-13T11:39:00.000-08:00

Comments? We don' need no steenkin' comments!
Um, comments are down again. Snor comments had worked so well, too, after everything else I crashed died sooner or later. For the time being, leave any ~~snide~~ witty remarks in the "anti-blog" at the top, or one of the other two boards there (the orangeish areas there, see them?). They are run by QuickTopic and have, so far, always worked perfectly. Rumor has it that Feral Living will be moving soon to a new less-buggy host using Greymatter, which has comments built-in, so this should just be a temporary thing.

2001-12-13T02:06:00.000-08:00

Feral writing tip XIV
[Long shot of village in snow, with light snowfall; passersby walk along sidewalk, slipping and sliding on ice. Zoom slowly to closeup of windowsill on one of the houses, with snowflakes falling on it; inside, a cozy living room can be seen ] "It's been snowing."
[Medium shot of large pile of used kleenex; in background, nurse in short white uniform walks past, out of focus] "I have bronchitis."
[Camera pans to reveal Miguel in Liberace-type dressing gown, sad expression on his face, lounging on the sofa, blogging with his laptop. Nurse, played by Charlize Theron, comes into view. She sets cup of hot tea and lemon slices on table beside sofa, gives Miguel shoulder rub.] "I am home sick from work today."
[Quick cuts showing glowing PC monitor with 12 windows open, all full of spreadsheets and a woman's fingers flying across the keys as she telephones simultaneously with Japan and America; a girl beating up a boy in school; two aggravated-looking elderly people] "Alpha is at work, Beta is in school, Gamma is at her grandparents."
[Medium shot of three cats, large, medium-sized and small, sleeping in the exact same positions on a sofa, kicking their legs as they dream of doing the Moon Walk with Danny Partridge] "The cats are sleeping."
[Camera follows nurse through house as she fluffs up pillows on bed, then prepares attractive platter of cold cuts and fresh bread, smiling all the while] "I think I'll take a nap too, then make lunch."
[Camera pans to window; it is now spring outside, and Julie Andrews is singing "Favorite Things"] "I had toast for breakfast. For lunch, I think there's still a piece of leftover appel strudel lying around somewhere."

[Writing tip: If you have nothing interesting to write, try livening it up with screen directions.]

2001-12-12T02:02:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday, kd!
kd is the wonderful woman behind the group blog surreally.com, where they save on bandwidth by not using any capital letters. I remember the old days when surreally consisted of just her and Mic, and everything was black and neon, and written in some tiny font size that made it look cool yet hard to read. The font is larger there now, so I no longer need my glasses to read it, and the group of contributors is far larger too - somehow kd has built up an extremely active community of disparate personalities around surreally. Good going, kd, have a great birthday, enjoy your margaritas and don't forget to eat something.

2001-12-12T00:44:00.000-08:00

"One bad motor scooter"
I forgot that I submitted this URL to Blog You for review. I submitted it, retracted it because I was planning a redesign, then forgot all about it. But Blog You never forgets. Worst of all, both reviewers get it, unlike other reviewers who shall remain nameless and un-linked. Blog You gives me nothing rancid or ignorant to get all upset and huffy about. I mean, listen to this: "he has a nice way of stating the obvious without it reading as such".

What more can you ask for? Go there now.

2001-12-11T09:44:00.000-08:00

Which sexy, witty blogger are you?

Looking for the 100% Miguel test? Click the banner above for the original post. (If you are going to link to the test - and please do - please link to the original post, to avoid any confusion. Thanks!)
We've been told that some people are having trouble with the test. If you can't get this one to work, try one of the following mirror sites:
100% Bulletproof Punk
100% Surreally
100% A Fire Inside
100% Melly
100% Opinebovine
100% Slanted
100% BobtheCorgi
100% Peace Dividend
100% Tripe
100% Words Mean Things
100% Xkot
100% Joeri
98% Melissa
100% Netdork
100% Virtual Pamela
100% Billegible
100% Ooh, a ceiling!
100% A blog with a name that keeps changing

2001-12-11T05:25:00.000-08:00

A life, how to get one
When I was a boy, I wanted to be a hermit when I grew up. And here I am, a hermit. Austria is my Montana, it is my desert. Here I am, a Stylite with a laptop, pecking away.

Do you think it would make sense for people from less-developed nations to start sort of a Peace Corps program in reverse, sending aid workers to developed countries to teach us how to be happy with less? I always have.

When we were building our house, I worked two jobs. I had 16-hour work days. I walked 20 miles to school, barefoot, in the snow.

I have since scaled that back to full time. My wife works part time. That's a luxury. Elective unemployment should be possible. As a reader said in comments to a post lower down, if everyone would work fewer hours and be satisfied with a little less, there would be enough jobs to go around.

For some reason that I don't grasp, this is not done at the present. Instead, we work long and hard if we do have a job (most of us) and are fucked if we lose that job. I think there is a method to this. If people are terrified of losing their jobs, they will be more pliable employees. If unemployment is your greatest fear (and it is my greatest fear, greater than terminal illness - I have been unemployed, and I haven't been terminally ill yet, I suppose) then you will put up with more at work and in the system it is part of.

Laziness and inefficiency will save the world, not efficiency and productivity.

2001-12-11T05:24:00.000-08:00

Snow
[Note: this post about winter in Austria does not contain the phrase "Currier and Ives"]
It's snowing lightly. So it is a little warmer than when skies are clear, meaning there's less ice to scrape off the windshield in the morning and the Dobló, which is a diesel, starts more readily.

When I was a kid in Washington State it would snow a few times in the winter. Rain was more common, but a foot of show wasn't extremely rare. Because we lived out in the country it was never necessary to shovel snow off walks and sidewalks, because we had none. As a kid, I thought shoveling snow would be fun and envied people who got to do it.

It snows more here in Austria, and I have learned to despise shoveling snow. It is no fun, whether scraping (in your pyjamas) a thin layer of packed snow off the sidewalk in front of your house so no pedestrians slip and sue you (the law requires homeowners to clear sidewalks along their property) or digging the car out of drifts 3 feet deep on a windy, cold day.

The snow today is only one inch deep. But soon it will be deeper, and soon it will be time to go skiing. When I was a kid, skiing was an exotic sport for rich kids, and I never went, instead playing hockey in my boots (I could not skate then) with neighborhood kids on a nearby pond when it was cold enough; the only equipment we had that was genuine were real hocky sticks and pucks, given to my busdriver father by the Vancouver Canucks when he used to drive them on charters to games.

Skiing is different here in Austria. Here, every child skis or faces humiliation. Where physical activity in winter is concerned, it is *the* common denominator. My oldest daughter is 12 and her class at school gets a week off in April to go on a school ski trip. Most schools do this. On this trip, not only must she ski well, but also have the right equipment and the right clothes. Kids familiar with the region the class will visit have an additional tangible advantage over the other children, and some families plan their ski trips with this in mind.

We are going on a family ski trip for a week in January, which is good because it will, among other things, give Beta a little practice before her class trip. It will also be the first year for Gamma to go skiing. She is 4 1/2, many Austrian kids are put on skis as soon as they can walk, or at least stand upright. My wife, and her father, are expert skiers by my standard, good skiers by Austrian standards I suppose. I am a lousy skier, but am excused from most skiing due to knee injuries.

We don't only ski in the winter. In the town near where we live there is an outdoor ice rink that's been in operation for a month already; they have hockey games there, some evenings they have an "Ice Disco" for older kids. The generally play music there even during normal hours, and I have seen couples waltzing across the ice. Average people, strangers I knew from my train commute into work, suddenly blossoming into dancers on the ice.

Best of all is when it gets so cold for so long that the creek freezes enough to skate on. Whole families bundle up and trudge through the snow, pulling the littlest ones on sleds, and skate. Kids play hockey, parents teach the younger ones to skate... I learned to skate a few years ago so I could skate with the kids. It's fun.

2001-12-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

Freedom through tyranny
We'll give this another try. Osama Bin Laden or George W. Bush is not the only choice we have, and I dislike being treated as if I were so stupid as to believe it were. An East German truck driver, who drove throughout Europe, said to a friend of mine 20 years ago, "In the West you have unlimited choices in the stores, but no money to buy anything; in East Germany we are guaranteed a job, but have nothing in the stores."

Freedom of choice. Unlimited, within narrow bounds. Freedom of lifestyle, as long as it includes employment. Am I mistaken or are the conditions of employment tougher than they were 20 or 30 years ago? More regimented? More drug testing going on, more surveillance.

In high school guidance counseling was all about finding the right career - that you would want to pursue a career at all was a given, it wasn't even discussed. A career seemed so predictable to me. I know now that this isn't necessarily true, but often it is. Pursue a certain career, which involves a certain lifestyle, house, say, wife and kids, certain car, golf, whatever. I thought once I could, for example, take a job at Coca-Cola or another large multinational corporation. Rise in the ranks. Big house, lovely wife, mid-life crisis at 40. Not too long ago, I met a person who was friends with a Coca-Cola executive, who had led that exact life.

30 years ago, I heard in school that modern technology was making us so productive that in 20 years we would have far more leisure time to pursue education, hobbies, and blogging. The opposite has happened - we work (on average) more hours than ever (in the last several decades at least).

That's part of the reason why I moved away. Pursue a career, or not pursue one and be poor. Worry about health care and educating your children. I moved to a country where it is possible to live a good life without working 60 hour weeks. Where schools are good and everyone has health insurance and jobs are - for the moment - slightly more secure.

Still, although I left the United States more than 20 years ago, I wouldn't give up my citizenship. For all its shortcomings, the United States is superior to any other country I am aware of in terms of the liberties guaranteed to its citizens by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Separation of church and state, freedom of speech - these get lip service in Austria, for example, but they are not as extensive as in America. In this way, I am a patriot. I prize what the United States stands for, and it is tragic to watch men destroy these liberties in the name of freedom.

The Bush machine is frightening, but looks slightly better when compared with murderous terrorists. But that is not the only choice we have. Life is huge, there are vastly more possibilities than that. This is a beautiful place, and we have achieved so much, don't let anyone take it away from you.

2001-12-10T07:33:00.000-08:00

Poll

What is with the 100% Miguel test??

Hey, I'm 100% Miguel too!!
How is this stupid test supposed to work?
Miguel, is this another one of your jokes?

2001-12-10T07:01:00.000-08:00

Tyranny
[Insert the following here: long, thoughtful yet inconclusive post on The War On Terrorism, including quotes such as: "On the one side you have a government that was not democratically elected, that wants to limit individual liberties, which does not want a complete separation of church and state, which wants to keep women at home..."]

2001-12-09T11:40:00.000-08:00

Your suggestions, please
Alpha has given me the green light to go crazy at amazon.com. What should I order?

2001-12-08T15:38:00.000-08:00

"You tend to ride your bicycle into the creek on your way home from wedding receptions, and have been known to rely on humor and pathos when you have nothing coherent to post."

Which sexy, witty blogger are you?

2001-12-08T15:08:00.000-08:00

Alpha is getting jealous
Must move shoe project.
Oh, and so now I'm going to get into more trouble for revealing intimate details. Well, at least I haven't posted about the lava lamp yet, have I?

2001-12-07T23:15:00.000-08:00

what+conditions+must+exist+to+whip+honey
Announcing a new Search Request service here at Feral Living. Please submit your answer to the above search request question in the comments.

2001-12-07T05:34:00.000-08:00

The sinking of the Titanic (progressive parenting, past and present)
Daughter: Dad can you teach me some English?
Father: [!! She's speaking English, not German!!] Of course, honey. What do you need?
Daughter: We're learning verb tenses. Can you teach me the differences between these?
Father: Sure! You know, this is right up my alley. I used to do this for a living, and verb tenses were my favorite part - they're hard to learn until you've learned them, then they're easy. And they enable such elegant nuances of meaning. Look. [Sits down with her and takes book, and paper, and begins to write.] You know, I used to stand in front of the board for hours and write out the examples. I can't teach this unless I write. Heh-heh. Look. Simple present. Something habitual or a quality about you. I get up at six, for example, means you always get up at six.
Daughter: I have dark-brown hair and brown-green eyes.
Father: Yes! Now simple past - begun and finished in the past, usually includes or suggests a time. Time is important. I went to work. When did I go to work? I went to work at seven. Always a certain time, even if it's not stated in the actual sentence.
Daughter: [?] Um... The Titanic sank.
Father: The Titanic sank eighty years ago or whatever. Present progressive. The -ing form. Happening right now. I am teaching you English.
Daughter: The Titanic is sinking. So what's with past progressive?
Father: Eh, was going on in the past when something else happened. An interrupted action in the past. The Titanic was sinking when, uh, the band started playing Walzing Matilda.
Daughter: [??] So the sinking was interrupted?
Father: Of course not, it kept on sinking. I mean, something long and drawn out is happening, and in the middle of it something else happens. Or, yes, something is interrupted. Now past perfect...
Daughter: I have a headache.
Father: No, I have had a headache. Three kinds of sentence: answers the question "have you ever had a headache?" "Yes, I have had a headache." Means at some unspecified time in the past. Time is not important, the When of it. Or, a past action that influences the present - or something that's just happened - The Titanic sank means, it happens to have sunk a long time ago. But, The Titanic has sunk means it just sunk, I mean sank, just now, and that influences the present - cancel your reservations on the return trip or whatever. It's what news announcers say when something has just happened, something big. Get it?
Daughter: I'm tired, I have a headache, I need to go to bed.
Father: [Remembers why he quit teaching.] Maybe we'll do this tomorrow if you feel like it. Future conditional, or something like that.

2001-12-06T23:58:00.000-08:00

Blogger Insider
This week, my Blogger Insider partner E. actually sent me some questions. His answers to my questions are here.

1) What superpower would you like to have?
Apparently, everyone in my family already has the power to disrupt electrical devices.

2) Your best Alpha, Beta, Gamma moment.
Hoo. Let me go answer the other questions first and get back to this one...
Life with them is a series of best moments. Like this morning at breakfast, Gamma, who is 4 1/2, sat down, picked up a piece of paper and felt pen and printed her name. Yesterday morning she couldn't do that. Now she can.

3) What are the best and worst places you've lived?
Best: where I live now. We have a great house, good infrastructure yet live out in the country, sort of. The mayor, village doctor, elementary school principal and all teachers, librarian, music school director, and people who run the local store are all women. For someone with two daughters, it's nice to have so many females in charge.
Worst: the sofa in a friend's apartment in a house in Seattle that was scheduled to be demolished soon and so the rent was cheaper one winter years ago while I was unemployed and depressed.

4) Is it possible Dutch tourists will ever get a clue?
To be totally honest with you, I think their main problem is that they are tourists and not necessarily that they are Dutch. Some of the coolest people I know are Dutch, although some Belgians have been known to disagree.

5) How do you know that you're in Death Valley and not the Sonora Desert if you see a tortoise?
The old desert trick question again! What's with you guys and your deserts? Because I'm always in Death Valley when I go to a desert. That's my only desert. So if I see a tortoise, I must be in Death Valley. Assuming I'm in a desert, of course, and not in a zoo.

6) What's up with the shoes? Why not yo-yo's?
The true story of the Shoe Project (the "why shoes" part): to discern whether people met on the Internet and not in real life were really the sex they claimed to be, I would ask them to describe their shoes, including brand, size, etc. on the assumption that most people would be unable to readily fake such details. Turns out not to work, but the Shoe Project started out as a Internet-identity-make-fun-of-Internet-projects thing.

7) Why do you keep a weblog?
So I can remember what the hell I did and when I did it.

8) Introvert or Extrovert?
Real life: pathetically introverted. Blog: you tell me.

9) If I were to visit you and said "Show me around this city.", where would we go?
I'd show you the door, while shouting, "who the hell invited you, E.?" Or, if not, we'd first take the big cat, Ollie, the one with the broken hip, to the vet for booster shots and antibiotics; then we'd run to the pharmacy for medicine for Gamma, who is getting over scarlet fever. Then we'd run out and shop for the last sushi ingredients I forgot to get this week, cause I'm making sushi this weekend. In the evening, I'm making ramen (tonight, that is). If we had any energy left over, and Alpha agreed to sit the kids, and you insisted on going to Vienna, I would... no wait, I'd send you to some museums during the day, and art galleries - there is an interesting museum of mortuary science in town - and in the evening go ~~get drunk~~ to a session at an Irish pub somewhere in town. Basically, you don't want to visit me unless you have a very high boredom threshhold.

10) What was the last book you read?
Uh, what's it called... (quick google.com search...) I'm still reading it, "Among the Believers" by Sir V.S. Naipaul. I recommend it - an interesting view of the world of Islam in the mid-1980s. Also working on "The Art of War" by Sun-Tzu.

11) The Euro - good or bad?
money=bad

(although, of course, no money=worse)

12) Are you banned from travelling to the Netherlands and Germany?
Honestly, who wants to go to ~~the Netherlands or~~ Germany in the first place? I mean, that's why they travel so much to other countries, right? Although Holland is a wonderful place, of course...

13) Do you miss anything about living in the States?
Friends and relatives, beef jerky, candy corn at Halloween and candy canes at Christmas.

14) Who is your idol? And if you could spend one day with them, what would you do?
My wife. Go on a date. Sorry, the idea of spending a whole day with only my wife is so bizarre I can't come up with a more detailed plan.

15) Boxers or briefs?
Snug elastic boxers.

2001-12-06T13:31:00.000-08:00

XXXI
Thirty-one pairs of shoes in the shoe project. Even more people have sent me shoes, but some of the links broke so I took them down. Three new pair in the past week. Thanks, everyone.

The Shoe Project was, originally, intended as a joke, making fun of web projects and myself at the same time. Unfortunately, the joke failed because the project didn't, and now it's a real project. If I would have known it would take off, I would have done a Tan-Line Project or something. Soon I will be moving it to its own page, won't that be cool. And another thing - a wonderful story Elise tells about her shoes has inspired me to, on the new page, include a short text (optional, contributor-written) with the shoe pics. I'll keep you posted. Send me your shoes (150x150 pixel image). Thanks.

2001-12-06T13:23:00.000-08:00

with subsequent children it soon becomes obvious that what works with one oft will not with the other

"Communication 101" at Bucolic Front. I find this really, really funny. And it's 100% Enterobius vermicularis-free!

2001-12-06T05:42:00.000-08:00

Undignified question of the day
You can't copyright something like this, right? You're not going to bust my chops, are you, michele? This won't be a steady feature here at Feral Living. I've been, eh, it's just, as I've mentioned, December is the horniest month so I've been reminiscing about accidents that have occurred while having sex. Surprisingly few, actually. I poked my wife in the eye, with my finger, up to the knuckle. It sort of slipped in behind her eyeball. There, that's mine. What's your favorite sexual accident?

2001-12-06T05:40:00.000-08:00

What can be done to control threadworms?
Warning: this post is all about pinworms and my mother. Although written in a tasteful style, it's still pinworms, so if you have a thing about them you are excused from reading this. The title and sub-headings are all taken from this website

Threadworm (also known as pinworm)

Threadworm (Enterobius vermicularis) is a common worm infection. Both children and adults can be infected, although it is mostly found in children.

How does infection spread

Threadworm is passed from person to person and is usually spread via children.

The female worms lay eggs on a person's skin around the anus

2001-12-05T13:12:00.000-08:00

Word list generator
According to this word list generator, the most common word at Feral Living right now (after subtracting the, and, a, to, and of) is "I", appearing 83 times. Who woulda thought. The first word of any interest is "scientist", appearing 16 times, followed by "mad" at 14 times. Otherwise, no surprises, sadly. Lots of "cats", "gammas" etc. Have to get my act together. Among those words used once were "glutinous" and "klaxons."
[Picked up at Pat's place.]

2001-12-05T12:55:00.000-08:00

Gosh, is it already Blogger Insider time again?
This week, E. of alt.nu has his monkeys working out questions for me. I sent him a list of 15 really lame questions, sorry, but I was at work and D. was distracting me...

2001-12-05T12:47:00.000-08:00

A look at the question of online identity

2001-12-05T12:46:00.000-08:00

St. Nick II

2001-12-05T01:39:00.000-08:00

Krampus
Gamma: "Is the door locked?"
Miguel: "Think so. Why?"
Gamma: "You sure it's locked? I'd better check. Good, it's locked."
Miguel: [Checks watch] "Eh, today's the fifth."
Gamma: "We have to keep the doors locked so Krampus doesn't come in."
Miguel: "Hah."
Gamma: "But if he should somehow come in, I can still climb up somewhere high so he can't reach me, or I could hide."
Miguel: "Hiding is good, you can't fall down and break something. But if you hide, be sure to keep still and hold your breath so Krampus doesn't hear you and find you that way."
Gamma: [Brain makes processing noises] "Yes, that computes. Or you could just give him a good one in the bean."
Miguel: "You bet."
Gamma: "Because you're the strongest."
Miguel: "Smart kid."

December 6th is St. Nicholas day in Austria. Tonight we will polish our shoes and line them up in front of the door (on the inside of the house). Tomorrow morning, there will be tangerines and chocolate St. Nicholi wrapped in foil, which unwrapped bear a striking resemblance to Easter Bunnies, which I bought yesterday; and small gifts, which I still have to buy. Traditionally, this stuff has been done by my wife, this year, it seems to be my turn, so I'll employ my usual shopping method of walking down the street near work in the freezing cold on my lunch hour with money in my pocket and a panic attack looming more strongly as my lunch hour draws to a close, and at the last minute buy something, anything, as long as it fits into a shoe.

Hell, I forgot the peanuts. St. Nick brings peanuts. I can walk past the outdoor market, my Kurds should have something. Or are they Turks? Don't want to get that mixed up.

St. Nick has a sidekick, Krampus, a demonic-looking alter-ego in chains who follows Nick around with a whip, punishing naughty children as Nick rewards the good ones. Today is Krampus day here. You give your sweetie naughty lingerie, mostly, or hire a Krampus to come over to your house to put the fear of God into your child.

Gamma has a terrific fear of Krampus. She knows he exists, because she's seen St. Nicholas handing out sweets at stores. Ergo his sidekick must also exist. And you do see Krampi running around in the streets, kids and young men mostly, masquerading in what must be some left-over pre-Christian pagan tradition. They take their job seriously, every year several innocent bystanders get injured, whacked too hard by an overzealous Krampus.

And Gamma, hard as this is to believe, just might have done something naughty, and be fully aware of this fact, which intensifies her fear. I cannot tell you how hard it is to refrain from pounding on the door and doing a Krampus act; "Gamma, it's for you! Krampus, I think," but I have held myself back this year. This is the day of the year on which she pays for a year's worth of naughtiness.

Instead, I go gift shopping at lunchtime. Oh, and we have black ice today making the streets and sidewalks nice and slick. Wish me luck.

2001-12-04T07:53:00.000-08:00

Gonna smoke those all by yourself, little girl?
Quit again. This time after only 2 months. The worst part of smoking was, for me, being a moocher. Somehow I'd arrived at this pattern of behavior where I felt, at some level, that if I didn't buy cigarettes, I wasn't really a smoker.

My lowest point, I now realize, was a visit to an Austrian school last year to judge an English language contest. Arriving at the school with no cigs of my own, I chanced upon a couple Austrian schoolgirls outside the school, smoking, and bummed one off them. They were quite friendly and we had a nice conversation. But still...

2001-12-04T06:19:00.000-08:00

Buying a television
So the youngest one, Gamma, gets scarlet fever for the second time, a relapse, and the doctor orders her to stay inside until Christmas. This strikes us as very boring for a kid, not to mention frustrating at missing out on all the advent activities - petting mangey sheep at the advent market, etc. So I have a brilliant idea: finally buy a television, and a DVD player. See, we haven't had a television since we became parents.

It was an experiment at first. I thought the kids would read more and do more things on their own if there was no television to entertain them. It appeared to work with the oldest one, who is now 12 and brilliant and talented in many ways. Also I consider television dumb and unnecessary.

That wouldn't matter now, though, because our oldest daughter has become a rabid television hater. Or is it just that she enjoys the special status of being the member of what she considers a small and elite group of non-TV-watchers. Doesn't matter.

But the little one is sick. We figured instead of entertaining her all the time (all stories all the time) we could just, for a break, turn on the TV.

What the hell, right? It's not the end of the world, right? I might even finally understand these pop-culture references people make.

The DVD vs video thing was our first problem. We decided to get a VCR, simply because they're still a lot cheaper here in Austria. So I loaded up on cash, and armed with that and our decision to buy a 70 cm screen and VCR, ventured out into the world.

I went to a local appliance shop and wandered around forlornly, unhappily. Apparently I was giving off serious tension vibrations and no sales clerks accosted me, for which I was thankful. I walked from television to television, noticing that, yes, 70 cm was big enough. Huge price range, though, in that category. So many different doodads and options. My brain was starting to turn off non-essential functions.

I was so stressed by this point that it is a miracle that my vibes didn't start blowing out the CRTs, or at least distorting the reception, like a cell phone ringing does to your PC monitor. I later realized that I was having a panic attack.

So many different sorts of gadget. I wandered along the rows of VCRs and DVD players, trying to discern obvious differences that would account for the huge range in price. I wandered in the direction of the exit. Finally, I was outside, and walking rapidly to my car.

"Nothing there," I decided. I would drive to the next store, I resolved. "Who am I kidding," I asked myself. I drove home instead, and confessed my failure to my wife. "At least you have something to blog," she said.

On the weekend, my bored youngest daughter and I made and illustrated two books.

2001-12-03T12:22:00.000-08:00

Staying put
Although I have traveled, and did move far away from where I grew up, staying put has played a greater role in my life than travel has, and it continues to. Unlike any of the friends I had growing up in the western United States, my siblings and I spent our entire childhoods in the same one house. People move on an average of once every seven years in the United States, so this is unusual.

I've taken a few long trips - a tour of Europe when I was in high school (which got me started on all this), a trip through Russia with the Trans-Siberian railroad in the 1980s, a couple bus trips across the United States. But most of my time is spent not going anywhere.

My wife and I lived in Japan for several years, but once we got to Japan I didn't knock myself out traveling around the country. Here in Austria, which is so centrally located, close to so many other countries, I'm lucky to get out of the house, except for possibly a trip during summer vacation. But I like it like that. Although I wasn't really fond of the town I grew up in and couldn't wait to leave, I don't find it any worse than most places when I return on a visit now, and I vicariously enjoy my wife's sense of place here now. The church we married in was the same one where her parents married, and her grandparents. The school my daughter attends is the same school my wife went to, with some of the same teachers. Some of the doctors at the local hospital are old classmates of hers.

And when I stop and do the math, I'm not only vicariously enjoying my wife's long affiliation with this place; of all the places I've lived, this is the place I've known the longest. My hometown I moved away from when I was 18. I first came here to Austria when I was seventeen, 25 years ago.

2001-12-02T11:20:00.000-08:00

Xmas
Anyone else think Christmas is the year's horniest holiday, by a wide margin?

2001-12-02T11:18:00.000-08:00

Blogdex
Are you registered with Blogdex yet? If you link to me, it's vital to my plan for world vice-domination that you be listed with Blogdex. Especially those of you who recently have moved to new URLs. Like you, Pat, f'instance. In days of yore I would have done this myself, but they've recently made this process slightly more cumbersome. Speaking of Pat, I finally received a GRE award without even trying for my use of jejune. Man, finally. Remember: Blogdex. Thank you.

2001-12-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

Explanation
Wow, full moon. That explains a whole lot of things.

2001-12-01T04:11:00.000-08:00

If you came here looking for Elise's shoes...
They're in the column at the right, near the top.
(Thanks Elise, you doubled my traffic, not that I am the sort of person who cares about that sort of thing.)

2001-11-30T07:51:00.000-08:00

If you ever wondered what D and I do instead of working...
Lost in Spacecheese
Leave it to Bazima
Starry Sheep Wars: The Viola Player Strikes Bach
The Jill Matrix Reloaded

If blogs were TV shows or movies...

2001-11-30T05:56:00.000-08:00

Blogger Insider Project update Emergency Mode
The waiters are walking around the now-empty-but-for-me restaurant, blowing out candles and stacking the chairs on the tables, upside-down, so they can sweep underneath. The roses I brought are wilted, as is the carnation pinned to my lapel. For the hundredth time, I check my watch (a brand-new Swatch Chrono with snazzy brushed metal band). It's clear that Anthony is not coming. Anthony, my Blogger Insider interview partner, has stood me up.

I activate the emergency transponder in my false molar, sending the emergency message to Blogger Insider headquarters, where alarms go off, massive whooping klaxons and flashing lights.

[Quick cut to London, where special agent Bulletproof Punk lounges around in his swinging bachelor pad, in silk pajamas, Liberace-style bathrobe and hand-stitched Persian silk slippers, watching "Space 1999" on a huge screen with a tray of gin-and-tonics on his chest. He sighs in a jejune manner, wearily hands the tray to the Page 3 model beside him (she is wearing strappy Blahnik pumps and a teddy printed - oddly - in a wasp pattern). He moves to the coffee table with panther-like grace, lifts the glass bell cover off the blinking red phone.] "Hello?" [jadedly] "Mmm. Well now's a bad time, actually, those little saucer things, the UFOs are about to crash into the moon again... Well, yes. Who for... that git? Oh, well, alright then... Yes."

[Dave returns to bed, fires up his laptop with satellite doo-dads and all sorts of blinking shite making whizzing noises]. "Honey, go and make a fresh batch of those, will you? Dave has to do a little work. There's a good girl."

[A few minutes later, the following list of questions arrives in my inbox, saving me from the utter humiliation of non-participation in the Blogger Insider Interview project. Below, the questions are printed in italic font, followed by my answers in non-italic font.]

1. You are trapped inside the body of a gummi bear and find yourself living in a Kafkaesque nightmare world where gummi bears are loathed, what do you do?
Mm. The old paradoxical-Russian-doll approach, I see. That workshop you attended in Minsk wasn't a total waste of time after all. Since I myself loathe gummi bears, such a world wouldn't be a Kafkaesque nightmare for me; on the other hand, since it is so defined by your question, any attempt to answer it on an a priori level, assuming it is my consciousness trapped in the gummi bear, would have me chasing my metaphorical tail, so to speak, leaving any possible hermeneutical efforts to exhaust themselves in an ad absurdum circular meandering of latinate pish posh. So it must be assumed, therefore, that it is the physical Miguel who is trapped inside an over-sized gummi bear figure, in which case - assuming sufficient oxygen - I would cleverly enlist several small children to chew off the sugary/glutinous carapace encapsulating me and so effect my escape.

2. Taking a walk in a zen garden you notice a rock out of place causing bad feng shui, do you move the rock to a better position or do you leave the garden to avoid bad karma? Explain your choice.
Neither. Even if I were the garden-keeper, both the Buddhist principle of non-interference and the zen ideal of spontaneity would speak against moving said rock; non-interference by directly proscribing the moving of the rock, spontaneity by going further and negating the possibility of a rock being out of place at all in a topographical construct devoted to accident and chance. At the same time, however, I would of course seek out a spot in the garden where the bad feng shui you posit disturbed my chi the least. I would eventually leave, but not until I had grokked the visual koan represented by the garden.

3. How tall are you in cubits? Hand spans? HB pencil widths?
Under 6. Over 17. Over 280. (All figures approximate). Did you just try and work any of those out for real? Sure, roughly.

4. You're walking in the desert and you see a tortoise... which desert is it and how do you know it's not a turtle?
Death Valley in Nevada. A turtle is an amphibian, and the arid conditions in Death Valley preclude the survival of such a large amphibian.

5. You discover that you are living with robots, very cunning and very secretly evil robots. Do you obey their every command, attack them in a fit of robophobic rage or try and harness their keen intellect to take over the world from a hidden Austrian base hollowed into the side of a
mountain with lots of banks of computers and foot soldiers to do your bidding? If the latter, what would be your demands?
I would say, "take over the world, you guys. And make it snappy!"

6. Can you explain the chaos coefficient in layman's terms without using metaphors or the words "the" or "and"?
It tells you, in concrete numbers, how much harder children or pets or both make it to perform a given activity.

7. When we send you our shoes, do you secretly get a thrill from them?
I didn't at first.

8. If Feral Living is finding the humor in the everyday chaos that is life, would you consider yourself a sadist who hopes fevently that people will fall over for no reason other than an amusing pratfall?
I was a pratfall-loving sadist long before Feral Living; isn't everybody?

9. Is Feral Living not actually living with wild animals?
I do get a lot of search requests to that effect. A feral child is, of course, a child raised by wild animals. In the case of the website Feral Living, however, and the lifestyle it represents (or at least gets a lot of its material from) it is "living with the social skills of one raised by wild animals".

10. A fan club is established and a site dedicated to recounting your every movement, do you continue to blog or would you close up shop and avoid the Internet altogether from then on?
URL??? (Wait, I mean, wait, isn't that what this site is?)

11. Were you hoping I'd stop at ten questions?
I'll survive.

12. What do you like most about your cats?
I find the level and quality of chaos they inject into my life a good source of mirth as long as it's not my turn to clean up; that and they're a good way for my children to learn about life and death and nature being "red in tooth and claw" and the anatomy of small-to-medium sized rodents and birds.
When do you like them most?
When they are asleep. They're so cute then.
Where do you mostly like them to be?
Outside.
How do you most like them to act?
They have a pretty good Cheech and Chong thing going when they get enough catnip.
Who would you most like them to attack? Why?
Scott S. this kid who peed on me in 5th grade.

13. Is this question going to be unlucky for you?
I am afraid that all these questions are going to be unlucky for me.

14. Where was the most interesting place to live for you?
Overall, Japan. Seattle in the days of odd women wasn't bad either. But any place can be interesting if you're deluded enough, is my motto.

15. How honest have you just been about yourself?
Pretty honest, especially on the cat question.

Thanks D.

2001-11-29T12:30:00.000-08:00

Blogger Insider Project update
Still no word from Anthony, the fellow I was partnered with for the Blogger Insider Project interview thing, I guess he's busy. So this is what I'll do: email questions to inu66@yahoo.com (or leave them in the comments to this post, if they happen to be working) and I will answer them, here, tomorrow.

2001-11-28T23:58:00.000-08:00

How to make a dirty bomb
From the dead horse department
Most of you, if you have been coming here for any length of time, are familiar with my tedious explanations of the Chaos Calculator at the top of the column at the left, and you are excused from reading this post. For you others, however: it's pure genius, the smartest thing I've done since marrying my wife. Briefly, it calculates how much harder a given task is depending on how many family members and pets you have living with you, because each addition raises the level of ambient chaos in your environment. Every month or so, I illustrate this for newcomers, using a concrete example. Today:

Building a dirty bomb:

2001-11-28T11:23:00.000-08:00

Six degrees of suppuration
My favorite part of working at the newspaper was writing the headlines, can you tell? My masterpiece was "Tanzania's Ammonia Bonanza" which I stole as-is from a Tanzanian press release. Besides an ill child, one of our cats isn't looking so good. Oliver, with the broken hip. Losing a lot of hair on his back; the skin is open, and nasty looking. I have been directed by my keepers to make chamomile tea and clean his back with cotton balls dipped in that, then to apply a white salve with my finger. The salve gets on everything he touches. How does this sound to you? It would have sounded disgusting to me before I had to do it, but actually, what the hell. It doesn't kill you. When it's over you go wash your hands and drink a glass of prosecco like nothing happened.

2001-11-28T11:18:00.000-08:00

Quarantine
That was always an, I don't know, obsolete-sounding word to me. Quarantine. Well, we're in quarantine now. Gamma's had a relapse of scarlet fever. No more 10-days-of-antibiotics-and-everything's-fine now. This time it's a month of lockdown, like the horror stories our parents told. She doesn't have to go to the hospital, but she's under strict orders to have no fun, to take no small visitors, nothing, until Christmas. No nursery school, no advent activities. No St. Nicholas or Krampus (her evil nemisis) visiting. We are allowed to go to work, her sister is allowed to go to school, but all in all this is a strain of streptococcus bacteria that calls for, I don't know. Cooler antibiotics. A serious attitude. The list of possible damage the disease can wreak on the body is scary.

Gamma wanted to hear Peter and the Wolf today; she waited all day for me to come home, because I'm the only one who makes her feel secure enough to listen to it. She clings to me in the scary parts (the horns, portraying the wolf).

2001-11-27T12:52:00.000-08:00

Height Issue
It has been brought to my attention that there is some controversy - or, at the very least, curiosity - concerning my height, which I must admit, of the incomprehensible things I have experienced recently, is without a doubt the most incomprehensible.

2001-11-27T12:50:00.000-08:00

More indications that my score on that IQ test I mentioned was like maybe a fluke
I volunteered for the Blogger Insider project, then thought no more about it, now find out I have to come up with 10-15 questions to ask Anthony by Friday. Anthony! Can you hear me? And the rest of you - like, what are you asking?

2001-11-27T09:11:00.000-08:00

Mailbag
You know I'm stuck for topics when I get out the mail bag. "Anonymous" wants to know if I have "any second-hand stories about Afghanistan involving female Spanish fashion designers and rosé wine."

It just so happens...

Pedantic Girl: Let me see that. Just as I thought, no return address.

Of course, it's anonymous.

Pedantic Girl: Uh huh. Austrian postmark? Is this like the letters to the editor you wrote back when you were editing that newspaper?

Shouldn't you be out proofreading galleys or something? Can I tell the story? Anyway, something over ten years ago, I had a Spanish fashion designer in a class I taught. She worked for an international agency located in Vienna. She told me this story about working on a project in Afghanistan. The project was intended to help women by helping them set up a factory where they produced local handicrafts, gaining employment in the process. The Spanish woman helped with the design end, and getting the designs into production, etc.

Pedantic Girl: You wrote "etc." Bad style.

Look, do you have a blog of your own? Or what? Anyway, the international aid workers lived in villas on the outskirts of Kabul. They worked in town during the day. At night they all sat around in someone's garden with the best view of town, drinking Mateus rosé wine and watching rockets and mortar shells streak through the dark in the distance, guessing from the sounds whether they were "incoming" or "outgoing". War eventually drove them out. I suppose there will be people much like them, doing things much like what they did, back in Kabul soon. Hopefully without the artillery.

2001-11-27T05:02:00.000-08:00

Comments
These new comments, which had been working fine, are temporarily down to move to another server. I think Feral Living will soon be moving to another server as well, and to another blogging system, including a more reliable comment system. The only thing that consistently works here are the QuickTopic message boards at the top - the "anti-blog" and so on. They've never given me an ounce of trouble. QuickTopic rocks.

2001-11-27T04:59:00.000-08:00

Infections
Was there ever a time when I wrote about anything besides sick kids and bedridden animals (I'm home today with Gamma, who has an ear infection, which we have been told is common after scarlet fever)? I think there was, but fatigue has clouded my memory and I am not in the mood to paw through my archives.

Here's a funny one: my wife wants me to enroll in a beginner's dance class (ballroom dancing) with her in time for ball season here. Just the two of us, and a bunch of 15-year-olds. Hmm. Blogging material, to be sure.

2001-11-27T04:56:00.000-08:00

Blogdex
Have you registered with blogdex yet? It's completely free.

2001-11-26T12:56:00.000-08:00

Feral word of the day

Struthious

adj

Take that, j o s h o, and D.

2001-11-26T12:48:00.000-08:00

My latest scheme
You, reading this. Go register your URL with blogdex right now. That is, if you haven't already. Most of the cool kids already have. See, I would do it for you, but they have installed this new anti-spam device that logs your ISP and only lets you register one a day.

It's free! And it's the first step in my plan for world vice-domination. Because we all know Haidi has dibs on world domination.

2001-11-26T12:35:00.000-08:00

Monday dysphoria
Today was a real Monday. I haven't been funny once, not even witty. Unfortunately I've already exhausted the exhaustion routine, and posts about cats and sick kids are passe. How about a pedantic rant about why I don't have a television at home? Any takers?

Well, how about a non-pedantic explanation instead? Yes, believe it or not, Asian Bastard has stopped watching television.

Seriously.

2001-11-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

Grandiloquence
Another thing I'm thankful for, then I stop: no grandiloquent toasts at the Thanksgiving party. No verbal ostentation.

That I can remember, at least.

2001-11-25T10:19:00.000-08:00

Only 363 days 'til Buy Nothing Day

2001-11-25T10:15:00.000-08:00

Purity
Does the idea of purity contaminate your idea of the sacred?
Or not?

2001-11-25T10:14:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving IV
How to make turkey ala orange: make the sauce from the duck ala orange recipe, except make more. It gives the turkey a classy golden-brown color. I was worried we'd run out of turkey, but we had enough. Yam-wise we were set, anyone know what to do with leftover yams besides throw them out? They weren't as popular with the kids as I'd hoped, a lot came back. The apple pie, on the other hand, went over well. Not as awful as I'd feared. The filling was a little under-cooked, and the crust was a little thick. I'd not been able to roll it out as thin as I should have, because I got something wrong translating the recipe into Austrian measurements, and it turned out more crumbly than it should have, so instead of rolling it out, folding it and plopping it into the pie tin I rolled it out, folded it, whereupon it fell into a million pieces and I ended up sort of building a replica of a pie shell out of little dough shingles. Gave it an interesting look. We just warmed it up before serving, threw some vanilla ice cream on it and it was accepted without any raised eyebrows. It helps that no one had seen apple pie before.

2001-11-24T08:17:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving III
There are days when the Jamesons only gives me heartburn, and then there are magical days like today when it goes down smooth like a good Irish whiskey should.

The only problem is whether I'll be sober enough to carve the turkey when the guests arrive in 45 minutes.

2001-11-24T06:07:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving II
On today's menu: faster turkey and Miguel's Awful Apple Pie (with special crumbling Morlock Lemon crust). Two more traditions occur to me: turkey cooking time calculation crisis, and the annual Thanksgiving freak out. Details to follow, things are just getting started. Have to get out of this apron, take a shower, and start acting like a host.

2001-11-23T13:25:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is no holiday in Austria so we celebrate it on the following Saturday, which is tomorrow. In our family, it has become traditional to 1)worry that the turkey is too small (my father tells stories about his mother getting turkeys so large she had to hack off legs and wings to fit them in the oven) and 2)burn the glazed carrots so badly that they fuse to the pot, like some sort of NASA ceramic heat shield. (It used to be a Christmas tradition for my mother-in-law to give me the pot, spic and span, which she had scrubbed between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but she's given that up.)

It is a common tradition on this holiday to say what you are thankful for. My brother's drunken toasts along these lines have become legendary among my relatives in the U.S., but this year he seems to have been more restrained. I am not a naturally thankful person, although I have a lot to be thankful for.

The Plain People of Ireland: Please, do tell us what you're thankful for.

Flush toilets I have been thankful for since using a public toilet in Heraklion, on Crete, in the middle of the night, about 20 years ago. Greek public toilets - at least back in those days - were basically a hole in the floor. This is still a common system in many parts of the world. Likewise, sewage systems, waste treatment plants, running water, gutters, garbage collection: thankful. Vaccination programs against various diseases: thankful. More generally, I am thankful to be living in a country that not only has a functioning public health system, but also a public health insurance system that makes good health care available to almost everyone at an affordable price. I simply am not able to understand how citizens of any wealthy country can allow something of such fundamental importance to be denied to themselves, or to their less-wealthy fellow citizens. Living in a country where women are guaranteed equal rights: thankful. Healthy, bright kids: especially thankful, since they were both premature and we were scared. Thankful for a good school system where education, and not just job training, is still considered important. To have, at my age, the opportunity to take music lessons: thankful. For the people I have recently met, in person or this way, who have in a short time done much to cure my curmudgeonly misanthropy: thankful. For my ability to make my wife shoot, with a well-timed joke, beverages out her nose I am thankful.

Thankful to have my own house, with heat, in the winter, and to be living in an intact society. Thankful for you, reading this, whom I will avoid boring by stopping here, when the list could go on and on.

For my unanimous election as the man in charge of cleaning and applying medicine to our injured cat's bedsores: less thankful.

2001-11-23T11:35:00.000-08:00

First snow of the year

It snowed this morning in a quick flurry, then quickly melted.

2001-11-22T12:48:00.000-08:00

Did your newspaper run this cartoon?
Thanksgiving Boondocks
[Via Peace Dividend. By the way, why didn't anyone tell me about Peace Dividend before? ]

2001-11-21T23:56:00.000-08:00

The latest from the day care unionization drive
Gamma, my youngest ~~robot~~ daughter... I don't know. Sometimes I think maybe I exaggerate in some of the stories I tell about her. Then she pulls something that makes me think, maybe not. Yesterday, the woman in charge of her group - who we know is both cool and good with kids as well as vastly experienced - told my wife they were trying desperately at the nursery school to get the kids to rehearse some numbers for a Christmas production for the parents - they do this every year, sing a couple songs and perform a simple play. But all the kids want to do is color. Because Gamma loves to color, and has incited all the other children to color too. They refuse to do anything else. When I dropped her off this morning, I noticed dozens and dozens of colored pictures taped to the walls there...

2001-11-21T23:51:00.000-08:00

Austrian Beauty
My commute to work takes me along the Danube for quite a stretch, which has a lot of water-loving trees such as poplar and various willows along its banks. Today it is really windy and gusty here, which not only blew my boxy Dobló from lane to lane, but also had this amazingly beautiful ethereal decidual architecture going on, with gigantic swirling globes of spiky golden willow leaves moving around my car, and big shapes of golden poplar leaves moving in front of me and dissolving as I drove through. Really dreamy. And then, as I drew closer to the city, came the plastic bags. First one, which had me immediately thinking of the dreamy part of American Beauty, and at the same time of Dave's recent nice post about a drifting plastic bag. Then another plastic bag, doing that dance, around and around between the cars.

Then another. Then another, this time with six feet of video tape. And a sandwich wrapper. Then, around the corner, the explanation - two huge garbage trucks, brimming with trash. There goes 20 feet of 8-track tape! And a flattened cardboard box, swirling, swirling.

Alright already with the plastic bags. It was plastic bags for several more miles. Swirling, swirling. Dancing.

This also reminded me of one of the first really good posts I read, about a year ago, when I first started reading all these blogs. Someone was driving through a city, amazed at all the flower petals blowing about. Then eventually noticed they were flying out of a garbage truck in front of him. But the post had this Zen-koan-type feel to it.

None of that at Feral Living. Here, only garbage flies out of our garbage trucks.

2001-11-21T23:43:00.000-08:00

No longer strangling warthogs
Cello lesson last night instead of tonight because teacher has some sort of gig tonight. Words cannot express my pleasure and satisfaction at some - but not yet all - of the new sounds coming out of my cello. I mean, the music is still really simple and all. But that cello sound, man. Wonderful. This is a major breakthrough in my life, I'm serious. I still have rhythym and coordination problems, and bowing remains rocket science, but what I originally thought would be the hardest - fiddling with the strings with the left hand, because I severed a couple nerves there with a chisel several years ago - is not such a problem. It is, in fact, the easiest part. And what looked the easiest - raking the bow back and forth across the strings - turns out to be the interesting bit.

2001-11-21T12:47:00.000-08:00

Presidential Pardon
Nowadays they have to work for their presidential pardon.
[Via Words Mean Things]

2001-11-21T12:01:00.000-08:00

I've been buttonated. From now on, you may (but are not required to) use this attractive button to link to Feral Living. Created by Hoopty.

Thank you, Hoopty.

2001-11-21T09:29:00.000-08:00

Nature or nurture
Observation: If your father, while driving, was in the habit, while you were riding in the front passenger seat, of surprise-slapping (in a loving way) your thigh so hard it left a red hand-shaped welt, you will be more apt to inflict similar, (loving) cruelty on your own children.
Hypothesis: This is learned behavior, passed from dysfunctional generation to dysfunctional generation; there is no gene for it.
Test: Compare thigh-slapping behavior in four groups: Adopted children of thigh-slapping parents, adopted children of non-thigh-slapping parents, non-adopted children of thigh-slapping parents, non-adopted children of non-thigh-slapping parents. Maybe you could work in identical twins somehow, too. My guess would be, slapping your own children's thighs would correlate most highly with having gotten your own thigh (the left one in the United States and other countries where you drive on the right side of the road, the right thigh in countries such as the U.K., Ireland, Japan and so on) slapped as a child, whether by a birth parent or not.

2001-11-20T12:35:00.000-08:00

Just wondering
What's with this Hoopty guy?

2001-11-20T12:23:00.000-08:00

About
Does it really bother you that I don't have an "about" page for Feral Living? At first I didn't because it is hosted at blogspot.com and there was no way to put up a second page. And I also thought, just as well, it's all there in the posts. But that was months ago, and now there are nearly a year's worth of archives. Dave's recent confusion over whether or not I live with robots is a case in point. When I started out calling my wife and daughters Alpha, Beta and Gamma it was sort of a Jane Goodall among the apes joke, but time has sort of obscured further what was an obscure joke to begin with...

On a related note, when my phone rang at work today, I sat through three or four rings before I could remember what my real name is, and finally answered it.

2001-11-20T12:02:00.000-08:00

Links.
Updated the links column on the left. Fixed some that had changed. Added a couple, including Bloggety Blog, llamalicious, and shelagh. Also took down two links, out of a total of three to Bulletproofpunk, because he not only caused the Teletubby song to get stuck in my brain earlier this week, he also put the theme song from Deliverance ("Dueling Banjos") there this afternoon. Only one link left, Dave, behave.

Wait, wait. Almost forgot Jill.
And Starry Sheep.

2001-11-20T11:45:00.000-08:00

Plug
The extremely prolific llamalicious has a new project. Everybody go look.

2001-11-19T09:44:00.000-08:00

Cold and nasty
The weather is freezing cold in my part of Austria today, dark and drizzly and generally unpleasant.
At least now I know who to blame.

2001-11-19T07:20:00.000-08:00

Weekend
During a lull in my door-handle (thanks Bauke) photographing activities this weekend, my wife and I went to Vienna, which was having a music festival sort of thing Saturday night, and experienced a Mozart Requiem in St. Stephen's Cathedral, where a friend of ours sings in the choir. The church was full of Filipinos attending an English mass held by an African priest. We got a good seat, but when the mass was finished they kicked everyone out of the church so they could check tickets. Then they let us all back in again, and so many people streamed into the church that it was impossible to check tickets; we went back to the seats we'd originally had. The exercise of walking back and forth was good because the church is fucking freezing. It was a cold night, to boot, and all the doors were open to admit audience. Talk about drafty.

I had a professor in college who once explained that back in the days before novels, etc. cathedrals were designed to be full of architectural and artistic symbols that can also be interpreted in a sort of narrative way. So, waiting for the music to start, I sat there looking up at the arches etc of the church wondering what it would be saying to me if I had listened to the rest of what the professor had said when he was explaining the symbolism incorporated in cathedrals.

That, and wondering whether I'd make it through the concert without having to pee, and if I would be able to stay awake through the whole thing. Then the music started. There was an orchestra and a very large, very talented choir. Mozart died before completing this particular requiem, and it was finished by a student of his. It was performed in two halves, the Mozart half first, the student end at the end, and in between there was, as a special treat, the first performance of something original written by the conductor. This was quite interesting since, at half-time, the orchestra and choir split up and moved to various spots throughout the cathedral, some in front, some in back, one soprano high up on the right side, etc. Two trombones, two trumpets and a sax were right next to us, which helped keep me awake. It was a different way to use the space in the cathedral, at least.

Afterwards we went to a restaurant with our friend, who had sung, and a friend of hers, a Swiss woman who is working in Holland, and therefore speaks German with an unusual Swiss/Dutch accent. We went to a funky, smoky old restaurant/tavern in downtown Vienna, drank wine and beer and ate gulash. My wife and I told all the Gamma stories you already know from reading this blog; they always go over pretty well. And we almost made the Swiss woman fall out of her chair with repulsion when we told the hedgehog story about when we fed the hedgehogs meal worms and the meal worms got away and crawled all over our cellar. She must be one of those people who picture things vividly when they hear stories.

It was a cold but enjoyable night, the first time in probably 20 years we have stayed out late in Vienna like that (the kids were with their grandparents).

2001-11-17T07:40:00.000-08:00

Weekend special: my doorknobs
Bob in New Jersey wants to see my doorknobs:

I have been in Austria, off and on, for over 20 years now, and have never seen an American-style doorknob, the round kind you turn to open your door. Everyone has the other kind shown in these pictures, a lever you press down to unlatch the door. This latter kind is more practical because when you get home with an armload of groceries or sleeping child, you can open the door with your elbow.

2001-11-16T07:25:00.001-08:00

Has this happened to you yet?
When you face an unpleasant experience, do you now think "blogging material!" rather than "this is going to be horrible" like you used to?

2001-11-16T07:25:00.000-08:00

Somebody call Faith Popcorn!
Gamma started a trend at daycare, 5 other kids are out with scarlet fever now. She is responding well to the antibiotics as far as scarlet fever goes, fever and other symptoms are no longer apparent. But the antibiotics are taking the usual toll on her digestion and as a result she is using up a lot of pyjama bottoms. Otherwise, energy high, mood good, sleeping okay once she falls asleep.

2001-11-16T07:24:00.001-08:00

Beta Update
[Setting: a kitchen, homey yet sleek with cabinets of brushed pine with white ceramic knobs, floor of white tiles with smaller black hexagonal tiles set into the corners, straight out of a Terence Conran book. Characters: Miguel and Alpha, sitting at a kitchen table made especially for them by an unemployed carpenter out of 2x4's based on a teeny table Miguel made years ago for Beta's doll house.]

2001-11-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

Counting
Waiting, I count. Waiting for the bus I count 10 cars, then narrowing down criteria for the count the longer I wait - ten cars going in just one direction, ten cars of a certain color. Waiting in the checkout line at the supermarket, I count people leaving the store. Anything can be counted when you're waiting, birds, waves, seconds, cigarettes. Decades.

Putting Gamma to bed we have a ritual - brush teeth (the person who helps her brush teeth cannot be the person going to bed with her that evening), look out the window (she likes to heckle passersby - "Hey you sleepyheads!"), cuddle in bed, read two stories, turn off the lights, chat, have a drink, get up and go to the toilet, go back to bed, have another drink, sing a few songs, then quiet down and try to sleep. She insists someone sleep with her. Same exact ritual every night.

This is when the counting starts.

It is dark. Things are calming down. With luck she will sink directly into sleep, but that rarely happens. If I am emitting nervous vibes, or if I try to get out of bed too soon, she will wake back up and everything's back to square one. So I try to appear to relax and fall asleep without actually falling asleep, because I'd like to have a little evening with my wife and sleep in my own bed. On a bad night I end up getting frustrated and storm out of the room angrily and tell my wife to take over.

Usually, though, I wait as long as I can, holding her until she gets tired of it and rolls over, then I start to count. I count my breaths at first because they're slower. I notice her level of agitation, then count ten breaths, then check whether she's quieted down at all. I count ten more slow breaths and see if she's relaxed any. This way I notice the little changes and don't give up hope.

Ten more breaths. Another ten. Sometimes she's asleep by now, but usually it takes longer. Even when she first appears to have fallen asleep, she's dangerous. She has this built-in switch that detects when I try to creep out of the bed and she wakes back up, and we start all over again. So at this point I start counting her breaths. They go faster. This is a new level of waiting - not long now.

I watch her by the amber light of her nightlight, which I originally bought her thinking since she's afraid of the dark, with a nightlight she'll no longer be afraid and will sleep alone, when in fact the illumination merely makes it easier for her to catch me sneaking out. "I'm only four," she says. "I'm not quite old enough to sleep alone." I watch her breathe. I still have a phobia that my kids will die in their sleep and sometimes I go into their rooms and make sure they're still breathing, watch their chests rise and fall, although I'm beginning to get over it. I've only been a father for 12 years. Asleep, Gamma has long eyelashes and a peaceful face now. For a moment she reminds me of the Frida Kahlo painting of the dead infant, then I think about something else.

I move my legs out of bed, but maintain contact with her, my head against hers, an arm over her, holding one hand. Ten more breaths. Pelvis out of bed. Wooden bed creaks, knees pop. In her shallow sleep, she throws one little arm over me. Checking.

Ten more breaths. She's quieter, but I wait another ten before moving again. Fucking gigantic tractor drives past outside, it's pitch dark where's he going in the pitch dark? He costs me twenty more breaths. She seems to be deeply asleep, but I know better. Each arm takes 10 breaths to move out of bed. It's only my head on the pillow. This is an uncomfortable position, let me tell you.

Finally, I'm getting up. I find things to brace myself on that don't make too much noise - a chest of drawers, part of the bed frame. I slowly rise. When my weight is off the bed, there is suddenly a flurry of creaks. She moves slightly, but continues to sleep. I stand. Braced against the ceiling (it's an upstairs room, the ceiling slants in) I take a first step, then another. My joints are popping like a cedar fire - wrist, knees, an ankle. Time to get out the yoga book.

Five of my breaths from the bed to the door. I make it out, drink tea with my wife, fall into bed and suddenly am wide awake.

I read for an hour, hoping to get sleepy. Turn out the light. After another hour of counting my sleeping wife's breaths, give up falling asleep, go downstairs and read a book (the latest German translation of a Camillieri detective novel). Suddenly it's two in the morning. I have to get up at 5.30. Go back to bed. Just about asleep - the cats start fighting. One of them wants out. Feed them both. Let Cosmo out. Go back to bed. The broken-hip cat is scratching on the door of the office. Go feed him.

Go back to bed. It's 3.00 AM. Fall into a deep sleep. To make up for lost ground, I have two dreams in one, a dream about having a dream. While the dream is still going on, I'm finding this interesting and interpreting the first dream inside the other one. Of course when I wake up, this is all I can remember and not the dreams themselves. Check the clock. 5.00. Debate whether to say the hell with it and get up, or go back to sleep. Then the alarm is ringing, it's 5.30, guess I fell back to sleep.

Get up, make strong coffee. Somehow not really any more tired than on any other day. Tonight will be different, I know - it's Alpha's turn to put the kid to bed. They have a different ritual - one story and Gamma falls magically to sleep. I don't know how she does it.

2001-11-14T06:38:00.000-08:00

Blogger crash jackpot
Couldn't get into Blogger earlier today. It's back up now, but the recently-updated list appears to be stuck, and as luck would have it Feral Living is on the list. It's not a Blog of Note but it's better than nothing. If you're visiting Feral Living for the first time, slag off why don't you and go somewhere more interesting. Try one of those links over on the left side.

Yo! And send me your shoes!

2001-11-14T06:35:00.000-08:00

Comments
BTW, giving comments one last chance... So use them, or I don't know what... Ev will be placed in the dungeon over at Bulletproof Punk with the cat and the corgi.

2001-11-14T06:29:00.001-08:00

The lava lamp
Bought a lava lamp the other day. I don't care what anyone says, lava lamps are cool. Maybe it's just not having a television and needing something to stare at slack-jawed. I could watch that thing all day. Except I can't put it in the living room because it turns out to be a bottle with those two liquids in it, just sitting in the base (where the lightbulb that warms and runs the mixture is located), with a top part sitting on top - nothing is anchored. It's a totally dangerous construction, and to be kept away from cats and kids. So no living room; bedroom is out because, well cats there too. So Beta has taken it over. Damn.

2001-11-14T06:29:00.000-08:00

On being good
There is a simple reason you rarely read about my daughter Beta here. Well, two simple reasons. First, she doesn't like to have her shenanigans spread around the Internet. But second, she has so far led a life 100% free of shenanigans (that, or she does an excellent job of keeping me in the dark about them, which is entirely possible).

Unlike my cats, she neither suffers catastrophic injuries nor do head wounds fester until they explode blood and pus all over the kitchen. Unlike her little sister Gamma, she never does anything naughty. She has never incited other children to forgo their naps, nor drawn on the walls and furniture, nor performed haircuts on herself and friends; just a few of the things Gamma has done.

See, I'm trying to write about Beta here and end up talking about Gamma. Because naughty is what's interesting, and Beta is good. It's far easier to write funny anecdotes about Gamma's various methods of placing herself at the center of attention, such as having a bowel movement in front of a prim lady at my wife's 40th birthday party than it is to write one about Beta's latest achievement.

We are proud of Beta. It is hard for me to write about her without bragging, or sounding like I'm bragging, and nothing is more boring than someone bragging about their kids.

Oh, you've shown great versatility lately. Those green photos were quite boring.

I have a high tolerance for people bragging about their kids, though, because mine are so exceptional. Gamma you know all about. Beta is... let me tell you about her. She is in the local newspaper about once a month, for some school achievement, or some gig at the music school, or something with the rowing club. When the music school has a big concert and 100 kids play, the photographer usually places her in front because the harp is such a photogenic instrument.

She is a serious kid, and an achiever with a low tolerance for failure. She will probably do well job-wise and all. At the same time, she is not a total geek; she has a photographic memory for jokes and a sharp tongue. She is a Leo, with all the Leo attributes, including thick hair, great courage, love of being flattered and back pains.

But I wonder sometimes whether she is not missing out in life by being so good. Whether being bad is not a valuable skill as well. If people are not somehow crippled by concentrating all the time on excelling, if they miss something in life.

The sisters are a fascinating pair. Beta is Apollonian, radiating light, Gamma Dionysian with one foot in a bucket of chaos at all times. Beta is the immoveable force, Gamma the irresistable object. They complement each other well - I hope they will be able to learn from each other someday - Beta to lighten up on herself a little, Gamma to exercise a little control when necessary.

It is possibly a birth-order thing. First-born are often the serious achievers, later-born less so; but you can be perfect and miserable at the same time. As a father I feel duty-bound to encourage Beta to continue with her great success, to keep studying hard and get straight-A's and practice her music. (And that is not all bad; she isn't being forced to do that - she herself derives great pleasure from a good report card or seeing her mug in the newspaper.) But I'm wondering whether... I don't know, whether I should take her out shoplifting or something.

2001-11-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

Beta's hike
Daughter Beta is 12 and starting to enjoy going places without her parents. Sunday was a beautiful, clear although cold day hereabouts, perfect for hiking through the vineyards of eastern Austria with her rowing club. She had a lot of fun. I wish I would have remembered to give her the camera because it would have been impossible to take a bad picture - leaves golden, rolling hills covered with vineyards, blue sky, husky rowers holding neo-Nazis in headlocks.

Beta told me that last item with an unmistakeable expression of glee around her eyes. No offense to any of my skinhead readers out there, but these two guys weren't... I won't go so far as to say they were a couple cheerleaders short of a pep rally, but they weren't the brightest bulbs in the marquee either. Leaning against a wall outside some village, drinking and razzing hikers as they went past. Yeah, okay, well we've all done that haven't we, so far so good. Their mistake was, when they decided to physically attack people, they picked a group including 20 active competitive athletes, men and women whose idea of fun is lifting weights when weather does not permit sculling a shell up and down the nearest river.

The rowers were quick and merciful.

2001-11-13T05:08:00.000-08:00

Comments Broken
First I break my antenna in the car wash, now this. For the time being, we will revert to the old system and politely request you to leave any remarks you may have in the anti-blog (link at top of page). That is run by QuickTopic, and has so far been reliable. Thanks to Bulletproof Punk for the heads up on the broken comments.

2001-11-12T07:21:00.000-08:00

Site of the week
Today's site of the week is Bulletproof Punk. At first I thought it was a hockey site, until I realized it's Bulletproof Punk and not Bulletproof Puck. I don't really understand what D writes there, but all the cool people link to BP on their site so I will too. He has a nice white layout going on, and comments.

Can I have that job writing for Weblog Review now?

2001-11-11T12:48:00.000-08:00

Cat Update
Ollie, for those who have asked, has a broken hip. He was hit by a car. He lives in the office now, sleeping under the desk where I am writing this right now. He is a huge white and grey cat, a vicious fighter and very kind to children. I mean seriously big. He is an angel, too. Good patient. Crawls into the litter box now and then, with his hind legs sort of flopping uselessly behind him, pulls himself in, goes, then stays there a while resting up before crawling back under the desk. Of course if we are around we help him.

He is eating and drinking well, has a good attitude (keeps himself clean etc, isn't giving up). Should heal in a month or so. If he's lucky he'll be fairly mobile.

Oh, and, btw, Gamma is down with scarlet fever. And Alpha leaves tomorrow on a short business trip to Italy. (Thank god for grandparents who can take care of the kids while I'm at work).Beta is healthy. Although we're all sort of watching each other for signs of scarlet fever.

2001-11-11T12:22:00.000-08:00

Dead Man's Curve
There is a tradition in Austria, or there used to be in previous centuries, of erecting a small shrine at the site of a tragedy, catastrophe or also sometimes to give thanks when a catastrophe was avoided or something positive happened. The shrine is called in Austrian German a "Marterl". There are several in my village, which is typical. The one in the picture at the right is average. It's about ten feet tall, not counting the cast-iron cross on top. Behind the grate is a small statue of Mary with baby Jesus and several candles.

Behind that Marterl, by the way, is a construction site that used to be the village soccer field, which was moved so they could build houses there. When they started digging out the foundations, they discovered several WWII bombs and artillery shells that had been disposed of there.

I haven't seen any new shrines this size. The one in this picture looks fairly new, but I would guess pre-WWII so at least 60 years old. Not that I know anything about this. Some are centuries old, though, and carefully restored, national cultural heritage type things. They are a rural phenomena. I have heard that long ago, people working in the fields would pray at them when they couldn't make it to Mass. The closest thing to shrines like this that I have seen in Austrian cities are plague columns, grand gilt things erected centuries ago by people happy they survived the bubonic plague.

The only new shrines one sees nowadays are not on such a grand scale. They are erected on the roadside where someone has died in an accident. Some are humble white crosses. Some are more elaborate. These two (which are typical in size- about 3 feet tall - and appearance) are between my village and the nearest disco, across the street from each other in a curve that is tricky, especially at night, because it starts out fairly mildly and suddenly gets sharp. The road is lined with trees, most of them apple trees, and there used to be apple trees where these shrines now are, but they were removed after the accidents. One of these shrines has an oval, enamel sepia portrait of a young man on it. Both have names, and are regularly maintained. Some of the flowers in the pictures are artificial (the pink roses), but the rest - including the shrubs - are real.

2001-11-09T12:39:00.000-08:00

Mailbag
Bob in New Jersey wants to see the dashboard of the Dobló:

My apologies to those of you with a small monitor

2001-11-09T12:35:00.000-08:00

Law enforcement gene identified
Solving a centuries-old mystery, scientists at F.L.U. (Feral Living University) have identified the gene that makes you look like a cop. According to F.L.U. researchers, although the law-enforcement gene (see images here and here) is found in all populations, its highest incidence is among Americans of Irish ancestry.

This solves the ancient dispute over "looking like a cop - nature or nurture?"

My father, a bus driver, was often mistaken for a cop. I don't know about my brother (who really does look like a cop), but I have been mistaken by various people who should have known better for a police officer, undercover police officer, DA and "secret police" agent.

Most recently, I was on my way to my cello lesson last night. I have to walk through a dark park, past a heckling bunch of thuggish young riff-raff sitting on a low wall and smoking. So I just put on a cranky expression and walked through, fast, the way my father taught me - like I had somewhere to be.

Which I of course did, my cello lesson I mean. As I passed them, I heard one girl say - and I had the impression that irony was not her metier - "he looks like he's with security".

So I went over and said, gruffly: "That's right, miss, orchestra police, show me your ID." And she said, "that's Sigmund Freud's line..."

2001-11-09T07:05:00.000-08:00

Albert Einstein Family
There are, I suspect, by now, some among you who find tedious my constant references to search requests leading to Feral Living. But this one was special: FL is first for "Albert Einstein Family" at AOL. Coincidentally, I took an IQ test yesterday and scored 132. Reassuring to know my guessing abilities haven't declined much since high school.

(And at google, we're #2 with a bullet for both Charlize Theron naked and copper nail kill tree)

2001-11-08T11:48:00.002-08:00

A Short Skit
Bouncer: Show me your ID.
Sigmund Freud: That was my line.

2001-11-08T11:48:00.001-08:00

So I took one of those tests...
...and I scored 100% childish-openhearted, 0% childish-playful, 0% adult-anal-retentive, 0% adult-responsible (the test was in German, so I'm translating).

Big surprise.

2001-11-08T11:48:00.000-08:00

ABC
Driving to work in the rain this morning, only slightly late, there were the usual characters on the road - hot shots on my bumper, people changing lanes without using their turn signals, others with their signals blinking but showing no signs of changing lanes; the truck driver with a flatbed piled high with concrete bridge elements who swerved in front of me to pass a long line of trucks going one kpH slower than he was. He was second-best, because little chunks of concrete kept blowing off his load and cracking into my windshield (luckily no damage).

The best one was the military jeep that pulled in front of me (he signaled). He was impeding my progress, so I ended up on his bumper, briefly, which is of course the car-language gesture for "step on it." I fell back a couple car-lengths after reading what was stenciled onto his bumper, though: "ABC AbwehrS" among other things. Of all the possible cars to rear-end, a jeep from the weapons-of-mass-destruction section of the Austrian military is not my top choice. The ABC stands for Atomic-Biological-Chemical and AbwehrS stands for "Abwehrschule" which means "Defense School". Fellows from that unit have been in the news a lot lately, usually anthrax-related interviews, where they say things like, Well on the one hand we're defenseless, But on the other we don't have any major enemies...

Someone should ask them why they call the section of the military devoted to handling ABC issues a "school". That makes me think schoolish things, like calling in a possible anthrax exposure problem and a jeep arrives, from which an old lady emerges, saying, "Commander Maier is in a conference, I'll be substituting today, I'm Mrs. Russel... eh, Private Fritz! Stop putting schnitzels and noodles and crisp apple strudel in Private Franz's gas mask! Right this minute, or you get detention." Etc.

2001-11-07T12:40:00.000-08:00

Mailbag
By popular request: Austrian light switches and electrical outlets.

We also have a switch/dimmer switch combo downstairs in the living room, but I'm too lazy to run down there and take a picture.

2001-11-07T11:45:00.000-08:00

This Afternoon, Stream-of-Consciousness
Where'd I park? Where'd I park the car? Left or right? Or straight ahead way down the hill? No, I parked there this morning, but moved it closer at lunch. It's left. There it is. What's in the CD player, Ramones Live. God, what was I on this morning... What else is there, Cramps. Haven't heard them in a while. Have to blog about the Cramps someday. The Cramps Are Better than the Ramones or something. Do a poll. Hey, no traffic, this is great. This is the bad corner. Fucking here is the traffic after all. How are we supposed to merge here? Watch out for that bus. And those pedestrians. Sorry folks. Turn at the translator institute. Turn at that corner for ten years now. No, took the train for 8 of those years, didn't I. Man it's dark nowadays. What is that, cones and rods? Night blindness? Feh. HEY BUDDY YOU WANT TO PULL IN FRONT OF ME TRY USING YOUR BLINKER NEXT TIME. Move to the end of the line like everybody else. Yeah I'm talking to you. This big Doblo demands respect. 64 HP worth, at least. Lucky the radio stations all suck, not such a problem with no antenna and all. [etc etc] Whoa we here at the music school already? Was I conscious for the last 30 minutes? Will Beta be tired from 2 hours of harp lessons? Are these delinquents smoking in the park going to mug me? What, am I getting old, feeling actual physical fear in the presence of young punks? That sucks. Here's Beta now. Phone for me. Alpha. The insurance man isn't coming to our house tonight after all, because our largest cat, Ollie, all 30 lbs of him, was struck by a car and she's at the vet with him and Gamma. Broke his hip. So I go home and make spaghetti. Then she comes. She's on her potato diet. Potatoes and red wine. The red wine was my idea, after a trip to the vet with Gamma and crunched Ollie she could use it. Ollie is in a box now under the PC. He's touch-and-go right now. But an operation would be over $1K with no guarantee he'd ever walk again so he'll have to tough it out. I'd like to describe more of this, but dishes await me in the kitchen.