Permanent Qui Vive
There are no stupid questions, just smart-alecky responsesYet another Sign-Off
I realize that this blog hasn’t been going for that long. But real life caught up with me and kicked me around a bit. But, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, I came out of it with only minor injuries.
I also discovered Facebook, which, to be frank, was much more interesting than me blogging about being unemployed. I have (almost) no doubt that I will be starting a professional blog in my new job, so the Web will not be absent from my dulcet tones. I’ll send the word around when that gets set up.
Close calls
I’m a tad groggy today. And, given that I’m not a coffee-drinker, I have to find some other way of keeping focused. [It's not that I don't drink coffee at all. I will drink it as a accompaniment to breakfast, or after dinner. However, I don't use it to wake up in the morning or to keep from falling asleep at night.] Scary events will do that to you. The kids and I had to wake up especially early this morning to get out of the house by 6:30, to get to school by 7:15, so that Daughter #1 could go on a field trip to the Falls of the Ohio.
After downing a SlimFast and filling the tank, we headed off to school. D#1 got to her bus on time, and I stayed with Daughter #2, reading her stories until she could go to the gym. The school charges for “before-care”, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for that when they force me to wake up that early. After some Aesop’s Fables and the first couple of pages of The Hobbit, it was 7:45, and she could skip off to the gym, while I could skip off home.
I’m one of those whackos who play classical CD’s in the car. As those of you who do the same know, the issue is that the dynamic range of a Mahler symphony (for example) is such that you can’t hear the low end, because of the white noise of the auto. The knob goes clockwise. Then a forte passage swoops in, you swoop for the dial, and the car almost swoops off the road. The listener is then constantly thinking 4 measures ahead so as not to be taken by surprise. This, unfortunately, makes driving with a clear head virtually impossible.
On the way to and from the kids’ school, one passes by a high school with the nastiest speed trap you could imagine. A local street, with three lanes going each way. 40 mph on either side of a 25 mph school zone. It’s one of those trap that even the speed demons will pull the reins on.
So, it’s 8:00 am, and I enter the Perfect Storm of a speed trap: I’m sleepy, paying greater attention to the volume dial than to the road, and there are kids coming to school. I must be going about 35 in the middle of three lanes. I notice a shiny, black Lexus on my left, going about 1 mph faster than me. He starts to break. This knocks me out of my reverie [SPEED TRAP, DOOFUS!] and I look up to see an officer, a hundred yards ahead, walking right to left. Empty lane, my lane, Lexus lane. As he’s doing this, he raises his right hand in the classic pose.
“Wait,” I think, “he could be stopping traffic for some other reason. Cops don’t do speed traps on foot, do they?” Black Lexus and I slow to a crawl. Then, with that same beautiful right hand, the officer motions me to keep going, and as I pass him, I see the hand tell the Lexus to pull over into a side street. He’s busted.
My brain had been working so slowly that I didn’t even enter the “OH SHITSHITSHITSHIT!” phase of the common traffic stop before it was over. I even felt sorry for the other guy, the Lexus notwithstanding. My morning was saved.
The reason that I mentioned this (other than to have something to post to this increasingly-neglected blog) is that the husband of a cousin of mine was involved in a head-to-head car crash the other day. The other driver, and I assume his passenger, both had alcohol in their systems. It remains to be seen if they were legally drunk, pending the results of the autopsies. My relative was “treated and released”, as they say. He was going to run a marathon this weekend, and his greatest concern was that he would have to miss it.
There but for the grace of God. . . .
“Pardon me, do you have any. . . .”
Usually, the kids are pretty talkative in the car in the morning. Even so, most of our conversations boil down to
“Did you remember X?” “Yes, Daddy.” “Did you remember Y?” “Yes, Daddy.” “Did you remember Z?” [Pause] “AAAAARGH!”
and then we turn the car around.
However, this morning, it was just dark enough so that the girls needed to turn on the reading lights in the back of the car. They each have their own reading light, and their own Lemony Snicket book. The radio is off, and in the car there is simply. . .
Silence.
So much silence that I notice it, and could swear that I’m a limo driver carrying two executives – one reading the Wall Street Journal, one reading the Financial Times — to the airport. I’m almost ready to stop at the next intersection and ask for some Grey Poupon. But then life returns to normal when I ask Daughter #2 if she likes her new deskmates. She was moved because there was a new kid in the class who simply HAD to sit next to her best friend. So now she’s with Susie (whom she likes) and Christopher (whom she doesn’t, because he’s too distracting). D#2 takes great pride in her behavior.
We then get into cooties and boy germs. It’s amazing how those concepts get passed from generation to generation. I wonder why there is a silly name for one and not the other. I forget if cooties were an ambisexual thing, or were cooties a synonym for girl germs.
Then it’s relationship issues. Apparently, people still haven’t “gotten the message” that D#2 and Marco are not “going out” any more [remember that these kids are six]. I might as well be hosting an episode of “Dr. Phil”.
More dodecaphonic goodness
Hot on the heels of the Raisin Brahms ad comes this informercial for the toe-tapping triskadekaphobic tunes of the second Viennese school.
Last sports post for a while
I know that all I seem to post about any more is sports, but being a Chicago-area native, and having three first-place teams is freaking me out.
The Bears are, according to the Sagarin ratings, the 5th best team in the league. Given the Bears’ performance last night, tonight’s Packers game will be very important to see how much fall-off there has been for the Cheeseheads since the loss of Brett Favre. If it’s a close game (single -digits) Look for the Bears to take the NFC Norris.
Intellectual dishonesty
I hate, hate, hate writing posts about politics. Mostly because my positions are usually so uninformed that you could blow them over with a feather. I admit that. But it just astounds me that the first thing that Sarah Palin’s partisans chose to focus on was her supposed “foreign policy experience”.
Now, it has been obvious to everyone on both sides of the aisle that she was picked as an offering to the religious right (McCain wanted Lieberman, but Rove said no – way to be a maverick, John!) The reason that she has resonated with the Republicans is her stand on guns, abortion, and taxes. Which is fine. But we’re not to think about her stand on these issues, instead focusing on her foreign policy experience?
The intellectual dishonesty of this astounds me.
Black and Blue
The Wife and I journeyed to West Lafayette last night to see the comedian Lewis Black at Elliott Hall, a massive, 6,000-seat proscenium theatre. He was as good as you would think he would be, which is to say, very good. Having come up by touring the college ranks, his local humor (about Purdue, Boilermakers, and engineers) was unforced. His opening act, John Bowman, was also funny — concentrating his act on “marketers”. Since this is a family blog, I can’t really repeat any of the jokes. Well, maybe not. On Joe Lieberman – “Have you seen his teeth? Never trust a Jew who needs a dentist.” On Mike Huckabee believe every word of the Bible is true – “[Jews] wrote the thing, and even we don’t believe it.” On people who wait until marriage to have sex – “You are gamblers on a level I can’t even comprehend.” A lot of different subjects were covered, and since the tour was sponsored by Comedy Central, I assume they’ll package a later version of this act as an hour special. He was up there for a good hour and fifteen minutes. Very much worth the seventy-five minute drive.
Yes, I didn’t see the Bears game. At the show, there were a preponderance of Brian Urlacher Bears jerseys with a smattering of others (Devin Hester, Robbie Gould, and even Muhsin Muhammad, who’s not on the team any more.) On the other side, there were Peyton Manning jerseys (worn almost exclusively by women) and Bob Sanders jerseys.
