Being the father of two girls who have politely but consistently refused to let me indoctrinate them into the wonders of America’s Favorite Sport, I wanted to shuffle a little bit through the preparations and take a couple of “behind the scenes” pictures.

I had a little time between lunch and picking the girls up, so I went and parked the car as close to the center of town as I could, which wasn’t very close. Driving downtown, I found you can try to paint yourself as a world-class city, but something will always peek through the cracks:

Because of the upcoming event, almost all street parking in “The Mile Square” has been taken away.¹ So I parked up on Mass Ave., and almost immediately came upon the intersection of New York and Massachusetts, very apropos for the game:

Reaching downtown, many of the streets have temporary honorary names: a block of Washington St. is now “Texans Terrace”:

Though some of the streets are more closely linked with teams; Pennsylvania Street has Eagles and Steelers signs.

On Monument Circle there’s a big “XLVI” on the south side of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, and huge signs draped over the sides of buildings.

It’s interesting that almost all of these signs simply reference the game and not sponsors. You would think that you’d see Budweiser or Coke billboards. But no, that’s how much power the NFL has over the marketing of its product. Even on non-sponsors:

Up and down Georgia St. there’s a little tent village. Things were still being assembled as I walked through (there was no security to speak of, which I found interesting). Crews were putting big stickers on the sides of buildings, and test out a huge zip line, which I assume is going to be part of the NFL Experience next week.

All in all, very interesting. With all of the outdoor events, it looks like, due to La Nina, there won’t be a huge snowstorm between now and the Sunday after next. For which the organizers will undoubtedly feel most grateful. As I’ve said before, most people think “Ew” when they hear they’re going to Indianapolis. But once here, they have a great time.

¹

The Mile Square constitutes the original boundaries of downtown Indianapolis, which are named North St., South St., East St., and West St. We Hoosiers are nothing if not pragmatic.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-D416-32045.

I’m not just famous, I’m IN-famous!

Last Thursday, as you may remember, I posted something about the marriage of a nationally famous blogger and her less-prolifically-blogging, linking to both posts in which they referenced their marriage. I don’t do a lot of linking to other sites in this blog, and certainly less than I used to in my previous blogs, but I thought that I should in this case because not everyone is familiar with both of them.

I got online some hours after originally posting, and looked at the little stats graph at the top of my page (WordPress users will know what I’m talking about.) This graph is a small, 48-column graph that shows you the number of visitors to your site over the last 48 hours. If you mouse over it, a number comes up telling you the height of the tallest column, basically giving you a scale. Usually, in my case, that number will be 4 or 5, and sometimes double that. Mousing over it now, the number was 27, and there were a lot of columns of approximately that height. Something, as they say, was “up.”

It turns out that my post was the first remote reaction on the husband’s blog, and so people naturally clicked to my post. I was lucky in that I hadn’t said anything defamatory or negative, just that I was sad that it was happening. Not knowing them, and not having gone through that situation, I didn’t feel comfortable holding forth on “what they should do.” In fact, I’m sort of stunned by people who do. Because of that stance, needless to say, I didn’t provoke any strong reactions in those who clicked over here for the first time, and so none of them felt the need to comment. Now my trackback post has fallen off of the front page of the husband’s blog, and traffic has resumed to its normal ebb and flow. A similar, though less dramatic thing also happened recently when a post of my was featured in a “good writing” site.

It’s fun to think yourself influential, even for a day or so.

The mad blood is stirring

Yesterday, Daughter #1 and her class put on selected scenes from Romeo and Juliet, which they had been studying all this term. Most of the kids were in one scene, and D#1 was Tybalt in Act 3, scene 1. Her favorite line was, “Romeo, the love I bear thee can afford/No better term than this: thou art a villain.” She got to play with swords, even though her teacher kept saying that she fought like a girl. Having to record the scene through the auspices of my Flip camera, I didn’t really get to see most of the scene. No matter, since most of the words were mumbled anyway. Next term is Lord of the Flies, and I asked if they were going to act that out as well.

She was very happy that I came, and I saw the mother of a kid who had left after fourth grade to live in Germany. I had worked with her at a previous job, and she was the one who recruited me to go to the kids’ present school. Now they were back, and her boy seemed none the worse for wear. Actually, I hadn’t seen a lot of the parents since the end of the volleyball campaign. We’re all back to our usual non-excited, non-cheering selves. Which is too bad, I suppose.

Those good and crazy people, my married friends

Preparations continue apace for the Cabaret. I secured a spotlight for the evening, and will meet about the meal service tomorrow. The Wife is knitting a blanket for the silent auction. I still haven’t been given my final marching orders on what song I’m going to be singing, but I should be able to ask the guy who’s putting the acts together tonight. Since I didn’t link to it last time, and since it is his birthday today, I’ll share with you the song that I really want to sing. The filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker was asked to make a film of the original cast recording of “Company” as the first of a projected series. The series was ditched after the first one, but Pennebaker’s film remains, not only as a fascinating musical piece, but also as a window into 1970′s New York: the fashions, the looks, the interconnectedness of these artists. Jones’ “Being Alive” is notable for both his performance, and for the fact that he left the show not long afterwards to have a mental breakdown, brought on primarily by his failing marriage. You may also notice Elaine Stritch, looking much the worse for wear. I read somewhere that she doesn’t remember these recording sessions, so far was she into her cups. Regardless, the whole documentary is on the Tube of You.

Some may also remember Dean Jones from the Disney film, “The Love Bug.” From the sublime to the ridiculous.

And now for Shrove Tuesday, we’re singing vocal jazz. I’m not necessarily agin’ it, given that the harmonies are really cool (my jazz theory is non-existent), but it is a bit of a stretch. It’s going to be a “Saints and Sinners” concert, and we’re going t be making our way through “Straighten Up and Fly Right”, a close harmony arrangement of Lennon/McCartney’s “Michelle” and, most unusual of all, the first two movements of Bob Chilcott’s A Little Jazz Mass.

First of all, let me say that I applaud Mr. Chilcott for attempting this. As a former King’s Singer, he obviously has the chops to put this together, and its clear that he loves the musical wellspring from which this flows. It’s also interesting to note that, he being English, he doesn’t have the racial cultural baggage that many composers in this country would have in dealing with jazz (it was the same with Mick/Keef and the blues). So, he just jumps right in.

Second, let me say that he doesn’t go for the jugular in this piece: this isn’t Missa Thelonious Monk. It reminds me of nothing so much as The Four Freshmen. There’s no improvisation written into the piece. Indeed, the Oxford University Press font in which it is typeset makes it appear like it’s another in the Tudor Anthem series. There’s no direction to “swing” the eighth notes either, which, being American, we automatically did.

I will keep you in suspense no longer:

[There seem to be a plethora of Asian choirs performing the piece on the Tube of You. I don't know whether because they all had to do it for a competition, or that Chilcott is inordinately popular in Japan and South Korea.]

I play the video not to make a joke (well, maybe not only to make a joke), but to say this. After we had gone through it a few times, the director asked, in a serious tone, whether this piece made anyone in the choir uncomfortable.

*****

For my Sunday morning choir’s upcoming Cabaret performance, we’re going to sing two pieces, a choral arrangement of “Masquerade” from Phantom of the Opera, and a vocal jazz arrangement of “All that Jazz” from Chicago. After learning major portions of the latter, our director asked if everyone was comfortable singing it.

Now, some of it, I think was because we were a church choir singing for a church event (though not a religious service by any means). However most of the lyrics had been toned down because this repertoire is primarily sung by high schoolers: “the gin is cold” was changed to “the ice is cold.” So, it wasn’t that we were singing nasty words.

But I do think that it had something to do with the style. Though we are a church that has no problem singing the South African anti-apartheid “Siyahamba” and the breadth of spirirtuals, we still are unsure about the jazz idiom. It’s not that the music is simplistic (most of these arrangements are in a pretty extended diatonic idiom) or unfamiliar (to most people.) We still haven’t reconciled jazz music with the sacred, except on a one-off, “cute”, “stunt” basis. The jazz mass above is much deeper harmonically than anything John Rutter puts out for public consumption, so it’s not wanting in that area. It’s as difficult to learn as anything we sing by Kenneth Leighton.

It’s just weird that two very musical people would put out the same question on the same Sunday with two different pieces of music in the same style.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-28560.

I’ve mentioned recently that our new dog was so well house-trained that I got a bit annoyed. Going through troubles together is how you forge a bond, right? Butch and Sundance worked so well together as a team because just less than half the time, they hated each other’s guts.

As a related aside, now seems a good enough time to reference one of my two or three favorite conversations in movies:

If you haven’t seen the whole movie, do it. Now. G’wan, I’ll wait.

OK, now watch The Sting.

Fritz is still at the “mark out your territory” phase, so there’s a lot of barking, both inside and out. But it’s directed barking, and we know why he’s doing it. We’ll let him stay outside for as long as we think that it won’t annoy the neighbors. He likes snow, so he’s (literally) in his element when we open the sliding door, and he rushes out. So far, everything had worked out. So well, in fact, that he actually fell asleep in front of the TV last night as we were watching a video. Not only was it incredibly cute, it was also a good sign to us. If we can wear out the dog, he won’t tear up the furniture, or get really bored and annoy us to death.

One of the things that we had to do to adopt Fritz was to take him to the vet within ten (10) days of taking him home. I scheduled a visit for him to the local large chain pet store. [Eventually, we'll get him in to see our old vet in Bloomington, but this one was just to get it over with.] We got home from church around noon, and I mentally got ready to take him to the vet. I was not 100% sure of my assessment of his personality, and so taking him out in public with a lot of other people and their pets made my brain freeze a little bit. I’ve taken to walking him with a leather training leash attached to a chain-link collar. This makes it much easier to “pop” him when he does something that he shouldn’t, like try to run after squirrels. Remember the squirrels.

Our old dog Sam, we had trained enough so that I could open the front door, and he would walk with me for ten yards, unleashed, to hop in the back of the car, and I guess that was what I was expected our heretofore generally laid back new pet to do. So, I open the front door, and Fritz does what any normal dog does. He bolts. Remember when I said that we renamed him because I didn’t want to be running around the neighborhood shouting, “Cracker!”? Well, I’m very glad we did, because I started after him. I saw, a moment too late, that there were three squirrels minding their own business, until Fritz tried to lay down the law.

Because of the recent weather, there is a melty sheet of ice over the whole front yard, which certainly prevents me from going full-out. Especially in black dress shoes. I finally get across the street and three houses down, and find him, making like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, his nose seeking out the sciuridian¹ malefactors. Luckily, it looks at though he is simply enamored of his freedom rather than being eager to escape from my clutches, so, after a couple of minutes, I’m able to grab on to his collar and walk/drag him back to the car, along with the folder of humane society records that I had dropped into the slush in the pursuit of the dog. Off to the vet.

In his defense, once in the store, he is almost perfectly well behaved. In the 20 minutes that we wait to be asked into the office, there are a couple of barks, some pulling and sniffing trips. And the barks were mainly because, right next to the waiting area, there is the plate glass window looking into the cat adoption corral, which doesn’t seem like the smartest thing in the world to do when you’re planning out a pet store. Great Pyrenees are, according to the literature, quite territorial, and since the dog hasn’t seen many people besides his family this week, when the vet tech tried to check his ears, his mouth lashed out a bit: I could touch his ears, no problem, but she couldn’t. Unfortunately, she’s the professional, and so she got a little muzzle which, again, he wouldn’t let her put on him, but when I tried to do it, he was just fine. When he lashed out (that’s too strong a phrase for what he did), I could see in his eyes that it was from fear of the unknown rather than anger. So, the ears were checked, and it turns out they needed a swab check. Which she did, and then left the rest for the vet himself.

Dr. Lee (that’s his first name)² comes in, and does the basic look in the ears again, feels the bones, decides that he’s a good size, but that he shouldn’t get any bigger. Fine with me, other than the fact that he says at the other corner of the examining room. I would think that I would look like a competent-enough pet owner to keep a good handle on my 65-lb. pet. But that’s just me.

So, back home we get. I think that I’ve learned my lesson about properly securing the dog before he goes out in public. I pick up the leash and chain collar from the front seat, get out of the car, open up the rear door, and string the collar around his neck. Good to go, right? Wrong. He apparently sees something else that’s wrong with the universe, and sprints out of the car, dragging me alone with him. I just have a grip on the leather, but don’t have my hand through the noose at the tail end. Fritz takes advantage of this and, though I’m grabbing on for dear life, I can feel it slipping through my hands. I try to stop his momentum (which is inexorably dragging me over the sheet ice of the front yard) by running along, murmuring, “feets don’t fail me now”. Eventually (strange word to use as it was no more than a couple of seconds from start to finish) I gave in to fate, let go of the leash, and fell onto the ground. The dog, who doesn’t seem to be chasing anything³, has disappeared. I surmise from my experience earlier in the afternoon that, since the dog is territorial, and I am part of his territory, he will eventually come looking for me. So, I stop my search, bring various things into the house, upbraid the children for the state of the back seat of the car, announce that the dog is on the loose, and rejoin the search.

Within a few seconds, I sight the dog running in and around a different set of houses from the first time, eyes wide, tongue flapping, leash trailing. After a couple of head and body feints, I get him to come toward me. I grab onto the leash, rope it securely around my arm, not unlike one of those CIA handcuffed briefcases.

Lesson learned again. Sometimes it takes me a while. Those P90X infomercials are becoming more and more attractive to me, as I see that a 65-lb. dog can generate about 500 pounds of force if he needs to.

And that’s about a two-hour slice of my afternoon. How was your Sunday?

EDIT: I completely spaced that, as I was leaving the store, two uniformed members of the metropolitan constabulary entered. And they had been summoned. If I were a good blogger, I would have stayed to get a story. There was no obvious violence or noise. I wonder what you need to do to merit a police visit at Petsmart?

¹Yes, I did just make that word up from the Latin name for the family of rodents that includes squirrels: Sciuridae. This will totally get me thousands of new readers.

²Maybe it’s a southern thing, but around here, especially with teachers, it’s always Mr./Mrs./Miss FirstName. As a child, I never referred to anyone in a position of authority by their first name: my kindergarten teacher was Miss Denton.

³Dammit, there was a poem that I was going to reference here. I think it was by Whitman. He sees a guy running, apparently after something the poet can’t see, and tries to ask the guy what he’s running after, and can’t get but a fragmentary, ambiguous answer out of him. Grr.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-31265

There is no noise coming from the outside. Neither is there a little red icon on the weather.com app. I do see occasional strobe light flashes of lightning through the closed blinds, but no attendant crash of thunder which would lead me to the conclusion that the storm is overhead. Maybe I can get a block in before the storm starts.

Jeans, with the half-pea-sized hole in the crotch telling me that they are starting the slow process of public disintegration, go on. I slept with a sweatshirt on: crimson, “Indiana University”. Black dress socks are under the aging Reebok hiking boots. Tim Gunn would be horrified. Glasses, oh yeah, glasses.

The hook of the lead goes on the dog. I’m strangely disappointed at the so-far perfect behavior of the dog. How can we build a relationship when you never make a mistake? Jacket goes on me, like most of my jackets, the zipper in the front is unusable.

The front door opens, and we step out into a wall of water. I’ve flipped my hood up. Despite its Lands’ End provenance, the hood is too big and will not allow me to see in front of me. It is a “standing in the rain” jacket, not a “walking in the rain” jacket. An eye blink to the side shows the temporary lake that gathers in front of my neighbor’s house whenever liquid precipitation falls. Then my head points almost straight down. Squish, squish, squish, on the front yard. A minor hitch at the curbside to glance for cars. To see them, I have to pull back the hood, and so my face is soaked. Prance to the other side of the street.

Fritz seems none the worse for wear, but then again, his Stepford-Wife affability doesn’t give me the opportunity to make a judgement¹ on this point. About 100 yards into the walk, the middle tranche of my sweatshirt looks like I’ve been in an exercise infomercial. I can hardly see where I’m going, and I have a fear that my rimless glasses will fall off my face into a deep puddle where they will never be heard from again.² I turn home, running and jumping I praying that I can hear the cars over the slush of the rain.

*****

I am certainly not the only one who read, blogged, or commented with some dismay that Heather and Jon Armstrong are going through a trial separation. This also follows hard on the heels of Maggie and Bryan Mason’s separation. I don’t profess to know any of them any more than I know anyone I see from a distance. I’m a long-time, though not from the beginning, reader of Heather and Maggie’s blogs. Their blogs are completely different, Maggie’s is by a woman who has it all together, and Heather’s is by a woman who is desperately trying to hold it all together. I think I may have left one comment on each of their blogs over the years, because the comment sections of mommy-bloggers scare me. Comment sections in general do.

You want to see that things are going to get better. That the rain is going to stop. That the decisions you make, most of which seem right at the time, will all add up to something. That the side of you that you put out to the world through your blog and Facebook and Twitter accounts is the one that will stick, is the one that is reality. Chuck Jones surmised that Bugs Bunny is the person we all want to be, and Daffy Duck is the way we really are. Social media is all about the Bugs Bunny, and the Daffy Duck masquerading as Bugs.Then there are the Elmers, all of us told what we’ve been trained to do, but really just straight men in someone else’s cartoon.

¹“Judgement” is the official and accepted spelling of that word on this blog. Suck it.
²I lost my last pair of glasses in the same way, though that time in broad daylight. They also fell from my face. This I attribute to the odd placement of my ears on the sides of my head, which makes a tight, comfortable fit for eyewear unsustainable in the long term.

About three months ago, I saw an ad for another exciting test: they wanted kids who considered themselves “Pokémon Masters”. Even though they are certainly not the usual demographic, given that they are girls, and the whole Pokémon thing went through a couple of years ago, Daughter #1 is a slave to the anime TV show, and Daughter #2 plays a number of the video games on her DS. It’s amazing how much of the culture they have absorbed, given that there are now 649 different species of Pokémon, and they all have different characteristics, and most of them evolve from one another (for example, Bulbasaur evolves first into Ivysaur, and then Venusaur). I could scoff at this, as a “these kids today” kind of thing. But this is not too different from what I did as a kid with collecting baseball cards. My relationship with Pokémon, however, is a subject for another post.

I thought this would be very fun for the kids, and help science along the way. The Wife called up the researchers, and we set up a time. Turns out that they would be having an MRI, and get to take home a CD of images of their brains. We pick them up at school, and drive the 75 minutes down to Bloomington. We turn into the parking lot just in time to hear one of the girls and my favorite new songs: though I can’t remember the name of it now, it did remind me of Party Rock Anthem (which you can easily find on the youtubes), and also this Pokémon parody of the song:

[This was HUGE in our house for a couple of weeks]. Anyway, we were greeted by a very nice woman in her (early) twenties, and let into the the Psychology building, and downstairs to a labyrinthine maze of offices. The girls were both put in a fake MRI enviroment, just to make sure that neither of them were claustrophic, and they simulated the sounds and images that they would see in the real thing. We were let by another woman of about the same age to the real thing, an eight-ton circular magnet. They got to choose what cartoon they were to be shown during the scan: D#1 chose Looney Tunes (turns out it was a good one: Bewitched Bunny), and D#2 chose Wolverine and X-Men.The researchers reassured us that if the MRI picked up anything really abnormal in the brain, that they would send it on to a real doctor, and we would be notified. Wow, free health care in the bargain!

D#1 went first, and once they loaded her in, the Wife and I got to talking with all of the researchers. We were soon interrupted with the question, “Does your daughter have any metal in her skirt?” Even though our kids school uniforms are built to outlast the cockroaches, they need to be mended from time to time, and if someone’s kilt (the proper term) starts ripping apart during the day, the usual procedure is to staple the seam together. It had not occurred to us, while the kids were taking off their metal necklaces, that they still had metal on them. No big deal, the staff member put a blanket over her legs. They also had to replace their normal glasses with special ones made of plastic so they could see the video monitor.

I really couldn’t suss out what the relationship of one to the others, but there was one in her first winter in Bloomington. She was from California, and we tried to give her an idea of what midwestern snow was really like, and how to deal with January and February. While this was happening, D#2 was drawing an anime character of her own on the dry erase board, since she was prohibited from seeing what her sister was seeing: the name turned out to be Xenobia, and she looked to be quite peeved. Then there was a “Dr. Jhon Dee” on his back saying, “Uh oh.” I’m not even going to try to figure out what all of this meant, but before I could ask, her sister came out.

D#2 saw basically what her older sister did, the cartoon, followed by a series of different images, which made little sense to me, but I’m very sure they were important. D#1 was made to take a 15-question test on what appeared to be physics and spatial relations (if Gear A turns this way, which way does Gear D turn?) When D#2 came out, none the worse for wear, she got the same test, and D#1 went on to a “Pokémon master” quiz, which was about 20 questions on all sorts of Poke-things. Since neither girl collects the cards, or has seen Pokémon: The Movie (where Herman Cain got his best lines), some questions they didn’t know at all. There were some supplementary questions on the “ripoff” Digimon world, about which my kids (thankfully, I might say) had no clue. It was also interesting for me from a test-assembly point of view. I learned from the staff that the person who put the test together wasn’t really into Pokémon, she was just using it as a means to an end. From what my kids said, it was obvious that it was difficult for the researcher to figure out what a hard question was, since the whole world was equally obscure to her. For example, the question, “Who is Pokémon #151?” might seem quite difficult (picking one out of 647. It turns out that the answer (Mew) is quite easy to remember for people who are into the game, since it is the last of the First Generation of the game (I realize that this minutiae is fascinating).

When the testing was over, the kids got some gift certificates for their time, a CD of their brain, and we headed out into the cold night. We stopped at the Crazy Horse (a Bloomington standby), the Wife and I picking up gyros, and the kids some normal kid food. Then it was back up north again. The new dog, who was spending his first extended time in the crate, seemed perfectly fine, though he was really happy to frolic in the snow in the backyard when we let him out. So far, he seems up for anything, though his major weakness is squirrels. I was walking him this morning, and it took most of my strength to stop him from racing after one. But if that’s the worst thing he does, we’re lucky.

D#2, as is in her nature, wanted to spend her gift certificate immediately. Which we did today at Target, on a Wii game, Lego Harry Potter, Years 1-4. Given what she had done for science, it seemed just compensation.

Luckily, this past Christmas, a number of friends banded together and gave us the equivalent of a gift certificate to get a dog. The Wife had been looking on the local humane society’s web page, and had picked out four potential mates. She called the HS in mid-December to set up a meeting, and impressed the heck out of them by not wanting a dog as a Christmas present. Rather, we came to the decision that we’d like a non-puppy, trained animal that was of medium size. So, we related to them four dogs that we had seen on the website, and that we wanted to try out at their bi-weekly meet-n-greet.

Yesterday was the day. To paraphrase Thurber, it was a day “of high wind and great portent.” To say nothing of the first significant snow of the season. We made our way out to the HS, a big horse barn with an attached office. The event was from 5-7, and we arrived just at five, so there was a bit of milling around, and the volunteers trying to figure out what was going on, but eventually the dogs came out, and we went through them one by one.

Hank was a big galumphing labrador mix. He was of very high spirits, and as such, was very hard for Daughter #2 to control. We wanted the kids to be able to walk the dog, so that but the kibosh on Hank. Sandy was a basset hound body with a lab head, really odd looking, and I called him Photoshop dog. Ellie was nice, but she was a bit young, and needed more training than we felt entirely comfortable with.

The last dog, whom we actually saw second, was Ritz. A Great Pyrenees/Retriever mix, he had been my favorite from the beginning mostly because he didn’t look like a Golden or a Lab. He was sweet, calm, cool, and collected. D#2 could walk him immediately, which endeared him to her. When I saw the name “Ritz”, I thought that we needed a new name, but we couldn’t use Cracker, because, if he got away for some reason, I’d feel really weird going around the neighborhood shouting, “Hey, Cracker, come here, boy.”

The process for getting our first two dogs was really involved, the shelter had to drive by our house to make sure the house was where and what we said it was. It involved a number of visits, which we accepted because we wanted to make sure that we would be good pet owners. So, we were very surprised that, once we had taken Ritz around the stable a couple  times, the HS woman said that, pending the paperwork and fees, we would be able to take him home. On the one hand, this was great, because we got the dog. On the other hand, we really hadn’t prepared the house for a dog. For example, the Christmas tree was still up, undecorated, but still in the house. By 6:30, we were outta there, the dog in the front seat, the Wife and kids in the back, the complimentary dog bed and huge plastic candy cane full of dog treats in the trunk. And it was none too soon, for a front had moved in and lowered the temperature by about twenty degrees. We were grateful to have a mountain dog.

Arriving home, the rechristened Fritz (not German, but short for François) was as calm as he had been previously. The tree went out, the crate was assembled, the initial walks around the backyard taken. The Wife and I went to the store to stock up on dog food, and treats and carpet cleaner (you never know). We got back, and everything was the same as we had left it. He being a herding dog, he didn’t like to have any of us out of his sight, and so we allowed him to sleep this first night in our bed, in which there was just enough room.

My alarm rang at 6:15, and so I thought, why not get the real walk out of the way. Jumping into warm clothes, I took him around the block, and he pooped and peed like normal. I was almost disappointed that I didn’t seem to need to teach him anything. The walk would have been longer, but given that the wind chill was slightly below zero, I bagged after just one turn around the block, as I could still feel my cheeks.

Which brings us to now, as he is happily perched ‘neath the Wife’s legs as she scans her computer screen. We have a dog now that we think we’ll have a good long time. And that, as Martha Stewart would say, a Very Good Thing.

Today’s big discussion was with the head of the middle school. Nothing bad: Daughter #1 is starting to look at high schools, and since we live in a way-out-of-the-way place, we’ve ony come recently to the ballpark. Daughter #2 will be entering her purview next year, and, since the curriculum has changed significantly since the last time that we had a fifth-grader, we wanted to be up to date. A very productive discussion on both counts.

Though I’m generally a morning person, I woke up very early this morning (like, 4:45) and couldn’t get back to sleep, the result being that I have been sleepy without being tired all day. Which sucks. Not even a midday brisk walk through the cold precipitation could shake me from this state. I know, “welcome to everyone else’s life, Hugh.” One of these days, I’m going to break down and buy something like P90X, so that I can at least work against the morning stupor, if not lose a bit of weight. I’d probably start with the appropriately named Insanity, though after I used it, I would only be insanitary.

Choir tonight. Mendelssohn, “There Shall a Star from Jacob” will be the focus for next Sunday, with more work on the Bach Cantata we’ve started… Oh, yeah, THAT’S what happened.

Just remembered. So, I started work with the caterer for the BIG EVENT last Monday, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly, when yesterday, I got an e-mail. It basically said, “Um, we can’t work with you.” Needless to say, 45 days from the event, I was a little freaked out. So, I go to the rest of the committee to share the news. I was told to go the business manager of the school, who knows someone, who knows someone. Got an e-mail this afternoon, and it turns out yes, they can work with us. It was very Godfathery. So, one near-heart-attack later, we’re on track again.

¹Stuff in this context is defined as any object that we interact with less than once every six months.

But, there’s no rest for the weary. I’m once again co-chairing a Cabaret/Dinner/Silent Auction as a fundraiser for my church choir’s pilgrimage to South East England this summer. Last year’s theme was Valentine’s Day, and this year’s is Mardi Gras. Since I did a over-the-top job with “When I’m Near the Girl I Love, I Love the Girl I’m Near” last year, I thought that would use that political capital to request (a) a slow song and (b) Sondheim. Since I’m not really a Sondheim scholar, that narrowed the choice down to two songs: “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park with George or “Being Alive” from Company. The latter is much better known and easier to extricate from the show (much like “Send in the Clowns”) but the former is more in my range, and beltier for me. Now that I think about it, “Finishing the Hat” is not really a slow song, overfull as it is with eight-note runs, but it’s one that I feel very comfortable singing. And it’s a “sweep-up” song for me, one that I missed out on the chance to sing earlier in life.

In high school, we had a winter festival concert every year. This involved several hundred singers and a number of the orchestras. As part of the extravaganza, they would hold auditions for two singers to sing an aria with the symphony orchestra. Two, because, like with graduation, there were two performances to accommodate the crowds. I tried out my senior year with “If with all your hearts” from Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Didn’t get it, lost out to two sopranos, one of whom sang “Glitter and be Gay” as I remember. So, I had no chance with a staid piece like mine. A couple years ago, a local choir/orchestra was performing an edited version of the oratorio, and I finally got to sing it. I had never sung a solo with an orchestra before, and I certainly wanted to impress these musicians. I was so scared at the first rehearsal, that it was probably the best performance I gave of it, driven as I was by fear.

My senior year of college, I was putting together a voice recital (actually a half-recital) and I really wanted to do some Sondheim. It got nixed by my voice teacher, probably because he couldn’t play the accompaniment. I had also discovered Sunday in the Park with George, and was absolutely entranced by the entire thing, listening to it constantly, and wooing this girl by forcing her to listen to it with me in the Music Listening Room (yes, that is a concept that The Youth of Today® will never understand). It worked on her: she is now The Wife. Getting a chance to sing it would make up for that missed opportunity.

I don’t know what it says about me that last year’s song was about an unfaithful man (leprechaun, actually), and this year’s are about men who have a lot of trouble with commitment. [Hi, Honey!] I’ll leave that judgement to my therapist.

Grab that crab, Clarissa! Eat that meat, Jennifer!
Why, doesn’t that pheasant look pleasant?

What I’ve called my “secret shame” finally arrived in the mail yesterday: the complete series of Two Fat Ladies on DVD. The Wife and I used to watch this show religiously, back when Food Network was actually trying to be about food and not the nightmare of Guy Fieri and Rachael Ray. I don’t tend to watch cooking shows for recipes that I can actually make, but for an experience of a world that I could never be in. This is why TFL and the original Iron Chef (and, to a lesser extent, Barefoot Contessa) have been my favorite food shows.

The first cooking show that I can remember seeing was The Galloping Gourmet with Graham Kerr. I must have been about five or six, when I saw him gallumphing into the studio. In fact, that’s all I can remember, nothing about the food stuck with me. My family was in a vacation home in Petoskey, Michigan. I think the place was called L’arbre Croche, though I can’t seem to find the original place on Google Maps. The home that we were in was called “Robinson 5″, which at the time immediately called to mind the Jackson 5ive and that groovy logo that they had. It must have been a time share or something.

The other thing that I remember, other than apparently watching a lot of public television, were the Petoskey Rocks. As I look them up on the Wikipedia, they seem to be interesting rock formations, but at the time they were great to skip into whatever body of water we were near at the time. Hey, I was five.

Anyway, we started watching the DVDs yesterday, and were pleasantly surprised to find that at least a couple minutes of each episode had been returned, since we were now free from the half-hour constraints of commercial television. The restored time was not in the cooking part of the show, but more toward the beginning, as they learn more about the little towns that they encounter along the way. Hijinks ensue, but the footage make the show appear much more leisurely, which is wonderful. They seem to use a lot more natural light in the cooking shots (indeed, there’s no lighting person listed in the closing credits), which only adds to the atmosphere.

Wow, these were from 1996. How long ago that seems. Well, it is a long time ago, 16 years. Back when we had no kids, and time for appointment television like Two Fat Ladies.