Party like it's 1989!

Hey! Look at that! Finally a post!

I've actually been pretty busy, but with a lot of stuff that is of absolutely no interest to anyone but me. And often even *I* don't give a shit about what I'm up to.

Anyway, last night Argotnaut and I went to see Bad Brains. That's right! And it was even an all ages show -- what is this, 1989? I won't go into a lot of detail about why I was motivated to see a live rock n' roll show by a major act for the first time since Bush the First was president because, again, who cares? but Bad Brains was one of my favorite bands in the ancient and bygone days when I actually listened to new music. And the BB's guitarist, Dr. Know, was a big influence on my guitar sound. Since it was one of the bands that Argotnaut also enjoyed, we got us some tickets and went to do what the young folks do -- actually be out and about after 11 pm rather than a) in my case collapsing in bed with a pile of dogs and cats, or b) in A's case doing homework and puttering around on-line until her natural sleeping time (say around 1 am) rolls around.

Here's a nice, blurry, cellphone photo for ya:


It was good to see the guys back in action, and comforting to know that a bunch of 50-year-old guys can still bring it when the spirit (in this case, Jah) moves them.

I've also been spending a lot of time editing together videos of Argotnaut's performances in Heidelberg with her theater group in 2005. It was a good exercise in using Final Cut HD and figuring out which video export options provide the best combination of small file size and acceptable quality. Again, you probably won't be excited by this unless you speak German, but all the videos are now posted on my YouTube page in case you're curious. A appears in "Polizeiwache," "Das Mauseproblem," and "Alte Freunde."

Other than that, I've been cycling and enjoying some long walks with the boys before I start classes in a couple of weeks. Now it's time to take Buddy and Pepe in for a clip and a bath before the year's first hot spell hits tomorrow. I'll be sure to post some before/after pictures...at some point.

Videos, Music, It's An Extravaganza!

As promised, for your appreciation or ridicule, here are the two main projects I did for my Digital Video Editing class at the Northwest Film Center School of Film.

The first one, "Slacker Manifesto," is the final project. The point of the project was to create a portrait of a person, place, or thing. As often happens, I had an idea that just would not go away, and despite its somewhat tangential relationship to the project's stated goal, I went ahead and did it anyway. This despite the fact that the portrait is of an imaginary person -- well, sort of an alter ego, really. Plus, the last few videos I made were pretty arty and heavy, and I wanted to do something fun and frivolous. I will preface the video by saying that the views expressed in the film are not necessarily those of the filmmaker, even though the filmmaker wrote, edited, and "stars" in it.


For the second video, each student was given a tape with 60 minutes of stock footage and told to edit down to a 1-2 minute piece to accompany a haiku that each student wrote based on the film. We had no say in what footage we got -- we simply had to make something of what we were given. It was an interesting project. The footage comes from the Prelinger Archives, a foundation whose goal is to preserve old films that otherwise would be lost. These aren't movies, usually, but instead are old industrial/trade/educational films, student films, home movies, old short films and other footage. I highly recommend visiting the site and cruising around. The search function is very good and you'll turn up some interesting stuff that you won't find anywhere else. (A high-speed connection is highly desirable, however.) Anyway, here's my haiku.

In other news, "The Unlikely Event," the electronica band of which Argotnaut and I are a part, have finally posted some songs. You'll find them here.

Enjoy!

Chicago visit highlights

Every once in a while I get an urge to make a pilgrimage to Chicago to visit old friends. Such an urge was triggered a few weeks ago when some old buddies informed me of a couple of very cool bands playing during the weekend of April 6-8. As it happens, the Cubs' home opener was scheduled for April 9. Thus, a road trip -- or more precisely a "crammed in economy class for four hours" air trip -- was born. A quick search of Travelocity.com turned up a good deal at Hard Rock Hotel Chicago . Here were the highlights:

Friday night: I arrived in Chicago to one of the coldest April days on record. Figures. Fortunately for the pigeons, they could keep warm around the "Eternal Flame" in Daley Plaza. One can almost hear them say "Coo! Coo! Thanks for the flame, Chicago war veterans!"

I dumped my stuff at the hotel, scored my Cubbie ticket via the concierge (aided by another Travelocity perk: a $25 ticket voucher),and then it was off to see "Led Zeppelin 2",at Martyrs'. The band was quite good (although they had decided only to do material from the first four LZ records, so no "Achilles Last Stand") and I had a chance to catch up with many folks I hadn't seen in a long time.

Saturday I test rode a new/old bike, a P-38 recumbent. I owned a P-38 in the summer of 2002 and loved it, but had to sell it in the wake of the calamity, because we needed the dough. The Bacchetta Giro I have now is a nice bike but the seat is very high and I'm uncomfortable balancing precariously on one tippy-toe whenever I have to stop. I had been thinking about going back to a P-38 but wanted to test ride one first just to make sure I would be comfortable on it -- the seat back on a P-38 is relatively vertical which makes for a somewhat "closed" riding position, as opposed to the more laid-back Giro. There are no P-38 dealers in Oregon but Rapid Transit bike shop in Chicago had not one but two for test rides! After a few seconds on the P-38, I felt as if I'd been reunited with an old friend. An added bonus is that I got the floor model and saved a few bucks. It's a lovely fire-engine red and I'll be sure to post pictures in a few days when it arrives.

Sunday I went visit Millennium Park in Chicago. Very impressive, and I imagine even more so in the summer when the gardens are in bloom. As it was, the brisk, mostly sunny spring day helped provide some nice shots even with my crappy phone camera. Here's a long shot showing the "cloud gate" sculpture at the left, and the stage for the outdoor arena in the background:

The "cloud gate" sculpture -- known affectionately in Chicago as "The Bean" is a giant kidney-shaped, chrome-skinned orb. As you might expect, the reflections are very cool:

If you walk under the crease of the sculpture, the reflections become more abstract:

On the other side of the stage is an enormous, winding, chrome-and-wood bridge. Here you can better see the ornamentation over the stage, which kind of reminds me of an enormous watch spring that has become permanently unsprung, or perhaps a pair of wrecked "Chinese handcuffs" of the gods.


Sunday, Yakuza at Beat Kitchen. Also very cool.

Monday, the Cubbie home opener. The weather relented a little bit and graced the crowd with a high of 43 degrees -- for about three seconds. As is my usual approach when I go to a game alone, I got my scorecard, two hot dogs and a pretzel. Awesome. Plus, pretty good seats:

The Cubbies lost, but it was still cool to be at the park. Afterwards, a dinner at one of my favorite Chicago pubs, the Duke of Perth:


Tuesday, back home. And none to soon. Tuesday's Cub game was even colder, and Wednesday's was snowed out!

The trip was a great time but it's good to be back home with my lovely spouse and stinky little boys. And actual springtime weather!

Multi-media fest

The clamoring throngs have insisted that I write a new post (actually, one person asked because, I think, he was afraid I'd passed on or something). So here it is. The crank in me lately has considered abandoning the blog thing because it's just so overdone. But then my family would never know what the heck was going on with me. The one thing I do less often than post on my blog is call members of my family. And they are all kind of the same way, which is weird because we're such social blabbermouths. So I shall make an effort to update more frequently.

There has been one notable development: I believe I have decided on a course of action for the immediate future. As regular readers know, I've been unable to come to a decision about how to best apply myself. Many factors are involved: making a living, doing something meaningful, utilizing my talents, acquiring skills that would be transferable to Europe if Argotnaut and I end up there in a couple of years, etc.

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that perhaps teaching English as a second language (TESL) might be an excellent choice. It meets all the above criteria and addresses an interest that my vocational survey turned up: a bias towards teaching. My vocational guidance counselor even suggested teaching, and she'd known me for all of two hours. Must be SOMETHING there.

Portland State University offers both a certificate in TESL and a Masters Degree. Of course, the degree would make me far more attractive to potential employers. The downside, obviously, is two years of full time Graduate school, or as John Irving calls it, "Gradual School," because it's where you gradually learn you don't want to go to school anymore.

There are several aspects to be investigated -- such as do I REALLY want to go back to school full time for two years?, considering that I haven't done that since Reagan was President. But hey, that's just more blog fodder! I'll be sure to keep my restless readers informed.

In the meantime, here's a little movie I did of our pets:



And also, here's what Argotnaut did on her Spring Break! Maybe this full time student thing isn't so tough after all! (That's a joke, my dove!)



Please note how often we change the sheets!

Super Blah Sunday

Wow! No posts in nearly a month.

Worry not. I'm still alive and have managed to survive the crash and burn of my once-mighty Chicago Bears in the Super Bowl. In fact, I celebrated the occasion -- I mean, the occasion of their APPEARANCE in the big game, not their shocking and disgraceful performance IN it -- by allowing the crazy woman who cuts my hair the opportunity to exercise her creativity:



And while the Bears' almost comic ineptitude was reminiscent of the "Upper Class Twit of the Year Competition" on Monty Python's Flying Circus, I still wear my Chicago "C" logo proudly, because the Bears are competitive with the best teams in football (rarely the case in the past) and I have faith that the team's management will actually correctly identify the Bears' problem areas and fix them, as opposed to prior management's usual approach, which often has been to open the door of the clown car and pluck out the most unpromising of the clowns that tumble out.

Okay, enough sports. While my hair stylist is flexing her creativity with dye and hair clippers, I'm using my cleverity (all six atoms) and creativity (maybe up to double-digit atoms) on my video editing course. I finished the first of the three course projects last week -- a re-editing of an action sequence in the old TV series "Gunsmoke." And I do mean OLD. The clips we're using are from the early black-and-white days, and feature Dennis Weaver as "Chester." That's before MY time even, so you KNOW they're old.

All twelve or so people in the class have the same assignment: use about 15 minutes of rough takes to create a tightly paced sequence with good flow and good continuity. It's been interesting to see how everyone's approach to the same source material has been a little bit different. There are a lot of parallels between music composition and film editing. You must work to find the right rhythm, pacing, emotion, and determine the most important elements and then figure out how to emphasize them while maintaining a pleasing balance. And also like any artistic pursuit, film editing is incredibly time consuming. The "Gunsmoke" sequence is an amalgam of probably 10 takes of varying quality. My final sequence is just shy of three minutes, and it took probably five hours of niggling around to get it there. I cannon IMAGINE how much time must be involved in editing something like the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Months and months of work by dozens of people, I'm sure.

I'm unlikely to post the results of the "Gunsmoke" exercise because I can't imagine anyone being interested in it. But the next project, if it turns out well, might be worth a You Tube distribution. We'll see!

Video saved the radio star?

For a little while now, I've been trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. And by "a little while," I mean about 30 years. Last September I went to see a vocational guidance counselor to help, which it did, in a very general way. However, while I wasn't expecting "you should be a professor of astronomy in a mid-sized university just on the northern outskirts of Cairo" kind of specificity, I do need more than "well, something arty and also a bit science-y."

I asked a few friends in Portland about it, and those who've seen my short films said that I should do that. Which, again, is helpful in a general way but there are other factors involved besides doing something creative. I would like said occupation to have the potential to provide me with a living wage. (Filmmaking is almost on a par with commodity trader or music producer as far as likelihood of losing vast sums of money in a hurry.) It also has to be a transferable skill -- Argotnaut and I will likely be leaving Portland in 18 months or so when she goes to graduate school for her linguistics degree, and I'd like to be able to get a job wherever it is we end up.

But a few days ago, I started thinking more seriously about an occupation Argotnaut and I have bandied about before: video production, and in a perfect world, music video production. This would enable me to use my skills as a filmmaker and audio engineer, is creative and science-y, offers the potential to actually earn a modest living and also is highly transferable, even overseas if necessary.

The more I thought about it, the better it sounded. So I have decided to pursue that. Starting this Monday, I am taking a video editing course at Northwest Film Center (the same place I took the Filmmaking class) and this Spring I plan to start work on a Video Production Certificate through Portland Community College. Therefore, in the next few weeks, expect to be tortured by more of my short films, this time shot on video.

For now, enjoy this very cost-effective and creative "OK Go" video if you haven't seen it already:


Or, if you prefer, here are a couple of nice pictures of Pepe with his tongue sticking out:

It's a man's world, unfortunately

Let me get this straight. Tara Conner, Miss USA, gets caught drinking while under age, an activity that is not only illegal, but could be deadly, especially if she gets behind the wheel of a car. But everybody deserves a second chance, right? Nobody's perfect and all is forgiven.

But.

Katie Rees, former Miss Nevada, shows her boobs, an activity that harms no one, and gets the boot -- from an organization whose sole purpose is capitalizing on the sex appeal of attractive women.

Wow. To quote Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, "Didn't you notice the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?"

It truly is a man's world, as the late, great James Brown said. The women can't take over soon enough as far as I'm concerned.

Coop de ville!

At long last, the coop she is finished.

Our handy dude did a really nice job with it, too. The coop at the former house was built on an existing dog run. Essentially all that needed to be done was to put a roof of chicken wire on top of it. Not a small job, but not terribly a complicated one, either.

Not so the current coop. Since no previous containment structure existed, this one had to be built. It is still using the side of the house as one wall (allowing the kitties access to it from a basement window) and the opposite wall is formed by the existing wooden fence. But the ends (including a handy gate) and the roof had to be constructed.

Our handy dude also outfitted the entryway with a kitty-cat cupola that allows them a high vantage point from which they can view all the tasty woodland creatures that visit our backyard, and a nice series of raised platform that allow them to hop up to the "viewing deck."

Here's a shot of Buster looking down on the almost completed coop from our bedroom window. "When the hell can I go out there?" he is obviously kvetching. Note the cupola in the background.


Here's a shot of the interior and two of the three raised platforms.


And finally, here's the triumphant Buster enjoying his stately perch.


Quite deluxe! "But Frinky!," you cry. "How do the cats get into the coop in the first place!?"

The answer, another series of platforms mounted on the basement wall. The basement window has now been outfitted with a pet door:


Yes, it's very nearly perfect for the kitties, except for the one squirrel who has learned to stand over the coop and hurl insults at the poor caged predators below. All I can say is, he'd better not get too close!

Mary Cheney toon

I just thought this was funny...

Cooped up

The new cat coop is nearly complete...outside is done. Now we just have to add the series of platforms that will allow the kitties to access it through the basement window. I will post photos when the whole thing is done, but for now I can just say, "not a moment too soon." First, Buster is very much contemplating hurling himself through the window at passing wildlife:


And now he's getting a martyr complex!



Better get that thing done quick before he gets stigmata!

Furry pants

Argotnaut and I continue to settle into the new residence and make it our own. Or to be more accurate, make it our pets' own. We have had ramps installed from the back deck down to the back yard, and along the two sets of steps that lead down to the front sidewalk. Buddy and Pepe have been pretty good about using the ramps and they too are settling into a nice rut. They were treated to an unusual sight in Portland last week, however: a dusting of snow:



That on top of the wettest November in the history of Portland, 12 inches of rain in 30 days. Fortunately, this is about all the snow Portland usually gets.

Meanwhile, the cats are making do until the new cat coop is built:

Where's our cat coop, dammit?!

The handy dude who built our doggy ramps is now in the process of constructing a new coop, which the boys will, I'm sure, disdainfully enjoy.

I guess you can see who wears the pants in this family.

Until the coop is completed, the kitties have to be content with the window box. Buster has accepted this for the time being. Grudgingly.


The humans, meanwhile, are also settling in. Or at least I am. Argotnaut has been so busy with finals that she has yet to make friends with our new abode. But after a trip to the Midwest next week, she should have the last couple of weeks of December and the first week of January to sit in front of the fireplace and also soak in the hot tub. Speaking of the latter, I've been trying to get up to speed with all the chemicals and such that one needs to enjoy a spa. What with all the Ph balancing, alkalinity, calcium levels and bromine concentrations, I feel like I'm back in high school chemistry class. I can hear the guy down at the spa supply place now: "Well, you got the basics down, but to really do it up right, you'll need some ear of foxglove (which you gotta dissolve in rose water), six types of powdered tree frog and some eye of newt, and then you'll be set."

Mmmmm...human cauldron.

Tofurky day in the new digs

I am still getting used to doing things with my Apple iBook G4, but I did manage to e-mail a couple of photos from my phone to my e-mail, and find/download an Apple-oriented ftp program with which to upload them to the frinky server. So here's a look at the back garden during an EXTREMELY rare dry moment, with the sun streaming through the bamboo by the tea house:


And does Tofurky have tryptophan in it? Possibly, but these guys are sacked because they got a T-day feast of chicken cold cuts and are now enjoying our gas fireplace (note Pepe in far upper right-hand corner):


We are slowly settling in and the house is great. Even with the record-setting amount of rain we've had this month, the house's relatively high vantage point and lots of southern exposure have meant we're getting much more light that the old house. And for those seasonally-affected disorderly types in the household, that's a very big deal.

NaNoWriMo DOA, et. al.

The move into the new house, she is accomplished.

Overall it went fairly smoothly, but still took so much of my time to organize that "Tipping Point" will have to wait for a while. Unless I write 40,000 words in the next week. Which ain't gonna happen.

No photos, I'm afraid, because my mighty laptop , Gigantor, is on the fritz. This just as I had decided that, rather than get a new TV to replace the ailing one we just donated, I would get a little gadget that allows one to watch TV on one's computer. Since Gigantor has a 17" screen, I thought, "that'll work for my purposes." Of course, as soon as I installed the gadget, the video card on Gigantor died. Do'h! I installed the same gadget on Lisa's little Fujitsu notebook, and it works fine. So at least I had access to football on Thanksgiving -- not that the games were worthy of much time.

So now I have to figure out what to do about Gigantor: fix it (for a hefty fee but much less than a new, comparable notebook) or sell it as is and buy something new. I have techy data to gather to make that decision and won't bore readers with the details. The upshot is that it's a huge pain in the ass to get photos from my phone to my little Apple iBook G4. So my posts will be prose-only for a little while. But at least I'm still able to surf and get e-mail and such.

Better news is that it looks like the old house has already sold! We accepted an offer last Wednesday and as long as the buyers' financing doesn't fall through, they will close on December 7. Hooray! Appreciation since we bought the house will allow us to pay off Lisa's student loans, do a few upgrades to the new house, and pump the rest back into our investments. Now I see why so many rich folks are real estate developers. The house gained about 40% in value during the 2.5 years we owned it. It's all timing and luck, though. Timing in that we bought before a big rise housing prices. Luck in that Portland's market remains strong as other cities have seen a marked decline recently. But if you have enough good timing and good luck, a person can grow assets real quick. Or lose 'em in a big hurry. But such is also true if you bet on the Miami Dolphins to go to the Super Bowl this year.

Well. Enough boring crap. More pithy posts to come, I promise!

"Tipping Point" excerpt

For anyone interested (Hi Mom!), I've posted an excerpt from my "National Novel Writing Month" effort. The novel is entitled "Tipping Point."

Click here to go to the NaNoWriMo Authors page where the excerpt appears.

The excerpt is only about 1,000 words, but if I chose a good passage from what I've written so far, after you've read it you'll want to read the rest of the novel. Too bad it won't be finished for another three weeks! (If then!)

Can I buy a vowel?

On her site, Argotnaut has a little question as to how one might pronounce "abo." Screw that. I want to know how to pronounce THIS guy's last name:

"USOC vice president Bob Ctvrtlik, who is overseeing the bid process, said the USOC would leave it up to San Francisco to decide what second options it might have."

That's almost as bad as this guy:

Mr. Myxlplyx

Riding the Storm Out

I bet you thought the title of this post had to do with the 60 mph winds and six inches of rain we had here the first week of November. Not so! I am, of course, referring to the election results, and more specifically to the resignation of the accursed Rumsfeld. No need to bash the old boy in this space more than I already have. I'm confident that history will do the job more thoroughly than I ever could. So: So long, you arrogant, American seviceman-killing, civilian-bombing, surplus-spending, goodwill-squandering, prevaricating babble-monkey! OK. One last ode to Rummy, famous for answering his own questions: "Did I do an exemplary job as Secretary of Defense? No. Do I wish I'd done things differently, like provide enough troops in Iraq to do the job I was entrusted with and provide the poor bastards with enough armor to protect themselves? Yes. Will I let the door hit me in the ass on the way out? No."

In other bright news, we will close on our new house this Friday, and Argotnaut and I hope to spend Thanksgiving eating Tofurky in the hot tub, just like our puritanical ancestors would have done. Well, actually, I guess they would have denounced and perhaps hanged us for such blasphemous sloth. But we'll drink a toast to them just the same.

Which is the real turkey? You decide.



And also, my new novel, "Tipping Point," continues apace. I got a late start, which means instead of having to pound out 1800 words a day, I have to manage 2000. But actually I'm on a 2200 word-per-day pace right now. I think it'll be a good story, but it will also be pretty grim. However, given the good news today, maybe I'll give my beleaguered heroes a happy ending. I'll be sure to post an excerpt when I get a chance.

NaNoWriMo Weather

It's November in Portland, and that means two things: the return of the Monsoon, and National Novel Writing Month.

The Monsoon has arrived right on schedule. Following a spectacular Autumn, Mother nature appears to have been watching the calendar and has delivered the rains right at the turn of the month:

And we in Portland can expect the Doppler radar to look like this for the next 4-5 months:


So. It looks like it's time to hunker down inside with a cup of tea and a novel -- a novel to write, that is. Unlike last year's effort, I don't have any idea what I'm going to write this year. But as it's already 2 November, I have to start today whether I have an idea or not. I've been giving it some thought the last few days, but all my ideas are more fit for short stories than a 50,000 word novel. However, NaNoWriMo waits for no author! If I don't have a rudimentary plot and some hastily sketched characters by about 4pm today, I'm just going to sit in front of the blank computer screen and start typing and see what streams (or plops or squeezes) out. Perhaps I'll do an embellished, roman a' clef about The Calamity. Hey, it worked for this guy.

Halloweenies

For the second year in a row, Lisa and I had a Halloween party to go to, which made me very happy. For several years prior to last year, we had no H-Parties to attend, and that always makes me feel like a loser. Halloween is by far the most fun holiday and I hate to miss out by sitting at home, watching reruns of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and waiting for trick-or-treaters who never show up.

This year we went to a soiree chucked by one of A's linguistic professors. He and his partner put out quite a spread and it was a very fun and interesting crew to hang out with. I guess I just like nerdy, academic types.

Argotnaut decided to go as "a dude." The result was half biker, half "Derek Smalls."



I had several ideas, including shaving my head again, wearing my Bears jersey, putting some electrical tape beneath my eyes and VOILA! Brian Urlacher:

But in the end I went for the tried-and-true invisible man theme, which was easy because I still had a bunch of gauze left over from my hip operation:

...although the young son of one of the partygoers assumed I was a victim of bad plastic surgery. I could go with that, too. But as I was making myself up, A noted that the bandages brought back vague and unwelcome memories of The Calamity. Truth be told, I hadn't even thought of that, which I take as a good sign.

Next year, I think Argotnaut and Pepe should go as the Madonna and Child:


In other news, Buddy had a follow-up with our vet today, who bent and twisted him and did all sorts of other wince-inducing tests on the poor boy, and he's doing much better. He's even been cleared for five-minute walks rather than being banished to the back yard to do his doggy business. As you might expect, that has made Buddy extremely happy, and I think there's therapeutic value in happiness. With luck we can VERY slowly increase his walks back to something approaching normal.

No further word on the house yet, but we expect to hear more later this week. But now, I must hand out candy to little sharks, fairies, supermen, princesses, and just recently two little kids dressed in black cloaks, "Scream" masks and carrying nunchuks. Kids are kinda creepy.

Vicarious money pit

Progress in moving into our new house has screeched to a halt, or perhaps more accurately, skidded to a halt, as the problem is a suspect sewer line.

As a standard practice when selling older homes, our heroic Realtor suggests all potential buyers have a "sewer-scope" done, which involves the insertion of a camera into the sewer line to inspect the pipes. (I'd like to have that footage for a goth music video! "This is the pathway to my soul, dark, cold, encrusted with filth...") According to the findings on our prospective home, "concrete pipe broken with holes and missing pipe at 14' on the counter. Unable to proceed past this point."

Now if we already owned the home, this would be very bad news. But now it could actually work in our favor. We have already put an offer in on the house and that offer cannot be modified. So the trust that is selling the house has two choices: spend the $10-15 thousand it will take to fix the problem and still sell it to us at the agreed upon price, or back out of the deal. This second option is not very likely because now that the trust knows about it, the problem would have to be disclosed to any other potential buyers. And it's unlikely that other potential buyers would be as attractive as us due to our sparkling credit and available assets.

For US, the possible outcomes are backing out of the deal, thus avoiding a white elephant (or is it a brown elephant in this case?), or simply wait the two weeks or so it will take to resolve the problem. I'm hoping the latter, because I'd really like to have this backyard and Lisa would really like to have the "tea house" in which to do yoga:


We haven't gotten out completely unscathed, however, because we've started sprucing up the current homestead in advance of putting it on the market. Some landscapers came over yesterday and did a bang-up job on our hillbilly yard. Here are some before and after pics:
BACK


FRONT



So for now, Lisa will have to keep doing yoga in the "Buddy Studio" here at home. But that has its rewards as well:

"You call that 'downward facing dog?' THIS is how you do 'downward facing dog!'"

A whiter shade of pale

Several months ago, I requested information about the Queen Mary 2.
This was in response to a request by Argotnaut to find out how, if we were going to move to Europe in 2008, we could get there without flying, so that we wouldn't have to put Buddy in a cargo hold. A's belief is that, if you wouldn't stuff your infant in a breadbox and stow him/her down in the cargo hold where temperatures can fluctuate between freezing and halfway to boiling and Jesus-God-only-knows if there's any light down there, then you shouldn't have to stow your doggy down there, either. Tough to argue with that logic.

As is my custom, I decided to make a game of this excersise...how could we not only NOT fly, but make the trip really cool. Enter the QM2. It makes the trip from New York to Southampton in six days, and NY to Hamburg, Germany, in eight. The ship has a kennel on board, which is kind of akin to the poshest doggy prison one can imagine, but still better than a 10-hour Auschwitz-like boxcar ride in the hold of a jet aircraft bookended by one's pet carrier being long-tossed by baggage handlers who may or may not be aware that there's a live (and scared poop-less) animal in there!

"There is no reason to be alarmed little dog! It is merely a de-lousing chamber!"

So now I occasionally receive in the mail brochures about the QM2. And they are a riot. Being a recovering marketing puke myself, I can see what Cunard's market analysis has revealed: that everybody traveling aboard the QM2 either ARE Thurston Howell and Lovey from Gilligan's Island, or fancies themselves as much.

You've never seen so many photos of picture-perfect, natty, wealthy Caucasian retirees in your life. Not a person of color to be seen. Even the waitstaff is a bunch of honkies! (Well, there might be a wog in there, but it's hard to tell in the lighting of the photos.)

Now I'm sure that there are wealthy (or, like us, just unwisely profligate fun-seeking) minority types on the boat. But it wouldn't do to indicate such in the brochure.

I'm not making a judgment against Cunard on this score. I just think it's kind of funny. Just wait til the Howells get a load of the Heckmans in their Homestar Runner t-shirts accompanied by their hillbilly dog.
Just one more reason (besides the jettisoning of the despised W. Bush) to look forward to 2008!