A Weekend of Stories

This was one of those rare weekends where we were able to cram in a lot of stuff, and yet I don’t feel overwhelmed, as if I didn’t have time for myself.

Saturday was book group, but on Friday afternoon, I still as only one hundred pages in. Since I chose the book, I figured I’d better get cracking. While Kris went grocery shopping, I climbed into the bathtub to read while soaking. Only I fell asleep.

I was dozing soundly when the phone rang. “Damn it,” I thought. “It’s probably Nick calling from work.” I went back to sleep. The phone rang again. Cursing, I pulled myself from the tub and sloshed naked to the phone. It was Kris. She was at Safeway, ready to pay, but she’d forgotten her wallet. She had, however, remembered her new cell phone.

I got dressed and drove to the store. “What would you have done if I hadn’t answered?” I asked.

“Just kept calling,” she said brightly.

Grrrrrr.

I’ve noted before that I’m not the best person to be using a chainsaw. By nature, I’m clumsy. One might even call me careless and not get an argument.

Still, there are many chores around Rosings Park that are aided by a chainsaw. We have a lot of wood, and while it could be chopped with an axe, that would take several orders of magnitude more time than I’m willing to spend.

The last time with had the Bacon-Flicks and Hampton-Zinnikers over, Chris looked at my chainsaw for me. It had an oil leak, and was altogether Not Right. He opened it up, fiddled with things, and then put it back together. “It should be ready to go now,” he said. “You just need to tighten these nuts.” Well, apparently I forgot to tighten the nuts.

I put the chainsaw away in its case, and forgot about it for months. On Sunday, though, we took advantage of the cool, sunny weather to tackle yardwork. One of our chores was to prune the lilac. We have a monster of a lilac out by the road, and we’re pruning it a little each year. This is our third year of trimming it, and next year should be the last.

To prune, we use our Japanese saw to hack a limb off at the base of the trunk. These are big limbs, though, three or four inches in diameter and very heavy. After Kris has harvested blossoms, I attack them with the chainsaw.

Well, on Sunday I was midway through the first limb when all of a sudden the chainsaw fell apart. No, seriously — it literally fell apart. The sideplate fell off and the thing stopped running (thank goodness). I was stunned. I also felt like I’d just escaped certain death. Eventually I realized that the nuts that hold the sideplate on had fallen out. (And remembered that I was supposed to have tightened them.) Through sheer luck, I found both nuts, and re-assembled the chainsaw.

I spent ten or fifteen minutes cutting up the remaining lilac branches. Just as I finished my final cut, the chainsaw stopped once more. I thought I saw the chain fly off into the bushes at a high rate of speed, and I thought, “Holy cats! I’m lucky to be alive!” In reality, the chain was dangling from the saw — it had kicked off the track. (This is just as dangerous as flying off, but at least it didn’t break.)

“You need to take a chainsaw class,” Kris told me after watching these mishaps. “You’re going to kill yourself with that thing if you don’t.”

She may be right…

On Sunday night, we met Will and Marla for dinner at Gustav’s. We almost didn’t make it.

When I started the car, the gas light was on. (It hadn’t been on the night before.) As we pulled away from the house and started up the hill, my car died almost immediately. “Damn Ford,” I said. I always curse my car when it gives me trouble.

“What’s wrong?” asked Kris.

“It may be out of gas,” I said. “That doesn’t really make sense, though. The gas light wasn’t on yesterday. Fortunately, we were just a few hundred feet from home, so I ran back to get the mower gas can. We got back in the car and started up the hill, but the car died immediately again.

“I’ll get my car,” said Kris. “Just leave your car here. There’s obviously something wrong with it.”

I was still convinced it was just out of gas. I made sure there was no traffic, then put the car in neutral and let it coast backward. While it rolled, I turned the wheel, turning the car to block the road. I opened the door and then gave the car a little push forward, continuing to turn the wheel so that the vehicle pointed downhill. (Basically, I did a three-point turn using gravity and muscle.) I rolled down to our house and parked. Then I tried the engine. It started. I drove around the block to make sure things were okay. They were. We drove off to meet Will and Marla.

Gustav’s isn’t one of my favorite restaurants. I find the selections limiting. Still, the fondue is good (especially with big, soft salty pretzels). Our waitress was a piece of work: brightly painted fingernails, obsequious manner, and an inability to to pass things across the table. When she set out the drink napkins, she sort of tossed them in the general direction they needed to go, but wouldn’t actually set them in front of people. She said things like “Absolutely!” and “Have we decided yet?” When she came back to take our dessert order, she smelled like she’d just smoked a pack of cigarettes.

After dinner, we followed Will and Marla to look at their new house, just past Keizer Sunnyside. It’s a lovely new home built on a hillside. Construction is nearly finished, and they hope to move in by the end of the month (though I keep telling them they won’t be in until June). We walked up the steep stairs to look in the windows. Then Will, on a whim, tried the door. It was open. “Should we go in?” he asked. They’re really not supposed to, but we took a risk. We walked through, admiring the layout and the materials. Will and Marla have selected all the tiles and carpet and paint color. They’ve done a good job.

I look forward to seeing the final product. In June.

A Three-Foot Monster

My nephew, Noah, came to work with Jeff the other day. His baby-sitter was sick, so he hung around his dad’s office playing with Hot Wheels and generally being a four-year-old. At one point he decided to tiptoe down the hallway, throw open my door, and shout, “BOO!”

Being a four-year-old, he wasn’t exactly sneaky. I heard him coming. Still, I did my best to act scared. “Ah!” I said, holding up my arms in fright. Oh, how Noah laughed. He thought this was a riot. He ran to Jeff and died laughing on the floor.

“What are you doing?” Jeff asked.

“I’m doing my job,” Noah said between giggles.

“Your job?”

“That’s my job,” explained Noah, “scaring Uncle J.D.”

When his giggles had subsided, he tiptoed down the hallway, threw open my door, and shouted, “BOO!”

Again, I acted scared. I leaped back in my chair, flung my arms in the air, and put on my best show of fear. Again, Noah thought this was great. He ran to tell Jeff: “I scared Uncle J.D. a lot. He went backward in his seat!”

Things were quiet for a few minutes. Maybe Noah was playing with his Hot Wheels. Maybe he was drawing. Whatever the case, eventually he decided enough was enough. He announced to Jeff, “I’m going to go scare Uncle J.D. again.” And so he did. In fact, he continued to scare me for five or ten minutes, by which time I’d long since given up on play-acting every time. (I had work to do!)

I did, however, take time to convince Noah that he could scare all of you…

Gasoline Alley – A Walk in the Woods

I warned you: now that I’ve officially mothballed Four Color Comics and Vintage Pop (though the latter will return in a year or two), you folks will have to bear the brunt of my comic-y meditations.

Today I want to talk about Gasoline Alley. I read this comic strip when I was a boy, but I could never really get into it. I didn’t get it. It wasn’t funny. The story didn’t make sense. It was worthless to me. My friends and I used to joke about it, making fun of it.

However, when Drawn and Quarterly recently began to publish a reprint series of the strip, I picked it up. I was blown a way. Gasoline Alley is my favorite comic strip of all those I now collect. It’s amazing.

When Frank King started the strip in the late teens, it was usually just a daily single-panel car gag. (Cars were novelties at the time, and not all comic strips adhered to a standard format.) In 1921, though, this all changed. King’s editor asked him to broaden the strips appeal, so he introduced a “baby on the doorstep”, and Gasoline Alley began to move from car-centric to family-centric. More interesting, though, is that his characters began to age in real time. The baby, Skeezix, grew up with his readers, eventually going off to fight in World War II.

King has a talent for observing the details of life, much as his fellow Midwesterner Garrison Keillor now does. He takes pleasure in the minutiae, in the everyday stuff. His art is both gangly and chunky, but it serves his subject well. (Whenever I get a new volume in this series, I take delight in pointing things out to Kris — “Look! He’s still using gaslight here, but by this time, he has an electric lamp.”)

All of this is prelude to the real subject of this entry. In the Gasoline Alley Sunday pages (which I have not read because they’re not collected in the compilations), the two main characters, Walt and Skeezix, would take an annual walk through the woods. Roger Clark has collected these autumn walks into one location.

They’re magical. Especially those by strip creator Frank King. Here’s a good one (click to enlarge):

The third volume of Walt and Skeezix (as the Gasoline Alley compilations are called) will be released at the end of June. I recommend these books highly.

Oregon History: The Exploding Whale

Educator of the week, Mr. Paul Jolstead, sent me a piece of Oregon mythology: the infamous exploding whale. I’ve seen this video clip before, and heard the story many times, but I suspect that many of you are unfamiliar with it. Here’s the original news story (3:26):

According to the Wikipedia:

On November 12, 1970, a 14 m (45 ft), eight-ton sperm whale died as a result of beaching itself near Florence, Oregon. Since all Oregon beaches are under the jurisdiction of the state Parks and Recreation Department, responsibility for disposing of the carcass fell upon the Oregon Highway Division (now known as the Oregon Department of Transportation, or ODOT), a sister agency.

After consulting with officials at the United States Navy, they decided that it would be best to remove the whale in the same way they would remove a boulder and, on November 12, used half a ton of dynamite to remove it. They thought burying the whale would be ineffective, as it would soon be uncovered, and they believed the use of dynamite would cause an explosion that would disintegrate the whale into pieces small enough for scavengers to clear up.

The engineer in charge of the operation, George Thornton, was recorded as stating that one set of charges might not be enough and more might be needed. Thornton later explained that he was chosen to remove the whale because the district engineer, Dale Allen, had gone hunting.

The resulting explosion was caught on film by television photographer Doug Brazil for a story reported by news reporter Paul Linnman of KATU-TV in Portland, Oregon. In his voiceover, Linnman joked that “land-lubber newsmen” became “land-blubber newsmen”, for “the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”

The explosion caused large pieces of blubber to land some distance away from the beach, resulting in a smashed car. The explosion disintegrated only some of the whale, most of which remained on the beach for the Oregon Highway Division workers to clear away.

Comedy gold.

Speaking of the Jolstead-Woodruff clan, Amy Jo’s blog has been humming right along lately. Go check out From a Corner Table. But be warned: you’ll come away hungry. (Paul, I want to see your beautiful engraved apple!)

Cat Calendar

For years now — maybe a decade — Kris and I have had the same yearly page-a-day calendar in our bathroom. It’s a cat calendar (“the cat calendar”, as we call it), and every day has a picture of a cat, the cat’s name (and the name of its owner), and some blurb about catness. We love it.

The first three cats of the year are prize-winners. I used to take the page from January 1st and tape it over the cats’ dinner bowls. “Look at this cat,” I would tell them. “This is what you should aspire to. He’s a Good Cat.” They never listened, but they had to stare at the winning cat for 365 days. Sometimes 366. One of my money-making blog ideas is actually based around this cat-a-day concept.

Anyhow, this is all prelude to the following picture:

Why this photo did not win first prize for the year I will never know. Look at it. This one snapshot encompasses a metric ton of catness. Poor, poor Sugar Plum. What mean humans she has, to subject her to such torture. And to photograph it! The indignity of it all…

One Small Step

Max (aka Meatball) has a bad habit. He likes to lay on the stairs, stretched long so that he takes up an entire step. This might not be such a big deal except:

He is grey and the stairway is often dark.
He doesn’t move when a human steps on him.

As you can imagine, this presents some difficulties.

It’s official: I’m cutting back to just three blogs. I’m not sure that I shared the plan Kris and I came up with last week, but here it is for the curious:

Cut back to just three blogs right now: foldedspace, Get Rich Slowly, and Animal Intelligence. GRS is most important, as it is now producing almost as much income as I make from Custom Box. I’m not cutting AI because I love it, and because it takes very little time.
I’ll continue to write about comics and vintage pop from time-to-time, but I’ll post about them here instead.
Next year, on my 39th birthday, I plan to reduce to part-time at Custom Box.
At that time, I’ll start another site since, in theory, I’ll have the time to do so.
On my 40th birthday, I’ll quit Custom Box completely.

These plans are tentative. Any number of things might change them. I might decide it’s foolish to quit. My web income might dry up. I might move to Australia. Who knows? But for now, this is the agenda.

Friday was gorgeous, just at the upper-end of my heat tolerance: sunny and 24 degrees centigrade (that’s 75 Fahrenheit for those of you who live in Oregon City). I met Matt for lunch, and then we headed to the tulip fields to take photos. Matt moved from California to Oregon a couple years ago. He’s a long-time professional blogger, and is full of great advice. Plus he likes photography, bike-riding, computers, etc. I’m pleased to have made his acquaintance.

Taking photos of tulips in the midday sun is an exercise in futility. The colors don’t photograph well under the best conditions; they’re a nightmare in the glare of the sun. The colors are so bright that they get “blown out”. Still, here are a few shots from the trip.

It's difficult to photograph tulips sometimes

Two examples of “blown out” colors.

I love old oak trees. They’re beautiful.

The tulip farm was very crowded. (I saw Karen Kropf.)

In the afternoon, Kris and I were going to visit the rhododendron garden, but we opted to do yard work instead. We made a trip to the hardware store to load up on mulch. Later, she worked in her flower beds while I popped dandelions and then mowed the lawn. Together we tied the blackberry and raspberry canes in bunches, which makes for a much neater presentation. My grapes look awesome. I love all the buds on the vines.

Because it was so beautiful, and because the weather is getting warmer, Kris opened the French doors in the bedroom and latched them down. In theory, they’ll stay open now until October. I say “in theory” because at 2am Saturday morning the rains set in. It rained for eight hours. It’s a wonderful, comforting sound (exactly like the “Hawaiian rain shower” I listen to on my iPod sometimes in order to get to sleep).

On Saturday we got a very early start, running all sorts of errands by noon. We stopped by to see Andrew and Courtney before 9am! Kris and Courtney discussed gardening while Andrew showed me his new Super Deluxe-o-Matic 12″ compound miter saw. I’m not much of a tool guy, but even I had to drool over that machine. (I’m drooling just remembering it.)

It’s been a great weekend so far. Now, early on Sunday morning, the sun is back, and I think we’re going to be able to finish our yard work while keeping dry. I’ll spend most of my day, of course, writing weblog entries for the coming week. It’s been a long time since I was ahead on my writing, but I sense that I can get there today.

Get Rich Slowly Discussion Forums

Dear foldedspace readers,

I’m here today to ask a favor of you. I’ve decided to bring back the discussion forums at Get Rich Slowly. When I launched the blog last April, I also set up a discussion board. It got a little use, but not much. Then the spammers found it. I shut the forums down last fall.

Fast forward to today.

I’m having trouble keeping up with all of the reader questions and suggestions. I’d like to bring the forums back as an avenue for people to seek additional help, and to have other conversations about wealth and happiness. I’m inviting you to help me get these forums started.

There’s not much there now because I’m just getting them off them ground. There are just a few sections at the moment — if needed, I’ll split things in the future. Let me know if there’s anything that could be fixed or made better. And feel free to add lots of threads.

The best way to make the launch of these forums successful is to have it seeded with many topics when I announce their existence to the public, which I plan to do on the site’s first anniversary, April 15th. In the next ten days, I’m hoping that you will help me get some discussions started.

To register, simply follow this link. You’ll also need to use the registration code 0325.

Hidden from Myself

I’m cleaning downstairs. After this week’s session with Lauren, I’ve agreed to clean the house (well, I agreed to clean my office, but I need to clean the house to clean the office), and I have piles of magazines, books, and papers on the dining room table.

I put the jacket back on The Secret. In the process, I find a stupid adhesive anti-theft strip, peel it off, and take it to the kitchen. On the way, I spot my lovely new notebook. I pick it up, too. I take a few steps, set down the notebook, take a few more, throw away the anti-theft strip.

It occurs to me that I ought to check Amazon to see if they carry this lovely new notebook. I retrace my steps so that I can check the model number. But I can’t find it. It’s not on the dining room table. It’s not on a chair or bookshelf in the library. It’s not in the bathroom. It’s nowhere in the kitchen. It’s not in the living room. (I hadn’t gone anywhere near these rooms, but I checked them anyhow.)

The notebook has vanished. Somehow I’ve managed to hide it from myself.

I am getting old.

Wii Man

Kris and I have been playing a lot of Nintendo Wii lately.

We played the game a lot when we got it in November, mostly because of the novelty. During the holiday season, we had fun sharing the Wii with friends. Whenever we had guests, we would create a Mii for them. (A Mii is a cartoon avatar that represents a person in the game.) We now have a large library of Miis for all our friends.

During January and February, though, we didn’t use the Wii much. It sat unused, looking more-and-more like one of those impulse purchases that I used to make. (I have boxes of seldom-used gadgets out in the workshop.)

Then Kris discovered fitness mode in Wii Sports. Wii Sports has five games: tennis, bowling, golf, baseball, and boxing. You can play these games by yourself or against other players. But you can also do three training exercises for each sport. In fitness mode, the Wii randomly selects three of these fifteen exercises for the player to perform. Based on the results, the game assigns a “fitness age”.

Kris had been doing this for about a week before I decided to try my hand at it. I was dismayed to find that my fitness age ws 58. The horror! I began to take the fitness test every day. (Each person is only allowed one chance per day.) I’ve managed to climb into the 30s and even the 20s now. I still have bad days (51 last Saturday!) on occasion, but most days I’m around 25. The best score you can get is 20, I think.

Meanwhile, I’ve also begun to practice bowling and tennis, the two games I find most enjoyable. For a long time, I was using a bowling throw that removed spin from the ball: I released the ball late, lobbing it out into the lane. I was able to get some good scores — a high of 258 — but ultimately I decided this lob throw was too sporadic, so I’ve been working on a spin throw. (I actually tried this lob throw at a real bowling alley, thinking it would reduce my natural spin. Not a good idea. It’s very conspicuous when your ball sails through the air and then clunks to the ground halfway down the lane. Management doesn’t like that.)

Tennis has been my real source of joy lately, though. As you get better at each game, you’re given a rating. “Pro” level is 1000. I think the max rating is 2000. My bowling rating has hovered around 1250 since last fall, but my tennis rating had been a measly 400. With daily practice, I have this up to about 1750 now, and can usually win against the top two computer opponents (rated 1900 and 2000). I love the tactics of Wii tennis: the positioning, the shot selection, etc. It’s fun. (I’ve never really played actual tennis, so I don’t know how it compares.)

I’ve also begun to explore other areas of Wii-ness. For example, yesterday I downloaded the Wii web browser. It’s quite a trip to look at my own websites from inside a video game console. I also recently downloaded some classic games. The Wii comes with a “virtual console”, which means it’s able to play games from all of Nintendo’s past systems. You have to pay to download them, but they’re relatively cheap. For example, I paid $5.00 to download Super Mario Land (from the Super Nintendo system) and $12.00 to download Mario Kart 64 (from the Nintendo 64). Fun stuff. The selection is limited, but it doesn’t matter because Nintendo is offering only the best classic games. (The Wii also plays Gamecube games directly — no downloads required.)

I bought several games when the Wii was released, but I haven’t played them much. (I’d like to trade them for other games.) I do like Zelda and the surgery came (which I forgot to show to Pam), but the others aren’t that exciting. I’m waiting for more stuff directly from Nintendo itself.

I’m only spending about 30 minutes a day with the Wii, but I’m having a lot of fun!

The Pleasures of Hot Food

Kris and I went out to Gino’s for dinner on Friday night. Since Amy Jo introduced us to the place a couple months ago, it’s become one of our favorite restaurants. It’s relatively close to home, the food is good, and the booths are private.

Ostensibly our purpose was to discuss my possible transition from the box factory to stay-at-home, full-time blogging. In reality, we wanted some of Gino’s hot food.

Most restaurant food is served tepid. It’s warm, but either the food has been sitting under a heat lamp, or it was never truly hot in the first place. (Often both.) This isn’t anything we’d ever really noticed until we found Gino’s. At Gino’s, the food arrives at the table piping hot. It’s a revelation.

On Friday, for example, Kris ordered an Italian herb-encrusted chicken on a bed of potatoes. When she cut through the bird’s crispy skin, steam poured from inside. She took a bite. She closed her eyes and sighed, “Mmmm…. this is so good, so hot.” The entire meal was like that.

For my part, I had a bowl of clams and mussels in a broth of wine, butter, and fish stock. When I met Tom and Paul at Gino’s in February, we’d ordered this for the three of us, and I had been shocked by how good it was. Sometimes you order an unassuming dish in a restaurant only to discover it’s one of the best things you’ve ever eaten — this is one of those dishes. My bowl came hot, too. It was delicious.

On Saturday we attended an impromptu dinner party at Jeremy and Jennifer’s. Yay! It’s been more than three years since we last experienced a Gingerich dinner party — this was the best yet.

For appetizers we had:

puff pastry with melted blue cheese
lime-pepper dates stuffed with almonds

The first course was, to my delight, a close facsimile of the clam dish I’d had at Gino’s the night before. Jeremy reduced some wine and fish stock with a lot of garlic and a little pork of some sort. He added a bunch of clams to the liquid and boiled them ’til they opened. After reducing the liquid further, he served each person 7-8 clams, a cup or so of sauce, and some garlic bread. It was awesome. (Gino’s version is more of a broth; Jeremy’s was more of a sauce.)

Next came an asparagus salad with tangerine aioli and hazelnuts. This was followed by a butternut squash ravioli with browned butter and hazelnuts. (Jeremy and Jennifer have a filbert orchard, so hazelnuts are plentiful.) The entree was rack of lamb served with green herb-butter mashed potatoes. The lamb’s presentation was great: it featured three chive stalks jutting from the potatoes. The evening wound down with a cheese plate, and then a banana bread pudding with chocolate and caramel sauces.

The food was delicious. The wine was excellent. The company was delightful.

But all I can think of in retrospect is that I WANT MORE CLAMS! I’ve never been a huge seafood fan, but the older I get, the more I learn to appreciate its charms. (Here’s a promising clam broth recipe from Giata.)