The most maddening thing, of course, is that during the Quiet Times, my traffic went up about twelve percent. Obviously I should post less.

So why start again? Well, for one thing, the old database, with seven thousand and odd items, was getting cranky. For another, it's not like anything is missing: all the old posts are still archived and are available at their original URLs. And the last time I ran an export of said database, it clipped off at the 18-MB point for some reason, meaning that if I reimported it, I'd have to port over a couple months' worth of entries anyway, and I've already put enough work into this thing.

However, my string of consecutive days with posts remains intact. (It's at 2,266, if anyone cares, and why should you?)

Stuff from the old templates will be gradually reintroduced. Right now, I just want to get moving again.

My thanks to Liz Lubowitz, at whose designs I sneaked a peek, and to Melody, who held down the fort in my enforced absence.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled bloggage.

A couple weeks' worth of old posts in the archives still have comment windows, because I haven't yet gone in to edit them out; however, the windows don't work anymore, so if you're getting glared at by MT if you try, that's why.

Eventually I'll get around to cleaning that stuff up and putting up a page of archive links. (Update: You can now access all the old archives, by category or by month, here.)

In fact, I was seriously thinking of chunking this look entirely and going to a new one, but I figured I had enough people peeved at me already.

I posted this at, um, a dating site:

It is with great relief that I announce that it did not.

I think I have the RSS thingamajig working now. The URL has changed, however: it's now at http://www.dustbury.com/index.xml.

Is there any interest in an Atom feed? If so, I'll see if I can work one up.

(Title stolen from the Oklahoma Gazette.)

Well, we've gotten the actual content to the point where it's just as long as the sidebar (depending on screen width), for the benefit of those of you who just love to scroll.

Also, the 500th Vent went up this weekend. Seriously, you have to wonder about anyone who puts five hundred anything on the Web. (We will not mention the thousands of previous blog posts here, because — well, we just won't.)

I had notes and outlines and text fragments and cross-references and all manner of stuff ready to go into a full-blown screed here, but to what purpose? This isn't a day to point fingers: this is a day to bow heads.

So I pray, and hope you will do the same, in memory of those who were taken away five years ago.

               — Delmore Schwartz

One of the factors that drove Sean Gleeson to create the "One Gleeson Plaza" address extension (which I mentioned here) was, well, factors, and I mean that literally:

Do any of you have a house number (or post-office box number) that is a prime? The house I reported on yesterday does; I don't, though there are two on my block.

And if you don't feel like doing the math, here's a list of the first thousand primes, from 2 to 7919.

A brief rundown of Merle Haggard's involuntary commitments:

1946-1951: various stints in juvenile hall
1952: Fred C. Nelles School for Boys, Whittier, CA (ran away)
1952-1953: Preston School of Industry, Ione, CA (released, sent back after an assault charge)
1957-1960: San Quentin (sentenced to 15 years for robbery, subsequently paroled)

Haggard was pardoned in 1972 by then-Governor Ronald Reagan.

(Love ya, Diane.)

And let me tell you, it's tricky to get both 360s synchronized.

I mean, really. I look like Sir Thomas Beecham contemplating a Spın̈al Tap performance.

(Snitch, I believe this was something you were looking for.)

Erica looks back at the last few years, and has good reasons to look forward:

Oddly, I could write almost exactly that same paragraph. I have lived alone for the last quarter-century or so, but I never thought of myself as having "my own place" until I had my name on the deed. Outgo is just as fast as income, which is not comforting, but it's not keeping me up late at night either. And while I have about as much social life as I can handle, which is not much, I remind you that I have lived alone for the last quarter-century or so, which has one obvious drawback. (As Erica says: "It's that whole thing about feeling like I don't have enough to offer until I get my own stuff in order.")

And there's probably one other difference between us. If she got "everything going right at once," she'd likely be delighted. Were I to do so, I'd likely be suspicious.

Still, having a lot of things actually in order is a cause for celebration, or at least for some level of contentment; when things are good, reminding yourself that they're not yet perfect is an effective way to bring yourself down. And frankly, I have enough of those already. Let's enjoy the security we have, however tentative it may seem.

Dr. Jan signed off this post as "a 3.5 year breast cancer survivor."

In a not-necessarily-unrelated story, this is my fourth year as a donor to the Boobie-Thon. One of this year's photos reads: "3 year survivor / 34 years old." Cancer doesn't check your ID to see if you're old enough.

And just in case the presence of survivors isn't quite enough of an incentive for you, here's a more-frivolous pitch I made back in Ought-Four:

Last year's donations totaled over $9000. Can they make five figures in their fifth year?

You know where to click.

Since the subject is bound to come up somewhere, here's the Official Personal Watercraft of the American Revolution. (Portrayal by professionals. Do not try this at home.)

I am advised that Lydia, the Tattooed Lady bore its insignia, or something.

Inasmuch as Technorati is giving me the Claude Rains treatment of late, I've replaced their search box with one of Google's — it's in the "Usage notes" area on the frontpage sidebar — which should produce marginally more reliable results.

Actually, I'm happy with anything that produces results at all these days; just about every day, there's a half-hour (more or less) period when this site is all but inaccessible. If it happened at the same time every day, it might be a bit more understandable, but no. I assume that it's related to lingering Dreamhost issues that are being gradually addressed. On the upside, response time has improved markedly in the past sixty days, though at least some of that is due to reducing the size of my database by 95 percent, an idea for which I claim no credit.

There were a couple of grumbles (offsite) this week from commenters who thought they were being thrown back into the moderation queue, vaguely reminiscent of "What happened to my access?" complaints during the BBS era. As always, the answer is simple: when you're set up in the auto-approval gizmo, it looks for your email address thereafter, and if it recognizes you, you're in. (Email addresses are not actually posted with the comment.) If you've dyslexicated a couple of characters, or if you've moved your "nospam" insert, or if you've used some other email address altogether, the machine doesn't know you from kimthenukegod@dprk.org, and the comment goes into the box for moderation.

Possibly apropos of this, Lynn reported that someone had come to her site via a search for a video on "your tub". "So much more clever than that more famous video site," she said, and just for the heck of it, I went out to yourtub.com and found, of all things, a splog with a handful of video links. These guys are hoping to make money from people's inability to spell and/or type — all the more reason to take a little extra care and make sure they don't get it.

Windows XP reports that my desktop box contains 706 fonts, a figure which is somewhat misleading, inasmuch as there are six variations on, say, Goudy Old Style, plus a Goudy Stout, so-called presumably because "Goudy Absurdly Extra Freaking Bold" would have taken up too much valuable screen area in Control Panel, and that counts for seven right there.

However many fonts I may actually have, I must admit here that I have all of the seven worst fonts known to man. I need not tell you which is the worst — everybody already knows — but some of the snarky commentary is worth quoting:

For those who asked: the logo font around here is in no danger of becoming criminally overused, since at small sizes it's darn near unreadable and at large sizes it eats up all your screen space.

(Via Swirlspice.)

Inasmuch as I am unfamiliar with the inner workings of Nissan's motor vehicles — more precisely, more unfamiliar with them than I was with the Mazdas I'd driven for the preceding eight years — I have referred any issues I have had with Gwendolyn (okay, one) to the local Infiniti dealership, which presumably knows its way around these byzantine devices.

Similarly, from now on, any issues I have with Technorati will be taken to Sean Gleeson, who apparently has Dave Sifry's number. (No, not his phone number. Get real.)

This man was not named after me.

Or, for that matter, I after him. It's just a sweet family story intended to inspire greatness.

As I've noted before, I have a fairly common name. Based on its frequency, I guesstimated there might be as many as 8000 of us; I was apparently just a tad high.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 4,288 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

(Via Swirlspice. As I could have told you, she's unique.)

Reprinted from three years ago:

At the moment, I have a truly wretched cold; unless it's actually going to kill me, which I rather doubt, it appears I can turn off the Anticipation module.

I am neither cool nor kid, but what the hell:

http://www.myspace.com/dustbury

If nothing else, this proves (as though proof were needed) that I have no shame.

David Berlind has found an iPod, and would like to return it to its owner:

If this sounds like your machine gone astray, write to david.berlind at cnet.com. Apparently Apple Customer Care hasn't been a whole lot of help — then again, how much private information would you want Apple to be giving out, anyway?

(Via Michael Katsimbris.)

The premise, from Robert B. Parker:

This caught the eye of Mary Stella:

Because:

Well, not this guy; my major goal is, indeed, Not Cutting Myself, and yes, I use one of the razors that reputedly make it difficult to do so, and yes, I use some aerosol emollient which could dissolve the weld on the muffler of a '67 Buick, which should provide as much protection as I could possibly need, but having had some unpleasant experiences thirty-some-odd years ago — I managed to draw blood with an electric, which is a trick — I stand there under the lights and watch every stroke as carefully as these not-especially-good eyes permit.

And no towel: I go from sink to shower, not the other way around. One of the mysteries of life, I suppose.

Once in a while I pick up a search-engine query asking the meaning of "dillhole".

Now I know. I was unloading groceries at the checkout stand, and a jar of pickles (dill chips for burgers, specifically) fractured into just enough pieces (two) to cause a hemorrhage of green all over the place. I picked up the jar, inverted it — the break was along the bottom ridge — pointed to the break, and asked, "Now is this a dillhole or what?"

I suppose you had to be there. (Actually, they didn't think it was all that funny either.)

VCR: 0. (It's automatic.)
PCs: 0. (Ditto. Expect all these to fail next year when the DST schedule changes.)
Garage clock: 5 seconds.
Cell-phone clock: 6 seconds.
Living-room clock: 7 seconds.
Range-top clock: 8 seconds.
Alarm clock: 14 seconds.
Microwave-oven clock: 17 seconds.
Wrist watch: 26 seconds.
Automobile clock: 5 minutes, 45 seconds. (That's one seriously-stiff adjustment knob.)

Still unchanged: answering machine, fax machine.

One of the advantages of MT 3.2 and above — I run 3.21 here — is the superior collection of spam tools: not one actual spam has gotten onto the site (though plenty have piled up in the Junk folders) since the database change in September.

In response to this, I have decided to keep comments and TrackBacks open for a minimum of thirty days, effective immediately. (The previous standard was one to two weeks.) I've closed off September items today; I expect to close the October entries around the 30th of November.

I don't expect this should cause any issues for anyone, but if it's a problem for you, let me know.

Susan B., this past Sunday:

The individual in question arrived here today with the same screed. I read it over, was planning to approve it, then remembered where I heard the name.

I read it again. It's medium-grade moonbattery, but that's not quite enough, in my view, to warrant junking the comment. I've approved worse. (I daresay I've written worse.)

Then I pulled a phrase out of the middle of it and sent it to Google, and discovered at least four places where the entire screed has already been enshrined, indicating that it's hardly needed here; it's a traveling text dump, nothing more.

So I've decided on this incredibly sub-Solomonic compromise: I won't post it here, but I'll put up a link to a place where it's already up, and you can read it for yourself if you so desire.

It does, however, meet the part of the definition that calls for a dream that makes you sit up and take notice, so I'll mention it here.

I'm on the periphery of a popular local eatery/takeout joint when I pick up on the crowd buzz, and what I'm picking up is implausible in the extreme: they've set up separate entrances marked "Straight" and "Gay." Shades of the Southern South, I'm thinking, and what the hell for?

On an impulse, I went in through the "Gay" entrance and noticed that no one was checking credentials, assuming such a thing were possible. I walked over to the "Straight" entrance: nobody watching that door either.

And the crowd seemed about twice as big as usual, so obviously the artificial constraints, or whatever they were, weren't discouraging customers.

I'm still puzzling over what, if anything, I am to make of this brief tale, except to note that people of any description have little use for attempts to pigeonhole them.

I was standing on a mountaintop at the Edge of Nowhere, or so it seemed, staring into the face of the enemy, and I knew he was staring back.

Not that anything scary was about to happen. There was a rather large body of water between us, and even on the clearest of days I couldn't see him and he couldn't see me. Still, I knew he was there, and I assumed he knew I was there, and a few dozen other guys were making a list and checking it twice and delivering it to the commanding officer. They were doing their job, and I was doing mine.

And a few months later, that particular job came to an end; I left this post, a little older, maybe a little wiser, an unexpected medal added to my uniform, and after a few days of R&R — well, maybe some R, but not a whole lot of R, if you know what I mean — I reported back Stateside and was assigned to the Reserves for three more years.

This was before "Be all that you can be," and I've never been sure I was all that I could have been. But we had a mission, and I was part of it, and I'd like to think that I had something to do with the fact that the enemy no longer exists.

That enemy, anyway.

On this day of remembrance, there are millions more with their own stories to tell. You've already heard mine.

(Originally posted 11/11/2004.)

So the Cute Cartoon Reptile issued the new auto insurance bill, and despite a small increase in coverage, the premium has dropped by 16 percent.

I'm just as surprised as you are. I can only conclude that their opinion of my driving is at least as high as my opinion of my driving.

Yes, I did bid on a PS3 on eBay today.

Rationalization: no way on God's green earth it will go for this price, and it will at least annoy the other bidders.

Outcome: Auction cancelled by eBay due to "violating one or more of our listing guidelines."

Original impetus:

Subsequent Fark headline: "Random Assclown bids $15,000 on every eBay PS3 auction."

Wasn't me.

I trust we all have something for which to be thankful; I am thankful that my list of such things seems to be a bit longer than it used to be.

Feel free to mention your own items in Comments.

It's been a while since I posted a dream up here, and perhaps that's just as well; rather a lot of my dreams are distinctly uncomfortable to endure, and most of them don't have the sort of entertaining narrative I'd like to pretend I'm capable of creating.

I have noticed, though, that the better ones seem to come after I've gotten up, shrugged, and gone back to bed, so if there's an actual pattern — but never mind; these things never work if you try to force them.

So I'm bicycling through Seattle. Since I've never actually been to Seattle, I have no idea where I'm going, let alone why I'm there in the first place, but two things strike me early on: this is a spectacularly gorgeous place — I'm assuming that the dramatic shadows overhead and the prodigious amounts of greenery actually exist in some parts of town — and while I get rained on for ten or twenty minutes, I don't seem to get really wet.

My most obvious connection to Seattle, of course, is the fact that guys who live in Oklahoma City now own the Sonics and the Storm. Somewhere by the side of the road, I find what looks like a periscope, sticking two or three feet out of the ground, with a Sonics logo on it. Up close, the lens turns out to be a very shiny bolt; on an impulse, I loosen it a couple of turns. Nothing happens and I ride on; a few minutes later I decide that this was a Bad Idea, and reverse my path toward the mysterious structure, which I never again find.

Random sightings: a person claiming to be the Invisible Man, and certainly he looked the part, though the orange jacket didn't help; an outdoor lesbian café (and what makes for an outdoor lesbian, anyway?); a very large gas station which, despite its size, had only two pumps.

I am loath to affix any meaning to this other than that I had a rough night — mattress and box spring, when I woke up, were offset fifteen degrees.

Top Ten Advantages of Turning Fifty-Three:

10. Not dead yet
    
9. Age and year of birth ('53) actually match, sort of
   
8. Nobody says a word if you go to bed at 10 pm
   
7. Mid-life crisis should be over and done with by now
   
6. "Distinguished" to "dorky" ratio goes up a couple of percentage points
   
5. Still likely to get a few bucks from Social Security before it goes completely broke
   
4. Ability to feign maturity improving all the time
   
3. Younger women will speak to you, so long as you don't actually try to date them or anything
   
2. Can shut off cell phone without worrying about missing something
   
1. Almost to the point where being carded might bring discounts
   

Not all of these will apply next year.

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	4.8
Mind:	6.2
Body:	3.7
Spirit:	7.1
Friends/Family:	4.1
Love:	0.8
Finance:	7.5
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

Though I kind of wonder about that Finance bit. Okay, the creditors aren't banging on the door or anything, but that seems a little high.

And it causes you harm, that's a moray.

The late John Lennon occasionally seemed like a character out of Dickens, putting aside his possibly-feigned misanthropy just often enough to wish you well. Despite my own discomfort with the season, I figure I can at least act interested for the next few weeks.

One thing that helps is "White Christmas" — not the weather report, but the Irving Berlin megahit — and while it's forever associated with Bing Crosby, my own favorite version was cut by the Drifters back around 1955. It's still in print, or whatever the term is for recordings that are still available, but you don't have to hunt up an old 45 (unless you want to, in which case it's Atlantic 1048); an old friend/regular reader has kindly passed along the link to a Flash animation set to this classic R&B arrangement, and this seems like a good time to share.

On the other hand, she also sent me some fruitcake, and you're not getting any of that.

Having somewhat depleted my supply of Schick Super Twin disposable razors (as discussed here), I was forced to seek out a fresh bag, and for some reason, they were unusually hard to find at the usual supermarket. Eventually I spotted them on the very bottom shelf, almost all the way into the toothpaste section.

What's interesting here is that Schick makes an identical (except for color) ST for women, and its vertical location was near the very center. After looking over the entire razor display, I concluded that:

1. Guys are more likely to spend too much for razors, and therefore the hyperexpensive models are given prime viewing space;
   
2. I'm not too proud to shave with something pink.

Price for a bag of 10, either variety: $7.99.

About five years ago, I took the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which differs somewhat from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator but which produces similar results. I fall into the INTJ group, which Keirsey calls "Masterminds."

A fellow on OkCupid wrote up his own personality test (65 questions), in which I also came up as INTJ. Instead of a "Mastermind," though, I am a "Crackpot":

I am comforted by the fact that the other 15 possibilities are described equally negatively: this is, after all, the Brutally Honest Personality Test. (The polar opposite of the INTJ, the ESFP, is described as the "Clown".) You can try it yourself if you're so inclined.

Incidentally, TheSpark.com, a site from the Pleistocene era which was run by the same guys who now operate OkCupid, had a similar test, which characterized me as the "Accountant." This was, of course, long before Time named me Person of the Year.

"The other man's grass," observed Petula Clark, "is always greener," and one verse of that song has been haunting me of late:

I don't see myself achieving this, exactly — for one, rather a lot of the accessible worlds of make-believe have been consolidated as the "reality-based community" — but as an experiment, I did try staying in bed 'til nearly three.

As you can see from the time-stamp, it didn't work.

I'll remember you as a man who stepped up to fill some pretty big shoes after some pretty bad steps.

And from a mast taller than the tallest ships, the Chief thanks you all.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled programming.

During the 1990s, and for a couple of years thereafter, I was anxious, perturbed, and generally disagreeable, and what's worse, I was unable to capitalize on those characteristics. The turmoil began subsiding around 2003, and by 2005, I was teetering on the brink of complacency.

Then 2006 threw me a couple of curve balls. The hardest one to face, of course, was the death of my father during the last week of the year. It's not like it was a surprise or anything, as I wrote on his 79th birthday:

I had no idea, of course, that a mere ten days after I wrote that, the Grim Reaper was preparing to call on me. I remember getting out of the remains of my car, shrugging, and hopping onto the cell phone; at no point that day did it occur to me that had one or two variables gone a couple of percentage points in another direction, I'd have been just as dead as that doe two lanes over.

One of the good ol' boys who stopped to offer a helping hand that day told me this: "If it's not your time, it doesn't matter what you do. And if it is your time, it doesn't matter what you do."

During a bout of pneumonia three years ago, I had come up with this bit of quasi-wisdom: "The number of times you cheat Death equals the number of times you cross his path — minus one."

If nothing else, I now understand our daredevils a little better: they're running up the score on that old scythe-wielding SOB while they still can. Dear Old Dad fought him off for the better part of a decade; I've had three run-ins with him myself. (If you're keeping score, the previous encounters were in 1960 and 1985; there was a short-lived surrender plan for 1988, which did not come to fruition.)

And being 3-0 so far doesn't give me license to act like a complete and utter fool, but it does provide a sense of perspective: if the big catastrophes haven't done me in, what can the minor trials and tribulations of life possibly do to me?

So here's to 2007. I hope I don't have to face the sort of things I did in 2006; but if I do, I'm (almost) ready.

According to Steven William Rimmer, this was Tax Freedom Day in the old Soviet Union.

On today's to-do list, only just recently completed:

• Laundry (three loads).
  
• Weed out 2006 magazine stacks. (Basically, this means: box up the six titles I keep, dispose of the rest. "The rest" filled 3½ lawn/leaf bags.)
  
• Listen to the Beatles' Love all the way through. (Reaction is somewhere between "Cool" and "Meh".)
  
• Start Zocor regime.
  
• Clean bathroom.
  
• Sort unpaid bills by due date. (Most of them are due on the 8th and will be paid on the 3rd.)
  
• Review annual memberships, add new one.
  
• Hang calendars. (I have three for this year, including one from these guys and one from these girls.)
  
• Check Gwendolyn's fluids. (Oil change due in late January.)
  
• Disassemble bedroom fan, blow out accumulated dust, reassemble.
  
• Toss about 40 browser bookmarks that are no longer valid.
  

For someone as indolent as I, this is a lot of work for a day off.

How do I know this day isn't going well? A coworker was stuck for a word, and floated a definition past me, and said word turned out to be "incubus."

I'm not sure which is worse: that she wanted to know about it, or that it was automatically assumed that I would know about it.

I am a firm (not to the extent of washboard abs, but work with me here) believer in the concept of Trust Your Gut: there's no reason to assume that your second or third impression is necessarily going to be any better than your first. Not everyone agrees with this premise — the last time I brought it up, the voice of John Cusack (in this) was echoed back to me:

But then there's this:

Now this says, very distinctly, "certain situations": it doesn't say "always." But given my particular propensities — given enough time, I can talk myself out of anything that has the slightest possibility of being beneficial — I think my position, if not exactly vindicated, is certainly (somewhat) justified.

(Via Ravings of a Feral Genius.)

The background:

• My driveway is rather steep.

• The person who throws the local newspaper route is hard-pressed to get the paper more than a foot or so up the driveway.

• There's a heck of a lot of frozen stuff out there right now.
  

The combination of these factors led to a dilemma this morning. The newspaper, in its plastic bag, got to approximately its usual point this morning; however, ice on the surface caused it to slide, slide, and slide some more, down to the end of the driveway and about a foot into the street itself. No way was I going to follow it down there: even if I made it without breaking my fool neck, how was I going to climb back up?

So I got down the garden rake from its hanger on the garage wall, positioned myself just this side of the curb, and stretched. The paper wasn't frozen in place, yet, so with a few semi-deft motions, I flipped over the rake, scooped up the paper, and flung it northward toward the manhole that covers the sewer line, which is perhaps unsurprisingly not covered with ice. Mission accomplished.

As a Brilliant Solution, this does not rank with my escape from the petroleum tanker in '85, but I'll take any little victories I can get.

Up to this point, I'd managed to fight off the annual winter blues, but today they forced their way onto the premises, and it will likely be a month before I can shoo them away.

There are a number of factors involved. The obvious one: I have a smidgen, maybe more than that, of Seasonal Affective Disorder, separate from the usual clinical depression (which has been in remission of late). It doesn't help that all the crap that fell from the sky over last weekend is still around: temperatures have remained below freezing since Friday morning, and won't recover today either. What's more, the Weather Guys insist that there's another load on the way, and I have this ridiculous idea that we ought to get rid of the stuff we have before we get more of it. Obviously this kind of thinking will never catch on.

Just as annoying is the approach of Valentine's Day, which has always had a strong emetic effect on me. (I need hardly point out that the usual trinkets and chocolates and general detritus have been in the stores since, oh, the second of January.) The Prophet, so far as I can determine, would never have endorsed such a thing, which is, to me anyway, the only appealing aspect of Islam.

So it's a funk, and not the good sort of funk. (Cue George Clinton: "We want the funk! Give up the funk!") Its ultimate severity is yet to be established, but regardless of the degree, I'm going to have to ride it out.

Well, sometimes. Saturday I grumbled about the unfortunate location of the morning paper, which was about halfway into the nearest traffic lane, owing to the combination of (1) steep driveway and (2) massive area of ice.

I added a comment on Sunday to the effect that they'd gotten it north of the curb, where it was reasonably accessible.

Today's edition was smack-dab between the twin redbud trees, a good fifteen feet up from the curb. (Unfortunately, it was in an extremely slick area, but they had no way of knowing that.) Credit where credit is due, I always say.

A useful bit of advice from Eric Siegmund, on how to do meaningful comparisons in West Texas:

Last I looked, Disney World at its peak covered 47 square miles, so:

"You could fit 110 Disney Worlds in Brewster County, Texas, and still have room for the entire city of San Antonio, and after that, you'd still have room for the entire city of San Antonio."

(Wikipedia notes that Brewster is bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined.)

Those of you who find my attempts to deal with winter amusing (you know who you are) would have enjoyed watching me attempting to dig out something of a path between garage and street through the two and a half inches of ice that descended upon the place last weekend and refused to budge for the next three and a half days.

What's most annoying, of course, is the fact that assuming everything melts Friday, which is a lot to assume, there will be another half a foot or so of snow Saturday.

Wonder if the lawn mower can double as a snowblower? It's a mulcher, after all.

For about five years, I used the cheapest possible toothpaste with my hyperexpensive toothbrush, for reasons I haven't quite fathomed. Last year the dentist informed me that there were some issues with various brands, including the one I was using; I switched over to a store-brand knockoff of Sensodyne, which is ostensibly kinder to the teeth. And while I don't believe there's any connection — the most likely explanation is the deterioration of an existing filling from somewhere back in the last century — last checkup yielded up one cavity, and I switched again, this time to a Crestalike. (Which reminds me of a piece Lileks once did about the rumors that Procter and Gamble were in thrall to Satan, in which he pointed out that their signature dental product would have to be the Anti-Crest.)

I have no exterior mailbox per se at Surlywood; instead, the mail is dropped through a slot in the garage door and is caught in a basket hanging on the inside of the door. Usually. Entirely too often, when the door is opened, something that hasn't dropped fully into the basket finds itself at exactly the right angle to fall upon the garage floor, where there's a reasonable chance it will be run over as I drive up with my 215-width tires.

My usual pasta sauce is Prego Traditional, into which I'm likely to toss a few things of my own, notably basil.

(Hmmm. She was right: these are not stirring blog topics. Except maybe the sauce, which has to be stirred regularly.)

I had bloodwork done today, which is about as much of a thrill as you think it is, but there was a new angle this time: breaking in the new kid.

A fourth-year medical student was assisting at the doctor's office today, and one of the things he was doing was the Industrial-Strength Intake Interview that is usually inflicted on new patients. An interesting fellow, this: a Pakistani with an Irish name. (Okay, not really. His given name is "Shamas," which almost rhymes with "pajamas," but most people, he said, seem to render it with a long A in the first syllable. I suppose he told me this to preempt the inevitable joke, which I wasn't actually planning to make.) He was satisfyingly thorough and just short of obsequious, which I suspect many people will find matches their idea of Good Bedside Manner. And while I technically didn't need this sort of interview — my file folder is now over an inch thick — there wasn't a bevy of new patients lined up, and I figured it wouldn't kill me to answer a fistful of questions, especially since I already had a bandage over my fist. (They've learned that my hand is a less-inefficient source of blood than my arm.)

Anyway, Dr Shamas, if you stumble across this, good work.

Tax returns completed and submitted. (This is actually two weeks ahead of last year's submission.)

Elapsed time: 50 minutes, which would have been less were it not for some particularly dumb things I did (read: "misplace list of donations" and "close browser at inappropriate time"), and an internal argument over whether I should revive the "1040 or Fight" title for this post.

As before, I used an online third-party filing service; I am persuaded that it's not possible to create one that has a completely un-clunky user interface so long as the forms themselves are discouragingly convoluted. They extended me some sort of loyalty discount for using them again, which didn't hurt. (I am insufficiently broke to get one of the full freebies, it appears.) I've printed out copies for reference, and now I don't have to think about it for another year.

This weekend has proved to be somewhat less unproductive than I had anticipated: not only did I finish off my tax returns, I got the car washed, the kitchen restocked, a new mix CD assembled, two blogs (not this one) updated to WordPress 2.1, and three loads of laundry done.

In other words, I did just about everything but, um, post.

For the second time this week, someone has asked if I'm losing weight. I honestly don't know: I don't own a scale. I certainly don't feel any lighter.

Still, there is some evidence which might support this premise. For the last ten years, I've bought the same size trousers from the same source. The last couple of batches — I usually buy two or three at a time — were just slightly snug with the standard five-hole belt fastened at the middle hole. Those same garments are now distinctly loose: even with the belt tightened to the max, if I take more than a couple of steps I can feel them sliding downward, putting myself awfully close to the dubious distinction of being able to pants myself without using my hands. It is true that as of the first of the year, I am on a cholesterol-reduction drug; but the slippage was taking place even before that. Fortunately, I don't work as a plumber.

You know, I might have to try this at one end of the next World Tour:

If nothing else, it would give me an excuse to stay at the Skirvin (or maybe the Colcord).

"Snipe me, you bastard!" I hissed as I looked at the screen and noticed that my final bid, placed fifteen minutes earlier, was still the high bid.

I believe what motivated this utterance was the collision of the memory that I'd dropped out of the bidding at $20 with the glaring fact that I'd gotten back into it at $46; I apparently expected to be punished for hubris, or at least foolish persistence, and sat on the item page pushing F5 at random intervals during the last two minutes of the auction.

I did win, and duly paid up, but there's still this nagging feeling: if nobody else wanted this so badly (there were 13 bids, but only four actual bidders), why did I?

And is there any way I can blame this on Valentine's Day?

I've done this twice before, and inasmuch as it's been three years since then, I figure I'd try it again.

Most anyone who keeps one of these little bloggy things reveals some things, conceals others, just like in Real Life™. For the 10.8 years I've had this soapbox, I've spilled rather a lot of beans, though I think my life falls a bit short of being, you should pardon the expression, an open book. As I see it, you have two choices: you can wait around for me to get to what you want to know, or you can ask now, and I'll get to it a bit sooner. In the previous versions of this scheme, I bundled all the questions received and dealt with them at one fell swoop. This proved to be no fun for people who missed the cutoff points, so I'm not doing that this time: instead, it will all be done within this single thread. If you have something to ask but you don't want it to appear on the site, there's always email. I expect that most of the activity will be within the first 72 hours or so, but the thread will remain open at least into mid-March, in keeping with my current 30-day closure policy.

As Otis once said, "Your turn."

It started with something called the Portrait Illustration Maker, a surprisingly-deep online application which enables you to make a 96 x 96 icon for your own Personal Avatar or whatever. I say it enables you because it didn't really enable fumble-fingered me to come up with anything acceptable: in successive attempts I wound up looking like Joan Crawford, Warren Oates, and Jabba the Hutt. Perhaps some combination of the three would have proven successful, but by then I'd given it up and turned the job over to Gail at Scribal Terror, who did a remarkable job in what seemed like record time. (Many of her regulars appear in this format in her official Rogues' Gallery, and most of them are rather less bland than I, not that this is difficult.) I should point out that I am slightly greyer than this, and some of the widow's peak has been eroded away by time, but otherwise this is a pretty good likeness, though probably not suitable for the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I bought this batch of cordless phones during the last Woot-Off, and they do have their quirks.

Three handsets were provided; needing only two, I hooked up the base station and a single remote station, and discovered that the handsets are numbered 3 and 1 respectively. Number 2, I assume, is still in the box. The manual indicates that you can add a fourth, though it must go through a tedious "registration" process; the ones sold in the package have the numbers already built in. The numbers aren't of much use unless you plan to use the intercom function, and since I have no reason to call another room to see if I'm in there, I have no such plans.

Said manual, incidentally, is labeled as "Part 2". Part 1, so far, is conspicuous by its absence; I'm guessing this was one of those "quick-start guides" that routinely get stuffed into new electronics packages these days, though this set I bought is a refurb (rox0rz!).

Scripts today have been running either slightly faster or quite a bit slower than normal; I'm unable to determine exactly why for either condition. Also, my POP3 mail to this domain isn't running (though I can retrieve it through IMAP), so if you wrote me and you haven't heard back, this may be why.

Or it may not. Given the events of today, which in aggregate will be hard to beat for Worst Workday of the Year, I don't believe anyone's explanations for anything.

(Having shot off my mouth, I now discover that I can't get my IMAP mail either. Sheesh. What a day.)

Those of us who have had them in the past know all too well that something utterly insignificant in the grand order of things can launch a low-level — sometimes not so low — panic attack.

For some reason, one of these hit me in the shower this morning, while I was reflecting on the contents of my wallet, such as they are. And while I was running down the list, inevitably I came to "driver's license," and, hmmm, when does it expire? "July '07," I said to myself.

Came back a voice from nowhere: "Are you sure?"

I wasn't sure. I cut the ablutions short by about a minute, toweled off, and dashed into the bedroom to see when in fact the license expires.

Which is, of course, July '07.

I spent the next few minutes alternating between getting dressed and berating myself for being such a [fill in suitable pejorative noun].

What got me out of that particular funk was a premise that had once or twice before caused an attitude adjustment: "You think you've got it bad?"

And I remembered Cathy Seipp, just now finishing out her term on earth, and the very last paragraph of the very last item she'd posted:

What, indeed?

Thank you, Cathy, and Godspeed.

A curveball from Scott Adams:

The number for me, I think, is 16. It's not that I feel the passions of youth rushing through me, or that I'm energetic to the point of being indefatigable, at the expense of taking care of business: it's simply that I have never quite gotten out of the mindset that everything that has happened up to now is merely prologue, and that "real life," whatever that may be, is still somewhere in the ill-defined future, despite the fact that I have an actual job and an actual mortgage and two children quite a bit older than sixteen.

That said, though, I'm secure enough in my teenaged self to tell those damn kids to get off my lawn.

(Via gorgeous "older woman" Jane Galt.)

And oh, occasionally they didn't see us fall:

Or, in my case, usually the rubric B F D.

Somebody else's excellence, of course, always managed to eclipse mine:

It's been five years since last I played, and be it noted, I did score that freebie. Perhaps I should wander into Chuck E.'s myself one of these days. (What a friend we have in Cheese's, eh?)

You leave an hour (well, 50 minutes) early one day for a dental appointment, and you still end up with 51.5 hours on the clock.

For the next two months it's only going to get worse, and then I'm going to have to leave town, just to put some distance between myself and the office.

After six years of just enough usage to justify having gotten the thing in the first place, I'm actually considering updating my Dawn of Time cell phone, mostly because there's a World Tour coming up, and there are some things I'd like to have that I don't have now.

Okay, one thing: my current candy bar is a single-band GSM phone, good only for the 1900-MHz band. That's good for T-Mobile, who runs an entire 1900-MHz network with decent coverage, made more so by roaming deals with other 1900-MHz providers. But there's rather a lot of countryside where no one has built out 1900 MHz, and where GSM exists there, it's on the 850-MHz band. T-Mobile will happily let you roam onto 850 MHz, but you have to have a phone that supports it, and I don't.

The kicker, of course, is if I request a new phone, I'll be tied to a new contract at a substantially higher rate. Which makes me wonder if, since all GSM phones are based on a SIM card, I can buy an unlocked dual-band phone from somewhere (eBay, Woot, wherever) and simply move my SIM. I've heard conflicting stories on this, so pointers to useful information would be gratefully appreciated.

The longest losing streak ever in NCAA Division I-A football is 34 games, by Northwestern University, ending in 1982.

In 1983, I started predicting the Playboy Playmate of the Year, and my losing streak is now up to twenty-four years. Any day now I should get a smirking email from Susan Lucci.

Inasmuch as it had rained ten of the last eleven days, I wasn't at all looking forward to popping open my office door this morning, and my apprehension proved to be eminently justified: the floodwaters, measured previously at a 3/8-inch depth, were now up to a full inch. Friday being my busiest day of the week, I contemplated closing the door and going back home, and let them deal with this crap. Finally I pulled out my Standard Resignation Letter, updated some of the particulars (for those poking around, it's screwyouguysimgoinghome.odt), and confronted the Prince: "If I have to swim this morning," I said, "I'll be walking this afternoon." At least one four-letter word was used: "Feds." I didn't mention that the one room in which you don't want standing water is the room in which you have six figures' worth of hardware, but it turned out I didn't have to.

A plan was hatched: we would hook up a couple of submersible pumps, one of which would empty out the room. The second would be used to drain The Swamp, a stretch of unimproved land along 42nd that presented three problems:

• It's infested with all manner of nasty stuff;
  
• It's higher ground, and gravity still works;
  
• It's on the wrong side of the fence.
  

Still, short of moving the sun a few thousand miles closer to the earth in the hopes of drying things out, which was never seriously considered as an option, what else could we do?

This plan went through several modifications in a hurry, and strips of the by-now-ruined carpet were pulled up to reveal by-now-ruined tile which no one had seen before. (The building is about 50 years old, the firm just short of 40.) El Jefe brought in a fresh new Shop-Vac; later in the day, a dehumidifier showed up. By three o'clock, the de-carpeted floor was pretty dry, the equipment was moved away (except for the dehumidifier, which was still running last time I looked), and the sun had come out.

Of course, half an hour later, as has happened on eleven of the past twelve days, the rain started again.

Still, it was a fine effort, worthy of kudos all around, most of which I delivered in person before the downpour began.

Note to self: You might want to see if there's a neighborhood newsletter to distribute before shucking your work clothes.

I'm just saying.

My father would have been eighty years old today, and I'm pretty sure he would have liked to have made it that far, if only to cock a further snook at the physician who shrugged and said "We can keep him alive one more year" — back around 1999.

An ornery cuss, you might think, and you'd be right. And tasked with raising five children from the very core of boomerdom, he worked diligently at being a hardass.

Today the hardass is derided as some sort of atavistic throwback to the Cro-Magnon, superfluous in the age of Shiny Happy People — until something needs to be done in a hurry. (There are those who believe that nothing should be done in a hurry; their moral center is the United Nations, which by design is incapable of anything resembling speed.)

But let's say you're faced with something like this:

Because that would be a hardass response, and that sort of thing is simply not done. Besides, some entities not officially classified as bugs might come along and lay claim to a few crystals here and there, and it would be so wrong to deny them. (I speak as someone who scraped a few off the side back in the day; it pretty much killed my sweet tooth.)

The essence of hardassery is that stopping the unwanted behavior comes first; if you're lucky, you might be shown the error of your ways later on, but right now you're getting a dose of aversion therapy. (If you're an errant child, said dose might be applied directly to your backside.) This is simply a recognition of the well-established principle that anyone able to feel pain is at least somewhat trainable. There's a significant the-buck-stops-here component as well, anathema to those whose modus operandi relies on appeals of unfavorable judgments.

In an era distinguished by endless wails of "You're not the boss of me!" the hardass reminds you, well, we'll just see about that. And every time we lose one, we sink a little bit farther into the muck.

Back in 2004, I had occasion to quote Cynthia Heimel thusly:

Cynthia, meet Lionel Shriver:

Ms Shriver clearly has a neck, and her voice is in no wise shrill. Then again:

(Via Jenny Davidson.)

This I did not know:

Speaking of cleaning military headgear, I could use some suggestions for reconditioning a white saucer cap, which seems to be in reasonably sound shape but which inevitably has accumulated some scuzz in the thirty-eight years since it was last regularly worn.

She wasn't looking at me, and I was doing my best to make sure I didn't look like I was looking at her.

I'd seen the Porsche about a mile earlier, when an ambulance whipped into the "wrong" pair of lanes and the little silver coupe came to a halt with, well, Porsche-like enthusiasm. The sirens passed; the car took off.

A couple of lights later, there was a service station vending 91 octane for a few ticks below three dollars. I pulled in, and there was the Porsche, its driver resplendent in bright casuals and/or casual brightness, a source of sunshine on a mostly-overcast day. I stopped rather too far past the point where the nozzle and Gwendolyn's filler lined up neatly; I was prepared to argue, should it become necessary, that I was trying to avoid scraping the door on the monstrous concrete slab that made up the far end of the island. It would not become necessary: I had not been noticed. Taking up the squeegee, I made the rounds, and in the time it took to dispatch the dust of the day, ten or eleven gallons had passed through the hose.

I took one last look: she'd gotten back in, the boxer six started up with a satisfying tha-RUMPH, and she disappeared faster than Sue Storm on Pamprin. She'd put in 15 gallons, which meant she'd run it down pretty close to the E. Which, it occurred to me, I'd probably have done too: the fewer stops you make, the more you get to drive. I suppressed a sigh and drove on home.

While no one would accuse me of being chipper — unless they expected me to chew up some wood or something — the general tone around here is decidedly more positive than it was six or eight years ago when I was wondering if maybe things wouldn't improve until I got around to not being around. (Vent #172, which begins "This is a suicide note" and then goes through several paragraphs explaining why technically it isn't, is a case in point.)

Still, every once in a while something pops into my head to remind me of the Bad Old Days, usually during sleeping hours, where the dream mechanism doesn't feel compelled to go easy on my sensibilities. This morning, after waking up at six, noting the presence of a newspaper and going out to fetch it, then returning to bed for another couple of hours, I got to "enjoy" a pair of scary scenes played out just above the pillows. (Two of them, anyway: at some point I apparently pitched the third across the room.)

In the first act, after a bogus "tour" that resembled outtakes from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, I have somehow been locked up in some sort of "medical" facility for wayward children, and the sadist dietitian on staff has contrived to make sure everyone gets something unpalatable. For me, there was this amalgam of rice cakes and spackle, with things that looked like vegetables but weren't, and vast quantities of mayonnaise, a true implementation of O'Brien's Room 101 Diet.

I don't know how that story ended because a second one followed quickly on its heels. In this one I am researching some arcane tax question, and I duly presented my findings to the couple who had requested my help. The presentation took place at a firing range, where they and several friends were gearing up to blow away a few targets. Informed that I might want to stand back a few feet for the duration, I heard myself saying: "Don't worry. If you shoot me, I'll be much happier." Evidently at the subconscious level I operate on a frequency somewhere between Beck ("I'm a loser, baby, why don't you kill me?") and Daffy Duck ("I demand that you shoot me now!")

Supposedly I have enough sense to avoid reading too much into dreamstuff. On the other hand, I do remember muttering this last week:

Weather-related stress. Yeah. That's the ticket.

I wore an orange T-shirt to work today. (No, that's not all I wore. Don't be a wise guy.) This, in itself, is nothing too unusual: this particular tee is in my regular rotation, and probably gets worn three, maybe four times a month. And inasmuch as it is in my regular rotation, I didn't think twice about it when I pulled it out of the closet this morning.

It was a few hours later when I remembered the errand I'd scheduled for after work: buying Gwendolyn's 2008 tag, and renewing my driver's license. The license didn't expire until July, but I figured a single stone would be sufficient for both birds, inasmuch as trips to the tag agency, even a good tag agency — and the one I go to is fairly decent — tend to leave me drained, both emotionally and financially.

And then I had to ask myself: "Do I really want to carry around for the next four years a photograph of me in an orange T-shirt?"

So I went home and put on a green polo shirt, which goes better with my particular smirk. And inasmuch as the young woman in line in front of me admitted to a height of five foot three when I would have sworn she was at least five-six, I had them shave two inches off my height, which evidently isn't what it used to be.

But no, I'm not working for the Giuliani campaign team.

Besides, that's his middle name. (I've read Molly Worthen's book, and even reprinted an anecdote therefrom.)

During the most recent World Tour, the inexplicable failure of my regular wireless provider to come up with even the slightest bit of roaming coverage anywhere east of Cookeville, Tennessee led me to unbox and activate a TracFone, which worked just fine in this dead zone and which works pretty well out here, except for the minor detail that since it was activated in central North Carolina, it carries a 919 area code, which can be offputting to the people I know who don't actually know anyone in central North Carolina.

I figure I'll handle it this way: burn up the remaining minutes (around 100), let it die, then reactivate it from here with a fresh fill. Presumably they'll have to fork over a 405 number at that time.

The phone itself is actually pretty decent, and it's dual-band, so I should be able to roam even into those mysterious 850 MHz areas where my old Nokia just glares at me.

First thing this morning, staff informed me that (1) from their perspective, this was the most successful period of dealing with my absence since I started disappearing for long periods around the turn of the century, and (2) everything was just absolutely a thousand million times worse than horribly godawful.

These observations are not in fact contradictory.

The World Tours so far:

• 2001: 4444 miles
  
• 2002: 4575 miles
  
• 2003: 4990 miles
  
• 2004: 4088 miles
  
• 2005: 4913 miles
  
• 2006 (aborted): 923 miles
  
• 2007: 4333 miles
  

Which, fractions discarded, comes to 28,266 miles, or once around the world and then some. (The 2006 total includes the first day through The Incident, and then a subsequent trip to see the young'uns; it does not include the length of the tow.)

You know, it's a darn shame they don't have frequent-driver miles. On the other hand, I did come up with $100 in gasoline credit while wandering about this year, which is probably as close as I'm going to get.

Norman Geras' normblog profile is one of the longer-running regular features in blogdom: over the years there have been more than 200 interviews, including most of the A-list bloggers, with occasional forays into the B-list.

We won't mention how far Norm had to dip into the alphabet to come up with me, but I was happy to participate just the same, and I thank him for the opportunity.

The following conversation took place early this morning in 42nd and Treadmill's cavernous (watch for stalactites) break room:

"There's cake, if you want any."

"Who's the unlucky person?"

"Me."

As she walks away, she adds, "Forty-three." And as she's walking away, I'm trying to remember if she looked any different when she was twenty-six.

Not much, I conclude.

Lots of stuff going on this morning, but the power stayed on.

Until about 3:50 this afternoon, when everything was nice and quiet outside, and suddenly the whole neighborhood (including a traffic light) goes dark.

Anyway, I have relocated for the evening to a hotel on the Northwest Distressway, on the basis that the last time this happened, it was next morning before power was restored.

And a brief bleg: I had to pop the emergency cable on my garage-door opener to get my car out. How the heck do I reattach the darn thing?

It's not every day I get a notice from the Postal Service that I have a certified letter waiting, especially not one from the Oklahoma Tax Commission.

But wait! This isn't for me at all: according to the notice, the letter is for someone named Sloan. I don't believe anyone named Sloan has ever lived here; certainly no one named Sloan has lived here in the last four years.

So it's a question of protocol: do I go down to the Post Office and tell them no, this isn't for me, or do I just blow it off entirely and wait for the inevitable Return to Sender? I'm leaning toward the latter, mostly because it requires the least work, but I hate to leave stuff on my plate, especially if it isn't my stuff.

I've mentioned elsewhere that my cell phone is six years old, which is true. And while my wireless needs are modest, the old device is getting cranky: more than once I've pocketed the little candy bar and gone off to run errands, only to discover when I got home that at some point it had simply powered itself off.

So I ordered one of these, which is hardly a high-end device but which should meet most of my requirements (including roaming into 850 MHz areas, impossible for the old phone) fairly easily. And yes, I did sign up for a two-year contract, but it's the same set of terms I've been on for the last four, so there should be no particular surprises, and in exchange for this lien on my soul, they let me have the phone for next to nothing plus shipping.

I suppose I'll have to go get a Bluetooth headset now.

Apparently, even when I'm up to date, I'm behind.

I'd mentioned that I'd ordered a new cell phone, and I figured the upgrade process, this being a GSM phone, would be simple: remove SIM card from old phone, insert into new phone, bingo.

Well, no. Actually, the new phone did read the old SIM card — it picked up my PIN and my phone book right away — but it had no idea where they came from, because it kept flashing "SIM card not installed." I got the T-Folks on the land line, and eventually we came to a conclusion: this vintage-2001 SIM card, dating from the VoiceStream days, is so old that new T-Phones don't acknowledge it as one of their own.

So they called the T-Store in Penn Square and had them set me up a new SIM card; I then had to get the old phone back into working condition just long enough to copy over some of the phone book. So much for "simple."

After a discouraging word or two from me about questionable cell coverage in the South, an apologetic T-Mobile will peel off $2.4 billion to acquire GSM carrier SunCom and insure that I don't have any further connectivity difficulties in the Carolinas or eastern Tennessee.

The transaction will close in early 2008; it will give T-Mobile a presence in, they say, 98 of the top 100 markets.

Note to self: Do not buy a programmable thermostat that has the programs already set up and running in firmware. (And if they're all like that, simplify this to "Don't buy one.")

Where Erica works, this is the definition used for insurance purposes:

These criteria seemed fairly sensible to me, but this is not by any means my area of expertise, so I'd welcome some comments from the field.

A dollar and sixty cents.

You may remember that taking advantage of a hotel promotion during World Tour '07 earned me a $100 gift card from Shell. (Actually, I had my choice of several brands, but pretty much any direction I go around town, there's a Shell station, usually in the form of a Circle K store.) I'd used it twice, to the tune of $71, meaning I had $29 left, and I vowed to use up exactly that much.

Now of course I could have waited a few days for the gauge to drop below 3/8 of a tank, shoved in the card, picked up my ten gallons or so (Shell V-Power was $2.859 at the station of choice today), let the card run out, and then swipe my check card or something else to finish the fill. But no: my mission was to complete the transaction as close as possible to $29.00.

So I started the pump, seized the squeegee, and after not enough time passed, the telltale Very Loud Click informed me that the pump had shut off — at $26.95. The Oklahoma wind managed to mask a couple of Anglo-Saxonisms as I started squeezing the handle for driblets.

At the $27.40 point, I was just this side of soaking my shoes, which runs very much contrary to New Balance's shoe-care recommendations. Declaring failure, I replaced the nozzle, strode to the counter, and reported my sad story to the cashier. "Here," I said, handing him the card and the receipt indicating $1.60 left. "Give it to someone deserving, or use it yourself." The poor fellow had never seen such a thing before, and as I turned back toward the door, the folks behind me gave me the strangest look I'd ever gotten in a C-store that didn't involve a zipper malfunction. At the time, though, I just wanted to wash my hands of the whole affair.

It dawned on me later that if I still had my old lawn mower, I could have fed it more than half a gallon of the low-test stuff. But no matter. What's done is done. Next tankful will be paid for in a more conventional manner.

As part of my ongoing effort to hide in plain sight, I offer here an image of my faded and much-punched Student Activity Ticket from my freshman year of college, recently uncovered by a cousin of mine (hi, Linda!) after a bout of spring cleaning (whether she's early or she's late, I'd just as soon not know) and added to the archives. (My actual Student ID is around here somewhere; unlike this thing, which is cardboard with formerly-transparent laminate, the full-fledged ID is genuine plastic, and in accordance with the data-processing dicta of the time, it's punched like an IBM card.) The photo had to have been taken during August 1969.

Photoshop disclosure: There's a reason the "Signature" line looks kinda ragged. Also, I engaged in some slight contrast adjustment, though evidently not enough to do any good.

And needless to say, fees have gone up.

I guess. It's blue and it's from Target, and the plastic bottle, once opened, proved to be just about as full as possible: if you pressed even slightly on the side, you'd displace a fair amount of fluid, usually all over your hands.

While attempting to multitask in the bathroom this morning, I spit up a mouthful of the stuff, not in the sink for some reason, but in the bowl. I then, of course, forgot all about it — until this evening's first flush, and that familiar vaguely-medicinal scent came wafting upwards. Admittedly, this is better than the usual scent one gets from the bowl, and I suppose twelve hours of diffusion enhanced the effect, but it was still somewhat offputting: I imagined the Ty-D-Bol Man getting a flu shot. Evidently I'm not drinking enough, or something.

At some point before the turn of the century, I abandoned store-bought antiperspirants in favor of a product offered by Avon, which proved to be no less efficient yet far kinder to my T-shirts. Further motivation: there was a part-time seller on the premises at 42nd and Treadmill, who was happy to fill my sporadic orders — I tend to order half a dozen bottles at a time, plus occasional novelties like sunscreen — and even happier to see me not hit on her. Amazingly, about the same time she gave up the business, another one of the staffers picked it up, and I continued buying the stuff.

I got down to my last bottle this month, and discovered that well, she's found another way to occupy her free time. Avon brochures are still not hard to find around the shop, given the sheer number of women who work there, but rather than break in a new Avon Lady, I decided to try their online shop.

Advantages: Flat-rate shipping (though there are faster, and of course pricier, options); no need to wait for the end of the current campaign.

Disadvantages: Utterly lacks the personal touch; base shipping option is Smartpost, which is not known for its speed.

And perhaps most pertinent: inasmuch as there are no part-time Avon representatives where I work anymore, were I to insist on that "personal touch," I'd have to contact a local representative on my own, and my brain tends to shut down when confronted with a woman at the front door.

As determined at the front door:

2000:  0
2001:  0
2002:  0
2003:  0
2004:  0
2005:  5
2006:  0
2007:  9

Let it be noted that I spent twenty minutes trying to get the porch light to stay on long enough to accommodate those nine little monsters. (It has one of those light-sensitive gizmos on it which lately hasn't been sensitive to anything at all.) Eventually it paid off; in fact, I had to kill the switch to shut it down.

I'm starting to see more kids in the neighborhood generally, which I hope is the beginning of a trend. I think we have something to offer in this corner of town: relatively-affordable housing stock in better-than-average shape for its age (sixty years), proximity to shopping, and one of the better city schools within walking distance.

I don't often fall asleep easily, so I keep on hand a supply of diphenhydramine hydrochloride tablets to help knock me out when necessary. The favored source for these was Albertson's, which vended a generic version under a store brand in a 100-count bottle for around $8, a better deal than the brand-name tabs (Sominex® et al.), which were usually sixteen for $3. With Albertson's now departed from this market, I'd been looking for a substitute, and store-brand tabs aren't hard to find, but they're almost always in the same configuration as the big boys: sixteen tabs in a box, which you have to punch out of the card, a packaging method second only to the plastic clamshell in terms of sheer annoyance value. (Getting title strips off CDs and DVDs comes in third, if you were wondering.)

In my usual secondary shopping mode at amazon.com — the one usually initiated by "I need someth